Iomega opens new Milpitas plant

Electronic News, Nov 3, 1997

Milpitas, Calif.--Iomega made its presence in Silicon Valley known last week when the Utah-based company opened a new facility in Milpitas--coincidentally, not far from the Fremont headquarters of SyQuest Technology, an Iomega competitor in removable storage products.

The new Professional Products division, nicknamed IoBay (for Iomega Bay Area), has 51,600 square feet--more than five times the size of Iomega's original Silicon Valley home, a 10,000-square-foot facility in nearby San Jose the company first occupied in 1995. "We're still adding staff to the 196 employees we have here," said Fred Forsyth, division president.

Last year, Iomega migrated its R&D efforts for its Jaz drive product to Milpitas. The new division will house product marketing and engineering, as well as be a repository for documentation, testing and failure analysis. The division plans to expand with another building soon, and is already looking at its long-term facility needs. Mr. Forsyth said that the desire to speed product time to market is what's driving Iomega's shift of people and capability to Silicon Valley.

During a press reception, where Iomega gave a tour of the facility, the company featured its newest products. Much of the buzz focused on the ease, utility and lower price of Iomega's new Buz drive, a 16-bit video capture and editing board combined with an Ultra SCSI controller that lets users capture full-motion video, sounds, digital pictures and music into a PC. Users can also edit the multimedia content and share it with others using Jaz or Zip disks, VCR tapes or the Internet. Buz comes bundled with various software packages for editing, capture and audio mixing. Priced at $199, Buz is undergoing compatibility testing, with shipments expected to begin 1Q98. "Demand for video editing on the desktop is about where demand for desktop publishing was in the mid-1980s," Mr. Forsyth said. "We think the entire spectrum of multimedia computing is at a point where it's about to explode."

Iomega also announced its new Jaz 2-gibabyte removable drive and 2GB disks. With software included, Jaz 2GB provides twice the capacity and up to 40 percent higher performance than the original Jaz 1GB drive for desktop and mobile computing. Fully backward-compatible with Jaz 1GB disks, the new drive has a maximum sustained transfer rate of 8.7 megabits per second. Jaz 2GB is aimed at the graphics design, desktop publishing, multimedia, CAD/CAM, software development, audio/visual and MIS markets. It is priced at $549 for an internal model; $649 for the external drive. Disks start at $169 each. The new Jaz drive is an indication of Iomega's success in good product design, said Lee Schugar, an analyst at Dataquest.