ADSTAR
In 1992 IBM's Storage Products businesses comprising eleven sites in eight countries were combined into one division, ADSTAR (ADvanced STorage And Retrieval);[1] The division encompassed all storage products including disk, tape & optical storage systems and storage software; for 1992 it had a gross profit of about $440 million (before taxes and restructuring) on a revenue of $6.11 billion of which $500 million were sales to other manufacturers (OEM sales).[2] To provide additional autonomy thereby further encouraging OEM Sales IBM in April 1993 established ADSTAR as a wholly owned subsidiary with outsider Ed Zschau as Chairman and CEO.[2] To some observers this appeared to be an admission by IBM that the storage subsidiary no longer provided a strategic advantage by providing proprietary devices for its mainframe products.[2] and that it was being positioned to be sold off as a part of then the IBM Chairman John Akers' business strategy. The replacement of Akers by Lou Gerstner in April 1993 changed the strategy from spinout to turnaround,[3] but the disk drive business under Zschau continued to be troubled, declining to $3 billion in 1995.[4] Zschau left Adstar in October 1995, replaced by IBM insider Jim Vanderslice.[4] The Adstar division was dismembered thereafter; the ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM) was renamed Tivoli Storage Manager in 1999 and the disk drive business component was sold off in 2003