Crosswalk 'Realigns'

Crosswalk, the software company McData founder Jack McDonnell started in 2003, has apparently reached a crossroads.

A source close to the company says it recently cut as many as 15 sales and marketing staff, and is considering scrapping its Crosswalk Storage Manager (CSM) storage management and reporting software and going in another direction.

Crosswalk would not make any executives available to comment, but sent a statement saying, We have realigned to better match the resources of the company. We’re continuing to sell and support CSM.”

The realignment follows months of industry talk that McDonnell was growing impatient waiting for positive sales results. That’s no surprise, considering he funded the company himself by selling more than $6 million in McData stock. In a Byte and Switch interview last August, he said he might eventually look for venture capital, but the Westminster, Colo.,-based company has raised no outside funding yet. (See Jack McDonnell, Chairman & CEO, Crosswalk.)

Crosswalk was able to get its products to market quickly by licensing technology from other companies. (See Crosswalk.)It developed CSM by licensing SANavigator storage management software from McData and Profiler-RS application monitoring software from Tek-Tools, and tied them into an internally developed common management interface. McDonnell said the focus would be more on internal development after it rolled out CSM, but staff cuts indicate that might not be the case.

Crosswalk might have missed its target by focusing on SMB and midsize enterprises. Reporting software from startups such as Bocade and WysDM are starting to win customers but primarily in large enterprises. (See Startups Strive to Save Backup and The Getting of WysDM .) Crosswalk introduced a version of CSM tailored for NAS systems last fall, but kept the same underlying technology. (See Crosswalk Intros NAS Bundle.)

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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