Dataram Shrinks Losses in Q3 of Fiscal 2011

March 21, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Clone server memory maker and storage upstart Dataram has been tightening its belt and moving closer to profitability in its third quarter of fiscal 2011 ended January 31.

In the quarter, Dataram’s overall sales fell by 3.3 percent, to $11.9 million. With research and development, stock compensation, and amortization costs all radically cut back, the company was able to cut losses in the quarter back to $839,000, which was a whole lot better than the $6.54 million loss it had in the year-ago period.

For the nine months of fiscal 2011 ended in January, Dataram’s revenues are up by 10.6 percent, to $35.6 million. The company’s losses for the nine months racked up to $3.8 million, significantly lower than the $9.13 million for the first nine months of the prior fiscal year.

John Freeman, Dataram’s president and chief executive officer, said that the company was proceeding with its manufacturing plant consolidation, which was initiated last year in the wake of its acquisition of rival Micro Memory Bank in April 2009. That consolidation is expected to be completed by the end of this fiscal year and has already contributed to cost cutting in the company’s core memory business. (Well, it’s not a core memory business, of course. That technology went into the dustbin in the early 1970s, being replaced by DRAM.)

“We have taken the necessary actions to ensure that our memory solutions business is profitable and growing,” explained Freeman in a statement.” Our outlook for XcelaSAN is strong, particularly as High Availability functionality is now a reality.”

Dataram announced the XcelaSAN Model 100 storage appliance at the end of February, which has high availability features such as redundant flash drives with mirrored RAID striping and UPS power protection. This HA version, which does not appear to have clustering of the storage arrays across multiple nodes, is shipping now.