Quantum

Quantum was founded in 1980 as Quantum Software Systems Inc. By 1984, it led the market for mid-capacity 5.25-inch drives. That year, a subsidiary was launched called Plus Development to focus on the development of hardcards. Plus Development became a successful designer of 3.5-inch drives with Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics as the contract manufacturer. By 1989, Quantum led the compact drive market.The company had 11 new models of 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives. It signed distribution agreements with Rein Electronik in Germany and Inelco Peripheriques in France. It also merged its subsidiary Plus Development Corporation into its Commercial Products Division.Quantum was the largest drive producer worldwide in 1994.In 2000, Maxtor agreed to acquire Quantum’s hard disk drive group. In 2004, Quantum became a member of the LTO Consortium after acquiring Certance.In 2012, Quantum announced Q-Cloud, which combines on-premise storage with cloud storage. In 2015, the company released a multi-tier storage product, StorNext 5.3, which supports Q-Cloud and powers the company’s Xcellis workflow storage technology.In 2018, Jamie Lerner became CEO and Quantum shifted focus from hard drives/tape to providing data storage, management, and protection for video and other unstructured data.In 2019, the company added a subscription for cloud-based device management and product, calling it Distributed Cloud Services.In 2020-2021 Quantum acquired technology to support the shift in focus including ActiveScale and CatDV. They also acquired video surveillance software from Pivot3.During the COVID-19 pandemic, Quantum was a recipient of a government loan of US$10 million as part of the Paycheck Protection Program .In October 2021, Quantum and IBM announced they would work together to develop LTO-10, the next generation of Linear Tape-Open technology.

Acquisitions

Prior to the 2000 merger of the hard drive division, Quantum began a series of tape technology acquisitions:

1998 – ATL Products, a manufacturer of automated tape libraries.

1999 – Meridian Data, a network-attached storage supplier

2001 – M4 Data Ltd., a manufacturer of tape libraries.

2002 – Benchmark Storage Innovations, who manufactured the VStape product line under a Quantum license.

2005 – Certance, the former tape business of Seagate Technology, becoming a member of the LTO consortium.

2006 – Advanced Digital Information Corporation , Scalar brand tape libraries, StorNext filesystem and De-Duplication technology.

2011 – Pancetera Software, a specialist in data management and protection for virtual environments, for $12 million.

2014 – SymForm, a cloud storage company.

2020 - Atavium, storage and data workflow startup

2020 – ActiveScale object storage business acquired from Western Digital.

2020 – UK-based Square Box Systems Ltd, maker of CATDV and a specialist in data cataloging, user collaboration, and digital asset management software.

2021 – Video surveillance assets from Pivot3, a hyperconverged infrastructure company.

2021 - EnCloudEn, a hyperconverged infrastructure software company.