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Linuxcare Reincarnated as Levanta
ches_grin writes "BusinessWeek is running a nice profile on Levanta, the former dot-com poster child once known as Linuxcare. From the article: 'It's not that Matt Mosman has an easy job. As Linux continues its march deeper into Corporate America's racks and racks of servers, his small Silicon Valley company, Levanta, is one of many trying to help companies install and manage all those servers--a big, complex problem that's not being solved very well right now. Still, Mosman has one thing going for him: He can't do much worse than his predecessors.'"
... hiring Martin Taylor for Levanta LIVE!
"Snatching defeat from the mouth of victory on a daily basis."
...does Ceren Ercen still work there?!
This happens quite often, and I'm always scratching my head, why would they take a perfictly reasonable and understandable company name and "synergize" it in to something stupid. Case in point, "Linuxcare" changed to "Levanta". I would avoid them based on that stupidity alone.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Don't let Levanta's nondescript, prescription drug-sounding name fool you
Glad I'm not the only one who immediately thought I'd be getting spams saying: L3van7a at l0w lovv pr1ce5
This guy's the limit!
I understand, from one of the developers of Linuxcare, that the company was managed poorly, chose silly routes for their services, and were probably a little ahead of their time. Let's hope they make this work.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
As the name is close enough to Levitra, with some clever marketing people will believe the company can keep your computer up.
I've seen Levanta's ads in Linux Journal before. Besides the silly name, it sounds like a pretty interesting premise--remote administration, deployment, and management of servers. I don't know how well it actually works, or how painful the integration with the managed servers is, but it certainly sounds cool.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
For those who, like me, are wondering about how the Levanta Intrepid (the actual box) can remotely manage servers with such "precision"... I looked it up on their website.
Basically, all of the servers that are managed by the Intrepid are set up to network boot, and use network disks. So the Intrepid controls the kernel they boot with and their filesystems. This gives it the ability to install or uninstall software behind-the-scenes, as well as make byte-level backups of servers and transition them to other machines (simply by switching around which server boots to which disk).
To me, at least, this seems quite clever.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
"Levanta" means "rise" in Portuguese, in the third person present tense. The infinitive is "levantar".
If LinuxCare left any mark on the world, tt's a poster child of bad-behavior of VCs and the importance of founders keeping in control when negotiating with them.
Someone with a clearer memory than me, and hopefully references, please fill in the details.
On the downloads page on the Levanta Web site, you can find a flash demo that gives a high-level idea of what Levanta's product does. If you enter in your name and some contact info, you can download a white paper that describes the technology. It's pretty cool stuff.
Sounds like a erectile dysfunction drug.
My doctor said Levanta!
doing better than an unmitigated disaster does not make you successful.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
In Argentina we ask "Levanta?" when we want to know if a system/computer/program etc is booting up alright.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
I used to work for LinuxCare, from January 2000 to Sept 2003. I have to say, to was a wild ride. At the 'LinuxCare' phase, I mostly did contract work to write Linux device drivers for 3rd parties. (Including some absolutely evil stuff like a C++ stub for kernel modules, and a 'look like NT' wrapper for a MPEG encoder kernel module.) In early 2000, we moved into our 'new' offices (we took up the entire basement of the huge converted warehouse building we were in), and had 'The Worlds Ugliest Mural' done by a local graffiti artist. The entire floor was carpeded with the LinuxCare 'X' logo. Yes, custom logo carpet. Around 2001, the support business collapsed. The Founders left, except for Art, but we picked up a new CEO, some really smart IBM guys, and started working on what was to be the Levanta project. Originally targeted for IBM z/390 mainframes, it used the z/VM operating system to provide multiple 'on-demand' Linux-on-390 'partitions'. (z/VM is the mainframe equivalent to VMWare, but 20 years old !) Akmal Khan came on board after Levanta was in full swing, and immediately took a dislike to the the distributed nature of our development group. There was Pittsburgh, doing the primary backend database; Ottawa was doing the web GUI and z/VM interface; Las Vegas handled the web infrastructure; project management in Atlanta; and San Francisco was sales and marketing. Except for SF and Ottawa, most sites telecommuted, so no 'office overhead' for those areas. It became apparent pretty quickly that Akmal was the micromanaging type. By spring 2003, A.K. had collected his own group of technical people (very good ones, by the way) in SF, diverted all development of 'Levanta-on-Intel' to SF, and started making it pretty clear to the managers that all sites except SF would be going away. That fall of 2003, the axe arrived for Ottawa, and I walked away from Levanta and the political mess that had developed. I'm glad to have worked for LinuxCare, and had a ton-of-fun working on Levanta-on-z/390.
I heard that Linuxcare had to buy the rights to the "Levanta" name from AstraZeneca, who had trademarked it as a possible name for their Viagra-clone.
Levanta was chosen more or less randomly at the 11th hour because the preferred choice, "Levanto" was unavailable as a domain name. It's a town in Italy, and they unsurprisingly didn't want to give up the name.
...an erection lasting longer than four hours, stop taking Levanta.
Except that it means the same thing in Spanish as it does in Portuguese and I'd bet over half of California took at least Spanish 1 in High School.
Oh and the million people in San Jose, Costa Rica might argue that your statement doesn't make any sense.
I watched a special on the news a few weeks ago. It showed multiple call centers where the employees were being trained and taught English. They also showed the new movement for IT support. Totally outsources data center management - remote administration. It's already being done and probably cheaper than Lavawhatever can do it for (unless their business plan is to sell the outsourcing)
If you have these things covered, it won't matter to the vast majority of customers what vendor(s) you use. Linux, Windows, Mac, whatever -- as long as it does what the customer needs and fits the above criteria, customers will flock to your solutions and pay you well.
I'm afraid you're quite wrong. Here are two specific examples.
In the first case, the customer was complaining about the spam that was flooding into their inboxes. There were many solutions available but we decided to offer a gateway with Linux under Postfix, Spamassassin, ClamAV and RBLs. We used the free versions of a major commercial distro so, if they wanted paid support, it was available as well.
Key selling points we offered to the customer included, highly effective, reliable, plug and play/no reconfiguration of the existing mail system, customizable, zero software cost, zero software maintenance costs, free signatures and free software upgrades, the same labor cost of any other solution. Total cost, 90% less than any similar commercial solution.
They chose to go with another company that offered them a Symantec SMTP gateway running on a Windows server. The price was thousands of dollars higher than what we offered. We countered with the identical solution for 10% less than our competition was selling to them and they still declined. The scuttle butt was that management was put off by our initial choice of "cheesy" products(Linux, etc.). No Sale!
The second opportunity was very similar to the first. This time we offered two solutions from the beginning. We presented them with both the Linux option and the Symantec/Microsoft option. The commercial offering was $5,500 more in up front cost and there were further recurring costs. We explained to them that the cheaper solution was just as reliable, virtually maintenance free, no recurring costs, no upgrade "protection", no subscriptions. They chose the $8,000 solution over the $2,500 one! Why!?!?!? They "just felt better about big names like Microsoft and Symantec".
After that, we took the free software references off our website and business has been great! Now I sell software and make a profit on every sale. For me, this beats the hell out of giving it away. But, I also enjoy a great deal of service revenue due to the constant need to reconfigure, patch, fix, fiddle with, reboot, etc. the commercial software solutions. The customers literally ask me to take their money and I'm happy to do so.