Sale of InterMedia to eMag Solutions
Over the period on 1998 to 1999 I met Brendan Sullivan several times. eMag was a company transistioning from a pure tape manufacturer to a more service provider business. Several times Brendan asked if was interested in selling and my answer normally was along the lines of if it would be good for the business, and give staff customers stability.
In late 1999 the interest got warmer and I ended up going to New York to meet the then CEO of eMag. We ended up shaking hands on deal. The purchase process was slow and tedious. In March 2000 I announced the deal to my staff. At that point only one person knew, because he had been ear marked to go to Atlanta and help set up a service centre there. 24 years later he is still in USA living on the West coast, but not associated with eMag.
The final deal went through on May 31st 2000 - and life changed.
Day 1 did not see a bug change. I expeced a lot of input from eMag at their new acquisition, but very little came through. The main control was from the UK branch in Wales - which was still manufacturing magnetic tape. Bit by bit we started working more closely together but sales leads were always an issue. The Lewes branch understood data conversion, but we not allowed to follow up these leads incase we missed 'the bigger picture' of selling tape. The very sad part of the purchase was the oveseas dealer network. eMag did not like sharing 50% of possible quite significant profit, but prefered to take 100% of nothing instead. The dealer network folded quite quickly - along with the regular source of income from software support fees.
Relationships with Atlanta were far better. They started a conversion bureau and Tim went to Atlanta for a few years to assist. Technically, this opened up a very different market for us. The eMag contacts, and jobs were mainly from traditional tape users, and so the type of tape we saw changed considerably. My first feeling was that almost every tape had IBM labels. There were fewer tapes from the many varied software systems we saw more of in Europe.
The different market in USA meant that we moved away from the the typesetting and data manipuation side. InterMedia for Windows had many manipulation tools but this was not required in the new market. Instead, we concentrated on the tape only package IMDrive, renamed to MM/PC . MM/PC was a true 32 bit program, and so could handle large data blocks much easier that the 16 bit InterMedia for Windows. MM/PC was still being used in the early 2020s so I feel it was a reasonable foundation.
About this time we started dealing with large numbers of tapes and I was interested in using libraries to manage them. MM/PC had features added to work with libraries. I knew there would be a stage of debugging development to make automatic operation smooth, but unfortunately I could never get support for this. My dreams did not come true until probably 20 years later when we had a 3,000 tape job with S2 Data (Sullivan Strickler). At that time I managed to control 24 tape drives and a 500 slot library using just 3 PCs. I was happy!
In 2004, I reached the age of 50, had spent 4 years working for eMag and decided to move on - and started CnW Recovery.