Three months after announcement $48 million funding by companies like ARM or ATIC, Smooth-Stone detailed its company momentum, including significant new executive hires, new office space and renaming the company.  The new name, Calxeda, pronounced “Cal-zeh-dah,” is a derivative of the Latin for "Smooth-Stone". Calxeda is developing ARM-based server products and plans to provide first samples of its industry-changing technologies in 2011. 

Calxeda’s business purpose is to remove barriers to innovation by supplying super-efficient technologies that deliver the performance businesses and institutions need, with an order of magnitude improvement in energy and space efficiency.

 “We believe the solution requires this order of magnitude improvement, literally ten times the energy efficiency, for half the price. This is within our reach with technologies we are developing at Calxeda. The response from customers and technology partners validates we are onto something big. The talented individuals joining our team, as announced today, provide further validation," said Barry Evans, chief executive officer of Calxeda.

In order to boost its competitiveness and add experience into its team, Calxeda hired renowned managers from companies like IBM, Marvell and Freescale onto strategic roles at the company:

• Karl Freund - vice president of marketing. At Calxeda, Mr. Freund will lead strategic market planning, market requirements, positioning, launches and market development efforts to support Calxeda’s business plans. Freund brings 30 years of server market experience to Calxeda.  He spent the last 10 years in various senior marketing positions at IBM, acting as vice president of worldwide marketing in the Tivoli's Unix-powered systems and mainframe business units. Before IBM, Freund had similar roles in SGI, Cray and Hewlett-Packard.
• Bob Baughman - vice president of business development and sales. Mr. Baughman has gained experience in leading worldwide sales organizations, brings expertise in full life cycle product management, proven revenue creation and growth management including taking a start up from zero to $1.6 billion, and shepherding companies through all phases from start up launch to IPO to acquisition. Bob Baughman was most recently with Polycom where he was vice president of product management of a $700 million revenue video solutions group, and was key in managing Polycom’s strategic partnership with Microsoft. Before that, Baughman was with Marvell and Intel, joining the latter after nine years at Dialogic Corp., which was acquired by Intel in mid 1999.
• Steve Beatty - vice president of manufacturing. Mr. Beatty brings 18 years manufacturing and business operations experience to Calxeda. He was previously senior vice president, responsible for product lines and manufacturing operations, at SigmaTel through its 2003 IPO and then acquisition by Freescale. Before that, Beatty was with Motorola, and previously served in active duty in the U.S. Naval Nuclear Power Program.

Founded in January 2008, Calxeda, formerly Smooth-Stone, aims to bring unseen performance density to the data center on a very attractive power foot print by leveraging ultra-low power processors based on ARM architecture. Calxeda promises make it possible for data center managers to increase the density of their computer resources while significantly reducing the need for power, space and cooling, an ambitious promise for a company that presently does not seem to have either 64-bit capability on the CPU hardware level or infrastructural or software partners. Still, Calxeda is funded by a syndicate comprising venture capital firms and semiconductor innovators, including ARM, Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC), Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Highland Capital Partners and Texas Instruments.

“The industry needs a new clock, not just another tick or tock. Mere modest improvements in efficiency will not remove the barriers to innovation that frustrate clients today.  That’s why I came to Calxeda: to help turn this vision into a reality,” said Mr. Freund.

Tags: Calxeda, ATIC, Smooth-Stone, Opteron