Disk controller company Mylex Corp, Fremont, California, is crediting the increased acceptance of the Peripheral Component Interconnect bus standard, and RAID storage technology, for its healthy profits and growth over nine successive quarters. The company says that currently, 20% of all servers use RAID technology, but that figure is expected to rise to 80% by 1998. It is also predicting that all low-end desktop personal computers will have RAID on the motherboard as standard by 1997. Mylex, which, prior to a management shake-up in 1993 had seen three years of red ink, turned in net profits for the year ending December 31 1995 of $13.1m, up 74.7% from last year on turnover up 61% to $100.4m. It claims to have 60% of the world market for RAID disk controllers, and says it is the only supplier to support EISA, PCI, SCSI to SCSI and all major operating systems including NetWare, Windows NT, Vines and Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix. Peter Shambora, vice-president of sales and marketing for Mylex, said the company has sustained around 70% growth year on year and as a result, needed to increase its engineering base to cope with demand. He said Mylex’s acquisition of Santa Clara- based disk controller maker Buslogic Inc added engineering capacity. It also brings SCSI technology and ASIC development and adds retail strength to the company’s OEM base. The company’s OEM customers include Hewlett-Packard Co, Digital Equipment Corp, IBM Corp, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, Fujitsu Ltd, Hitachi Ltd, Acer Inc and AST Research Inc. Shambora said the company is now setting its sights on Europe and has a three-phase expansion plan for the next five years, including establishing a new distribution center for Europe in Belgium or Holland, increasing support staff and establishing a separate European operation with its own general manager. On the product front, the company says it will develop a standard graphical user interface through which users can access both Buslogic’s SCSI host controller, and Mylex’s RAID controller. It also said it is committed to the UltraSCSI input-output interface and will be launching a RAID UltraSCSI product in April.
