Irvine’s Gateway Inc. is shaping up under its Taiwanese parent, Acer Inc.
Acer is about three-fourths of its way through folding Gateway’s operations into its own.
Since the $710 million deal closed back in October, Acer “has methodically worked through the process of integrating the two,” Gateway spokeswoman Lisa Emard said. “They’re still kind of working through the final details.”
It was a bit fuzzy who would be the top local guy after former Gateway chief executive Ed Coleman left in January.
Officially, there isn’t a top local executive for Gateway, according to Emard, because Acer’s leaders are spread around the globe. Its chairman is in Taipei, while its chief executive is in Milan.
Managers at Gateway are set to report to Acer’s Rudi Schmidleithner, who runs the PC maker’s pan-American operations out of its U.S. headquarters in San Jose.
Schmidleithner makes the trip to OC every few weeks, and Gateway’s trio of division heads from Irvine go up north often, Emard said.
The trio includes: Gary Elsasser, senior vice president of products; Bob Davidson, senior vice president of global retail; and John Costello, senior vice president of marketing and Gateway’s direct sales unit.
Acer plans to keep Gateway’s two buildings in Irvine, Emard said.
So far, Acer has combined sales, product development, customer service and operations groups.
Some divisions at Gateway are staying largely intact and also will serve Acer, including its global retail business and desktop PC product development and engineering groups.
Acer bought Gateway largely for its tight relationship with U.S. retailers in a bid to reach consumers here.
Other units run out of Irvine include direct sales, marketing, Web development and online sales, and its accounting and legal departments.
Going Government
Fountain Valley’s Kingston Technology Co., the top maker of memory products that go into computers and consumer devices, is going after more sales to the government.
The company recently released a memory module,a circuit board loaded with memory chips,just for servers.
“We have a sales team specifically focused on the federal government as they are one of the biggest,if not the biggest,purchasers of technology equipment,” spokesman David Leong said. “It’s natural for a company like Kingston to see if our memory products, specifically server memory in this case, fit their needs.”
The product complies with the Trade Agreement Act, a set of rules for buying products by the General Services Administration. Compliance with the act means that a product has come from or been built in a country that has a trade agreement with the U.S.
Adapter War
For the fourth straight quarter in a row, Aliso Viejo-based QLogic Corp. upped its lead over rival Emulex Corp. of Costa Mesa for a profitable bit of electronics that go into data storage networks.
QLogic reached a big milestone in the first quarter,a 50% market share for sales of host bus adapters, or cards full of chips that speed up the flow of data on a network, according to statistics from Redwood City-based market tracker Dell’Oro Group Inc.
The company, which had a recent market value of about $2 billion, took market share from Emulex, which had about 39% in the first quarter.
Together, the two make up about 90% of the market for host bus adapters.
QLogic has been consistently gaining market share at the expense of Emulex and smaller competitor Milpitas-based LSI Logic Corp. in the past 12 months.
A year ago, QLogic had a 43% share, Emulex had 36% and LSI had 5%.
Despite the share gains, QLogic is seeing less revenue from host bus adapters than it did in the fourth quarter, suggesting lower prices are helping to drive its gain.
“The first-quarter sales were below fourth quarter’s numbers, which is typical of the industry,” said Tam Dell’Oro, principal of the Dell’Oro group.
Companies are switching to buying gear for what’s called virtualized storage networks, which require fewer servers to do the same amount of work.
“Since users can get more applications running on each individual server now with virtualization, the number of server units may remain soft,” Dell’Oro said. “That means fewer host bus adapters are required.”
She downplayed concerns about slower spending on technology by companies putting a damper the host bus adapter sales.
“Storage remains one of the top issues for corporate compliance and government regulations, so my guess is that senior executives are not going to skimp budgets here,” she said.
