Kingston Technology Co. has teamed up with Intel Corp. to market drives made of flash memory to corporations and makers of laptops and servers.
The pact with chipmaker Intel is a shift for Fountain Valley-based Kingston, the leading maker of memory modules for computers.
Kingston traditionally has taken a “wait and see” approach to new products. It waited years to get into flash memory cards for consumer electronics, which now make up a quarter of Kingston’s $4.5 billion in yearly sales.
“This is one market where we believe it will grow quite a bit,” spokesman David Leong said. “The opportunity was there to jump into it right now with Intel.”
The move puts Kingston in an emerging market. Drives made of memory chips,known as solid state drives,are starting to grab business from traditional disk drives. But they’re still in their infancy.
Kingston plans to resell drives made by Intel to the big companies that now buy its memory modules as upgrades for computers. Kingston is set to provide technical support and testing of the drives.
Intel plans to offer the drives to computer makers like Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc., IBM Corp. and others.
Intel makes two flash drive models,one that goes into business laptops and another for servers on corporate networks.
The drives are set to ship in the fourth quarter, Leong said.
Kingston has a long history with Intel.
“We have had both an engineering and marketing relationship with Intel for more than a decade,” Leong said. “We work together because we are all part of the same ecosystem.”
Kingston’s main business is buying memory chips and assembling them onto circuit boards that boost the performance of computers. It also makes memory cards that store photos, songs and data on consumer electronics.
A few years ago, Kingston worked with Intel on a memory module designed to amp up the reliability, speed and density of memory chips in servers.
The move into solid state drives is part of an expansion by Kingston. The company started selling flash cards and portable USB drives in 2004.
Industry watchers have had their eye on Kingston to see if it would get into solid state drives.
Solid state drives store data using memory chips instead of spinning disks as with drives from Lake Forest-based Western Digital Corp. and Scotts Valley-based Seagate Technology LLC. Solid state drives are costlier but more reliable and have taken lucrative business from disk drives in laptops and servers.
Western Digital and Seagate don’t make solid state drives, though there has been rumors of them looking to get into the market.
Kingston hasn’t trumpeted its move into solid state drives. The news broke in a roundabout way a few months ago when a conversation with a sales director for Kingston in Europe, Middle East and Africa got posted on a relatively obscure tech news Web site, Blocksandfiles.com.
One blogger called the Kingston-Intel drives “one of the most anticipated to come to market,” on tech gadget review site Legitreviews.com.
“People have been very excited about it,” Leong said. “The resounding thought is, ‘What took you guys so long?'”
Kingston is playing catch-up in flash drives to Milpitas-based SanDisk Corp., the biggest maker of flash memory devices, and Santa Ana’s STEC Inc., which sells solid state drives to the military and industrial users.
Size and industry pull could prove an advantage for Kingston. That was the case with flash memory cards for cell phones, digital cameras and music players, where Kingston was years late but caught up quickly.
Getting into solid state drives wasn’t a tough sell, according to Kingston Mike Sager, vice president of corporate communications.
“It’s different from the consumer flash market, where there is such a variety of possible end products we could choose to get into,” he said. “Solid state drives are not as fragmented, so it was a little bit easier for us to make the decision to get into it.”
It’s unclear if Kingston has plans to eventually sell solid state drives for PCs geared toward consumers.
“We got into this knowing that the market is in its infancy but we fully expect it to grow,” Leong said.
CORRECTION:
The above story on Kingston Technology Co. should have said the company plans to sell solid state drives to businesses while Intel Corp. plans to target computer makers. Also, Kingston entered the flash memory products market in 2004.
