Fusion-io Repositioning Ahead of Earnings Call
Flash memory juggernaut Fusion-io is set to announce its financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2013 on August 7. The earnings report will shed new light on the company’s activity in recent months, namely its acquisition of NexGen and the high-profile management shakeup that left many analysts speculating about its future.
In April, Fusion-io revealed that it’s shelling out $119 million for NexGen Storage, a Louisville-based maker of hybrid arrays. The startup uses Fusion-io’s flash cards in its n5 series systems for small and medium enterprises.
The company announced the buyout a day after it held its third quarter earnings call: it reported a net loss of $20 million on sales of $87.7 million. A week later, Fusion-io replaced former CTO Neil Carson with Pankaj Mehra, an academic who served as the chief scientist for HP Labs Russia before joining the flash vendor.
The appointment of Pankaj Mehra as CTO didn’t raise nearly as many eyebrows as the departure of founding CEO David Flynn and fellow co-founder and chief marketing officer Rick White. A particularly vague follow-up statement from Fusion-io had us believing that the founders were given the boot due to the unsettling decline in the company’s stock price since 2011, but current chief executive Shane Robison dispelled that rumor in an exclusive interview on our flagship program theCUBE (see full video below).
Robison told SiliconAngle CEO John Furrier and Wikibon’s Dave Vellante that the founders “have done nothing wrong,” and added that “we [management] believe we have a great foundation set by the founders.”
SiliconAngle’s inside source had a different take on the matter. He told Mike Wheatley that “they were founders with immense control and the board didn’t like that they had so much power. The board wants to bring more supervision and governance to the company.” Another anonymous tipster cited “financial irregularities” as the reason behind the founders’ abrupt resignation.
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