Opengear Nabs 'Record' Revenue, Expansion

Based in the high-tech Mecca of Sandy, Utah, remote access console server vendor Opengear has announced what company officials call "record revenue and rapid expansion," reporting a "doubling of sales and an increase of staff numbers by 30 percent against comparable period in 2008."

The open source-based Opengear line of console server products are intended to replace the more expensive proprietary products from companies such as Avocent (News - Alert), Raritan, MRV, Digi and Lantronix.

"AAA National Office provides managed firewall services to AAA Clubs and needed an out-of-band management product to the remote firewall," says Rick Dimmick, senior systems architect and network and systems management at the AAA national office, adding that they chose Opengear's product "at a reasonable price, via the Internet or dial-up."

Opengear has recently expanded its R&D facilities and has put new software engineers to work on open source management software projects to be announced at industry conferences in October in Chicago and November in Portland, Oregon.

"Our quarterly revenues are up and we have a good order book outlook through mid 2010," says Bob Waldie, founder and CEO of Opengear," saying he expects market conditions to "return in late 2010."

Earlier this month TMC had the news that the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Campus Information Technology and Educational Services, had adopted the Opengear CM4148 to manage all of the equipment in its data center.

The campus network has 70,000 computer connections in over 130 buildings and 76 percent of the classrooms offer wireless connections. As the campus network grew, so did the data center and the number of servers that required, in university officials' estimation, an out-of-band management tool.

"The University of Illinois was an early adopter of the CM4148 and has benefited from a high-density console server at a low cost per port, with the benefits of a broad feature set and a flexible open source platform," said Todd Rychecky, vice president of sales at Opengear at the time.