GOVERNMENT

Concurrent Thinking Ltd today announced that it had spun out its cluster appliance business into a new company. The new company will exploit technology that was conceived and sold by Streamline Computing Ltd, the UK’s leading integrator of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Over the last 18 months, this technology has been deployed at more than 40 of Streamline’s customers in the UK.

The spin-out follows the successful completion of a syndicated funding round of over £1M, which included original shareholders as well as a new investor, Carbon Trust Investment Partners. The funds will be used to grow the business internationally as well as reach a larger market within HPC and more mainstream computing sectors. A particular focus will be placed on exploiting the company’s technology for holistic energy management within data-centre environments.

"Total annual carbon emissions from the ICT industry now rival those from the aviation industry. Supporting technologies that reduce energy consumption in data centres is a key focus for us," said Peter Linthwaite, Managing Partner of CT Investment Partners which advises Carbon Trust Investments. "Concurrent Thinking's integrated, scalable, easy-to-use technology combines power control with server and operating system management.  This results in a significant return on investment for customers as it reduces total cost of ownership, while simultaneously reducing their facility's carbon emissions.  Carbon Trust Investments is delighted to be backing a UK business that is poised for rapid growth and will make a meaningful difference to cutting the ICT sector’s carbon emissions."

The company’s current product, concurrentCOMMAND, is a system deployment and management product for scalable computing infrastructures. Although the product was architected for the stringent requirements of HPC users, it is a generic tool that is able to manage IT systems made up of racks of third-party servers, peripherals, operating systems and applications, whether for use in HPC, mainstream data-centres or next generation clouds. ConcurrentCOMMAND provides an open framework that allows the company’s channel partners and its end-users to deploy system and application software, and then monitor the state of hardware, software and environmental conditions so as to ensure system continuity, minimise costs and optimise system performance. It is built using the latest Web 2.0 technologies, allowing it to be used from any internet-capable device.

“Given the significant growth in IT systems that are based on clusters of commodity servers, there is a growing consensus that technology developed within HPC may be deployed successfully with the mainstream computing marketplace. This is partly due to the demands of large-scale HPC applications which often lead to the adoption of a more system-wide approach to scale-out computing architectures,” said Dr Michael Rudgyard, CEO and founder of Concurrent Thinking. “We believe that the products we have been developing, as well as other forthcoming products, will allow us to offer solutions that are equally relevant to data-centres and next-generation clouds as they are to HPC. We welcome the support of our investors, both new and old, and look forward to building the company’s business and product portfolio both within and beyond our traditional customer base.“

The spin-out of Concurrent Thinking Ltd mirrors the spin-out of its sister company Allinea Software Ltd in July 2009, both companies originally stemming from R&D projects within Streamline Computing Ltd, which was founded in late 2000. The three companies, while sharing many of the same investors and a common history, are now independent legal entities. Streamline Computing will continue to sell Concurrent Thinking products as a primary UK reseller, much as it currently sells products from other third parties.