Monday, January 5, 2009

EMC buys Seattle’s SourceLabs

By Mass High Tech staff

Storage and virtualization giant EMC Corp. has acquired Seattle-based SourceLabs Inc., an open source software support startup, and has hired "a number of the company's employees," an EMC spokeswoman confirmed in a brief statement. Continuing to run as a standalone business, SourceLabs will operate within EMC's Cloud Infrastructure Business. The purchase price was not disclosed.

A source told American City Business Journals’ Seattle technology blog TechFlash that some of the team has started working at EMC’s Bellevue offices, where TechFlash co-founder John Cook was able to leave a voice mail message for SourceLabs chief architect Will Pugh. SourceLabs chief executive Byron Sebastian had not yet set up his voice mail at the Bellevue location, according to a receptionist. TechFlash could not reach him on his cell phone Friday.

SourceLabs, which operates the open source community Swik.net, raised a $7 million venture round from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Index Ventures in 2006. It marks the second major acquisition by Hopkinton-based EMC (NYSE: EMC) of a Seattle startup in the past 12 months, following its purchase of Pi Corp. last year.

TechFlash reports that back in November it heard that SourceLabs was encountering rough patches in part because some of it clients included large financial institutions which had been hurt during the economic collapse. (The company’s customer list at one time included Merrill Lynch, whose sale to Bank of America was completed Friday.)

In November, SourceLabs chief executive Byron Sebastian told TechFlash that the “economy is tough” and noted that customers were moving slower than they had in the past.

“It takes more time to get commitments,” Sebastian said at that time. “It makes it harder for us to plan.”  He also said that Swik.net attracted about 1.1 million unique visitors each month, with SourceLabs self support offering for Linux and Java growing its visitor count by 400 percent during a six month period. That product is used to troubleshoot issues developers have with open source software like Linux, Xen, and Apache, he said.

Sebastian — who previously worked at BEA Systems Inc., Crossgain Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. — founded SourceLabs in 2004.  An EMC spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment.

Eric Engleman contributed to the TechFlash report.