The Austin, Texas-based company has made a name for itself as a pioneer in the blade PC market, which sees the standard PC taken off business desktops and replaced by a rack of PC blades in the data center connected to a small user port on the desktop and the usual mouse, screen, and keyboard.
ClearCube’s president and CEO, Carl Boisvert, told ComputerWire that driven by revenue up a little over three-fold in 2004, the company is aiming towards an initial public offering. Our first priority is to drive a self-sustaining business, but our intent is to go public, he said. The end of the year is a goal.
Boisvert was reticent about discussing the company’s financial position ahead of any official Securities and Exchange Commission filings, but he did say that the company has no debt and is growing rapidly, with employee numbers boosted from 75 to 150 last year, and an expanding business outside the US.
That success has been driven by the company’s focus on four core verticals – financial services, healthcare, government and education, and commercial and manufacturing – and while the company is planning to expand its focus it is being careful to keep control of its costs ahead of any offering.
ClearCube is now targeting opportunities in the contact center market after striking a deal to provide 3,000 PC blades to contact center outsourcing specialist TelVista, part of the Latin American Grupo Carso conglomerate.
The company is building up partnerships with companies in the contact center market to target more opportunities in this space, a route to market that the company will concentrate on for new verticals. For us to continue our growth we have to be multi-channel centered, Boisvert said.
While Boisvert said the company could hire a group of salespeople to target contact centers, he added that ClearCube is concentrating on partnerships as it controls its costs, if we are to drive to some time kind of liquidity event by the end of the year.
Like any CEO steering a fast growing company towards an IPO, Boisvert was bullish about ClearCube’s business opportunities, but remains realistic about its chances of knocking the business PC off the world’s desktops.
We are on the verge of being the next big systems play, we have introduced a different way of doing business on the desktop, he said. We’re going to give you the power and flexibility of a PC with the security and control of a server.
As cool as our technology is, I’m not naive enough to think we’re going to replace PCs all over the world. We’re best at green field sites or refreshes, he admitted. Gartner has predicted that 120 million PCs will be replaced this year, however, giving ClearCube a sizable market to aim at. We’re happy as long as we’re getting our piece of that, he said. We’re not out to replace every PC.
Boisvert added that the company is also considering the extension of its Management Suite blade management software to blade servers. There’s really not that many competitors in the management space for blades, he said. There’s clearly a big dilemma out there for the management of blade servers. Although we don’t have that capability today, it’s not that difficult to do tomorrow.
