Plasmon plc Share Discussion Threads

[29palms] 03/7/2008 22:00

Yeah...and I also smell it from you.
LOL

[mikey_b] 03/7/2008 21:58

well go wash yourself to$$er

[mikey_b] 03/7/2008 14:59

well funny you should mention that....Germany has just stopped providing Zimbabwe with paper for banknotes. Yesterdays BBC website had the article.

[u813061] 03/7/2008 14:51

How long before the next rights issue ? This company issues more paper than the Bank of Zimbabwe.

[timtom2] 30/6/2008 10:52

Looks interesting as does the new website.

[hang] 30/6/2008 10:46

Back to the future


Once upon a time archive provider Plasmon had a RAID product line. It's come back in another guise as part of Plasmon's new NetArchive product.

Plasmon's own RAID product line was unceremoniusly dumped when the firm underwent a financial and management restructuring. Now a RAID product has come back, courtesy of NetApp, with Plasmon's software providing a two-tiered storage capability with online disk and online optical archival UDO drives - which can be taken off-site.

The relationship with NetApp was announced last week. The new NetArchive 1 product integrates NetApp RAID technologies with Plasmon's Archive Appliance and data management software to allow customers to provision data within NetArchive according to its unique storage requirements. It's policy-driven wth data moving automatically betweeen the NetApp storage and the archival drives.

Plasmon CEO Steven Murphy said: "NetArchive is a key step toward the realization of Plasmon's strategy to simplify the archive process through virtualization. NetArchive revolutionizes our customers' approach to archiving by delivering an intelligence-based system behind a single storage node. The NetArchive leverages appropriate storage technologies to balance capacity, performance, and storage costs against the legal and business value of data and improves operational efficiencies while meeting customer requirements for a robust disaster recovery strategy."

This is reminiscent of SGI's InfiniteStorage Filesystem which transparently moves data between different storage tiers, including tape. That's to cope with multiple servers needing access to vast amounts of data; it's a way of getting over capacity problems in storing the whole lot on online drives. NetArchive is more focussed on archiving data for long-term storage and compliance reasons.

Plasmon has Terri McClure, an ESG analyst, stating: "Customers can no longer afford to deal with the complexity associated with the morass of solutions most vendors offer to move persistent data to secondary, tertiary, and off-site storage tiers. IT professionals want a virtualized archive solution to manage data for business and regulatory requirements with multiple price, performance, and retention choices. Plasmon NetArchive enables just that solution."

It's interesting that the NetApp kit is characterised as RAID storage and not FC or iSCSI SAN storage or filer storage. All of these can be used by the way. The door is open for Plasmon, in theory, to put other suppliers' online drive arrays behind its software. Is the firm knocking on EMC's door for example, or IBM's or HP's?

It will also be interesting to see how Plasmon's archive software develops as the form competes against other archival software providers such as Mimosa and Waterford Technologies.

NetArchive is available immediately through Plasmon and certified Plasmon resellers.

[mikey_b] 30/6/2008 09:15

oooohhh.....4.5p bound ?

[aquilla] 30/6/2008 09:13

From Netapp's website:

NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that help our customers accelerate business breakthroughs and achieve outstanding cost efficiency. Our dedication to principles of simplicity, innovation, and customer success has made us one of the fastest-growing storage and data management providers today.

Customers around the world choose us for our "go beyond" approach and broad portfolio of solutions for business applications, storage for virtual servers, disk-to-disk backup, and more. Our solutions provide nonstop availability of critical business data and simplify business processes so companies can deploy new capabilities with confidence and get to revenue faster than ever before.

Year founded: 1992
Number of employees: 7,600+
Revenues: $3.3 billion (FY2008)
Member of S&P 500
Member of Nasdaq 100
Fortune 1000 Company

[timtom2] 28/6/2008 21:29

u8 - how do you know?
The new location is a lot cheaper and lots of head going/gone by end of July.
Revenue implications - come on. The Agilisys + Dutch + future Net App will add nicely.

[nothingtolose] 28/6/2008 20:10

Hang - If you are an idiot your not alone as I bought a few of these recently. If the new sales team start delivering, there is potential for massive upside here IMHO.

[u813061] 28/6/2008 00:34

Announcing deals with negligable revenue implications deeply misleads some investors. Cost base is still too high.

[deep powder] 26/6/2008 15:51

I think it will be a good move.

[hang] 26/6/2008 15:44

I may be an idiot but i've just bought 100000 of these for a little punt over the next 6 months and the worst that can happen is a loss of £5000

[timtom2] 25/6/2008 23:10

Good piece of news but they are going to need more such and results to turn the share price around convincingly. There is a good chance of the share price multiplying many times from here.

Still can't find a list of major holders > 3%. This information should be on PLM's website. The free float will help determien the rate of rise when the turn around is apparent.

[deep powder] 25/6/2008 07:15

RNS out, looks an interesting partnership...

[jotoha1] 22/6/2008 21:37

Truly amazing , nearly £60 million loses and they still have some support, whats the game here then?

[timtom2] 21/6/2008 16:53

Replacing EMC in various places has been happenng for a while.
Perhaps EMC might want to buy PLM.

[hang] 21/6/2008 15:55

There are some encouraging stuff happening.................
I'm beginning to think that its a good time to buy a lot more of these.
Even for the placees to break even will give us a near 100% return at these levels


International law firm replaces EMC with Plasmon
posted on 20 June 2008 05:27


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Clariion and Centera replaced by Archive Appliance


Loyens & Loeff is an independent Benelux-based full-service law firm with integrated corporate law and tax practices. It has over 850 lawyers working across seven offices in The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg and eleven offices in the world's major financial centers. With over 1,500 employees worldwide, Loyens & Loeff provides legal and tax services to large and medium-sized corporates, banks and other financial institutions, operating internationally.

Loyens & Loeff exchanges thousands of emails each day with their customers and colleagues around the world. Email is used to communicate important legal and procedural information and the distribution of content to specific individuals inside and outside the company must be carefully tracked.

The firm accumulates between 4GB and 5GB (Gigabytes) of email and associated attachments each day and this volume is doubling every year. Some of the largest inboxes can generate more than 60,000 emails a year. While best practice dictate that these records should be archived for seven years, the current corporate retention policies at Loyens & Loeff exceed this. Given their existing volume and projected growth rates, Loyens & Loeff estimates that their email archive could grow to as much as 40TB (Terabytes) over the next five years.

Loyens & Loeff have been using a Microsoft Exchange email environment for many years and later installed Symantec Enterprise Vault (EV) to help manage their email archive volume. Although this environment was operational, it was not fully optimised and emails were being archived on EMC Clariion primary storage or Centera hardware. This architecture was very expensive and required backup, creating a significant cost and resource burden for IT services.

It decided it wanted to optimise its Symantec EV environment to better archive email from Exchange servers located on the primary site in Amsterdam and provide a Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy at their facility in Rotterdam. It required a more cost-effective email archive solution than EMC Clariion and Centera. In addition, the archive media life needed to be greater than magnetic disk to reduce the frequency of hardware replacement and stable enough to eliminate the need for daily backups.

Local integrator 2E2 Data Management recommended the use of Plasmon's UDO Archive Appliance for long-term email.

After some consideration, Loyens & Loeff purchased two Plasmon UDO Archive Appliances, selecting the 38TB, AA638, which will enable it to meet its five year email capacity target without significant additional capital investment.

Kees Sprangers, Senior System Engineer at Loyens & Loeff, said: "We calculated that installing a Plasmon archive could save us more than 280,000 euros over the next five years when compared to our current EMC storage. This saving is achieved through lower purchase and operating costs and since the Archive Appliance uses very stable UDO media it also eliminates the need for archive backup. This saves us money (and) also reduces our backup window and IT resource."

The Plasmon UDO Archive Appliance has been fully certified by Symantec with its Enterprise Vault software. Using a standard file system interface, it appears as a normal share making for a simple configuration with EV. Loyens & Loeff developed a policy-driven staging strategy that moves emails from local inboxes after three months and stores them within EV. After an additional nine months all email is transferred to the Archive Appliance for long-term retention. This process is totally automated and transparent to the end user. They have full access to all their old emails through a standard Exchange interface.

This allows Loyens & Loeff to offload infrequently-accessed email from expensive primary storage while providing full and transparent access to emails of all ages. In addition, Loyens & Loeff decided to deploy Plasmon's UDO Compliant Write Once media
which provides excellent authenticity since email cannot be altered once written, but also allows Loyens & Loeff to physically destroy emails at end-of-life as part of their corporate risk management policies.

For extra protection emails archived on the AA638 in Amsterdam are replicated each evening to a second AA638 at the Loyens & Loeff DR site in Rotterdam. Archive backup is eliminated through the combination of stable UDO recording technology and a second copy of all emails at their DR facility. The longevity of the UDO media and Plasmon's long-term product support philosophy means that Loyens & Loeff can operate their Archive Appliance for much longer than standard disk storage systems, lowering total cost of ownership and minimising risk.

Loyens & Loeff has also identified additional environmental benefits to the deployment of their
two AA638s. The UDO Archive Appliance consumes substantially less power than an equivalent magnetic disk archive.

Kees Sprangers said: "We calculated that our two AA638s will cut our power costs by 60,000 euros over five years of operation. This improves our bottom line and helps the environment."

Loyens & Loeff is planning to expand the archive to include unstructured data from its content
management system and as regulatory oversight grows they may need to meet new compliance obligations. With these additions, their archive capacity will also increase so the scalability of their architecture is another critical consideration

[mikey_b] 18/6/2008 13:28

as we near 4.5p ;-)

[timtom2] 18/6/2008 12:34

My first entry was profitable a while back on the run-up after Hanover started involvement - very pleasing and a good return in short order.

Subsequent re-entry was not so good but have averaged down reasonably. Still think i will make a decent return on this but mis-read/timed the 2nd entry.

First sign of the turn around and it is worth looking at increasing but I wouldn't be surprised to see the price move in advance as "wathchers" start to take a position.

[hang] 18/6/2008 11:40

slight change in sentiment with the MMs - half an hour ago 150000 shares cost 5.38 online, its now 6.53, must have been you Chris

[chrisdgb] 18/6/2008 11:10

Yes I have been monitoring for a while and it has the smell of a decent turnaround and the prospect of a multi bagger, a rare beast outside the commodity sector..

[timtom2] 18/6/2008 10:47

30p+ for the CEO to get his bonus and he's not the type to want to fail.
Still can't find an up to date list of major holders but most are in 10p+ and again the pressure is on to deliever.

The free float was small as a % of the total and still should be after the placing as they found homes for the stock.

Breakeven + 2H09, sales due to rise from the forecasts available and if you do the maths you can see 30p+ as more than possible. I have my own thoughts on breakeven and we could get a pleasant little surprise.

Curious as to why no more buyers yet though. May be one of those than only moves a few days a year but when it does it takes a decent step.

Pressure is on to deliver $. Costs cuts have been pretty major.