Storage Technology Corporation (commonly StorageTek or STK; known as STC until 1983) was founded in 1969 by four former IBM engineers — Jesse Aweida, Juan Rodriguez, Thomas Kavanagh and Zoltan Herger — with headquarters in Louisville, Colorado. It was publicly traded on the NYSE under the ticker STK, reporting roughly $2.2 billion in 2004 revenue and about 7,000–7,100 employees. In June 2005 Sun Microsystems agreed to acquire it for $4.1 billion in cash ($37/share); the deal closed in August 2005 and the company was delisted. Sun itself was acquired by Oracle in 2010, and the product line continues today as the Oracle StorageTek brand. The independent corporate entity ceased to exist in 2005.
Products / operations. A genuine operating hardware and software vendor, not a shell. StorageTek made enterprise data storage: automated tape libraries and tape drives (notably the T10000 drive family, SL8500/SL3000/L-series libraries), disk arrays (FlexLine, BladeStore), virtual tape and storage-networking products, and storage management software (Storage Archive Manager, ACSLS, LTFS-LE), sold with support and professional services under its "information lifecycle management" positioning. It also held networking patents unrelated to tape, which is what the tracked suit involved.
Litigation posture. The record shows exactly one tracked case, as plaintiff and none as defendant — the profile of an operating company asserting its own patents, though it is a single historical dispute and not evidence of a serial assertion program. Venue is the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division (case data), not a plaintiff-friendly district such as the Eastern District of Texas.
Notable case. Storage Technology Corporation v. Cisco Systems, Inc., No. C00-1176 (N.D. Cal., Judge Susan Illston), filed in the Western District of Wisconsin in 1999 and transferred, asserted U.S. Patents 5,842,040 and 5,566,170 against Cisco's NetFlow Feature Acceleration and MPLS technologies. The district court granted summary judgment of non-infringement in 2002; the Federal Circuit reversed in part (329 F.3d 823, 2003). A San Francisco jury found for Cisco in June 2005 on non-infringement and invalidity. StorageTek also brought a separate trade-secret/contract suit against Cisco over NuSpeed Internet Systems, resolved in Cisco's favor (8th Cir. 2005).