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Panasas Plots New Path

Panasas Inc., which gained much of its initial success selling Linux NAS clustering gear to the U.S. government, is looking overseas for its future. As part of the plan, the four-year-old startup's appointed a new CEO, Victor M. Perez (see Panasas Gets New CEO).

"My goal is to have international sales be 40 percent of total sales," Perez says. Opportunities shaping up in Europe and the Asia/Pacific region will help Panasas to profitability by the second half of 2005, he maintains.

While sales to U.S. Department of Energy labs such as Los Alamos and Sandia helped put Panasas on the map (see Panasas), Perez and VP of marketing Larry Jones say Panasas's ability to outperform other NAS gear, due to an architecture that eliminates extra file processing, makes it suitable for other markets, such as geological testing, genomic testing, and film production.

"Seismic processing is a worldwide opportunity. There's just as much work in Aberdeen, Scotland, as there is in Houston, Texas," Perez says.

Right now, though, Panasas has exactly no international business, though it claims to have "about 20" paid-up customers and 30 or so more evaluating its equipment.

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