This recent story from Wired is all about a company based in Salt Lake, City called Fusion IO (FIO). I won’t pretend to understand the technology but I know it was one of the hottest tech stocks around until it lost nearly 50% of its market cap since last October. Even now it trades at a stratospheric PE multiple . I drive by their headquarters on the freeway here all the time, and this Wired article piqued my interest and did a great job of explaining the company and the race for massive database solutions. Wired does a great job of explaining things but FIO has a web site with a cute folksy animation that does an even better job.
The point being- is it cheap enough to consider buying? Well that depends. My first crack at the 10Q, the most recent quarterly statement has a very strange feature. Research and development costs for the quarter amounted to 18.6% of revenues. Gee that sounded high but guess what, they’re actually growing. The prior year over year quarter’s R&D costs were 16%. That just seemed very high to me so I looked at a few other companies in the tech space to try and get some comparisons. For example, Apple spent 1.8%, Google 13.4%, and Microsoft 11.7%. Can Fusion IO let off the accelerator and not get left in the dust?
BY CADE METZ 03.14.136:30 If you hire a plane, you can fly over the massive data center Apple operates in the woodlands of North Carolina, snapping some distant photos of the 500,000-square-foot facility that drives the company’s iCloud web services. And if you’re on foot, you can get a little closer. You might even sneak a peek at the solar farm or the biogas plant that helps power this internet engine room. But Apple won’t let you inside the building — and it won’t tell you what you might find there.It would be nice to know. Like Google and Amazon, Apple delivers web services to hundreds of millions of people across the globe — at last count, iCloud served over 250 million souls — and that requires a whole new breed of hardware and software, stuff that’s far more efficient than the gear inside most data centers. You can think of this as the technology of tomorrow. As the web continues to grow, the tech used by the Apples and the Googles will trickle down to the rest of the world. In many cases, it already has.
via Apple and Facebook Flash Forward to Computer Memory of the Future | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.