Fusion-io endures loss as flash competition heats up
Fusion-io has seen its profits fall but revenue climb, as competition in PCIe-attached flash technology heats up.
The Salt Lake City, Utah-based company reported revenues of $94.2m (£57.9m) and a net loss of $4.67m for the third quarter of 2012 on Thursday, up on the previous quarter's $84.1m and with less of a loss than the previous $5.7m.
"We believe our vision is resonating with customers and strategic partners, and we will continue to prioritise the expansion of our market footprint along with investment in innovation," Dennis Wolf, the company's chief financial officer, said in a statement.
During the quarter, the company introduced new technologies, such as a software development kit, designed to lock companies into its products, by making them more reliant on Fusion-io's software stack.Talking to ZDNet UK in January, the company's chief executive, David Flynn, characterised this approach as akin to "laying a minefield" by making it more difficult for competitors to sell their hardware into customers using the technology, to ZDNet UK in January.
"PCIe SSD is becoming a tougher market — more competition," storage blogger Chris Mevans wrote in a pair of posts to Twitter. "Fusion-io [is] only differentiated by [its] API. If vendors write to the API, [the] company succeeds. If not, [the] company fails."
Though Fusion-io was first to offer PCIe-linked flash cards, major IT companies have since piled into the sector. EMC and Dell announced similar products in February, Huawei in March and LSI in April.
The seven-year-old company expects revenue to be flat in the next quarter.