History 2002: Tom Ward President and CEO, Exabyte

After massive restructuring at Exabyte, Juan Rodriguez is taking a break from everyday management.

He is handing over the reins as president and CEO to newcomer Tom Ward, in exchange for the position of chairman of the tape drive company, replacing Larry Jones, assuming also his former role as chief technologist before the departure at the beginning of the year of former president, CEO and COB Bill Marriner.

Ward, 45, began his career at StorageTek (co-founded by Rodriguez) before joining the late HDD maker MiniScribe. In 1987, he founded storage distributor Data Storage Marketing, sold ten years later to Comstor, a business unit of GE Capital IT Solutions. He then founded Canicom, a call center company, also sold off, before more recently taking the position of COO at Protocol, a $280 million integrated direct marketing company. His primary mission, after making a personal investment of $1.2 million in Exabyte, will be to sign on OEMs, to expand the current stable of Apple, Compaq, IBM, Fujitsu Siemens and Bull.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 173 on June 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.