Ex-Congressman Zschau to Head Adstar, New Spinoff From IBM

Ed Zschau, a computer entrepreneur-turned-politician who served two terms in the House of Representatives and made an unsuccesful run for the U.S. Senate in 1986, is returning to his roots. He’s been hired to run Adstar, IBM’s $6-billion, San Jose-based disk-drive business. Adstar is being spun off as a wholly owned IBM subsidiary.

Zschau, who is 53 years old, founded the Silicon Valley data-storage company Systems Industries in 1968. He later worked as a venture capitalist and served as chairman and chief executive of Censtor Corp., another Silicon Valley data-storage firm.

In addition to heading Adstar, Zschau was appointed to IBM’s board of directors and named a vice president of the company. Adstar’s current general manager, Ray Abu Zayyad, a 31-year veteran at IBM, was named president and chief operating officer of Adstar.

Adstar predominantly supplies other IBM units with magnetic storage systems, subsystems and direct-access storage devices for computers, from mainframes to notebooks. Last year, about $500 million of Adstar’s business involved non-IBM customers.