History 2003: Eurologic RAID Activity Now in Adaptec Orbit

Adaptec has been seeking to diversify in order to compensate for the decline of the SCSI market.

Last year, it acquired what remained of Tricord Systems, in clustering NAS software, most likely with a view to acquiring Eurologic in order to combine their respective know-how. So it has come to pass that Adaptec purchased the Dublin-based Eurologic Systems, a seasoned specialist of external JBOD, SCSI, FC and ATA RAID solutions to be integrated into its storage solutions group.

The Irish company was founded in 1988 by CEO John Maybury, his wife Heather and CTO Hans O’Sullivan.

Since its very beginning the company has shipped 148,000 storage systems representing 21TB.

Current OEM or resellers include Acer, Avid, Bell Micro, Fujitsu-Siemens and Tech Data.

Another major OEM was Dell, but this customer was lost after Dell signed with EMC.

Consequently, Eurologic returned a loss last year. It currently employs 111 people, down from more than 300 workers in 2001.

“We expect Eurologic will contribute between $60 and $70 million in revenue during Adaptec’s fiscal year,” said Adaptec CFO Dave Young.

The I/O company already proposed small RAID subsystems, but with little success, and will now be able to extend its product line, despite the fact that certain of its RAID components customers are likely to take a dim view of this new competition from a supplier.

Adaptec will not takeover Eurologic’s SAN software business, which was divested as a separate entity before the deal and will continue to operate independently.

A few days later, we learned of the creation of Elipsan, in Bristol, UK, established with 27 people through the spin-off of the IP SAN division of Eurologic founded in 2000 following Eurologic’s acquisition of network archival software company K-PAR Systems.

Elipsan’s CEO, Hans O’Sullivan, incidentally, is none other than the former co-founder and CTO of Eurologic.

Adaptec had little need for this activity, given that it already has its own outfit for iSCSI technology.

Recall too that Eurologic and the Hermes Softlab Group or HSL of Slovenia, formed a new venture, StorScape, in 2001 in order to develop CIM-based storage management software. Before the deal with Adaptec, HSL, who had 51% in the venture, acquired the 49% ownership of Eurologic. The Slovenia-based development team of StorScape will be retained and becomes an HSL subsidiary. Note that HSL has a new CEO, French Olivier Carron de la Carriere.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 183 on April 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.