LSI Spells Engenio

And the next storage company to go public could be Engenio Information Technologies.

Never heard of them? How about LSI Logic Storage Systems Inc? Engenio is the name the company will take when it goes public -- a new name to distinguish it from parent LSI Logic Corp. (NYSE: LSI).

The spinoff of what's now Engenio was first announced last November. The new company filed an S-1 Registration Statement with the SEC in February, declaring that $250 million in common stock would be offered for an IPO (see LSI Logic Spins Off Storage Systems and LSI's Storage Sub Plans IPO). With the name change, Engenio also has applied for listing with the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol NGE. Company spokespeople say it remains on track for an IPO by the end of June (see LSI CFO Eyes IPO).

If that happens, Engenio would be the first storage company to go public via IPO since Seagate Technology Inc. (NYSE: STX) in December 2002 (see Seagate Goes Public With a Whimper). Industry analysts believe software company CommVault Systems Inc.

will follow later this year (see CommVault 'Well Positioned' for IPO).

So, what does "Engenio" mean? No one can say. A company spokesman said nobody can talk about the specifics of the name because of SEC regulations. “I don’t know if it makes much difference,” says analyst Steve Berg of Punk Ziegel & Co. “For the first year, everybody’s going to call it, ‘Engenio, formerly known as LSI Logic Storage.’ The idea behind the change is that they’re a separate company and they need a separate name.”

LSI Storage sells SAN arrays to IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) (NYSE: STK), the Teradata division of NCR Corp., and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) (NYSE: SGI).

According SEC filings, LSI Storage generated $426 million in revenue in 2003, which represents a profit of $15.7 million, or $0.31 per share. The parent company lost $308.5 million, or $0.82 per share, for 2003 on revenue of $1.69 billion.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch