Fusion-IO Reports Solid 4Q Earnings, Plans To Acquire IO Turbine

Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io, which in June closed its IPO, also said it will acquire IO Turbine, a developer of caching solutions for virtualized environments, for about $95 million. Fusion-io expects to close the acquisition later this month.

San Jose, Calif.-based IO Turbine, which in May exited stealth mode, develops software that takes advantage of SSD and Flash storage on servers to increase the performance of primary storage in virtualized server environments.

IO Turbine's Accelio software is designed to tackle bottlenecks caused by multiple virtual machines sitting on clustered physical servers which are trying to access NAS or Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN storage. It was initially released for VMware environments.

The IO Turbine acquisition will help enterprise customers increase the utilization, performance and efficiency of their data center resources and increase the value of their data, said David Flynn, Fusion-io chairman and CEO, in a statement.

“IO Turbine’s software is uniquely architected to take advantage of flash memory in the server to solve the I/O bottlenecks, the inhibitor to the adoption of enterprise virtualization. We believe integrating ioMemory and IO Turbine adds a critical and previously missing performance component to virtualized IT environments that will accelerate the adoption of Fusion-io technology," Flynn said in that statement.

The integration of IO Turbine's software with Fusion-io's ioMemory memory modules will help improve data center ROI by increasing the number of virtual machines which can be hosted per physical server, Fusion-io said.

Customers will also be able to virtualize data-intensive applications that in the past were difficult to migrate to virtualized environments while maintaining performance, Fusion-io said.

Fusion-io is essentially a startup itself, having been founded in 2006. Its most famous executive is Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who joined the company in late 2008 as its chief scientist.

For its fourth quarter of fiscal 2011 -- the first quarterly report since its IPO -- Fusion-io reported revenue of $71.7 million, up 556 percent from the $10.9 million it reported for the same quarter of 2010.

The company also reported earnings $5.8 million, or 6 cents per share, compared to a loss of $11.9 million, or $1.00 per share, last year.

For all of fiscal 2011, which ended June 30, revenue was $197.2 million, up 445 percent from the $36.2 million it reported in fiscal 2010. The company also reported full-year earnings of $4.6 million, or 6 cents per share, compared to a loss of $32.5 million, or $2.95 per share, for fiscal year 2010.

“We believe our significant year-over-year growth emphasizes increasing industry recognition that storing data close to the CPU where it is processed finally addresses the data supply problem. Fusion-io offers a simple, efficient, cost-effective platform that integrates within existing architectures to meet the data demands faced by modern enterprises as they seek to accelerate databases and applications and to virtualize their infrastructure," Flynn said