ADIC

Talk about being bold. Enterprise backup vendor ADIC bought nearly 10 percent of its rival Overland Storage's shares in October, sparking speculations of a merged entity that could put greater pressures on the competition.

ADIC jumped at the opportunity after learning that Overland had lost Hewlett-Packard's OEM deal. While Overland has gone on to reject the takeover bid, the move shows ADIC's appetite for growth.

ADIC, which counts IBM and StorageTek as competitors, also made a bid for the midrange tape market by launching in 2004 the Pathlight VX 2.0, a midlevel storage system that combines disk and tape in a single appliance, the Pathlight VX 2.0.

Since then, it has gone on to enhance these systems. In April, ADIC launched the Pathlight VX 450, a disk backup offering designed to provide midrange data centers with enterprise-level protection for their most critical data.

In doing so, ADIC now pits itself against vendors such Quantum and HP.

For fiscal year 2004, the company raked in US$454.8 million in revenue, a 7.3 percent growth over 2003. Not bad, considering that analysts expect the overall tape industry revenues to grow at only 1.3 percent year-on-year.

This makes ADIC one of the key storage players to watch in 2006.