Intransa in Transition

The revolving door at Intransa continues to spin, with the IP SAN startup set to unveil a new management team next week as part of an attempt to refocus the firm on video surveillance, medical imaging, and the telco market.

Former Topio vice president Bud Broomhead will assume the Intransa CEO hot seat from Tom Alexander, who becomes the vendor's vice president of corporate development. (See Intransa Trades In CEO and Tom Alexander, CEO, Intransa.) The startup had undergone an executive exodus over the last year that saw Alexander replace Avi Katz as CEO and included the loss of founder and CTO Peter Wang, not to mention the CFO and VPs of engineering, global operations, and marketing. (See Intransa's in Transition and Ex-Intransa Trio Aids Startups.)

On Monday, March 5, Intransa will announce more new hires, with former MaXXan execs Jeff Whitney and George Vaiser becoming, respectively, the vendor's vice president of marketing and vice president of sales. (See MaXXan Morphs Into CipherMax, MaXXan Switches to Encryption, and Startups Roll Heads, Reorganize.)

The new CEO, who was recruited by Alexander, told Byte and Switch that he is now eyeing opportunities in the burgeoning security market. "The real prize for us is network-based applications. Most cities have a real challenge to put cameras in all public places like buses and taxis, and that is driving storage [demand] crazy," he says.

VP of marketing Jeff Whitney also confirms that Intransa is now on the lookout for OEM deals with firms that develop video surveillance, IPTV, and even medical imaging applications. "We're talking about working with people who are in the ecosystem of providing video surveillance to their customers," he says.Whitney didn't name any potential OEMs, but with spending on homeland security growing, Intransa is not the only vendor scoping video surveillance. (See Exponential Storage.) IBM, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman are playing in this space. In one project revealed last year, for example, Canada's Cape Breton Regional Police Services and Cape Breton University in Sydney, Nova Scotia, started working with IBM to build data classification and search tools for surveillance data. (See IBM Fights Crime in Canada.)

On the storage side, Intransa has already clinched one major OEM deal with Huawei 3Com (H3C), which is using the vendor's Storcontrol software on its Neocean IX5000 iSCSI SAN device. (See Huawei Sets Sights on IP SANs, China: Storage Superpower?, and Chinese Shockwaves.)

The vendor is also going after telcos, managed services, and service providers like Yahoo and Youtube that rely heavily on the Internet. "We have a sales team in California starting to focus on that area," says Whitney.

On the hardware side, next up is a 10-Gbit/s Ethernet version of Intransa's StorStac device, which will be launched sometime in the next quarter. (See 10-Gig iSCSI SANs Set for Takeoff.) "There are two active beta customers in the U.S., another two are about to roll out, and also an international beta," says Whitney. The exec would not name the customers, though he confirmed that one is in the weather forecasting space and another is in medical imaging.

That said, Intransa is up against competition from both Fibre Channel vendors and IP SAN rivals EqualLogic and Lefthand Networks. (See Intransa Trades In CEO, EqualLogic Tops Offs SAS Series, and EqualLogic Chalks Up Wins.) Against this backdrop, the vendor's personnel changes had prompted speculation that Intransa was burning money, although Broomhead told Byte and Switch that there is no financial panic at the firm.After securing an additional $10 million in funding late last year, the CEO says there is no pressure to chase VCs. "We have fresh money," he says, adding that Intransa is not likely to go out for another round until late 2008 or early 2009. (See Intransa Scores $25M.)

It has also been suggested that Intransa has lost ground to its IP SAN rivals as a result of its executive upheavals, although Broomhead claims that EqualLogic and Lefthand are targeting different parts of the market. "They gained a lot of momentum in the SMB market [but] we're not really organized for SMBs," he says, noting that Intransa is more focused on the enterprise space.

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch