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Huge new demand for Medical Record storage in 2014 and beyond. No guarantee that Iceweb will get any significant piece of that, of course. As I've said before, I think their technology is amongst the best in the industry especially when price is factored in.
I'm surprised how many posts here considering the share price has cratered. There must still be some potential buyers interested.
While the product news keeps getting better, the share price is doing a Thelma & Louise. IceBOX 2.0 is another in a series of great product announcements. The products offered are amongst the best in the industry especially considering the price.
I'm not recommending the shares be bought right now, but I find the company to be interesting and worth watching.
Cloud business is bigger than most of us can imagine. Will Iceweb ever get a piece of it? Doubtful. But stranger things have happened. Look at the hiring that Amazon Web Services is doing.
http://aws.amazon.com/careers/
One thing that all of the major players (AWS, Rackspace, Google, Microsoft) seem to be lacking is private cloud services. And that just happens to be precisely what Iceweb has been focusing on after burying the former CEO.
You don't have to be a NASA rocket scientist to see what's going on here...
Management has pretty much given up on selling storage products. What they are trying to do now is sell the company. That's what all the new products are about. And the merger with the subterranean nuke-proof data center company. Iceweb has some great products, ideas, and people. They just can't sell much of it.
There are numerous behemoth monster companies in the industry who could easily acquire IWEB and start selling it's products if that's what they were determined to do. Most already have a cloud strategy and direction so they'd never bother with Iceweb. The most likely type of company to be interested in IWEB would be someone that appears to be falling behind in the high tech race. Microsoft is the first company that comes to mind.
No predictions here. There is a high probability that Iceweb will continue to flounder. But you can't rule out that some accountant may add up all their "stuff" and decide it's worth much more than the market cap.
It is interesting that they mentioned the price but not the name of the reseller. It's always been the other way around.
If a county government (certainly on a tight budget these days) can spend over 1/4 million on storage, it's a sign of a very large potential marketplace for the Iceweb (or whatever the new name is, Zimbus?) products.
Iceweb is not making it as a seller of data storage hardware. I'm not a big fan of corporate name changes and I've always liked the Iceweb name. I hope they keep the cool ICE theme for some of their products and services. The transition from purveyor of hardware boxes to a full service cloud provider will not be easy, quick or a guaranteed success. The market potential is enormous and Ximbus has some advantages over their goliath competitors. They are small enough to be flexible and focused on one thing -- the cloud.
The IceBOX service seems to match or exceed Google Docs and IceBOX has the advantage of being a private cloud. I wish they had a demo.
I haven't looked at iceweb.com lately and was surprised that it looks much more professional.
My sincerest apologies. I don't read your posts anymore. Don't read most of the others either unless it appears to say something that hasn't been said here before many times.
CTC getting flipped. The company was sold Jan. 1 and now about to get sold again.
http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2013/03/04/kc-internet-service-providers-sell.html?page=all
http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2013/01/10/wichita-firm-buys-computers.html
Carefree Data Center (In Devlopment)
Oddly enough, CTC doesn't have a functioning website.
http://www.ctcco.com/
Other than today's Iceweb PR mention of a massive "underground limestone cavern", Google has no other information.
Maybe the plan is for Source Capital Group to bring in investors to fund the whole thing. And, screw over existing IWEB holders in the process, of course.
http://www.sourcegrp.com/story.html
Underground Limestone Cavern. Is that cool or what?
Private clouds look better after every news story like this one.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_EVERNOTE_HACKING?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-03-03-07-30-21
IceWEB products are already very secure. Taking your cloud private with IceBOX makes it more secure. The product line appears to be very well engineered and it should be fairly easy to add additional layers of security and threat detection as necessary.
There is plenty of money to be made with private cloud products. It's too bad that the Iceweb finances deteriorated to the point where it's highly questionable that they'll be around long enough to take advantage of this growing market sector.
Gaining traction on Ice.
Last week they got what was probably the first real international sale in company history, BlueZebra in Thailand. This week, one of the first sales to a university.
Today's price and volume action is somewhat encouraging as investors responded with some interest but not overblown enthusiasm.
Maybe they've finally found their niche with IceBOX. Maybe not.
True. The storage business ain't what it used to be and years of sluggish sales is a huge problem that won't be remedied quickly.
What keeps IWEB interesting for some of us is the way they continue to develop innovative storage solutions.
Don't quit your day job, funny man.
Fusion-IO got taken to the woodshed as sales to Apple and Facebook got delayed (or cancelled?). This is a warning to IWEB holders that the "Gee Whiz" technology stocks don't always do so well. On the other hand, Iceweb technology is more mainstream and affordable than what Fusion offers. Iceweb has a broader customer base and product line than Fusion which is highly dependent on the aforementioned two clients.
It's been said here before, but Iceweb needs someone or something to kick sales into high gear. I don't know if that will ever happen.
The Iceweb technology is very impressive. They don't need a technological breakthrough. They need a sales breakthrough. You gotta ask yourself one question, "Are these shares worth a nickel?"
I haven't been paying much attention to the news lately but I've been watching the price. I did notice the recent Model 7000 sale. The big ticket sales are what they need in order to become a profitable entity.
I work in the tech industry and nearly all of our clients require more storage and have a very limited budget for it. Sounds like a business opportunity for Iceweb, no?
These government sales are a strong confirmation of a superior product at a great price and a reliable support structure. This is what I've been saying for a long time.
The question is whether the current management can take a superior product and make the kind of profits that a superior product deserves.
I've been a strong believer in Iceweb products for a long time.
What they need at this time is a serious partnership with a tech industry leader. Who? I don't know. But any tech company that doesn't currently have a unified storage product could suddenly be offering one of the best products available. All they'd have to do is sign an agreement with Iceweb.
I don't know if it will ever happen. The best product doesn't always win out.
They need a very strong established reliable partner that believes in their technology. They have to be selling their technology not their boxes. If they can't do that, the future will be very difficult.
New Products?
It doesn't seem likely to me that they'd announce a Model 8000 here since they have seemingly sold only one of their high-end Model 7000s. The new products could be something that would be attractive to Enterprise level organizations moving to OpenStack which is gaining momentum. An announcement along these lines in conjunction with Rackspace is something that could actually start generating revenue and some positive "buzz".
http://beta.fool.com/vtdave/2012/08/26/5-reasons-you-should-be-fanatical-about-openstack/10116/?ticker=GOOG&source=eogyholnk0000001
In any event, I'm watching what they announce for new products. It's got to be something that's different from what they are already doing and it's got to produce actual sales quickly.
Samsung/Apple verdict has ramifications for Iceweb. Samsung will need to work extra hard to differentiate their products. Having superior cloud services will be part of that and Iceweb could play a role there.
More important than that though are the Intellectual Property ramifications. Whatever IP that Iceweb legitimately owns just became more valuable. Even seemingly unimportant user interface techniques can now be owned and protected. That's the good news. The bad news is that it will be extremely difficult, expensive, and time consuming to protect that IP.
The clock is ticking on Iceweb. Whether Howe and the new team members are up to the task of protecting the IP without diluting it to death remains to be seen.
Toole landed at least one actual sale with Samsung and a partnership with Rackspace. Both of these are huge corporations and they are moving very aggressively with their cloud initiatives. Iceweb has a new CEO and it would be premature to dismiss the Samsung and Rax relationships. Although, it will not be easy to convince customers to choose Iceweb over more established vendors.
TooleMan marketing HIMSELF now.
http://steven.softheme.com/
If you don't get it, his references to Iceweb are in the past tense.
The new CEO Howe will announce some serious cost cutting and a change in direction for sales and marketing. My best estimate anyway. At this point, the best chance for success in the foreseeable future would be a licensing arrangement for their technology with a major force in the tech sector. If we don't see a hint of that in the upcoming presentation, then I think the future is not so bright.
I don't expect them to stop selling storage boxes. They are going to need all the revenue they can get. The future and the real (potential) value in Iceweb has always been that they are at least one step ahead of the competition technologically. All of this just my perspective.
CEO Howe has bigger problems than sales. It appears to me that the late CEO Signorello may have swept some financial problems under the rug. I think Howe tried to clean that all up with more open disclosure in the latest report.
It will be very difficult for a financially unstable company to sell storage boxes. The best option here would be to license the technology. Since the partner would have full access to the software, hardware design, and engineers, the financial situation would not be as much of an issue. Should Iceweb fail, the partner would own the technology. Much cheaper than developing it from scratch.
The "situation"?
My guess is that's a reference to a company losing money being turned into a company making a profit. It does imply that Sig wasn't a great manager and we've had posters here provide some evidence of that. In my opinion, Sig did create a great and timely product.
Great products don't always sell though. We'll know more in the next couple days and by early 2013 I think it will be clear which direction this ship is sailing.
Data Center spending soars and Fusion blows off the doors.
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2012/08/10/ffiv-ctxs-fio-correlate-to-surge-in-data-center-says-ubs/
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/cody/2012/08/10/how-to-trade-fusion-io-after-the-blow-out-quarter/
The Big Data centers have a need to grow and money to spend. Iceweb will only need a tiny fraction of this business to break even and a tiny fraction more to be profitable.
Rackspace Net Revenue Reaches $319M in Q2, Hints at More Cloud Product Launches Soon
http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/rackspace-net-revenue-reaches-319m-in-q2-hints-at-more-cloud-product-launches-soon
Racks Rockets.
As a new partner with Rackspace, this is encouraging news for Iceweb.
A blast from the past.
Dog, you're right it's been awful quiet. As another poster stated, IWEB is a high risk situation with potential high rewards.
Since there is no current news, I dug up this old PR from two years ago.
http://www.iceweb.com/press_pdf/08172010DHHS.pdf
I had forgotten about this one. Iceweb and the late Signorello have been targeting the health industry for some time now. You can take that as failure or give them credit for persistence. The relationship with Infian is encouraging. Samsung's efforts to move into health with TVs designed for patients and handheld devices for doctors and nurses give some hope that sales to that customer will grow.
Iceweb's competitive advantages in the industry include their focus on cloud based solutions and processing large volumes of images and videos. Giving health professionals secure anytime anywhere access to advanced imagery and diagnostic tools at an affordable price is something that few in the government or industry will oppose.
I'm holding for now.
Racks kicked off Cloud Storage service today.
"With the cloud service launch, Rackspace has also started offering instances of MySQL databases. The company claims that a single instance of this database can execute three times as many transactions as a similar offering from Amazon."
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/260203/rackspace_debuts_openstack_cloud_servers.html
"All data stored in Cloud Files is instantly written to three storage disks, all on separate nodes or locations that have dual power supplies."
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/files/technology/
The service is feature packed but still needs some work.
"Rackspace recommends that Cloud Databases users back up their data using mysqldump until backups are supported in Cloud Databases."
http://docs.rackspace.com/cdb/api/v1.0/cdb-devguide/content/overview.html
No mention of Iceweb here but no mention of EMC, Netapp either. The Racks concept is to provide cheap, fast, reliable cloud storage, so it wouldn't make sense for them to promote a particular brand other than their own.
I'm not gonna suggest that all of this is done on Iceweb products. But there is no reason whatsoever that with the recently announced Racks/Iceweb partnership that Iceweb's inexpensive sophisticated modern storage products can't be a part of Rackspace Cloud Files especially as Racks retires old storage and adds capacity.
There is an awful lot of material to read here. You can signup for a Racks cloud account for free and pay only for what you use.
https://cart.rackspace.com/cloud/
New Video Documentation
"One of the Top 50 of the Global 500 That is in the Electronics Manufacturing Business Purchases IceWEB 7000 Unified Data Storage System" is a bit too long for a headline.
"Global Electronics Manufacturer Purchases IceWEB 7000 Unified Data Storage System" has a nice ring to it.
Iceweb hasn't announced any sales lately. That's a good valid point we can all agree on. Is it really necessary to hairsplit PR language to dispute the indisputable over and over again?
We don't know much about the internal workings of Iceweb marketing. One possible scenario is that Iceweb made a sale to a Canadian bank for a call center application in which Samsung was involved. The Tooleman leveraged that to get a Samsung sale and a Rackspace partnership. If that's the case, it's brilliant maneuvering to get deals with major players who otherwise might have been highly reluctant to deal with a small company like Iceweb.
Of course, another possible scenario is that DataSpan brought in the Samsung business and Rackspace was just desperate for partners.
One way or another, I doubt we'll be having these same kinds of debates in 2013.
The future of the Cloud
This article is primarily about Racks but it applies to the whole industry. I won't say a whole lot about. People can read it and draw their own conclusions. Racks is seeking to make a profit within the paradigm of Open Source software and inexpensive, generic, reliable hardware. This is usually done by giving small customers a free ride (or cheap ride) and charging the Enterprise for the advanced features that only benefit them. I believe IceSTORM can fit well into this paradigm.
http://gigaom.com/cloud/rackspace-ceo-were-playing-a-different-game-than-amazon/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%3A+Tech%29