About Us

Company backgroundOpternity's technology has its roots in the optical recording technology originally developed by Philips and Sony for the LaserVision and Compact Audio Disc. During the early 1980's Philips also developed the first recordable "write-once" optical disks and drives, first at its Digital Optical Recording (DOR) lab in Eindhoven and later at its joint venture with Control Data in Colorado Springs.

Both founders of Opternity played leading roles in both activities. While at Polaroid later in their careers, they were both instrumental in several NIST sponsored consortia focused on developing optical tape mass storage systems during the 1990's. Due to various business and technology reasons these activities did not lead to commercial success at that time.

Applying the most recent but proven optical recording technologies as developed for CD/DVD/Blu-ray to a high-density large capacity tape system poses significant technical challenges that until now were not solved in a reliable, robust and low-cost manner. Opternity has solved this problem with a new inventive approach. This allows for the creation of new system solutions that are eminently suitable to serve the emerging market for long-term archival and reference data.

This "permanent archival data" storage segment is quite distinct from, but compatible with, on-line storage, storage networking, storage mangement and back-up/recovery solutions. Permanent storage is unique in its requirements for vast scalability, extremely low cost and long unattended data life. A broad customer field will include industries with regulated data archiving requirements such as financial institutions and health care organizations, and enterprises that process huge data sets such as government agencies, geophysical and biomedical research companies. As requirements for permanent storage grow, all mainstream corporate data centers will quickly become customers across many application categories.

ManagementOpternity is building an experienced management team with many years of combined experience in advanced data storage including magnetic tape and optical disk.
In addition Opternity has assembled an experienced team of advisors to help guide the company and secured the support of several key contract design engineering firms in the areas of media technology and drive design.

CEO & Founder - Maarten R. de HaanMaarten de Haan is one of the early pioneers in optical data storage. He has extensive business experience in management of high-tech startup activities for large international corporations. Maarten was VP and general manger of the Philips/CDC (now Plasmon) Joint Venture that develoed and commercialized the first recordable optical disk systems in the US. As VP of the Electronic Imaging division for Polaroid, Maarten directed the introduction of the world's first 2 megapixel digital camera that received several industry awards. De Haan studied physics, chemistry and electronics (MS) at the University of Amsterdam and has an MBA from Tuck School of Buisnees at Dartmouth.

CTO& Founder - Marinus J. MonenMarinus (Rien) Monen was the original architect of the CD-ROM and the first recordable optical disk drives at Philips and the Philips/CDC Joint Venture. Marinus holds several patents on subsequent generations of optical storage. At Polaroid, he led the development of several imaging devices (digital camera, scanner, photoprinter) from concept to commercialization. Marinus also directed the engineering efforts that demonstrated the technical feasibility of optical media for high capacity data storage applications made with web technology and managed Polaroid's optical disk program with Iomega. Monen has an MS engineering degree in applied physics from the Technical University Eindhoven.

SVP International Marketing & Sales - Kurt SchörghoferKurt Schörghofer has more than 20 years of sales and marketing experience in the data storage industry. He has filled various strategic positions with Compaq, Nokia, Sony, Fujitsu and Adaptec. Kurt is located in Munich, Germany.