Plasmon plc Share Discussion Threads

[rhiannon] 05/9/2008 07:23

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST?! wdik

[hang] 02/9/2008 16:16

yeah, you can get 140 shares in plasmon or a bag of chips, i know which i would buy with this company's prospects

[andrbea] 02/9/2008 13:30

- 22%

cheap as chips

[andrbea] 02/9/2008 12:50

1 trade all day (a buy)
and down 17%


would be nice to get some news from the company (last time was Aug 8)

[timtom2] 26/8/2008 11:38

Still here - have been travelling a while. Out of pocket but what the hell - 2nd time IT has burnt me. Should learn my lesson and stick to buy-out situations.

Good luck everyone.

[andrbea] 26/8/2008 10:07

Also:

29 July 2008


Archive Consolidation

What is slowly happening is archive consolidation, to use Plasmon CEO Steve Murphy's phrase. He says that one layer of the cake is an archive virtualisation layer. It sits - lays would be a better term - above the actual hardware and presents it as an archive pool, ideally a single logical pool, to the archiving application. This could be a general archiving application or specific one, specific to e-mail or medical images for example.

Plasmon has its NetArchive product, using NetApp storage and also a WORM optical storage option, with file movement between the two. The company is not interested in moving up the archive stack as it were; it simply wants to present an archive storage resource to applications thart need to archive data. It is in this contect that it is partnering with Mimosa.

[andrbea] 26/8/2008 10:05

sorry if posted before:

[andrbea] 21/8/2008 13:55

spread has tightened

up 6%

do they want to play ball?

[mikey_b] 18/8/2008 16:44

Agree. Thanks for getting back.

[andrbea] 18/8/2008 15:58

touché

but many AIM stocks have that problem, making any rise meaningless

current example

ihgp 0.09-0.12 up 10%

[mikey_b] 18/8/2008 15:52

and the spread is......?

[andrbea] 18/8/2008 15:13

200k buy

up 5% now

[pinkfish] 15/8/2008 21:07

;) chins up.

Darkest hour and all that.

[mikey_b] 15/8/2008 14:08

Basically, they are not the company you might have invested in a year (or more) ago.

[andrbea] 15/8/2008 14:04

Tx for that Mikey.

I liked the newly-minted direct salesforce bit:

NetApp Plasmon's Trojan Horse for Enterprise Data Centers
July 16th, 2008 by Beth Pariseau

Since he sold Softek to IBM and was appointed CEO of British-based optical storage vendor Plasmon last November, Steven Murphy has had a tough row to hoe. Plasmon is one of the few survivors–if not the only survivor–of the optical storage market, which historically has been stunted by usability and cost concerns.

Because of optical's past, Murphy is pitching Plasmon as an "archiving solutions provider." He says Plasmon led too much with its blue-ray optical media in the past. "It's important, but what's more important for IT managers is a conversation about managing their data requirements," he said. "This is a change for Plasmon."

Plasmon began its transition with software for its Archive Appliance that allows applications to access the optical drives through standard CIFS and NFS interfaces, rather than requiring applications to understand the optical media management going on under the covers. That extended to its Enterprise Active Archive software, which supports multiple media libraries as a grid and offers encryption-key-based data destruction for individual files.

Last month Plasmon introduced RAID disk into its branded systems for the first time through a new partnership with NetApp. The main goal of the resulting integration, called the NetArchive Appliance, was to give users a nearline single-instance NAS-based archive for rapid recovery of archive data, since optical media typically has at least a 10 second response time, according to Plasmon chief strategy officer Mike Koclanes.

Plasmon has several irons in the fire when it comes to a turnaround strategy under Murphy, including licensing its media for resale by other channel partners, and riding the wave of interest in archiving brought on by amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in December 2006. But it's still going to take some doing to get tactically-oriented IT folk thinking on as long-term a strategic scale as Plasmon's value proposition demands–users worried about putting out fires aren't going to be moved by talk of reducing data migrations over decades.

This is where the NetApp partnership comes in. Plasmon has a big task in front of it, trying to bring a medium back to some of the same doorsteps where it has already been passed over before. Maybe if it's disguised as NAS, goes the current strategy, it could help get a foot in the door.

Koclanes gave the example of one customer who said he was interested in Plasmon's archiving, but wouldn't get funding for a new capital equipment project. When the NetArchive product was discussed, it occurred to the customer that he did have built-in funding for more NAS space. "We're trying to focus on the ways the archive can solve other problems, and ways for users not to have to try to get an entirely new platform put in," he said.

Plasmon's newly-minted direct sales force will also emphasize that single-instance archiving to an optical jukebox provides backup relief by removing stagnant files from primary storage systems, has inherent WORM capabilities, and can natively be used either as an on-site part of a library or an off-site data copy for DR, Koclanes said.

Still, anybody checking purchase orders carefully at such a company might notice some unusual costs–while Plasmon systems go for anywhere from $50,000 to $800,000 ("That's not a price range," one of my colleagues said when given these figures, "that's the entire pricing spectrum"), the "sweet spot" according to Murphy is around $225,000. Each optical disk costs about $33–cheap in absolute terms, but not when compared with the cost-per-GB ratios available in today's hard-drive-based systems.

[mikey_b] 15/8/2008 13:58

Good link. I see they come to the conclusion I posted about 2 yrs back, it was valid then too: "Each optical disk costs about $33–cheap in absolute terms, but not when compared with the cost-per-GB ratios available in today's hard-drive-based systems."

[andrbea] 15/8/2008 13:10

maybe you're right CP, we'll see

found this too on the net, sorry if posted before

[cyberpost] 15/8/2008 12:58

"depends on how 'significant' that additional funding is"

PLASMON dont have cash flow so you can say good bye to a loan.

Only way is to issue more shares... so even raising a meager £1m at what ? 1p ?... hence the massive dilution.

[andrbea] 15/8/2008 12:54

[Contributed by Steve Tongish, marketing director EMEA, at archiving solution specialists, Plasmon.]

Aug 15

[mikey_b] 15/8/2008 10:31

Until it folds it can. Bad management, belief in outdated products.

Timtom, I truly hope you got out of these.

[cyberpost] 15/8/2008 10:31

andrbea

its the prospect of being diluted beyound comprehension that is keeping the price weak.

[andrbea] 15/8/2008 10:29

down 12% on a single sell

MMs having a laugh

down 14% yesterday too

before all that I read that the mkt cap was 3M

can't keep on declining surely?

[mikey_b] 15/8/2008 09:57

give yourself a stroke, you'd enjoy it more most likely.