The new head of OCZ Technology Group said that the company will try to rebuild its product line to improve its profit margins. As a result, OCZ will concentrate on high-end solid-state drives that offer high performance and/or capacity. The company will still continue to address consumer and OEM markets as volume-wise they are growing quickly.

"We are in the midst of rationalizing the product line. The company itself has done amazing job of covering a broad portfolio into almost every market segment that exists. Based on the size of the company, capital structure of the company, that is just an impossibility. [...] We will be migrating more and more away from [the most commoditized areas, what is called the value part of the product portfolio] to the high-end of both the client market and then obviously driving more into the enterprise market as well," said Ralph Schmitt, chief executive officer of OCZ Technology, during a conference call with financial analysts.

While OCZ will obviously make a number of changes to itself to address the issues that are in place, it will not  cut-down its research and development (R&D) efforts. The new CEO definitely understands that the best way to avoid commoditization is continuous development of premium products with unique features. Naturally, such approach allows creating solutions tailored for particular markets of customers.

"We will innovate to continue to differentiate our products. Our focus will be to further penetrate the OEMs and especially the enterprise market," stressed the new CEO.

Ralph Schmitt, who began his career as designer of storage systems, clearly understands the value of OCZ's technologies and developments. But in addition to just packing a product with leading-edge technologies, the company will try to put more attention into each products so to make them better overall.

"The positive here is clearly having a lot of the technology ourselves. The controller technology as well as the software, firmware aspect of things and the knowledge around NAND flash management is very expensive and will be used to differentiate the company. We are going to be going after differentiation because we obviously know we have some very large competitors that have other strengths [like in-house NAND flash manufacturing] so, we are going to be playing with our strengths. But one of the biggest changes you will see is a more focused approach to the product," said Mr. Schmitt.

Tags: OCZ, SSD, Business