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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 comments:- August 2010 - STEC ( 2009 revenue $354 million) offers SSDs in more form factors than any other company.
  
  STEC has been featured in StorageSearch.com's Top 10 SSD Companies List - for all 13 consecutive quarters. Its best previous rank was the #1 top spot in Q2 2007.
  
  STEC used to be the company which every other SSD company wanted to beat - owning (as it did for many years) the top performance slots for HDD compatible server flash SSDs - and a sizable chunk of the military SSD market too
  
  STEC doesn't sell enterprise SSDs directly to users, instead its route to market has been to rely on oems to design its SSDs into their systems - and wait for the sales ramp to happen.
  
  The initial advantage of that approach (when the SSD market was smaller than it is today) is that the company did not have to invest in developing its own routes to market and related marketing competencies.
  
  The disadvantage - in the current SSD market - is that the company is vulnerable to being swapped out in design sockets. Additionally - STEC is poorly positioned to acquire expertise about rackmount SSDs (an important market in which its server SSDs are deployed and compete) - because the company doesn't supply integrated solutions.
  
  One factor which has helped STEC in recent quarters has been a growing awareness in the SSD customer community that the company's ability to put on a good show in the ballet of solid state storage - has been due to hard training and scientific expertise. A lot of newer entrants to the SSD market thought the SSD dance was a lot easier than it actually is - and have come crashing down onto the market stage after performing a few short pirouettes. Competitors may learn a few more technical tricks - but they cannot easily contend with the mystical nature of STEC's legendary reputation for performing impressively season after season.

Here are some recent STEC 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.

In February 2010 - STEC reported that its revenue for full-year 2009 grew 55% to $354 million.

In March 2010 - STEC started sampling a new family of SlimSATA and SATA-CF 32GB/64GB flash SSDs for use in embedded markets. Performance is 15,000 / 6,000 R/W IOPS and R/W transfer rates are up to 135MB/s and 130MB/s respectively.

In May 2010 - STEC confirmed that its revenue for the 1st calendar quarter of 2010 decreased 39% (to $38.8 million) compared to the year ago period. Poor results had been anticipated and flagged in guidance due to the company's over strong dependence on a single oem customer - EMC.

Also in May 2010 an article in TheRegister.co.uk suggested that STEC may soon launch a PCIe SSD to compete with the likes of Fusion-io and Texas Memory Systems. That's not a real surprise. The enterprise server acceleration market is STEC's biggest market. And the PCIe SSD market has - in less than 3 years - established itself as the most important enterprise SSD form factor - based on SSD search volume.

In August 2010 - STEC announced details of 2 technologies the company is using to improve data integrity and reliability in its enterprise market MLC flash SSDs. These are called CellCare and S.A.F.E.