Executive Q & A with Michael Arnone, Director of Marketing, FUJIFILM Data Storage Solutions

How long have you been working at Fujifilm and what is your role in the company?

I have been with FUJIFILM Data Storage division for 3.5 years now as Director of Marketing for the FUJIFILM branded Linear Tape Open (LTO) product line, and I’m located at the FUJIFILM North America headquarters in Valhalla, NY. Prior to being with Fujifilm, I spent 13 years in business aviation marketing making sure that sales take off!

What’s do you like most about your job?

I have really enjoyed installing a digital marketing infrastructure from the ground up. This is what we call the “DX project” and it involves a lot of new technology, processes and organizational improvements. This allows our sales & marketing teams to be more efficient and results in a better customer experience when seeking information about our products, services and value proposition. But I also like the creative side and the development of content that we use in the DX project.

Can you talk about some of your recent marketing campaigns?

Our current campaign is called “Built on Tape” and started in early 2023. This ANA Award-winning campaign features eye-catching creative and is designed to build awareness for the fundamental advantages of modern data tape. We believe organizations can build solid storage strategies with tape as a building block especially when it comes to cool or cold data. Hopefully readers of this blog page will have seen our banner ads throughout the IT world. 

What are the advantages of modern data tape that resonates best with your audience?

While tape technology has been around for a long time, it still resonates with target users even more so today for a lot of reasons. We are in a period where organizations are “data driven”. Their data has a lot of value and its growing and no one wants to delete anything. This creates a financial burden when it comes to long term retention and protection of ever increasing amounts of data. So things like total cost of ownership, or TCO, become very important. That’s a big advantage for tape technology. It has the lowest TCO of any storage medium. On top of that, because of the increasing value of data, it’s a target for cyber criminals, and things like ransomware are a lucrative endeavor. Tape has proven to be a sensible part of cyber security strategies in that data can easily and affordably be disconnected from the network and stored offline and offsite were the bad actors can’t touch it. And I would say what also resonates today is sustainability. Organizational stakeholders from consumers and investors to the C-suite executives are understandably concerned about global warming and climate change. So that’s another big advantage for tape in that it consumes no energy unless it’s being read or written to in a tape drive. Other technologies are drawing power and generating heat 24/7. But much of the data on these energy intensive devices has gone cold and access frequency is low. So, moving that data for long term retention to eco-friendly tape systems does resonate with the target audience today.

What are the more challenging aspects of your job?

One definite challenge is raising awareness of tape’s powerful value proposition and changing the perception of tape as old or outdated technology. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just look at the 50 TB announcement by Fujifilm and IBM recently. That was a 2.5X leap in capacity compared to the previous generation! So tape is not sitting still, it is constantly evolving with innovations based on nanotechnology to meet the ever increasing amounts of active archive and cold archive data that needs to be retained and protected. Another challenge would be to increase tape’s overall share of voice in the industry. We are making a lot of noise and we’d like to see more noise from other tape vendors as well.

What is your outlook for the tape market over the next 10 years?

What impresses me about tape technology is that it has so much room to evolve and grow in terms of capacity and value. If you look at the technology roadmaps, the future capacities are amazing compared to where we are now. There appear to be few technology limitations, and the ecosystem supporting tape is robust when you look at things like all of the automation options and innovations in software that are happening. So being realistic, you have got rampant growth of data, a highly reliable, cost effective and sustainable technology with a great ecosystem. If new technologies do come along, I think they will only complement tape rather than displace it, so I think the outlook is very strong for 10 years, but really for decades to come. I think we have a long runway!

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I like the water, so sailing and spending time on the seashore are what I like to do along with my wife and two kids (10 year old daughter, 7 year old son). I haven’t played golf in something like five years now, but I have a lot of fun at soccer fields on the weekends watching the kids splash around in the rain and mud! It’s all good!­

What are your plans for Halloween?

We’ll be doing the town trunk or treat. I’ll get dressed up to complement my son. The “Mario and Luigi” Nintendo characters are the choice. I’ll have to strap on some overalls, a green cap, and a little bit of courage for sure!