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Mission Critical Linux in Trouble
Dynedain writes: "ZDNet reports that Mission Critical Linux who specialized in server clustering, is laying off 90% of their work force of 60 after failing to secure a buyer of the company. :("
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. Great, now that their site is /. into oblivion they have an awesome chance of attracting buyers, on top of that they wont have to worry about their bandwith bills either .
1
"Think, It aint illegal.....yet" - George Clinton
"Last Friday, the company announced new funding and a restructuring that eliminated its services and consulting work and significantly pared down its product line."
Yeah, I'd say that announcement just said it all. "Eliminated its services and consulting work..." and "pared down its product line". What else does a company need to do to dissolve itself?
Sadly, a failure like this is a high-visibility public relations disaster. Companies should refrain from including the name of an operating system in their company name.
Had the company "Mission Critical Implementations" gone under, it would have gone largely unnoticed.
Their failure as a business reflects poorly on their marketing and their business savvy - not on their choice of toolsets. The industry decision-makers, however, will be affected. "Yet another linux failure" will be the gut reaction.
>>Mission Critical Linux in Trouble
they're not in trouble. They're dead. Please give an example of any company that has had to resort to laying off *90%* of their staff and has survived the calendar year.
Well, I keep harping on this, but companies need to figure out how they will provide value and either lower their costs below this, or find a way of boosting revenues with advertising. Being that many companies can't sell advertising to their custommers, means that cost control is the key...
I have seen many pre-IPO small company plans and most of them scare the heck out of me... If everything goes perfectly and we ship product the day that we plan, with custommer demand that we expect, we will be able to survive...
Well software engineering isn't that exact, and frankly custommer demand for a new product is horribly hard to predict...
Oh well another entry for fsck'dcompany.com
"Our mission is for forward thinking companies to be able to deploy Linux strategies and fulfill their business objectives. We consult with clients to develop the best technological solution to their business problems........"
So we read from their mission statement that basically they're a Linux services consulting company trying to compete in an arena where Redhat and IBM already have most of the dollars. I feel bad for them, but it's not something uncommon in a difficult market.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Does anyone else get nervous when a company that purports to offer mission critical systems has their own web site succumb to the /. effect?
No wonder they're laying of 90%...
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
Perhaps they should strategically rename themselves "Mission Impossible".
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Bloody hell! Now what's going to happen to the mission?!
-- the most controversial site on the Web
They should have clustered themselves - that way if one of their business nodes went bankrupt or was sued, then the other business nodes could take up the slack.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Once again, the patented DotCom Business Strategy (tm) fails.
1: Get cool-sounding name.
2: ??????
3: Profit!
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
I could care less about karma, so there's the disclaimer.
/. users make the following joke:
......
It's funny.. when an Open Source, Linux, BSD, *nux company is on its way down, everyone is sad and want to support or purchase products to try to keep it going. But any other company and many
Step one: product/service
Step two:
Step three: make money.
If any of these companies had a GOOD, well thought out business plan, they wouldn't be going out of business because they could find a buyer, Sep. 11th really hurt them, or the current economy keeps them from being profitable.
If they had a GOOD service/product that people need, then they will survive. It's the nature of business that some companies will rise and some companies will fall. That's LIFE.
(lets see how quickly my "against the flow thinking" gets me modded down)
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
fewer distros. At least in the for profit arena. Hobby distros don't depend on economics as much to stay around because they don't need to stay in business to stay around. I don't mean any disrespect to Mission Critical Linux. But there must be demand to meet the supply of distros.
It is sad that a Linux company has gone under, but maybe this is just a sign that in our (for now) weak economy there isn't room for a bunch of High-End Distributions quite yet. Red Hat is still going strong, but they have name recognition and have been around for a while. I have talked to people who didn't recognize the word "linux" but did recognize "Red Hat." In a time when companies are not spending very much on tech, companies are more likely to go with something they've heard of, regardless of how well it gets the job done. (again, not a slam on how good any distro may be, just a comment on human nature)
Hopefully as Linux continues to pick up speed / market share (which in my opinion it is doing and will continue to do) the need for more companies devoted to the "mission critical" niche will come to be. All it will take is time. More people have heard of Linux now, Linux continues to improve both in quality and ease of use. It is not going away, but sadly not every distro will make it.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
Ouch. The words mission critical would be a hard enough job for an established company like IBM to live up to....Let alone a fly by night company thats not even going to be around to distribute the next security patch that just might make your "Mission Critical" server go up in a pile of smoke because of a division by zero error or something :)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Sorry things didn't work out MCL people. Consulting sucks, I know. My company had to lay people off to get to break even and we're still struggling to tread water. And we were one of the slow and steady firms during the boom. Its kept us afloat after the crash, but man does it suck. Competition is fierce and clients want more for less. Props for trying to do it with Linux (wish I was as lucky), but I guess it just didn't work out
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Which was supposed to be the centerpiece of their other lines of business... They couldn't get the consulting services business off the ground (Really bad timing more than anything else- nobody's doing ANYTHING in the industry. I just wish that these companies would wise up and realize that they make things far, far worse by trying to shore up their short-term profitability by laying people off- they're making the downturn that caused the lower profits worse than it needed to be.) so they killed the expensive part of the company and focused on the software that WAS making them money and reduced their staffing accordingly.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Everything is relative. I bet those systems keeping track of your bank account are mission critical to someone. For the shareholders of the bank at least. And they would be for me, if a failure in them prevented me from receiving my salary and i couldnt feed my daughter or pay mortgage. ;)
/Pedro
I've made an observation after seeing this article.
Businesses dealing with Linux, whether it be hardware, distros, or whatever, should use better judgement in naming their business and products.
Case in point, "Mission Critical Linux" sounds good as long as the company is successful. However, the name is overly generic, and now that the company is headed for deeper waters, Mission Critical Linux could be mistaken for the concept of mission critical linux.
Now all it will take is a single incompetent journalist to briefly perview the headline, and make the assumption that "Linux" itself is in trouble. Want to take bets on how long it will be before this shows up in E-Week?
Another example would be a product called "Linux On The Desktop". The product gets the death axe, and then it could be misrepresented as "linux on the desktop is dying".
See the point? These companies running around trying to make a few bucks from open source products need to take a deeper look at properly branding their products. Enough said.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I pay for my linux CDs, and I don't download music without the performer's permission.
I don't consider it a waste of money, because my dollars keep the goods I want available.
Eventually, you will be doomed to listen to my favorite music, and load my preferred distribution, because you are too shortsighted to keep your favorites in the market. They'll all end up flipping burgers!
I confess that this amuses me.
--Charlie
Don't worry, our products group is still around. It's everyone else that got canned. We're working to finish the new versions of our clusters to make sure that they find good homes rather then disappearing.
Perhaps the problem is your definition of "Mission Critical" Here is another one that might do the job better.
Actually we only had a couple of aerons, and we're keeping all the high end machines thank you.
Ok, here's the dirt. Basically we had to choose between getting more funding, or selling the company. Two offers came over the table to buy the company and we picked one. It fell through at the last moment and we had to make some tough decisions. Our support services were loosing money, so they're gone. We've kept profitable custom engineering projects and our cluster products groups. Hopefully we have enough funds to stay alive untill our products can support us. We're not planning on going completely out of business in the near future.
Full disclosure: I'm one of the employees that didn't loose their job. Someone else may be less optimistic about the whole thing. Since we were as nice as possible about laying people off (They got to stay around, paid, using their offices to find new jobs for three weeks) you probably won't find too many pissed off ex-employees.
It's too bad that this story hit now, when we're moving our office, rather than three weeks ago when we all learned what was happening. It's amazing that 50 people managed to keep their mouths shut for so long :)
That's a rather restrictive definition of mission critical. There are many applications that are clearly critical to an organization's survival that don't fall into a life or death situation.
Take for instance an ISP, which needs to mitigate the failure of one server. The MCL approach is: General purpose internet servers, NFS failover, and shared SCSI/RAID storage.
Linux and clustering software like what MCL sells do serve that need. Microcontrollers don't.
It's funny, but both stories are from the same press release. ZDNet and NewsForge chose to put different spins on the same story. They're both right. We have new financing, we have a renewed focus on high availability, and we laid off 90% of our staff.
It would seem to me that most companies large enough to actually NEED a 'mission critical' server farm would have their own IT staff. So why would they outsource the work of setting it up when their own people can do it cheaper? Seems like MCL really limited themselves from the start.
To those Open Source consultants among you, think small business.
Ok, I was one of the employees that got the axe, and I'm telling you it ain't like that. The company was very up-front about all their dealings and did everything in their power to keep the employees from getting screwed. They paid us for a month and maintained our benefits while we basically used their facilities to find new work.
As for Rick Angell, he's taking a gamble. He's paid what I consider more than what the IP is worth for both the IP and the company's debt (which must still be discharged somehow), gambling that MCL's IP will actually become worth something, and he's kept around as many employees as made sense to work on those projects. In the end, it could all still fall flat...
FWIW I've dealt with Rick personally, and he believes in Linux. He also believes in (at least some of) the products MCL was/is developing, and is pumping his own money into the company to keep it alive. That's quite a gamble to take, if your goal is to rape the failed company... And even the rest of the investors weren't interested in screwing over the employees... If they were, they could have declared bankruptcy a month early and split the cash that was paid to employees in salaries and benefits.
Sure, it's easy to be cynical when something like this happens. But management and the investors really did try to do everything they could to keep the company alive... and then for the employees, when it became evident that wasn't an option.
We did everything that SteelEye did, and we did it from scratch. SteelEye bought their technology from NEC, and they haven't gone anywhere with it sice they've had it. MCL had all the same deals with Compaq, IBM, Intel, and HP. The difference is that our investors gave up on us when times got tough. That may well happen to SteelEye soon too. They had the same number of employees we did, the same amount of cash, the same amount of revenue, and the same amount of time. I'd wager that you'll be hearing about them looking for more money in the near future.
99% of SteelEye's customers are people running the old version of LifeKeeper on windows NT from when it was NCR's product. That user base is probably shrinking, not growing. We're not dead yet. We're still working on our clusters. When our telco grade stuff comes out in 6 months or so, everyone will see who has the better technology.
No corporation in the world gives a damn what happens to its "project" if the corporation takes a nosedive. The whole point of the "project" is to make the corporation some money and prevent the nosedive.