Today marks a new morning for Quantum. With our announcement of first-quarter earnings for the fiscal year 2020, Quantum celebrates the completion of a transformative journey. The result? A lean and nimble company poised for growth.
Any company approaching the 40-year mark is bound to have gone through some evolutionary stages. In our case we needed to face up to some historical missteps, necessitating an arduous process to restate earnings for multiple quarters. It gives me great satisfaction to announce that we have completed the restatement process. The impact of the restatement was almost exclusively related to the timing of revenue recognition. This is a positive outcome of this process, and it also means the costs we have incurred as part of this restatement process are now largely behind us. This process also served to initiate significant changes in our leadership, in our board of directors, and in our entire corporate structure.
We have committed ourselves to a new strategy and direction, which is vividly captured in our latest video . Quantum customers have long valued our leadership in both the high-speed processing of video and long-term low-cost cold storage of video and unstructured data. Quantum already provides the video infrastructure for some of the world’s largest studios and post houses, corporate brands, sports networks and franchises, airports, research institutions, and hyperscalers. Given the massive market across these industries and the strength of our core technology, we are focused on leading this video storage infrastructure market. Now Quantum is applying our expertise to rapidly growing applications with similar technology requirements such as video surveillance, autonomous vehicles, medical and surgical video, manufacturing video for quality assurance, satellite, and geospatial imagery, military and tactical applications, video search and analytics, and more.
We increased our tempo of innovation to address emerging market opportunities where we could capitalize on our strength in managing storage for video and video-like data. We unleashed a torrent of new product developments, including the F-Series NVMe flash storage arrays, the VS-Series hyperconverged platform for video surveillance, the R-Series line of ruggedized, removable storage systems, and Quantum Cloud-Based Analytics, enabling monitored and configuration through the cloud, essentially connecting all of our product deployments to the Quantum Distributed Cloud. The pace of product introductions brought revitalized energy to the people who are responsible for creating these offerings and delivering them to our customers.
We have reaffirmed our focus on ethical business practices, and we
have emphasized the importance of margin and profitability, as opposed to top
line revenue growth. This is directly related to designing and selling products
based on our own unique intellectual property. Significantly, we
eliminated $70 million in annual expenses, making the company leaner and more nimble.
As many of our customers are keenly aware, one challenge we faced was a shortage of LTO media due to a dispute among suppliers. I’m pleased to report that this supply issue has been resolved, with both FujiFilm and Sony agreeing to license LTO-8 technology. With this agreement, customers can be assured that they can continue to take advantage of the unique economy and archive capabilities that only tape can deliver.
You can find all of the details about Quantum’s quarterly performance and structural transformation in our press release . Later this year, it is our intention to return Quantum to public trading on a stock exchange.
Looking forward, I
see substantial opportunity to move to a software-defined architecture across
our product portfolio, to value engineer our products for even greater
performance while reducing costs, and to make our software more searchable,
more accessible, and more intelligent.
This is all good
news for the people who depend on our products every day. It’s also good news
for the people who come to work here each day, because they can be assured that
their efforts matter. And it is good news for the people who show their
confidence in Quantum’s vision through their ongoing investment. To all of you:
thank-you for your trust. Going forward you will see a new Quantum, resolved to
learn from our history and energized for the promise of tomorrow.