GlassHouse Picks Auspex's Bones

Storage consulting firm GlassHouse Technologies Inc. has netted around 330 customer support contracts from bankrupt NAS vendor Auspex Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ASPX) (see GlassHouse Buys Auspex Unit).

Auspex, a pioneer in the NAS space, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in April and laid off most of its employees (see Auspex Shuts Down).

Under the terms of the deal, GlassHouse has agreed to assume responsibility for Auspex's existing support contracts and will pay $280,000 in cash to Auspex's creditors. GlassHouse, which expects the deal to close by the end of June, says it didn't bid for Auspex's intellectual property or R&D assets.

"This lets us engage in a business that is, quite frankly, complementary to what we do," says Mark Shirman, GlassHouse's president and CEO. "It gives us a recurring revenue model."

Auspex has 234 active customers in the U.S., which include Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) and Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT). In addition, Auspex had 100 customers in Europe that are currently unsupported after the company shut down its operations in the region. GlassHouse will continue to outsource break/fix maintenance services through NCR Corp.However, Shirman acknowledges that the support services group represents "a tangential piece of business for us." He says the bigger opportunity for GlassHouse, which provides storage network design and implementation services, is to help those customers migrate to a new NAS infrastructure or provide them other consulting services.

"The [Auspex] box is basically twilighted, so they'll have to upgrade at some point," Shirman says.

As part of the transaction, Framingham, Mass.-based GlassHouse will hire about 20 Auspex employees, which will bring the company's headcount to "a little over 80 and a little less than 100," according to Shirman. [Ed. note: Ummm... so that's, like, probably 90 or so?]

Tom Ludden, formerly VP of Auspex's customer services group, will head the new business unit. Ludden will report to Michael Tobin, senior VP of operations at GlassHouse.

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch