Timpanogas Research Group, the Orem Utah-based Novell breakaway clustering venture, is seeking investment partners to help it complete the development of its VNDI virtual network disk interface technology. Timpanogas recently settled its acrimonious legal battle with Novell (CI No 3,458), but spent a lot of money in the process. The legal battle drained Timpanogas of all but $600,000 of the $2m in seed capital it originally raised at the beginning of last year. As a result, TRG posted a tax credit of $1.6m for its fiscal year 1997, which it can credit against future sales of its product. But the company says it needs at least $1.2m to complete the product development and launch of VNDI for Windows NT, NetWare and Linux. So it’s hoping to land a $2m investment by selling up to one million shares of its common stock, at $2 per share. Privately-held Timpanogas says that balance sheets are available to interested investors. Currently, 20% of the company’s 5 million outstanding shares are held by venture capital investors, 40% by CEO Jeff Merkey, and 40% by company president Darren Major. An additional 500m shares are held within TRG, said the firm. VNDI is described as a distributed, fault tolerant, highly-scalable distributed network infrastructure for file servers and workstations. It is intended to enable users to create both virtual network disks and devices, and pools of mirrored, stripped, fault-tolerant storage to improve reliability and scalability of NT server set-ups. Costings assume a product launch in 1999.
