KOM Honoroed for Junk-A-Juke

Gotta love the name of KOM's current promotion to get people to upgrade to more current archival storage technology. Funny thing is that back in the day, KOM was heavily in the optical jukebox business. Can't remember if they sold the actual hardware, but I know they had software for managing those beasts. But, then again, you don't stay in business in the technology market for 42 years without being adaptable.

It seems KOM has been honored by Computerworld for "promoting positive social, economic and educational change." From the press release, "KOM Networks created the  Junk-A-Juke Upgrade Program to provide a very affordable vehicle to help customers overcome the upgrade costs for secure archive storage solutions without utilizing any capital expenditures while at the same time  responsibly recycle obsolete and antiquated storage (Optical, RAID, SAN  & NAS) including other electronic waste keeping it out of our landfills and donate the proceeds generated from the resale of usable components to Feed The Children US and Speroway (formerly FTC Canada) to help children in our own communities and around the world."

Okay, that's pretty cool. We get rid of "obsolete technology" - I guess that's what MO and UDO and have become -  and feed children. A win-win.

Jukebox article

I remember writing articles in years past encouraging the use of optical disk jukebox storage for document images. Rich Payne, an end user who speaks at a lot of industry events, recently wrote this article in AIIM's Infornomics saying that jukeboxes have gone the way of dinosaurs. The writing has been on the wall for many years. Unfortunately, I often found myself swayed by the energetic pitches of jukebox vendors such as Plasmon, which pretty much bet its whole company on next-generation UDO optical disk jukebox technology. Plasmon's filing for bankruptcy last fall may have been the death knell for jukeboxes. There are just too many people out there developing better, cheaper, faster, magnetic technology for a niche technology like optical disk storage to remain viable.

Ralph