Gateway Travels Down A New RoadGateway Travels Down A New Road

Gateway Inc. has ambitious plans for both the consumer and business markets. In a presentation in New York on Tuesday, the company talked up strategies designed to gain ground in both market segments. Much of Gateway chairman and CEO Ted Waitt's presentation focused on consumer electronics products for the holiday season, but he also outlined Gateway's designs on the market for business storage devices.

Gateway hasn't been a competitor in the storage market to date. But Waitt described it as a market ready for change from vendors looking to shore up sagging PC margins with high margins on their storage products. Cost will be a big factor in any success Gateway has in the storage market. "We base our price on our cost, not on our competitors' prices."

Gateway is moving into the network-attached storage space, and its goal is to bring enterprise-class storage to smaller companies. The company wants to be a "disruptive factor" in the storage market in terms of price and form factor, says Scott Weinbrandt, Gateway's senior VP of enterprise systems and professional business services. Gateway's storage devices include a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) storage subsystem with a serial ATA interface and a DAT (Digital Audio Tape) autoloader for less than $2,000. Next week at Comdex, Gateway plans to reveal a partnership that will help the company address the higher-end SAN segment of the storage market.

The company has its work cut out for it, as it will be challenging established market leaders Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and EMC. "Customers want more competition in the storage market," Weinbrandt says. "They feel they're paying 60- to 70-point margins on storage products."