Plasmon plc Share Discussion Threads

[mikey_b] 31/1/2008 13:08

why "If" timtom. I have long given the tech argument for why this company adds nothing to the industry.

rgds,
mikey

[timtom2] 31/1/2008 12:35

Who knows?
Directors bought £500K worth and majorly down too.
If they don't perform it could go lower.

[elsyd] 31/1/2008 11:49

Can this go much lower

What a stinker

Thinking of ditching these with major loss

[timtom2] 11/1/2008 16:24

we shall see.

[mikey_b] 11/1/2008 13:08

Mad dogs and englishmen eh? HNY Tim.

mikey.

[timtom2] 11/1/2008 13:03

added some on the volume spike day.

[mikey_b] 10/1/2008 11:27

quiet here this year

[strutt12] 04/1/2008 08:06

Hang

Why was the buy at Bid then?

[mikey_b] 03/1/2008 23:00

the sell was wise

[hang] 03/1/2008 22:56

strutt12 you'll find it was a buy and sell

[strutt12] 03/1/2008 18:57

Happy New Year

So who's dumped 2 mil then?

[mikey_b] 28/12/2007 09:48

wonder what 2008 will bring in the 60G at a price against the 100's of G really cheap battle....good luck.

[mikey_b] 18/12/2007 22:11

I think you could be right but the recent loss of disks helps strengthen the offsite HD storage option case.

Good luck Timtom2.

rgds,
mikey

[timtom2] 18/12/2007 22:09

I made decent money out of PLM this year, I hope that repeats and it may well do from these levels !!

Perhaps pf did too,

[mikey_b] 18/12/2007 15:40

well, give me your money and I'll give it back in a years time :-)

[pinkfish] 18/12/2007 15:39

Perhaps we geta repeat in 2008.

Would suit me.

[mikey_b] 18/12/2007 14:40

One year on and no change overall. This was the share price 12 months ago.

[elsyd] 13/12/2007 13:32

Are results due on this one any time now ?

[hang] 10/12/2007 17:07

I have a feeling this might trickle back up to 30p without further ado. At the end of the day, if the company is to believed - and several large institutions have been won over - then it is going to enter into another growth stage of its checkered history. I like to follow Amvescap when they go heavy into relatively small companies. I remember when they kept piling into Game Group at 25p to 35p several years ago..........reaping benefits now!!

[mikey_b] 07/12/2007 08:11

nice article. I am wary of this:
"I think it's somewhat scary that such a big company has withdrawn from the market space," said Walker. However, Walker said the vacuum could create opportunities for companies such as Call/Recall, Plasmon and others. "

Big players have better research resources. 1.6TB in 3 yrs would be performing average IMO.

[hang] 06/12/2007 21:34

And this is a more balanced view of Plasmons market prospects

Optical Storage Makes Enterprise Inroads
December 4, 2007
By Leslie Wood



Optical storage has long had its proponents who proclaimed it as the next great storage technology, yet its enterprise customer base remains small a quarter century after its introduction (see Optical Storage Technology Aims for Enterprise Acceptance).

Despite its slow market acceptance among enterprise storage users, some who require data retention, longevity and secure WORM (write once, read many) storage have found it to be the answer to some pressing storage needs. In today's world of fast-changing technology, compliance regulations and ever-changing business needs, data migration is not only costly, it is also time-consuming. And that new environment is providing an inroad for high-capacity optical (HCO) storage technology.

Has the time come for HCO to be considered as an effective alternative for data storage? For those requiring secure, long-term retention that ranges from 10 to 15 years or longer, it just might be. Banking, medicine, law enforcement, aviation and publishing are just some of the industries that might benefit from HCO's longevity and convenient archival retrieval.

PowerFile, for one, has built an appliance, Active Archive Appliance (A3), for industries with long-term online archiving requirements. According to Jonathan Buckley, vice president of marketing at PowerFile, the company counts among its customers each of the industries mentioned above.

Ed Walker, vice president of engineering for Call/Recall, said storing data on disc-based HCO is easy and cost-effective. "HCO is also beneficial for e-discovery versus trying to find data sitting in tape farms, as this can be a very painful and labor-intensive experience," he said.

Another major player in the HCO market is InPhase, a spin-off of Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs. The company recently launched the first storage devices to use holography to write data to disc. This first generation of holographic data technology, according to an InPhase spokesperson, promises 300GB of storage per standard disc, which is approximately six times more than Blu-Ray.

And this is only the beginning, as the company expects to be able to produce 1.6TB of data on a single disc within the next three years. For now, the product is aimed primarily at the data and video archiving space (such as broadcast and media companies). But that may soon change.

Sony Bows Out

Sony recently withdrew from the professional HCO market, leaving UDO (Ultra Density Optical) as the only standard, and Philips also withdrew from the market earlier this year, raising questions about the technology's enterprise viability - but also creating opportunity for newcomers.

"I think it's somewhat scary that such a big company has withdrawn from the market space," said Walker. However, Walker said the vacuum could create opportunities for companies such as Call/Recall, Plasmon and others.

Buckley believes the Sony withdrawal is cause for concern. "If anything, the Sony withdrawal probably gave the marketplace more pause for thought about optical storage overall, which is quite unfortunate," he said. But Buckley said booming archival needs could be enough to overcome any short-term setback.

"UDO is far from being a dominant technology by any metric," Buckley said. "Although it is considered a standard, Plasmon is the only company making the drives, meaning that they are few and far between, expensive and a risky proposition for companies looking to commit data assets for 20+ years. This has left a very nice market opportunity for companies such as PowerFile, which has a fresh approach to archival storage, leaving the metric for the bellwether standard up for debate in a couple of years."

But Plasmon is making inroads and making them fast. In August, the company announced 50 percent growth in its UDO Archive Appliance sales. It has also seen increases in the overall market adoption of its UDO2 technology with the certification and shipment of UDO2 by GE Healthcare, AGFA, IBM and Konica Minolta.

"Plasmon is seeing a very strong interest in our UDO Archive Appliance as a result of corporate governance and regulatory compliance standards, e-discovery and increasing demand for secure, searchable, long-term archives," said Plasmon CEO Rod Powell. "This positive growth for Plasmon's UDO2 archival storage solutions is evidence that we are responding to market demand and helping businesses meet unique business requirements."

Although professional HCO offers true physical WORM capability, companies are confused as to exactly what this means. According to an analyst at Gartner, Plasmon's HCO offers two types of media, rewritable and WORM, and the technology for the two is quite different. With WORM media, the surface of the media is an amorphous structure and is altered to a crystalline state that cannot be reversed. Rewritable media does just the opposite, where a crystalline surface is heated and rapidly cooled, leaving amorphous data points.

Can Commodity Discs Get the Job Done?

Differences in HCO discs aside, the technology's proponents generally believe that companies requiring long-term data retention or round-the-clock reliability should not consider using commodity CD or DVD drives in optical libraries.

"Generally, customers seeking the greatest reliability and longevity of formats have been betting on Blu-Ray using PowerFile's data integrity scheme with fantastic success," said Buckley. "Without question, raw CD/DVD libraries are fundamentally too unreliable for the enterprise."

But he noted that this was also true of SATA drives, yet SATA has met with growing acceptance in the enterprise storage market. "The drives were employed inside systems using various forms of RAID and error correction schemes to deliver system uptime demanded at a cost that only a commodity component could deliver," he said.

Walker said commodity discs might be able to be used with the right configuration. "If configured with multiple drives, I don't think it will be a long-term issue," he said. "However, although I do believe that reliability testing is still needed, I think that commodity CD/DVD will be an alternate option for optical libraries."

Although optical storage is currently lagging behind both disk and tape storage systems, there is hope on the horizon. Technologies such as InPhase Technologies' Tapestry holographic storage systems have the potential to jump-start optical storage. Customers in some vertical markets are already successfully using HCO as a long-term archival record solution in conjunction with proper data management tools to provide secure, read-only access with reasonable time to recovery. Companies with requirements for WORM storage that need long-term storage without migration should also consider HCO as an alternative to disk or tape archival storage.

High-capacity optical storage is finally making good on optical technology's 25-year-old promise, but it still has a long way to go if it hopes to unseat disk and tape.

[hang] 06/12/2007 21:20

Have a read of this article - i think the share price is set for a major turn around!!


Plasmon's newly installed CEO Steve Murphy says he is sticking with the company's existing plan to build its business around the sale of complete systems - including third-party products - rather than just components.


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Formerly CEO at Softek Storage Solutions, Murphy last month took up the CEO's position at embattled Plasmon, which sells optical storage.

Although Plasmon says that sales of gear featuring its latest UDO drives are growing fast, demand for the company's older products has been dwindling for some while.

Last year Plasmon launched its first archiving appliances, a move that Murphy said was a "massive sea change" for a company that had previously only sold optical drives, and had relied on resellers to put systems together for customers.

"No IT customer anywhere in the world is just buying components any more - they want a solution," Murphy said.

"Our strategy is to continue to layer on capacities," Murphy said, but would not say what further products are in the pipeline. Early this year Plasmon began shipping the second generation of its proprietary UDO optical drives, with a 60GB capacity. The next generation UDO3 drives are "well beyond" planning stage, Murphy said.

This year Plasmon began selling CAS storage systems originally developed by Nexsan Technologies, and an ICM appliance created by Arkivio.

Plasmon clearly hopes to develop into an integrator or service provider. "For the mid-market we may have the right solution for every company, but large sophisticated businesses may require magnetic disk. We're trying to position ourselves as consultants that will help customers identify the best solutions for them," Murphy said.

That does not mean that Murphy cannot make a sales pitch for optical storage.

"If you're banging against an archive constantly, if you feel you need a 24-hour archive, then [magnetic] disk is probably the right answer. But you'll need to back that up - and tape isn't the right answer for that," he said.

Unlike optical disk, tape does not create an immutable copy of data, and cannot provide random access to data, the CEO argued.

In December 2006 Plasmon signed up giant distributor Avnet, and now says that that through that deal it has won 22 "sophisticated" integrators in North America. Many of these are IBM resellers that are happy to be able to offer an alternative to EMC's Centera CAS box, Murphy said.

Plasmon is sticking to its prediction that a cost reduction program it launched this summer will return the company to positive cash flow by its fourth fiscal quarter, ending in March 2008. For the six months to September 30 2007, Plasmon's revenue was 15m pounds sterling, or around $30m. On a constant currency basis, Plasmon said that was down 14% year on year.

[timtom2] 05/12/2007 09:11

This one worth a read too.
Added more and will just have to wait !!

[mikey_b] 05/12/2007 09:02

Good to see you guys getting some respite.

rgds
mikey