Our History

The 1970’s

PMD stands for Pangbourne Musical Distributors and that is how we started life back in 1977 situated in…yes you guessed it Pangbourne!  Founder and Chairman Geoff Dance began his business building audio amplifiers for recording studios located in the Southeast of England.

Geoff’s passion for music forged connections with many audio recording studios. Acknowledging Geoff as a ‘man that can’ they began to ask if he could source and supply ‘Reel-to-reel’ tape used for professional audio recording at that time.

 Geoff being an irrepressible entrepreneur very quickly built the business to be one of the leading distributors of audio tape in Europe. The proliferation of the business was timed with the emergence of personal audio cassette tape, which would revolutionise the music industry and lead to Sony Corporation producing products like ‘The Walkman’.

The 1980’s

Geoff decided that a central UK location would be ideal for distributing products across the UK and a move to Stratford-upon-Avon followed and remains the home of the company to this day. The industry at this time was built on ‘magnetic tape’ and led to changing its trading name to ‘PMD Magnetics’.

Geoff decided PMD needed its own brand of audio products and a shift to manufacturing led to the company acquiring factory premises. With newly developed import connections in China for raw materials, Geoff began manufacturing PMD’s own brand of audio cassettes and before even the mid-1980’s arrived PMD’s audio cassettes have become one of the leading brands for professional recording studios, educational institutions, HM Police and beyond!

The mid-1980’s led to the new medium at that time video tape technology (VHS). PMD formed a strong alliance with the then powerhouse Konica UK of the Konica Corporation Japan. In 1986 PMD also became an approved distributor for Sony and Fujifilm Professional Video Tape products which meant PMD could expand ties with the professional creative industries, plus forge forward with domestic audio and VHS cassette sales.

These fast-paced tape technologies moved quickly with the Japanese corporations of Sony and Fujifilm being relentless in their product development into more sophisticated digital tape technology and PMD were right at the forefront of this movement. This continual refinement and enhancement led PMD to start selling data storage media products, the floppy disk was born… (Google it!)

The 1990’s

PMD began to sell data storage media and with a well-established customer base that already trusted PMD’s deep knowledge of the recording media industry, the PMD team helped guide customers into this new world of data storage technology.

Products like the floppy disk became more compact and higher capacity, but were quickly replaced by cartridges such as Zip, Jaz and later DLT. These formats were very much aligned to professional users with substantial amounts of data, but the audio and video world were evolving too.

Optical disc…CD-R and later DVD-R discs came to the market and boasted seamless digital recording but remaining compact and universally accessible for the consumer market. ‘The Discman’ followed the steps of its predecessor ‘The Walkman’ and compact disc became THE format for domestic audio and very quickly for video with the rise and rise of DVD. PMD moved quickly to keep pace with this rapid digital evolution by expanding its brand of products to its own CD and DVD products.

The 2000’s

Data storage tape had become big business for PMD. Formats like LTO was now considered the most reliable and cost-effective data storage product on the market and a product still used across the world even by Cloud data centres!

PMD expanded the depth of the contracts with HM Police, UK Universities, Councils and other open government organisations and often were exclusive given the company’s ability to customise and create bespoke products for its many customers. The company ran its own fleet of vehicles delivering next day, long before the days of Amazon!  The company now at the height of its industry was exporting products to 15 different countries across 3 continents!

The 2010’s

PMD started life in this decade very much in the same vein as the one which came before it. However, technology was again starting to shift. Audio and Video recording was no longer on tapes and discs replaced by memory cards and hard disk drives. PMD developed a new set of vendor relationships, some we still have today with the likes of Western Digital and Seagate.

Our knowledge of data storage media sparked conversations with HPE and IBM about selling IT hardware. It was a logical step to develop our knowledge of IT storage from the hardware perspective and we started to sell both HPE and IBM server and tape systems, something we continue to this day.

Backup was a constant conversation, but the company has always believed in building strong customer relationships and in turn these have navigated the business into new areas such as network infrastructure.

By the end of this period little did we know there would be a quantum shift in our history.

The 2020’s

When the global pandemic hit in March 2020 PMD’s business was still largely based on physical products that relied on IT professionals being onsite at their places of work. When this was no longer possible PMD had to pivot… and quickly!

True to our business principles, we reached out to customers keeping regular dialogue and it became clear their pain was from being catapulted into remote working and for the education industry this was particularly challenging.  Microsoft 365 adoption was almost mandatory to carry on delivering lessons to children. Educational customers were operating across Microsoft Teams to deliver lessons and OneDrive was adopted for sharing homework.

PMD has always been a data protection business. The products sold over the years were always about keeping a customer’s data safe. We were fortunate to have built up financial strength over the many years of trading. We used this strength to quickly establish new vendor relationships around Software-as-a-Service. These software’s designed to both protect and securely backup our customers data both on-premise and in the cloud.

The disastrous effects of the pandemic were seismic across the world, but for PMD it also gave birth to a new dawn…Cyber Security Solutions.

To mark this re-birth, in June 2023 we announced our new company name PMD Data Solutions Ltd. PMD will always be at the heart of our organisation, but the times of Magnetic media are now firmly in our legacy and under our new name we have driven our data protection business forward.

Today, our sales and technical teams are growing as we enter a new era for the business. The foundations built by Geoff’s entrepreneurial skill continue to serve us well. The principles of ‘customer first’ and always looking to solve customer problems keep us true to our course and we are confident the future will deliver success for the company and for the customers it serves well past our 50th anniversary in 2027.