Why We Sold AccessFlow to INX

As the June 9th anniversary of our sale of AccessFlow to INX approaches, I've been reflecting about our decision and how things have turned out.  We were fortunate in that AccessFlow’s success as a leading VMware partner led to a fair amount of interest from potential acquirers.  In early in 2008 my partner, Gary Lamb, foresaw the coming convergence of VMware and Cisco in the data center, and felt it important that we be aligned with a strong networking organization.  We agreed to be acquired by INX last June because of the firm’s stellar reputation as one of the nation’s top Cisco partners.

In our acquisition discussions with INX’s executive team, we made it clear that we did not want to become the virtualization division of a networking/UC company.  We were assured that INX was making the investment to acquire AccessFlow because the company wanted to become a leader in the data center virtualization space.

INX has lived up to the promise.  The firm quickly became a VMware Premier Partner, acquired a seat on VMware’s Partner Advisory Council and began hiring great VCP engineers at its branches across the country.  And while it was initially a challenge to convey the virtualization messaging to 125 account managers steeped in “speeds and feeds”, the receptivity has been fantastic.  I have to confess that it is a bit intoxicating to be ushered into large Cisco accounts across the country in order to talk about our virtualization vision to a very attentive audience.

It turns out that the Cisco and VMware partnering went beyond what we expected.  Cisco’s VN-Link technology is incorporated in the vNetwork Distributed Switch of vSphere 4, while VMware technology enables the existence of the Nexus 1000v , and to a large extent, the market for UCS and the Nexus 5000 and 7000 family of switches.  Products from both organizations are, in our opinion, essential if the objective is 100% data center virtualization – something that Gary and I have felt should be the goal since we co-founded AccessFlow in May of 2005.

Last week INX achieved another milestone in data center virtualization by being one of the first few companies to receive the Advanced Technology Partner certification for Cisco’s Unified Computing System. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/INX-Achieves-ATP-for-Cisco-bw-15169875.html?.v=1

Comments

[Brad Hedlund]

Congrats to your success!