BlueArc wants IPO for Christmas next year

Comment BlueArc is hoping to have an IPO in early next year, and wants it to be known that no one reseller represents anything like half of its revenues.

We suggested BlueArc reseller HDS, which says it has sold more BlueArc products than BlueArc itself, might account for more than half of BlueArc's revenue. But this isn't the case.

BlueArc corporate communications head Kort van Bronkhorst used a car analogy to explain this. BlueArc builds car engines - NAS heads - which it uses in its own storage products and which its partners, like HDS, resell. BlueArc sells complete storage products and services, cars as it were, to its customers through its channel, using arrays from LSI, HDS and DataDirect Networks.

Consequently its storage revenues are vastly more than just the head revenues and HDS does not represent half or more of HDS' revenue. Van Bronkhorst said: "They (HDS) could very well sell more engines than we do, (but) we sell the whole car which brings in tremendously more revenue."

There is no way BlueArc would consider walking away from its channel, with Van Bronkhorst saying: "The channel is important for us, and will be even more so for the virtualisation announcements coming in January."

This could be followed, we might suppose, by an IPO announcement. ®