A Long-Awaited Win Comes To Fruition

The resurgence began last March when Maxtor unveiled an exclusive partnership with D&H Distributing, which introduced Maxtor's SCSI and Serial ATA hard disk drives to a host of solution providers. "We've used Maxtor hard drives for almost two years now," says William Hook, president of Keystone Computer, a systems builder based in DuBois, Penn. "We had used them years ago, but dropped them when we began to have problems with the product."

However, Hook says that last year, on the advice of his D&H rep, he decided to give Maxtor a second chance. This time around, Hook has seen a definite improvement in product quality and Maxtor's channel business. "The failure rate for their drives today is virtually nonexistent, and we haven't had to return one yet," Hook says. "Maxtor has become our first choice."

In addition, this year Maxtor signed a distribution agreement with Synnex, which now carries Maxtor's enterprise Atlas and MaxLine products. The vendor has also unleashed a number of new storage products in the past 12 months and garnered a number of industry accolades.

Clearly, Maxtor's efforts have paid off. The vendor narrowly beat out Seagate, a multiple ARC winner, for this year's top spot (Maxtor's weighted total was 72, Seagate's was 71). While Seagate won the product innovation subcategory and loyalty contest by a small, one-point margin, Maxtor bested its rival in the support and partnership subcategories. Meanwhile, the other two vendors in the category, Hitachi Global Storage and Fujitsu, were left in the dust, posting poor support and partnership numbers.

Despite Maxtor's improvements, the company, along with other disk-drive makers, have had a tough go of it this year. Pricing pressure has hurt profit margins and, as a result, the market has been hit hard on Wall Street. Maxtor, for one, has had to grapple with losses and layoffs despite shipping more than 11 million hard drives in the second quarter.

For many white-box makers, higher end workstations, servers and storage units have become an increasingly attractive business. If Maxtor can continue its upward trajectory, it will certainly command an even bigger portion of that upper echelon segment.

John Samborski, vice president of Ace Computers, Arlington Heights, Ill., says he's rooting for all disk-drive vendors. "The vendors are a crucial part of our business in the systems-builder market, but they don't get the credit or attention that, say, Intel or Microsoft do," Samborski says. "They're doing a great job for us."