Levanta

Open source pioneer Levanta goes out of business?

Rumor has it that Linux and virtualization provider Levanta, whose recent release of Levanta 6.0 earned it a SearchEnterpriseLinux.com Product of the Year award, may have gone belly up.

At Levanta’s offices, no one is answering the phones, and a press release has yet to be issued; but on the Mikes Thoughts blog former Levanta Senior Director of Services Michael Perry said that the writing is on the wall. He shared a teary-eyed reminiscence of his time at the 9-year old Linux venture:

Levanta is gone dear reader. I will miss it and what it might have been; but I’ll never miss a whole subset of the cast of characters who thought they were above the laws of space and time. No you were not as it turns out. You made the failure as much as if you drove the car. You simply cannot run the company like its your personal kingdom. Sorry. So, it will be gone and people will wonder whether it was good or bad.

This came as a shock to outspoken user and Levanta advocate Arty Ecock, manager of VM enterprise systems at the City University of New York (CUNY), Computing and Information Systems (CIS). “If the news is true, then it will be a great loss to our organization,” Ecock said, adding that Levanta’s product was “a perfect fit” for his organization and that they were just months away from making a new Intrepid X purchase. “We were very big fans.”

According to Ecock, the Levanta product was superior; if anyone is to blame, it is an inferior sales and marketing team. “They had a winning product but they didn’t know how to market it.” Ecock added that the sales team was “garbage.” As one of the first open source commercial startups, Levanta always faced an uphill battle. There was virtually no market for enterprise Linux when Levanta started. But after companies discovered Linux, several players moved in, and apparently Levanta couldn’t get its act together. “There’s nothing that I know of on the market that will easily replace what we have. Now we’ll have to go back to square one,” Ecock said.

But Levanta users may not have to worry. If some analysts are correct, the company may be in the process of being acquired. Should this be the case, users like Ecock would expect Levanta to rise from the ashes and dominate the market under the direction of a better marketing strategy.

So is Levanta really dead, or is it in the process of being bought? If you have information on the company’s status, please let us know. But it appears that this is no belated April Fool’s joke.