Slovenes Take Over StorScape

Hermes SoftLab, a large Slovenian software developer, has acquired the remaining 49 percent stake it didn't hold in storage resource management (SRM) firm StorScape Inc. from Eurologic Systems.

Hermes SoftLab, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has subsequently shut down StorScape's U.S. office in Boxborough, Mass., and moved North American sales and marketing activities for StorScape to the Hermes SoftLab USA office in Mountain View, Calif. An industry source familiar with the company, though, says its staff in California consists entirely of "one technical person."

StorScape was formed in October 2001 as a joint venture of Eurologic and Hermes SoftLab. It has developed an SRM application that was supposed to be geared around the Common Information Model (CIM), which has formed the basis for Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)'s vendor-independent storage management specifications (see StorScape Joins Software Parade).

Each company put about $5 million into StorScape, according to Steve Duplessie, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group Inc. (Neither Eurologic nor Hermes SoftLab would confirm the amount of the investment.) But as Eurologic's fortunes steadily declined over the past year -- and the company was being forced to make sizeable layoffs -- it decided to pull out of the venture, Duplessie says (see Eurologic Pares Headcount).

"By the time Eurologic figured out their investment was getting pissed away, they were in dire straits all over the place, so they took a piddly million bucks to get out," says Duplessie. [Ed. note: How do you say "jack squat" in Slovenian?]Earlier this month, Adaptec Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT) acquired Eurologic for $30 million in cash (see Adaptec Adopts Eurologic).

Gregor Knafelc, a spokesman for Hermes SoftLab in Slovenia, tells Byte and Switch that StorScape's product is still very much alive and in active development, with customers around the world.

"We have still operations in Slovenia it's 40-plus development engineers," he says. "We decided to buy StorScape because we're consolidating our product portfolio. We've fully merged it with our company."

According to Hermes SoftLab, customers that are using StorScape include Entech Enterprise Technologies, a Canadian systems integrator; NEC Corp. (Nasdaq: NIPNY); and Vzajemna, the largest private health insurance company in Slovenia, with more than 1 million subscribers. [Ed. note: That's even more than the number of subscribers to HBO Slovenia!]

But the vicissitudes surrounding StorScape are a reflection of the difficulties some SRM players are having gaining significant traction. BMC Software Inc. (NYSE: BMC) and StorageNetworks Inc. (Nasdaq: STOR) have shut down their SRM divisions in recent months. Startup ProvisionSoft Inc., meanwhile, is dangerously close to shutting its doors, if parent company CMGI Inc. can't find a buyer for it (see ProvisionSoft at Half-Staff, Arkivio Runs Out of Silver, StorageNetworks Hacks Self in Half, and BMC Folds Storage Unit).At the same time, other vendors – including AppIQ Corp., Astrum Software Corp., Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA), Fujitsu Software Technology Corp. (Softek), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and Overland Storage Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL) – say they're seeing increasing uptake of their SRM offerings (see IBM's Tivoli Tightens Its Laces, Softek Upgrades Its Wares, Fujitsu Softek Targets BMC Users, SRM Tools Get Loaded, AppIQ Scoops Loot, and IBM Snaps Up TrelliSoft).

— Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch