TECHNOLOGY : Former Director Turns Archive Corp. Buyout Into Opportunity, New Firm

Michael W. Harris saw the handwriting on the wall at Archive Corp., and he rewrote it.

A director of marketing at Archive, a Costa Mesa company that makes equipment that duplicates data stored in computers, Harris knew that his job wouldn’t last long when he learned last year that Conner Peripherals Inc. was going to buy the Costa Mesa company. At night and on weekends, Harris began to create Rememory Corp., a company built around a software program that he had thought about for years but only recently decided could become a cost-effective product.

In January, he got a push when Conner announced that it would lay off 100 Archive employees. In April, Harris chose a severance package over a reassignment to another position, and he began working on his project idea full steam.

With investors and a healthy severance package, he pulled together more than $250,000 in capital. At the end of May, he started in earnest. His idea was to create a software package that could take a load of worry away from overworked corporate computer managers known as network administrators.

After only two months of full-time work, Harris and four other employees--three of them former Archive people--have launched their first product: the Rememory Data Management Server system. It sells for $6,000 and comes with all the hardware necessary for backing up data on a network computer. Rememory takes the hardware and software and puts them together so that companies don’t have to do that on their own.

The system basically takes care of the complicated business of periodically backing up all the data on a computer network. It comes with its own computer system and can be plugged into a network within 10 minutes, Harris said.

It thus frees the network administrator from worrying about whether a network of computers is adequately backed up in case of equipment failures. The administrator typically would have to configure the system painstakingly to perform storage backups on a regular schedule.

“That has always been the problem with tape backup systems,” Harris said. “The user has to become an expert to make it work. We take the guesswork out.”

Once in place, the system takes about two minutes to back up 45 gigabytes of data, a typical amount for a medium-size corporation.

Harris hopes to hire as many as 20 people in the next year, though he is not targeting Archive employees. He said he is also taking steps to protect Rememory’s technology.