Q: Have there been any significant changes in your product line-up now and in the future, also has your product roadmap been altered in the near foreseen future ?
R&D usually is a continuously developing process based on the ever changing knowledge of that particular technology. The anticipated changes follow a natural sequence of launching new product replacing previous generations which were already on the roadmap before the acquisition. Of course, there are always small changes due to normal developments that might pull in a new product or push it out a little. But that’s just a normal R&D / engineering process. Our current product line-up has been on the roadmap before the acquisition and even the new controller platform ‘Jet Express’ has already been in development for quite some time with the launch planned for early next year.
The one thing we have done since the acquisition is obviously transition all our products to 19nm Toshiba NAND, something you can see throughout both our consumer and enterprise solutions now.
When it comes to future products, Toshiba is going to release a TLC based drive in the second half of this year and we are going to sell it under the OCZ brand as well.
Last but not least, I want to point out that being part of the largest NAND fab in the world obviously also gives us more detailed insight into the technology itself, with information that would generally not be shared with outside parties. We can take that insight and improve our products even further in the future.
Q: So the Toshiba acquisition, what does it matter to existing OCZ customers in terms of firmware updates and let's say updated revisions on the OCZ Toolbox to maintain their drives - I'm asking this so specifically as most of your last-gen product do not make use of Toshiba NAND flash memory?
That’s a very good question as it might be a bit confusing to some after Toshiba acquired the OCZ Technology assets. Just as the warranty supports the vast majority of the OCZ Technology products, so will the firmware support maintain. These updates maintain to be available via our website and get updated as normal.
Q: What impact does the Toshiba takeover have on your future product development ?
I have to grab back to a previous answer on R&D. The engineers from OCZ and Toshiba are obviously going to work closely together in terms of new product developments and as I pointed out, one of the biggest advantages for us is gaining an even deeper insight to the NAND technology itself.
As part of the Toshiba Group we are also going to be in a position going forward where we can get early access to new NAND and with the TLC drive in the second half of this year we are entering the entry level market again which we were not able to compete in recently.
Q: Where there other parties interested in purchasing OCZ Technology assets and Intellectual property, e.g. Seagate.
We have always had the policy not to comment on market rumours and there have been plenty over the years. OCZ Storage Solutions is now part of the Toshiba Group and with that we have direct access to NAND, I personally couldn’t have wished for a better company to acquire the assets of OCZ Technology.
