As the founder and chief executive of a high-tech company, Nathan Thompson is used to looking forward, not back.
But he’s been doing a lot of the latter recently as his Spectra Logic Corp. — a Boulder- based data-storage company whose roots trace back to Thompson’s dorm room at the University of Colorado — marks 30 years in business.
In 1979, Thompson was a sophomore engineering major at CU when he withdrew the $500 that was in his bank account to start a memory-board manufacturer called Western Automation. In 1987, Western Automation bought the assets of a company called Spectra Logic, and the company reincorporated as Spectra Logic in 1993 because it was a better- known name in data storage, Thompson said.
The 30-year milestone is significant, Thompson and others say, considering the dynamic nature of the storage industry.
“It is kind of amazing . . . the degree to which companies have started and died — (companies) that were competitors or the hot company around here,” he said. “We’ve just sort of steadily marched along.”
Some competitors have faltered and faded, he said. Others, including the once-tenacious Exabyte Corp., StorageTek, and, now, Sun Microsystems, fell into the hands of others.
“There is so much consolidation, so much chaos in our marketplace, we’re finding a lot of customers are walking to us,” Thompson said.
Spectra specializes in a variety of data-backup products, including disk-based technologies. However, the company’s hardware and tape-based libraries are its bread and butter.
David Hill, principal of IT consulting firm Mesabi Group LLC and author of a blog for Network Computing, recently said Spectra has successfully defied “the conventional wisdom that hardware is a bad business and tape is dead.”
Hill was unavailable for an interview but referenced a recent blog post he made about the company.
In his Nov. 24 post, Hill noted that Spectra Logic’s latest release, the high-capacity T-Finity library, gives it a stronger foothold in the high-end enterprise market — especially as Sun’s StorageTek brand has weakened.
While Sun has faltered, Spectra has been able to capture some prestigious contracts in the high end, including Cray Research as a reseller and the Korean Meteorological Association as an end-user, Thompson said.
“By sort of sticking with our knitting, we’ve been in a growth market, and we’re doing well,” he said.
Thompson said his company’s stability comes from a variety of areas: It’s a privately held company, its manufacturing is done in Boulder, it offers employees stock options, and it has a persistent focus on research and development.
Spectra this year is expected to spend 13 percent of revenue on research and development, a move that could sacrifice some profitability but also could allow it to gain a competitive edge, he said.
Along with T-Finity, Thompson said, other innovations include a software product to advance the viability of tape for archive storage and an efficiency- related technology in the disk space, he said.
