The Paris, France-based company filed for declaration de cessation des paiements, the French equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, in January after numerous plans to assist the company through to profitability failed.
Schemes such as the Mandrake Club and various rounds of reorganization appeared to be steering the company in the right direction early in 2002, but by January 2003 the company’s outstanding debts were weighing heavy and it was forced to call in the protection of the French courts.
That protection has enabled the company to become cash-flow positive since January, according to CEO Francois Bancilhon, who is following an aggressive plan to take the company out of Chapter 11 by year-end.
Our immediate goal is to exit from this status before the end of the year. Agreed, this is an aggressive schedule, but this is the plan I am focused on, and I strongly believe it is achievable, he said in a statement.
MandrakeSoft’s performance throughout the rest of 2003 should be boosted by a potentially lucrative move into the area of high-performance computer clustering. Last week the company introduced MandrakeClustering, a new clustering solution designed for research laboratories and compute-intensive applications.
The product was developed through the CLIC project, a joint development by MandrakeSoft, Groupe Bull SA, the University of Grenoble and the RNTL French Agency for New Technologies, and is now available for Intel Corp Pentium- and Advanced Micro Devices Inc Opteron-based hardware. Support for Intel’s Itanium 2 processors is due in September.
Also due later this year is version 9.2 of the Mandrake Linux distribution. Although less well known in corporate circles, the company’s Linux distribution is popular and well respected among the Linux community. Earlier this year the company focused its attention on the business market with the release of Mandrake Linux Corporate Server 2.1.
Source: Computerwire
