* HP plans to acquire RLX
After an acrimonious start to the company’s founding by a former Compaq executive, things have turned full circle for server-management software maker RLX Technologies, which HP last week announced plans to acquire.
RLX was founded in November 2000 by former Compaq executive Gary Stimac and was sued by Compaq (now owned by HP) in February 2001 for allegedly poaching other Compaq executives.
RLX of Spring, Texas – just a stone’s throw from HP’s Houston offices – started off making low-power blade servers, based on Transmeta chipsets. Stimac had seen such technology at a company called RocketLogix, which RLX acquired in November 2000. With $60 million in venture capital in the bank from Compaq founder Rod Canion, Soros Venture Partners and Sternhill Management, RLX started business the same month.
At that time, only a few other vendors dabbled in blade servers. But soon, HP joined the market and launched blade servers of its own design. IBM followed and RLX found that its market share was dropping.
RLX reorganized in December 2004 to focus on its Control Tower blade server management software, which monitors and reprovisions blade servers. The software is most known for its ability to tie together policy, workload and task management in Linux environments.
The acquisition of RLX’s Linux blade management software would allow HP customers to deploy Linux on HP’s server blades.
Following completion of the acquisition, which is expected by the end of October, RLX’s business will be integrated into the HP BladeSystem group. HP claims that over time it will fit some of RLX’s intellectual property into HP’s own blade management software called Systems Insight Manager, as well as in its ProLiant Essentials server software designed to help boost the performance of computer networks, and in OpenView.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
