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STEC

STEC, Inc., designs, develops, manufactures and markets custom memory solutions based on Flash memory and DRAM technologies.

See also:- STEC editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com

• editor's notes:- January 2010 - STEC offers SSDs in more form factors than any other company. Only Foremay, RunCore and BiTMICRO come close to this breadth of products.
  
  STEC's core strategic markets are in the military and high performance enterprise server markets.
  
  You can see dozens of competitors for STEC's military SSDs here and even more competitors for STEC's enterprise customers who integrate its SSDs into rackmount arrays here.
  
  STEC has been featured in StorageSearch.com's Top 10 SSD Companies List - for all 11 consecutive quarters. You can see my commentary (both positive and negative) in those articles.
  
  Here are some recent milestones extracted from SSD Market History.
  
  In May 2008 - STEC launched its first PCIe form factor SSD.
  
  In March 2009 - STEC announced that its revenue in 2008 had grown 20% year on year to $227.4 million.
  
  In April 2009 - STEC was listed #7 in the 8th quarterly edition of the - Top 10 SSD Companies. (Its lowest ranking in 2 years.)
  
  Although STEC has been successful in getting its products designed into storage arrays by large storage oems such as EMC - STEC's partners have not added enough value or IP to their own rackmount SSD offerings.
  
  Consequently these "STEC inside" SSD systems are weak in comparison to many competing systems which are faster or cheaper (due to better leveraged SSD technology). In the view of StorageSearch.com - STEC relies too much on market pull-through by partners who are me-too or weak in the SSD space. Unless it invests more in its SSD branding - its business is vulnerable to substitution and replacement by any new SSD kid on the block with a faster SSD controller.
  
  In May 2009 - STEC confirmed rumors that its Zeus-IOPS SSDs have indeed been oemed by IBM in several popular servers and storage systems.
  
  In July 2009 - STEC announced it had received $120 million order for its ZeusIOPS SSDs from a single enterprise storage customer for delivery in the 2nd 1/2 of 2009. This followed an earlier announcement that the company has partnered with a leading defense systems contractor to supply its MACH8 industrial SSDs for integration into a platform designed on behalf of the U.S. Military as part of a 12 month, $28 million supply contract.
  
  ...Later:- in November 2009 - we discovered that the big customer behind the $120 million order was EMC - who would be carrying inventory through to 2010.
  
  In August 2009 - STEC said it will ship 6Gb/s SAS flash SSDs in both 2.5" and 3.5" form factors in Q4. STEC's new ZeusIOPS SSDs will deliver 80,000 IOPS random read, 40,000 IOPS random write with transfer speeds of 550MB/s read and 300MB/s write. STEC also said it's sampling a faster version of its 3.5" FC compatible SSDs. STEC also announced a new policy of offering MLC flash in so called "enterprise class SSDs".
  
  Also in August 2009 - an article in the Shanghai based 21st Century Business Herald (Chinese language) discussed STEC's share price and competitive environment, quoting many SSD analysts, including the editor of StorageSearch.com.
  
  In October 2009 - STEC was ranked #3 - in the 10th quarterly edition of the Top 10 SSD companies.
  
  In November 2009 - a legal company called Brower Piven said it was considering a class action lawsuit against STEC regarding what it called "misleading statement(s) to investors" (earlier this year) regarding the state of design wins and oem potential business related to STEC's ZeusIOPS.
  
  My own view related to investments in SSD companies is that because it's such a fast changing and confusing market where there is no overwhelming enduring market advantage attached to any single supplier at the present time - you'd be nuts to regard any such investment as a long term prospect. (Where in this context "long term" is 5 minutes after the next press release from another SSD maker.)
  
  Although many companies are establishing reputations within the market, and such reputations are material factors for buyers who choose between different types of products - those are project dependent pragmatic decisions. There is no clear relationship between these factors and stock price.