“We dominate this market. There’s no one in the same hemisphere.”
STEC Inc. Chief Executive Manouch Moshayedi is fond of sweeping, bold pronouncements. But it’s hard to argue with him on this one.
Santa Ana-based STEC enjoys a rare position for a technology company these days: a near monopoly.
The company’s hold is on an emerging market for drives that insiders call “solid state” because they have no moving parts.
Last year, STEC rolled out a line of solid state drives that are set to be built into servers made by EMC Corp., Hitachi Data Systems Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and others. It also recently announced design wins with IBM Corp. and a unit of Fujitsu America Inc.
Analysts see more deals on the horizon
“We continue to believe that STEC remains in the driver’s seat with a significant lead in enterprise solid state drive solutions,” said Richard Kugele, an analyst at Needham & Co. in Boston. “Beyond the company’s solid supply relationship with EMC, many additional tier-one customers are far from their potential in terms of production shipments, leaving us (with) the expectation for more material growth later in 2009 and into 2010.”
Right now, STEC is the only game in town for solid state drives, which are seen as eventually replacing traditional disk drives as the primary storage devices for companies.
Server makers are attracted to solid state drives because they typically are smaller, more durable and require less electricity to power up and operate, making them ideal for end users that need to keep and serve up lots of data.
Early adopters include government agencies, insurance companies, trading services, freight companies and other financial institutions.
Some potential competitors have entered the fray in the past year, including Lake Forest’s Western Digital Corp. and Fountain Valley’s Kingston Technology Co.
Scotts Valley-based Seagate Technology LLC also is rumored to be…