Quantum has reported an 11% loss in revenues of $147m for the second quarter of the financial year, with net losses of $5m compared to profits of $14m in the same period the year before.
Quantum blamed lower-than-expected revenue from backup tape automation products. However, the company also reported record revenues of $42m from disk systems and software sales.
Since the mid-1990s, Quantum has made its name as a backup tape products vendor but prevalence of tape as a backup target is shrinking and vendors in the market are competing for fewer customers.
Quantum president and CEO John Gacek blamed short-term factors, however.
Gacek said: “We believe the shortfall in tape revenue and impact on profits was largely due to the industry transitioning to the latest LTO generation technology.”
Meanwhile, use of disk as a backup target is increasing. Quantum reported better news here and revenue in its DXi disk backup hardware and StorNext scale-out file system products grew 14% and 27% respectively.
“We are very pleased with our record results in disk systems and software, as these products are key to driving higher revenue growth and profit,” said Gacek.
Quantum’s products range from SME to enterprise scale and include Scalar tape libraries; DXi disk-based backup hardware with data deduplication; StorNext scale-out file system-based products that target big data; vmPRO VMware backup appliance and software products; and Qcloud cloud-based backup and disaster recovery services.
