Bringing Ellison's storage baby to market

Four years of research later and the storage company financed by Oracle Corp. head honcho Larry Ellison is finally moving product out of the door and naming its first customers. San Jose, California-based Pillar Data Systems Inc. is to launch the SAN (storage area network) version of its Axiom hardware, software combo in three to four weeks, while the NAS (network attached storage) release quietly slipped into the market in April.

Pillar is garnering plenty of attention thanks to Ellison, the company's sole investor to the tune of US$150 million via his Tako Ventures LLC firm. The firm already employs 325 staff, 70 percent of them in research and development, and is expanding aggressively. Pillar is also aggressively pricing its products, which it claims are easy to install, are flexible and will simplify storage management.

Mike Workman, Pillar's ebullient president and chief executive officer, came to the company with 20 years experience in the storage business, including stints with IBM Corp. and Conner Peripherals. He told IDG News Service how he ended up at Pillar and about working with Ellison. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation.

IDGNS: How did Pillar come about?

Workman: It's a weird model. I didn't look for them. They looked for me. Steve Fink [Pillar's chairman and treasurer, also CEO of Lawrence Investments LLC, the parent company of Tako Ventures] and Larry Ellison had been investors in Digital Appliance for nine years. They were wanting to put more money in and have a serious storage company. They started looking for a CEO who knew storage and in 2001 they called me. We set up a call. Larry's extremely bright with an awesome sense of humor. Then I flew over to Israel where Digital Appliance was based. I said I wasn't interested. It would cost $100 million. It was a do-over, a mulligan. They said, 'OK, let's start' [from scratch]. They decided to give me $100 million.

IDGNS: Hasn't it taken you a long time from 2001 until now to come out with products?

Workman: It did take us a long time. But we're offering a full spectrum [with Axiom]. Many startups attack a niche, but we want a home run, not a bunt. Our product has 2.5 million lines of code and our hardware is purpose-built for storage. We have over 140 systems installed inside of Pillar. We listened to customers complaints about storage. A very common complaint was why does storage cost so much? Everything moved down in market -- PCs, midrange servers, etcetera. Storage didn't do that. Network Appliance is a great company, but they've had same architecture for quite some time. EMC's architecture is quite a bit older than that, it dates back to Clariion.

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