This wouldnt be the first time that Imperial Technology has run into a sales drought. In mid-2002, the El Segundo, Calif., company was so parched for business it was forced to lay off around half its staff, leaving it with only about 20 employees to its name (see Imperial Goes Into 'Hibernation Mode').
The problem for Imperial Technology and other solid-state disk (SSD) vendors is convincing customers to pay a small fortune for better I/O performance. SSD systems consist of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) modules designed to eliminate I/O bottlenecks for high-performance applications such as transaction-processing databases. But while they deliver far better I/O performance than magnetic disks, SSDs are much more expensive per megabyte.
In May, Imperial competitor Solid Data Systems felt the burn too, and was forced to lay off a chunk of its staff (see Solid Data Gets Squishy). Other players in this space include Platypus Technology Inc. and Texas Memory Systems Inc. (see TMS Torches SSD Storage and Platypus Sinks Claws Into SSD).
Imperial, after its near-death experience last summer, appeared to have turned things around. "The rumors of our death were greatly exaggerated," CEO David wittily japed in an interview with Byte and Switch in January this year (see Imperial Snaps Out of It).
In fact, after landing a few new big accounts, David was so confident in Imperials survivability that he not only hired back all of the companys laid-off employees, but added a few new faces to the crowd as well.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
