Stratus Technologies
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Stratus Technologies, Inc. is a Maynard, Massachusetts, based producer of fault tolerant computers. The company was founded in 1980 as Stratus Computer, Inc. in Natick, Massachusetts, and adopted its present name in 1999. The current CEO and president is Dave Laurello.
Stratus Computer was a Marlborough, Massachusetts, based producer of fault tolerant minicomputers. It competed with computers from Tandem Computers and to a lesser extent Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX.
Starting in 1983, its computers were resold worldwide by Olivetti under CPS/32 brand. Then, from 1985 to 1993, its computers were resold by IBM under the IBM System/88 brand.
[edit] History
The company's traditional markets have been financial services companies such as banks and stock exchanges. Beginning in the 1990s, the company moved into the telecommunications industry, particularly in the area of network management and custom services, with the result that its telecommunications revenues surpassed those from enterprise computing. This led to a buyout of the company by Ascend Communications in 1998 (later acquired by Lucent Technologies).
The enterprise server portion of the business was of little interest to Ascend and that portion was spun off in a management buyout in 1999, with funding from international investment firm, Investcorp. The company was named Stratus Technologies, Inc.
In the second quarter of 2002, Lucent sold the telecom product lines that originally came from Stratus to Platinum Equity Partners, a buyout firm based in Los Angeles. That unit was eventually named Cemprus LLC. Stratus purchased Cemprus in 2003. It's now a wholly owned subsidiary of Stratus. This acquisition gave Stratus the SS7 signaling software for phone networks and intelligent gateway software so that traditional and IP voice equipment are able to communicate. This software can be used to support higher-level telephony applications such as calling-card and toll free phone number services.
In 2006, Stratus purchased Emergent Network Solutions of Allen, Texas. Stratus sold off Emergent in 2009, and Emergent is now known as Stratus Telecommunications (their web address is http://www.stratustelecom.com/ ).
Now privately held, Stratus Technologies, Inc. is owned by private equity investors Investcorp and MidOcean Partners (formerly DB Capital Partners) as well as Intel Capital and NEC.
[edit] Products and customers
Its product line was originally based on Motorola MC68000 processors, but then migrated to Intel i860 processors and finally Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC architecture. More recent systems are based on Intel processors and run VOS, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 and Linux. The VOS operating system had many features inspired by or derived from Multics and continues to be deployed on the current generation Stratus servers. Stratus has a home-grown UNIX product, based on the original UNIX, called FTX (Fault-Tolerant UNIX) and still supports it although it is not sold on new servers anymore. The company sells the VOS operating system running on V-Series ftServers. Since August 2006, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is shipped and supported on T-Series ftServers, while Windows Server 2003 ships and is supported on W-Series ftServers.
The company has recently started offering Stratus Avance, a virtualization product. Avance allows deployment of applications across high-availability virtual machines, freeing up existing servers while providing high availability. Stratus also sells and supports VMware ESX Server, an enterprise-level virtualization product, on its ftServers.
Stratus has a large presence in Phoenix, Arizona, and Maynard,_Massachusetts, in the USA and several worldwide offices, in locations such as the UK, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Africa, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Japan.
The company has a vast customer base, but popular types of its customers include banks and credit unions, emergency response centers (such as 911 in the USA), police departments, fire departments, hospitals, clinics, governments, credit card companies, stock exchanges, telcos/phone companies and Internet providers.
