Remember that Engenio IPO? It's off - and so is the CEO
LSI reorganises Engenio and its RAID operation
By Chris Mellor | Published: 11:00, 17 August 2005
Recently we ran a Whither Engenio piece. It's been overtaken by events.
LSI Logic has removed Tom Georgens, Engenio's CEO, and is folding its RAID business into Engenio.
Engenio is an LSI Logic subsidiary making drive arrays which is sells through OEMS like StorageTek, IBM and Sun. It has been positioned for an IPO for a year or more. LSI Logic has a separate RAID controller business, the RAID Storage Adapter group. This is being combined with the Engenio operation and the new operation's products - drive array systems, RAID hardware and software, will be sold by the LSI Logic sales force instead of its own.
Phil Bullinger is the new head of Engenio. The moves have taken place months after Abhi Talwalkar became LSI Logic CEO, joining from Intel. He doesn't see any near-term likelihood of an Engenio IPO.
It's a case of Engenio revenues not being good enough to my mind. The business competes with Dot Hill and Xyratex in a second tier of drive array vendors below the big three: EMC, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM. Drive arrays are going through a phase of increasing modularisation and HDS, for one, is adding multi-vendor virtualisation facilties to its high-end and modular arrays. Sun has a similar controller, the 6920, and buys in arrays from Dot Hill as well as Engenio.
Once the Engenio engineers get access to LSI Logic's RAID IP we could see far more capable array controllers result.
Incidentally Tom Georgens was a pleasure to meet and interview and I wish him all the best in the future.
