Yesterday there was a very misleading rumor re-posted over at Bit-Tech. The original rumor was dragged up by the register on the 2nd of July and surrounded an analyst’s comments on Seagate’s entry into the SSD market this year.
According to analyst named Kevin D. Vassily [Vassily works at the Investment Bank Pacific Crest Securities) Seagate will not be ready to release its new enterprise class SSDs this year and might be delayed until 2011.
Vassily’s comments were in a note that covered STEC’s (a rival enterprise class SSD manufacturer) prospects for the coming year. He states that Seagate had issues with LSI and due to these issues would not be able to finsh up its design for the SSD controller. Vassily further goes on to say that Seagate would have to use a “start-up” company to finish the controller design work. Due to this he (Vassily) believed that mid 2011 was the earliest that Seagate would have a competing product.
When we read this we immediately contacted both Seagate and LSI. Although we have not heard from LSI yet Seagate was quick to respond with the following statement.
“In addition to our industry leading enterprise product lines, we remain committed to solid state development, and are on track to deliver our first enterprise SSD enterprise product shipments later this calendar year. We have increased our development focus on solid state ,and will continue to invest the appropriate resources to be successful in this emerging storage market.”
It would seem that Vassily did not bother to confirm his information with Seagate. It is quite possible that the wording in the note was intentional. After all saying that Seagate was moving to a start-up would undermine confidence in any new products being released as would major delays in the launch of these products.
We do not know the reasons for this misleading information but considering they were in a note on STEC’s prospects it could be bias in favor of STEC on Kevin Vassily’s part.
