Gear6: deep-sixed or changing gears?

April 27th, 2010 — Data management

Considering Gear6 recently took up the cause of refuting the death of memcached it is somewhat ironic that it is now Gear6 that is rumoured to be close to death.

Not just rumoured, in fact. eWeek reports that the company is in the process of shutting down its operations, while rival Schooner Information Tech has declared that Gear6 recently filed for a business liquidation process called Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors.

The erstwhile caching appliance vendor, which changed its focus to the Memcached open source distributed memory object-caching system just over a year ago, has not issued a response – despite requests for clarification from us and others.

The lack of response is ominous, and we are sure the company built up some baggage thanks to its previous incarnation as cache appliance provider, but there are a few reasons why now would seem to me to be an inopportune one to cut and run:

  • The current Memcached strategy has only be going a year.
  • The company recently claimed to have added 100 new customers since the launch of a version of its Web Cache software for cloud platforms in December 2009 (not all of which are paying no doubt, but….
  • The profile of Memcached has never been higher.
  • Gear6 also recently inked a partnership with Hewlett-Packard that apparently sees Gear6 added to HP’s Extreme Scale-Out portfolio and HP’s field staff and channel partners trained to deploy and support Web Cache on HP’s BL, SL and DL servers.
  • The company raised $4m of an expected $12.7m financing round in August 2009, according to SEC filings.

    • .

    It is perfectly possible, of course, that the rest of that planned $12.7m was harder to come by than executives – or investors – had anticipated, but my first thought when reading about the Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors was that of a change of ownership for the company’s assets rather than total disappearance.

    We shall see.

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