Verari Systems went on the block last week, and the website has a new front end screen explaining that the assets of the company are available for competitive bid. This struck me as a surprise for three reasons:
First, since their inception, Verari had made some impressive sales of their gear and software — combining blade servers and dense storage in a cluster configuration. Government, prestigious healthcare institutions and others had adopted the platform that, among other things, garnered the company many lauds and awards.
Second, from my chats with users of the systems, the stuff worked pretty well. Verari was all over its customers, as most start-ups are, custom configuring stuff, resolving any problems and adding new capabilities as needed. It was proprietary, of course, but no less monolithic than the brand name guys are trying to build today with their mainframe mini-me’s.
Third, the company was helmed by a guy I respect and personally like, David Wright — formerly of EMC, Legato, Amdahl and IBM. I spent some quality time with David when Legato was still Legato and was impressed by his skills in bringing that company back from the brink prior to selling it to EMC.
I hear through the grapevine that they blew through a lot of VC money and that they gave deep discounts to move systems into their primo accounts at NASA, Johns Hopkins and elsewhere. Then, when the economy soured, they couldn’t right the black versus red ink.
I didn’t blog about them because frankly I regarded them as too proprietary. Still, I watched to see how they did — if only as a predictor of how the purveyors of new monolith “solutions” would fare. Given the developments, I wonder about the solvency of both the monolithic platforms coming on the market and the cloud phenom generally.
Not sure whether this is a clear indication of the future of either, or just the new rules for the old game of trying to survive an economic downturn. I wish David and company every success going forward.
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