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Linux Business

Mission Critical Linux in Trouble 158

Posted by michael from the need-a-big-red-hat dept.
Dynedain writes: "ZDNet reports that Mission Critical Linux who specialized in server clustering, is laying off 90% of their work force of 60 after failing to secure a buyer of the company. :("
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Mission Critical Linux in Trouble More

Mission Critical Linux in Trouble

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  • Maybe... (Score:1, Funny)

    by cOdEgUru ( 181536 )
    Mission Critical just went critical..

  • Now they have to worry about paying their BW bills (Score:3, Funny)

    by king_ ( 143380 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2002 @06:17PM (#3121406) Homepage
    . Great, now that their site is /. into oblivion they have an awesome chance of attracting buyers, on top of that they wont have to worry about their bandwith bills either .

    1
  • "Last Friday, the company announced new funding and a restructuring that eliminated its services and consulting work and significantly pared down its product line."

    Yeah, I'd say that announcement just said it all. "Eliminated its services and consulting work..." and "pared down its product line". What else does a company need to do to dissolve itself?
    • Well, sell the ones that have not walked out the door with the ex-employees. ;) That is all they need to do to fully dissolve at this point.
    • Which was supposed to be the centerpiece of their other lines of business... They couldn't get the consulting services business off the ground (Really bad timing more than anything else- nobody's doing ANYTHING in the industry. I just wish that these companies would wise up and realize that they make things far, far worse by trying to shore up their short-term profitability by laying people off- they're making the downturn that caused the lower profits worse than it needed to be.) so they killed the expensive part of the company and focused on the software that WAS making them money and reduced their staffing accordingly.

  • Failure of a Company, not an OS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2002 @06:17PM (#3121416)
    Sadly, a failure like this is a high-visibility public relations disaster. Companies should refrain from including the name of an operating system in their company name.

    Had the company "Mission Critical Implementations" gone under, it would have gone largely unnoticed.

    Their failure as a business reflects poorly on their marketing and their business savvy - not on their choice of toolsets. The industry decision-makers, however, will be affected. "Yet another linux failure" will be the gut reaction.
    • But they are the ones who named it "Mission Critical Linux" and not "Mission Critical Implementations" to begin with. They wanted to (I hope not) ride the Linux fervour and when the fervour died it, along with the other countless dot com firms, they died too..

      If they get blamed for putting Linux in a bad spot, tough luck.

      It was inevitable.

    • Re:Failure of a Company, not an OS (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      On the other side of the coin, if this company is success, people will say, 'A Linux success'.
    • Sadly, a failure like this is a high-visibility public relations disaster. Companies should refrain from including the name of an operating system in their company name.

      In a way, I would say that it is appropriate to attach the two. This company, like most in its industry, is failing because they failed to make their product marketable and profitable. I know that profit is a four-letter word in the open source community, but the fact is that companies need to make money to stay in business. And, we have to be honest with ourselves, Linux has benefited greatly from the support it has gained in the corporate world.

      Companies that have chosen to participate in the Open Source/Linux gold rush are going to have to keep a close eye on the small successes [redhat.com] in their industry. It's a tuff nut to crack, but I think in the end the few that survive will find a way to remain profitable in an Open Source community and what we will end up with is a better business model for companies that aim to compete in the operating system market.

  • RIP (Score:4, Insightful)

    by furiousgeorge ( 30912 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2002 @06:18PM (#3121420)
    >>Mission Critical Linux in Trouble

    they're not in trouble. They're dead. Please give an example of any company that has had to resort to laying off *90%* of their staff and has survived the calendar year.

    • Re:RIP (Score:5, Funny)

      by harvardian ( 140312 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2002 @06:23PM (#3121475)
      Hey man, Be still has 9 days left before dissolving, and I'm still holding out hope.
    • corel.
    • They're not dead, they're, um... they're just resting.

    • Re:RIP (Score:2)

      by Fjord ( 99230 )
      Actually, it's quit common for companies to lay off 90% of the staff and then survive. It's the ones that lay off 30%, then are running out of cash, so another 20%, then run through more cash around, so maybe another 30%, then a few moneth later the financials are still bad, then another 20%. Now their at ~30% of their original force and they finally run out of cash and funding.

      Big cuts like this are usually what a company needs to survive.
  • If they only employeed more folks, the media/politicos would scream about how this company's failure shows that capitalism doesn't work. Ignorance of economics is not an excuse.

  • It's all about the Benjamins (Score:3)

    by bstrahm ( 241685 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2002 @06:19PM (#3121432) Homepage
    Well, I keep harping on this, but companies need to figure out how they will provide value and either lower their costs below this, or find a way of boosting revenues with advertising. Being that many companies can't sell advertising to their custommers, means that cost control is the key...

    I have seen many pre-IPO small company plans and most of them scare the heck out of me... If everything goes perfectly and we ship product the day that we plan, with custommer demand that we expect, we will be able to survive...

    Well software engineering isn't that exact, and frankly custommer demand for a new product is horribly hard to predict...

    Oh well another entry for fsck'dcompany.com
    • Well, I keep harping on this, but companies need to ...find a way of boosting revenues with advertising.

      Dude. I hate to break it to you... But that is *so* last century. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. Especially for the smaller players that have nothing to really differentiate themselves from the pack and don't have mile-deep pockets.

      • Dude. I hate to break it to you... But that is *so* last century. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. Especially for the smaller players that have nothing to really differentiate themselves from the pack and don't have mile-deep pockets.

        I don't know, ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN all seem to be doing pretty well... Or should I say Disney/GE/CBS/AOL ... I think CBS is still independant

        Advertising works in MANY markets, just because the internet advertising market is collapsing doesn't mean that all advertising based services are failing
    • "Well software engineering isn't that exact, and frankly custommer demand for a new product is horribly hard to predict...

      I think you can broaden that to any level of engineering isn't that exact. Hardware is typically worse because of the huge manufacturing costs involved. At least with software its easier for the bean counters to push overhead costs into different buckets.

  • The consulting business is tough for everyone (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Vicegrip ( 82853 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2002 @06:20PM (#3121436) Journal
    "Our mission is for forward thinking companies to be able to deploy Linux strategies and fulfill their business objectives. We consult with clients to develop the best technological solution to their business problems........"
    So we read from their mission statement that basically they're a Linux services consulting company trying to compete in an arena where Redhat and IBM already have most of the dollars. I feel bad for them, but it's not something uncommon in a difficult market.
    • I don't want to flame, but from the tone of the article it seems that the main aim of the company was to be bought out and generate a good return for the original investors.

      The buyout didn't happen, and the lack of a 'plan B' caused the company to fold.
      • The plan was not originally to get bought out. Unfortunatly or main investor (which happened to be GAP) got scared when the economy tanked and decided that they needed cash. They decided to sell us *at a loss* just to get liquid.

        Furthermore, we did have a 'plan B' but 'plan A' seemed to be going along fine. It fell through on the last possible day, and by then it was too late to jump on 'plan B'. At lease we have a 'plan C', but it's too bad that so many people had to loose their jobs.

  • Mission Critical? (Score:5, Funny)

    by klieber ( 124032 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2002 @06:20PM (#3121438) Homepage
    Does anyone else get nervous when a company that purports to offer mission critical systems has their own web site succumb to the /. effect?

    No wonder they're laying of 90%...
  • Another report of a company associated with Linux going under. Do we have to rely on the IBMs of the world and the private hackers? Will the little companies be able to survive this economic cycle or was the Biz Model just poor for all these dying companies?
  • Perhaps they should strategically rename themselves "Mission Impossible".

  • Mission Critical Linux gone! (Score:4, Funny)

    by streetlawyer ( 169828 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2002 @06:22PM (#3121463) Homepage
    Bloody hell! Now what's going to happen to the mission?!

  • Failed to Flollow Their Own Advice (Score:5, Funny)

    by zulux ( 112259 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2002 @06:22PM (#3121464) Homepage Journal
    They should have clustered themselves - that way if one of their business nodes went bankrupt or was sued, then the other business nodes could take up the slack.
  • Once again, the patented DotCom Business Strategy (tm) fails.

    1: Get cool-sounding name.
    2: ??????
    3: Profit!
  • ... when i checked it out. The chance of seeing such a product go away with not even a bang makes me sad. Has anyone tried it in production?

    /Pedro
  • Misstion Critical Linux announced that they had new financing and a renewed focus on high availability. Newsforge Mention of Press Release Here [newsforge.com]
    • It's funny, but both stories are from the same press release. ZDNet and NewsForge chose to put different spins on the same story. They're both right. We have new financing, we have a renewed focus on high availability, and we laid off 90% of our staff.
  • well there web page seems to be down to, must be part of that 90% :)

  • /. and it's funnies... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DraKKon ( 7117 )
    I could care less about karma, so there's the disclaimer.

    It's funny.. when an Open Source, Linux, BSD, *nux company is on its way down, everyone is sad and want to support or purchase products to try to keep it going. But any other company and many /. users make the following joke:

    Step one: product/service
    Step two: ......
    Step three: make money.

    If any of these companies had a GOOD, well thought out business plan, they wouldn't be going out of business because they could find a buyer, Sep. 11th really hurt them, or the current economy keeps them from being profitable.

    If they had a GOOD service/product that people need, then they will survive. It's the nature of business that some companies will rise and some companies will fall. That's LIFE.

    (lets see how quickly my "against the flow thinking" gets me modded down)
    • when an Open Source, Linux, BSD, *nux company is on its way down, everyone is sad and want to support or purchase products to try to keep it going.

      Aha! I've worked out what the crucial second step is. The complete business plan is:

      1. Come up with a goofy idea which involves Open Source Software but has no obvious potential to make money.
      2. Announce that you're "restructuring" and laying off 90% of your workforce. Watch your company get reported on slashdot.
      3. Make money, as thousands of slashdot readers pull out their wallets to help an Open Source Software company stay afloat.
    • >>(lets see how quickly my "against the flow thinking" gets me modded down)

      Impossible. You mentioned that you WOULD be modded down in your post, therefore you will be modded up +1 Insightful.
  • How about Sale! Sale! Linux?
  • ...besides RedHat, might have been SteelEye Technology, Inc. [steeleye.com]. Their competitive product, LifeKeeper (bought from NCR of all people), is described as follows:
    LifeKeeper®, our flagship product, makes it easy to keep business-critical applications, data, servers, and storage running all the time. For over 10 years, LifeKeeper has been a proven solution protecting thousands of servers in Global 1000 companies.

    Unlike MCL, however, SteelEye does more than just Linux - they also handle Windows and Solaris products. Also, they have actually managed to get some agreements going with the likes of Compaq, IBM, and Intel.
    Nice to have another commercial option besides RH for clustering...
    • redhat doesnt have any clustering technology whatsoever. all their clustering work is repackaged versions of GPLed software such as LVS for the HA web server clustering and kimberlite for clustering samba/NFS etc etc. i think they have a MOSIX based processing cluster as well but im not sure.
      ive not seen redhat actively develop any software completely on their own other than the distro/rpm and the gui installer.
    • We did everything that SteelEye did, and we did it from scratch. SteelEye bought their technology from NEC, and they haven't gone anywhere with it sice they've had it. MCL had all the same deals with Compaq, IBM, Intel, and HP. The difference is that our investors gave up on us when times got tough. That may well happen to SteelEye soon too. They had the same number of employees we did, the same amount of cash, the same amount of revenue, and the same amount of time. I'd wager that you'll be hearing about them looking for more money in the near future.

      99% of SteelEye's customers are people running the old version of LifeKeeper on windows NT from when it was NCR's product. That user base is probably shrinking, not growing. We're not dead yet. We're still working on our clusters. When our telco grade stuff comes out in 6 months or so, everyone will see who has the better technology.
  • If you want to do anything "mission critical"(definition: if your device breaks, people will die) then you DON'T use Linux, or Windows or any other popular operating system. You MIGHT use something like VxWorks but that's only if you are doing something complex. Otherwise you don't use any operating system, you just program a microcontroller.

    If you take apart 90% of the mission critical systems in the world(ie heart monitors, air bag controller, etc) you'll find an 8051 or something similar inside. I don't want to trust my life to a million lines of spagetti code and neither do most people. Maybe this is why the company can't find a buyer??
    • Everything is relative. I bet those systems keeping track of your bank account are mission critical to someone. For the shareholders of the bank at least. And they would be for me, if a failure in them prevented me from receiving my salary and i couldnt feed my daughter or pay mortgage. ;)

      /Pedro
    • Perhaps the problem is your definition of "Mission Critical" Here [computeruser.com] is another one that might do the job better.
    • That's a rather restrictive definition of mission critical. There are many applications that are clearly critical to an organization's survival that don't fall into a life or death situation.

      Take for instance an ISP, which needs to mitigate the failure of one server. The MCL approach is: General purpose internet servers, NFS failover, and shared SCSI/RAID storage.

      Linux and clustering software like what MCL sells do serve that need. Microcontrollers don't.

  • Maybe the world needs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by subgeek ( 263292 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2002 @06:32PM (#3121548) Homepage Journal
    fewer distros. At least in the for profit arena. Hobby distros don't depend on economics as much to stay around because they don't need to stay in business to stay around. I don't mean any disrespect to Mission Critical Linux. But there must be demand to meet the supply of distros.

    It is sad that a Linux company has gone under, but maybe this is just a sign that in our (for now) weak economy there isn't room for a bunch of High-End Distributions quite yet. Red Hat is still going strong, but they have name recognition and have been around for a while. I have talked to people who didn't recognize the word "linux" but did recognize "Red Hat." In a time when companies are not spending very much on tech, companies are more likely to go with something they've heard of, regardless of how well it gets the job done. (again, not a slam on how good any distro may be, just a comment on human nature)

    Hopefully as Linux continues to pick up speed / market share (which in my opinion it is doing and will continue to do) the need for more companies devoted to the "mission critical" niche will come to be. All it will take is time. More people have heard of Linux now, Linux continues to improve both in quality and ease of use. It is not going away, but sadly not every distro will make it.
    • FYI,

      Mission Critical Linux is not a distro. It amounts to a custom kernel and a clustering software for which Redhat and Debian packages are available. The fact that Redhat recently announced very similar clustering features in an upcoming version certainly didn't help.
    • We don't have a distro. ZDNet isn't to good at doing research.
    • MCL doesn't make a distro, they do clustering and remote management stuff.

      When I interviewed for an intership with them a couple of years ago, the main thing they seemed to be pushing were some encrypted, authenticated, remote admin GUI tools. IIRC, they gave away their remote admin tools and kernel dump analysis tools. They would basically admin your servers for you for a fee. Sssseemed like a pretty good businessmodel at the time, but Linux admins have become cheaper and Linux adinistration has become easier in the past couple of years.

      However, I'm suprised they weren't able to market themselves to medium to large size businesses. 24-hour competant server management is hard to find and expensive. Iif you out-source it, you can effectively cost-share the admins during off hours. I guess nobody wanted to pay the premium for the difference between garunteed uptime and standard Linux uptime.

      • MCL doesn't make a distro, they do clustering and remote management stuff.

        thanks (everyone) for info on MCL. I suppose that's what I get for just reading the article and not looking at MCL's website as well.

        I guess nobody wanted to pay the premium for the difference between garunteed uptime and standard Linux uptime.

        I can see that. It doesn't surprise me that MCL is having trouble, but I still think it's sad.
  • now i don't have to read fuckedcompany.com today.
  • Isnt this just another company that goes belly-up because they weren't making money in the first place? I believe that most companies (dot-coms) crashed because they thought that a nasdaq ticker would be some kind of miracle cure that would make money for them.

    There are a few linux companes that does quite well and will continue to do so. Many hasn't gone public, and have no plans to do so, since they don't need money to expand or whatever.

    First make money, then go public. You have a much better chance then.

    But then, what the hell do I know?

    .haeger

    Soccer on the web: Hattrick [hattrick.org]

    Cure cancer: Join Team 249 [stanford.edu]
  • ZDNet reports that Mission Critical Linux who specialized in server clustering, is laying off 90% of their work force of 60 after failing to secure a buyer of the company. :(

    Was the frownie taken from the ZDNet article, or was it part of the company's letter to employees and shareholders?

  • Ouch. The words mission critical would be a hard enough job for an established company like IBM to live up to....Let alone a fly by night company thats not even going to be around to distribute the next security patch that just might make your "Mission Critical" server go up in a pile of smoke because of a division by zero error or something :)
  • They have (had) a couple of nice products... Convolo in particular... and they were great FS / OS evangelizers... first DEC, then Compaq, now MCLX? What's going to move into Lowell now? HP?
    • DEC/Compaq weren't in Lowell.. Wang was tho. :)

      DEC/Compaq is up Rt 3 in Nashua and down 495 in Littleton and Marlboro. DEC used to have an office on just about every other exit o 495 between Franklin and Tewksbury and on various points all over the Greater Maynard Area. It was great when you were a DEC employee. No matter where you were, you were only minutes away from a clean toilet when you REALLY had to go.

      As for MCL, it's a damned shame. I have some friends and many former work associates who worked there. Some of the best engineers in the business.

  • Have a friggin heart people... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by psxndc ( 105904 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2002 @06:49PM (#3121644) Journal
    I know its easy to get +1 funny for all the jokes but c'mon, you know that 90% probably reads /.

    Sorry things didn't work out MCL people. Consulting sucks, I know. My company had to lay people off to get to break even and we're still struggling to tread water. And we were one of the slow and steady firms during the boom. Its kept us afloat after the crash, but man does it suck. Competition is fierce and clients want more for less. Props for trying to do it with Linux (wish I was as lucky), but I guess it just didn't work out

    psxndc

    • Competition is fierce and clients want more for less. Props for trying to do it with Linux

      Consulting is easier when you have Linux and Free Software in the mix: my clinnts don't balk at my bills when I don't have to include CAL fees for NT Server, Terminal Server, NT, MS-SQL, etc..

      After I made the switch to include Free Software - my consulting business has drastically increased in profitibility - my clients have smaller invoices and yet by billable rate has almost doubeled.

      • I'm all for Free Software, but the truth is, a lot of companies want MS technologies or Solaris. A long long time ago, like 1996 long ago, we used to be a linux/NT house, and all the clients that wanted linux wanted it because they could nickel and dime us. It was just a pain in the ass (so I've heard, I wasn't around then). As for now, none of our clients are asking for it. I've prepared a "how to get a linux mahine up" document just in case, but they all want Win2K or Solaris. *sigh* And most of our cost doesn't come from OS licenses. For most of our clients a couple grand on licenses is a drop in the bucket compared to cost of analysis, design, development, testing, etc.

        psxndc

  • Everybody out there don't go crazy, stuff like this is bound to happen. All the time.

    It's the same in every area of industry. Yeah, Mission Critical was a Linux company, and thats to bad, but take a step back.

    Only so many companies can survive in any area, currently, there are many, many linux companies out there. This process may hurt right now ( you know, on the inside ;) ) but most likely, if they had good linux programmers, I'm sure they'll get picked up by other linux companies. The not so good programmers they had, not so much. But remember, in other industries you get fired, and you were working on something you really loved, thats it, no more. At least here if the programmer gets fired, and he really has a passion for it, he can continue, at least in a way to contribute to his work/passion, until he gets picked up by another company.

    The ones who don't have the passion, the love, will most likely go on to other things.

    Sorry if that last line sounded really corny.

  • I've made an observation after seeing this article.

    Businesses dealing with Linux, whether it be hardware, distros, or whatever, should use better judgement in naming their business and products.

    Case in point, "Mission Critical Linux" sounds good as long as the company is successful. However, the name is overly generic, and now that the company is headed for deeper waters, Mission Critical Linux could be mistaken for the concept of mission critical linux.

    Now all it will take is a single incompetent journalist to briefly perview the headline, and make the assumption that "Linux" itself is in trouble. Want to take bets on how long it will be before this shows up in E-Week?

    Another example would be a product called "Linux On The Desktop". The product gets the death axe, and then it could be misrepresented as "linux on the desktop is dying".

    See the point? These companies running around trying to make a few bucks from open source products need to take a deeper look at properly branding their products. Enough said.

  • Insider story. (Score:4, Informative)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2002 @07:51PM (#3121996)
    Ok, here's the dirt. Basically we had to choose between getting more funding, or selling the company. Two offers came over the table to buy the company and we picked one. It fell through at the last moment and we had to make some tough decisions. Our support services were loosing money, so they're gone. We've kept profitable custom engineering projects and our cluster products groups. Hopefully we have enough funds to stay alive untill our products can support us. We're not planning on going completely out of business in the near future.

    Full disclosure: I'm one of the employees that didn't loose their job. Someone else may be less optimistic about the whole thing. Since we were as nice as possible about laying people off (They got to stay around, paid, using their offices to find new jobs for three weeks) you probably won't find too many pissed off ex-employees.

    • Re:Insider story. (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As an employee that got laid off, I can honestly say that he's right, not many harbor hard feelings. The management tried thier best to make this as painless as possible on us all, and for the most part succeeded. Many employees have managed to find other jobs elsewhere, myself included, but some are still looking (and should be offered jobs! they're good people!). Best of luck to those who stayed. And for the management team, I'd work for them again any day, they truely tried to make the best of a horribly sh*tty situation.

      RIP MCLX.
  • "Mission Critical Linux would have had to lay off staff, with no severance
    and probably still would seek relief in bankruptcy court, Angell said......
    With buyout hopes on the wane, Angell formed a new corporation--which soon
    will be named Mission Critical Linux LLC--and bought the old company's
    assets with funding from undisclosed investors. "

    Oh, yeah ... buy what's valuable for a song, dump the rest, screw the investors and employees, file Chapter 7...and Angell walks away with a bag full of money and IP while everyone else gets screwed. And I thought Linux was supposed to be different...

    • Oh, yeah ... buy what's valuable for a song, dump the rest, screw the investors and employees, file Chapter 7...and Angell walks away with a bag full of money and IP while everyone else gets screwed. And I thought Linux was supposed to be different...

      Ok, I was one of the employees that got the axe, and I'm telling you it ain't like that. The company was very up-front about all their dealings and did everything in their power to keep the employees from getting screwed. They paid us for a month and maintained our benefits while we basically used their facilities to find new work.

      As for Rick Angell, he's taking a gamble. He's paid what I consider more than what the IP is worth for both the IP and the company's debt (which must still be discharged somehow), gambling that MCL's IP will actually become worth something, and he's kept around as many employees as made sense to work on those projects. In the end, it could all still fall flat...

      FWIW I've dealt with Rick personally, and he believes in Linux. He also believes in (at least some of) the products MCL was/is developing, and is pumping his own money into the company to keep it alive. That's quite a gamble to take, if your goal is to rape the failed company... And even the rest of the investors weren't interested in screwing over the employees... If they were, they could have declared bankruptcy a month early and split the cash that was paid to employees in salaries and benefits.

      Sure, it's easy to be cynical when something like this happens. But management and the investors really did try to do everything they could to keep the company alive... and then for the employees, when it became evident that wasn't an option.

  • It would seem to me that most companies large enough to actually NEED a 'mission critical' server farm would have their own IT staff. So why would they outsource the work of setting it up when their own people can do it cheaper? Seems like MCL really limited themselves from the start.

    To those Open Source consultants among you, think small business.
  • Now will be a TRUE test of OpenSource. Mission Critical projects such as Kimberlite (server failover/clustering) will be seeking new homes. The OpenSource Initiative was created to support disasters such as this. Let's show the corporate world that OpenSource IS viable. When the time comes, by adopting these orphan projects, we can show corporations across the world the power of OpenSource - transcendence of the project beyond the life of the origional developers.
    • No corporation in the world gives a damn what happens to its "project" if the corporation takes a nosedive. The whole point of the "project" is to make the corporation some money and prevent the nosedive.

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