Gear6 Reportedly Shutting Down Operations

This doesn’t happen very often in the bustling storage hardware and storage-related software businesses, but The Station received tips April 23 from several reliable industry sources that storage software maker Gear6 is in the process of shutting down its operations.

Gear6, based in Mountain View, Calif., is a 4-year-old maker of Memcached-enhanced software that helps Web applications run more efficiently. The company released a new product on April 13, Gear6 Web Cache, which accelerates data access to structured MySQL data sets in addition to unstructured data.

Gear6’s cache-centric approach addresses a widening gap between increasingly powerful servers and constrained, disk-based systems by eliminating bottlenecks. Gear6 is led by President and CEO Tom Shea, former CEO at Roxio.

On April 14, Gear6 execs Mark Atwood and Joaquin Ruiz were interviewed by video blogger Robert Scoble at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, Calif., giving no inkling that the company was in trouble. Ironically, Gear6 was a major sponsor of the conference.

It has been whispered among industry insiders for several months that the company has had serious financial struggles. The Memcached (pronounced Mem-cash-dee) market isn’t quite where it should be yet, especially for a young company that apparently is running out of venture capital.

Schooner Technologies, which also uses Memcached prominently in its servers, told The Station April 23 that Sherwood Partners, a liquidation firm, contacted it to say Gear6 has filed for ABC (Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors), which is a California legal proceeding for orderly liquidation.

Martin Pichinson, a Sherwood principal, wouldn’t reveal anything definitively to The Station about Gear6 but did say he expects to have better information on Monday, April 26.

Gear6 did not return a phone call from The Station on Friday.

Personally, we’re hoping that this report is premature and that Gear6 can continue. This company has some good technology and it would be sad to see it go away.

Tune in here April 26 to find out the latest.