MSP Bust: Oculan Closes Shop

The company, which was founded in 2001 and had built up an impressive program of 200 solution providers to resell its managed network services, simply ran out of money, according to Oculan President Robert Davis.

"While Oculan was growing at a brisk pace, the company needed another round of investment capital to support our aggressive drive toward profitability," Davis said in a statement released Monday. "The decision to suspend operations effective immediately was made when recent negotiations with potential new investors over the terms of that round reached an impasse."

Davis declined to elaborate on why negotiations for additional funding broke down or how much money the Raleigh, N.C.-based vendor was seeking. When reached for further comment on Monday, Darrek Porter, the company's vice president of marketing, also declined to provide details.

Porter did confirm that a handful of Oculan staffers will remain on the job temporarily to complete the administrative, financial and legal tasks associated with the suspension of operations. The company employed 50 people in total, he said.

"On behalf of our employees, I want to say to all those who believed so strongly in Oculan that we deeply regret this outcome," he said. "We believed that another round of funding was near, but when this impasse was reached, it quickly became clear that time had simply run out on [us]."

Earlier this month, Oculan unveiled a new plug-and-play appliance for managing Microsoft network environments at a fraction of the cost and complexity of industry alternatives. The appliance, dubbed Oculan 5.0, combined a variety of systems and desktop management functions with security solutions that provide customers with a comprehensive managed services approach to handling Microsoft networks.

It was not clear whether another managed services company will purchase the intellectual property behind the device.