Over the course of four days (April 12-15), nearly 35,000 people schmoozed and strolled through 83 conference sessions and more than 325 exhibits laid out across 200,000+ square feet in the Georgia World Congress Center. Organized annually by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), the AIIM conference and exposition brings together the latest tools and trends for managing business data throughout the enterprise. Traditionally a knowledge management and imaging-driven show, this year's gathering focused heavily on Web delivery and the impact this not-so-new medium is having on business processes. At the same time, though, vendors and those on the exhibit hall floor spoke frequently and enthusiastically about MO. For DVD proponents, AIIM '99 was a mixed bag: only one conference session focused specifically on DVD, only a handful of exhibitors made significant DVD-related announcements, and those who did had mixed feelings about the format and its potential as the business user's storage and distribution media of choice.
Despite the hodgepodge of knowledge management-related technologies and techniques touted by vendors (including OCR, workflow, imaging, ecommerce, and records management on the application side and XML, microfilm, MO, WORM, RAID, CD, and DVD on the delivery side), AIIM's DVD announcements were noteworthy. The biggest news came from Pioneer, which announced (at long last, many agree) its second-generation, 4.7GB DVD-R drive. Priced at $5,400 (a huge cost cut from the first, generation drive's $17,000 price tag--not to mention a competitive advantage that should increase exponentially its presence on the desktops of both title developers and information managers by Q4 1999), the DVR-S201 began shipping in limited quantities last month. With 1X write and 2X read speeds for 4.7 and 3.95GB media, the DVR-S201 supports incremental writing and is compatible with both DVD-ROM drives and DVD-Video players. The company also promoted its 4.7GB DVD-R media (DVS-R4700), which retails at $40 apiece, as well as its DRM-7000 FlexLibrary, which allows users to mix and match DVD-R, CD-R, DVD-ROM, and CD-ROM technologies in a traditional jukebox configuration.
Two rows over, Verbatim introduced its own series of CD and DVD media, as well as a new 5.2GB MO drive and standalone version of its 4X/4X/20X CD-RW drive. The company's new DataLifePlus 4.7GB DVD-R and DVD-RW media are scheduled to ship this quarter; its 4X CD-RW and 8X CD-R media are shipping now. In other optical news, Verbatim unveiled its 5.2GB MO drive and media, which store up to 21 four-drawer filing cabinets' worth of data on a single, removable 5.25-inch disc. With sustained data transfer rates of up to 10MB/sec and burst transfer rates of 20MB/sec, the 5200 lists at $1,999 (internal) or $2,099 (external).
The media's MSRP is $150. Finally, Verbatim announced volume shipments of an external SCSI version of its CDRW4420 drive. Bundled with CeQuadrat's just!burn mastering and packet-writing software, the MCA 4420 is priced at $499.
With DVD-R hardware entering its second generation (albeit from the same lone manufacturer who brought us the first round of recordable DVD) and the RAM versus +RW/-RW rift nowhere near resolution, it was a bit puzzling--but not surprising--to see many vendors announcing tweaks to their product lines to make room for DVD-R and RAM. On the software side, Hyland Software announced that its OnBase Authoring, OnBaSe Export, and OnBase Publishing modules now enable uses to archive and store their data on DVD-R media. Also on hand was Smart Storage, which not only integrated support for both DVD-RAM and MO devices into its SmartStor Archive software, but boasted another new product line identity. (Earlier this year, Smart Storage had added +DVD to its line of SmartCD storage and duplication software.) Now marketed as SmartStor, the company's product branding better reflects its expanded support for multiple storage media (including CD-R and ROM, plus DVD-R, ROM, RAM, WORM, and MO).
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