Scalable Informatics Closes Down their Shop

Joe Landman explains Scalable Informatics technology to Rich Brueckner

We are sad to report that HPC vendor Scalable Informatics has gone out of business. Headed up by CEO Joe Landman, Scalable Informatics spent the last 12 years building ‘Simply Faster” software-defined storage and compute solutions to the financial, research, scientific, and big data analysis markets.

There are days when this reporter wishes he wasn’t in the news business. Today is one of those days.

Joe has posted this note on the company’s web site:

“We want to thank our many customers and partners, whom have made this an incredible journey. We enjoyed designing, building, and delivering market dominating performance and density systems to many groups in need of this tight coupling of massive computational, IO, and network firepower.

Sadly, we ran into the economic realities of being a small player in a capital intensive market. We offered real differentiation in terms of performance, by designing and building easily the fastest systems in market.

But building the proverbial “better mousetrap” was not enough to cause the world to beat a path to our door. We had to weather many storms, ride out many fads. At the end of this process, we simply didn’t have the resources to continue fighting this good fight.

Performance does differentiate, and architecture is the most important aspect of performance. There are no silver bullets, there are no magical software elements that can take a poor architecture and make it a good one. This has been demonstrated by us and many others so often, it ought to be an axiom. Having customers call you up to express regret for making the wrong choice, while somewhat satisfying, doesn’t pay the bills. This happened far too often, and is in part, why we had to make this choice.

This is not how we wanted this to end. But end it did.

Thank you all for your patronage, and maybe in the near future, we will all be … Simply Faster.”

So HPC has put another innovative company out of business. What happened? Joe has shared his thoughts about the company over at his blog.

On behalf of everyone here at insideHPC, I would like to send out deepest regrets to Joe and his team.

– Rich Brueckner

 

Comments

  1. Rich- Thanks for this article and kind words regarding Joe Landman and Scalable. The human touch you have put to (virtual) paper puts into perspective the difficulty small businesses with great IP have in bringing innovation to HPC. Today, in the 21st century, It is mostly forgotten that the largest companies in HPC got their starts in garages in the 80s and 90s.
    regards,
    Bob Bolz
    AQUILA