Enstor in administration

Storage integrator Enstor has gone into voluntary administration owing over $3 million to creditors.

Peter Marsden and David Kerr from accounting firm RSM Bird Cameron have been appointed as administrators.

Marsden told CRN that $2.4 million is currently owed to trade creditors but would not name names. A further $780,000 is owed to St George Bank, he said.

Enstor sells storage hardware and software manufactured by companies such as EMC, Veritas (Symantec), Storagetek, Legato, VMWare and Falconstor.

Marsden said RSM Bird Cameron was attempting to sell the business. He said that Enstor’s trading was “fairly restricted due to cash flow restrictions.”

The majority of Enstor’s 42 staff working in the company's Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane offices have lost their jobs.

Terry Semple, who was appointed MD in October last year, said: “Basically the industry downturned and we couldn’t survive.” He declined to comment further.

A former Enstor employee told CRN that “when the company wound up, it wound up with very little notice.”

A creditors' meeting is being held on 10 May at the Sydney office of RSM Bird Cameron.

On May 13 last year, Semple made a substantial investment in Enstor which gave him a majority stake in the company, diluting the shareholdings of Ken Wood and technical director Bart Steanes, who founded the company in 1998.

Semple joined the company in 1999 as a technical consultant and was promoted to sales executive in May 2000.

Another owner, general manager Tony Bagala, has left the company.

Enstor had also invested over $1 million in developing ‘Enstor Coherence’ a middleware product that glues together storage systems from multiple vendors, Semple told CRN last October.