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While it was Quantum that bought ADIC, from a European perspective it's hard to shake off the impression that ADIC has taken over Quantum - especially when the new organisation's European VP was still giving out business cards with the ADIC logo on at SNW Europe, because his new ones hadn't arrived yet.

It was inevitable that the ADIC way of doing business would prevail in Europe at least, because ADIC had many more feet on the ground here, and was selling direct rather than through resellers, says Kevin Honeycutt, formerly ADIC's EMEA sales and marketing VP and now in the same role at Quantum.

"ADIC has had a much larger team in Europe because it has been focused on the high end - it's very sales intensive, with a large field service organisation too," he adds.

One result of the combination is that it puts Quantum's DLT technology in a stronger position against its rival LTO. Quantum manufactures both, of course, but continues to argue that DLT is the more cost effective option.

"The DLT Value-series drive is twice the current LTO capacity, but slower," Honeycutt says. "LTO has done a very good job of unseating DLT, but I think the two companies together have a better chance of showing the market that DLT still has value."

Another result is that it brings Quantum several new technologies, especially in the area of backup-to-disk. In particular, ADIC had just completed the purchase of Rocksoft whose data de-duplication software has the potential to improve disk backup utilisation by 20 to 30 times, Honeycutt claims. It means that once you have backed up for the first time, a subsequent full backup runs at the speed of an incremental backup.

"You have to have scale to sell to large enterprises," he says. "We now own the tape technology, media technology, automation, data management software - ADIC had already embraced the idea of using disk and tape together, so Quantum now owns more pieces of the technology."

There have been job losses following the merger - Quantum's European marketing manager being one of them. The company plans get up to $75-million of cost savings over the next four quarters, from 'rationalising' its R&D and marketing and closing overlapping offices, yet Honeycutt claims there should be fewer redundancies than might be expected.

"Quantum was more channel-leveraged [ie. it sold more through resellers] so there was relatively little overlap as we brought the organisations together," he says.

A Quantum insider said that while there had been rumours of an acquisition on the way, he was surprised when he heard - only the day before it was announced to the public - that it would be ADIC.

"I didn't think it would be that big," he said. "I thought it might be SpectraLogic or Overland Data."

The big concern for users will undoubtedly be how long their chosen Quantum or ADIC products will remain available and supported, and Honeycutt is keen to allay fears.

"Over time we will rationalise," he says. "But we have told the channel that all our products will continue indefinitely. The disk portfolio will probably be where the first converged products appear. We hope to converge others as the product lines reach end-of-life."