scion
15 years ago
SEC CHARGES FORMER ISILON SYSTEMS CFO WITH FRAUDULENTLY BOOSTING REVENUE
Litigation Release No. 21210 / September 14, 2009
Accounting and Auditing Release No. 3050 / September 14, 2009
Securities and Exchange Commission v. Stuart W. Fuhlendorf, Case No. C-09-1292 (TSZ) (W.D. Wash. filed Sept. 14, 2009)
Securities and Exchange Commission v. Isilon Systems, Inc., Case No. C-09-1293 (RAJ) (W.D. Wash. filed Sept. 14, 2009)
SEC CHARGES FORMER ISILON SYSTEMS CFO WITH FRAUDULENTLY BOOSTING REVENUE
The Securities and Exchange Commission today filed securities fraud charges against Stuart W. Fuhlendorf, former Chief Financial Officer of Isilon Systems, Inc. On the heels of the Seattle-based electronic storage company's successful initial public offering (IPO), Fuhlendorf allegedly cut secret side deals with Isilon customers to allow the company to report inflated sales to its shareholders.
The SEC alleges Fuhlendorf concealed the true deal terms from Isilon's controller, audit committee, and outside auditor, leading the company to report $4.8 million in improper revenue during 2006 and 2007. In a separate proceeding, the SEC also filed settled charges against Isilon for its misleading financial information.
According to the SEC's complaints, filed in federal district court in Seattle, Isilon became a publicly-traded company in December 2006 and its stock price increased 77 percent on its opening day. The high expectations created by the successful IPO placed significant pressure on Isilon's management to meet analysts' lofty revenue forecasts. When anticipated deals failed to materialize, the SEC alleges that Fuhlendorf personally negotiated deal terms so that Isilon could get product out the door, even though the secret deal terms made revenue recognition improper under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and the company's own internal policies.
The SEC's complaints allege that Isilon improperly booked revenue on five transactions, including three transactions with oral side agreements between Fuhlendorf and representatives of Isilon customers; a sale in which the terms were not fixed and determinable until after Isilon's quarter ended; and a roundtrip transaction that was essentially a circular flow of cash from Isilon to the customer and back to Isilon. The SEC alleges that Fuhlendorf lied to Isilon's audit committee about the true nature of the deal, which was merely a sham transaction designed to artificially boost Isilon's revenues.
In February 2008, following an internal investigation, Isilon restated its financial statements to correct its accounting for these and other transactions.
In its federal court action against Fuhlendorf, the SEC alleges Fuhlendorf violated Section 17(a)(1), (a)(2), and (a)(3) of the Securities Act of 1933 ("Securities Act"), Sections 10(b) and 13(b)(5) of the Securities Exchange Act ("Exchange Act"), and Rules 10b-5, 13a-14, 13b2-1, and 13b2-2 thereunder and aided and abetted violations of Sections 13(a), 13(b)(2)(A), and 13(b)(2)(B) of the Exchange Act and Rules 12b-20, 13a-1, 13a-11, and 13a-13. The SEC seeks a permanent injunction, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains plus prejudgment interest, financial penalties, forfeiture of bonuses and other compensation, and an officer-and-director bar.
In the separate settled proceeding against Isilon, the company has agreed (without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations) to be enjoined from future violations of Sections 13(a), 13(b)(2)(A), and 13(b)(2)(B) of the Exchange Act and Rules 12b-20, 13a-1, 13a-11 and 13a-13 thereunder. In deciding to accept Isilon's offer of settlement, the SEC took into account the cooperation that Isilon provided the SEC staff during the investigation.
http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2009/lr21210.htm
cooler
16 years ago
NBC's Ambitious Olympics Coverage
By Chris Preimesberger
2008-07-15
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Storage/NBCs-Ambitious-Olympics-Coverage/
NBC's Ambitious Olympics Coverage
Storage vendors Omneon and Isilon will handle a record 3,000 hours of hi-res and low-res video at the event.
NBC is busy putting the finishing touches on its near-round-the-clock coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games that debut Aug. 8, and IT storage will play a significant role in the success or failure of the effort.
Since the international event was first televised live by ABC in 1960 from Rome, no network has ever attempted to produce this much footage of an Olympiad.
When the Games host the closing ceremonies Aug. 24, the network will have broadcast just shy of 3,000 hours of swimming, track and field, gymnastics, volleyball, baseball, basketball, fencing, water polo, horseback riding, and numerous other competitions. About 25 percent of it will go "in the can" for archiving.
NBC's Beijing TV schedule, released July 8, includes about 2,900 hours of live TV coverage. That live coverage, broadcast over NBC and MSNBC, will exceed the total number of U.S. television hours—which now stands at 2,562, to be exact—for all previous summer Olympic Games combined.
About half of this expected footage will be shot in high-definition video. Consider that 96 hours of HD (4MB per second) footage comprises about 1 raw terabyte of storage capacity; that means about 11TB of storage will be necessary for HD alone.
The remainder of the footage will be shot in standard format (2MB per sec) to be distributed for Webcasts and handheld devices. That footage will take up somewhere around 6TB of storage.
Most of what will be filmed won't be thrown away during the event. Basically, NBC and its partners will be doing in Beijing what the big movie makers do every day in producing computer-generated films: file-based supercomputing, only with no special effects outside of many "intros" and "outros." The "special effects" will mostly be provided live, courtesy of the several thousand world-class athletes gathered in mainland China.
The network will be storing all that raw and edited digital footage in impressive storage data centers that include Isilon Systems and Omneon Video Networks hardware and software packages.
How does a network shoot, edit and air all that video in a manner that will tell all the various stories and keep viewers interested? Simple: It distributes everything.
Matt Adams, vice president of broadcast solutions at Omneon, worked for NBC for 10 years. He was brought to Omneon two years ago to come up with new applications of its technology and to find new markets.
"This, of course, is a huge amount of finished content to be delivered, so we had to come up with a pretty radical workflow in order to make that much content," Adams told me. "We also didn't want to haul everybody and their uncle over to Beijing, because [NBC] couldn't afford it, basically."
Omneon worked with NBC for more than a year to come up with a workflow plan "that would allow people to work at home in the United States and repurpose the content that NBC captures over there and deliver it to the different distribution outlets," Adams said.
Adams, Omneon and NBC came up with a concept called "proxy-based workflow."
"This requires making low-res copies of thousands of hours of competitions that are captured in our storage system in Beijing, and using a product called ProCast—a video acceleration management product that proxies the images over to another media-grid storage server in New York," Adams said.
"Then all 40 [at-home] editors—we call them shot-pickers—make their shot selections using the proxies. Once they decide which shots they want to make a deliverable piece with, then the system sends the proxies back to Beijing [to NBC's data center headquarters], where the high-res clips are called up from the main arrays to match the [low-res MPG4] proxies that have been selected."
An XML file of metadata is made for each low-res video package that accompanies the video via virtual private network to Beijing. NBC production editors in Beijing—or, as a backup, in New York—then use the metadata to locate and link the individual high-res pieces together at their own editing workstations to construct a finished piece. Those editors responsible for the finished content can pick and choose what they want from the shot-pickers' selections.
Only after the piece has been plotted out shot by shot is the accompanying high-res video brought up from the storage arrays to make a broadcast-worthy file.
This saves a great deal of time, effort, power and I/O in threading through all the hours of video to be shot. "We'd clog up the data pipes between the at-home editors, New York and Beijing if we didn't use proxies," Adams said.
Viewers of NBC Olympic Webcasts will be able to request specific events on demand, if they missed them the first time on the live broadcast—or if they simply want to watch everything on their desktop or laptop computer screens. Everything will be accessible at NBC.com and MSNBC.com.
Main event highlights will be available for mobile video devices, including BlackBerrys, mobile phones and iPhones, Adams said.
It's not been a challenge to shoot the raw content, Adams said. The challenge has always been what to do with it.
"We have about 180TB of storage available to us in Beijing. We'll have about 4,000 total hours saved on the system, with about 3,000 or so being broadcast," Adams said.
This is a good example of where things are going in the traditional broadcast business, he said.
"Network broadcasters have always been myopic in how they distribute content; the network structure in this country and pretty much around the world is that way," he said. "The secondary markets are starting to mature, are stuck for content and have now gotten the ear of the old-guard networks that they need to be serviced."
Now all that remains is for the Games to begin and for people to start watching. Hopefully it will all pay off for NBC, which has invested several billion dollars into this 16-day event and hopes to raise its overall ratings as a result.
ScovilleUnits
16 years ago
Hummmm? I don't Know????
Isilon to Provide Clustered Storage for NBC's Coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games
Tuesday , April 15, 2008 13:01ET
LAS VEGAS, April 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- (NAB, BOOTH #SU8525) - Isilon(R) Systems (Nasdaq: ISLN), the leader in clustered storage, today announced that they have been selected to provide Isilon IQ clustered storage to NBC during the network's coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, August 8-24. The announcement was made today by Craig Lau, Vice President, Information Technology, NBC Olympics and Brett Goodwin, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, Isilon Systems.
Described as the most ambitious single media project in history, NBC will present more than 3600 hours of broadcast coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. NBC will be using Isilon IQ clustered storage as the primary, on-site storage solution for media created on its HD EVS XT[2] server system and will be archiving its entire collection of low resolution Olympic footage onto Isilon IQ, ensuring unmatched data availability and reliability for this critical content. NBC is among hundreds of media and broadcast companies who rely on Isilon IQ to create, access, deliver, and archive the next generation of digital media.
"NBC's broadcast of the Olympic Games in Beijing is an unprecedented media event, broadcasting thousands of hours of programming via standard and high definition, online, on-demand, and even on-the-go wireless coverage over just a seventeen day period," said Craig Lau, Vice President, Information Technology, NBC Olympics. "This epic undertaking requires the latest innovations in broadcast infrastructure and Isilon clustered storage plays an important role in our media workflow, enabling immediate, reliable access to content 24x7 to help power our Olympic broadcast operations."
In Beijing, NBC is primed to deliver the first-ever television broadcast of the Olympic Games available completely in high-definition. Following NBC's successful use of Isilon IQ for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens and the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Torino, NBC is using Isilon IQ as a core storage repository for two key aspects of NBC's Olympic broadcast workflow.
First, to serve the real-time editing and production needs on-site in Beijing, NBC has deployed separate Isilon clusters in the International Broadcast Center and two other venues to store and access content produced by its HD EVS XT[2] server system. Isilon IQ delivers unmatched performance, ease of use and data availability, providing a single, shared pool of highly scalable storage to support the seamless ingest, edit and play-to-air capabilities of the six-channel XT server system. Second, NBC will deploy Isilon clustered storage to archive low resolution video of the Olympic Games, ensuring this valuable content is immediately and reliably accessible by producers for later editing and broadcast.
In April of 2007, Isilon announced a multi-year agreement with NBC Universal to use Isilon's IQ clustered storage systems to archive and access its growing stores of media programming, including TV and productions, movies, news and sports. NBC Universal has deployed Isilon IQ to complement and, in some cases, replace traditional tape based technology which allows for faster access times and increased reliability.
"We are currently witnessing a sea change in the way digital media is being created, managed, and delivered and consequently, an entirely new storage infrastructure is required to handle the insatiable demands of tomorrow's media consumer," said Brett Goodwin, Vice President of Marketing & Business Development, Isilon Systems. "Isilon IQ clustered storage is designed specifically to meet the unique demands of media and content delivery companies who are serving up the next generation of entertainment."
Powered by OneFS(R), Isilon IQ delivers the industry's first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of digital content, eliminating the cost and complexity barriers of traditional storage architectures. OneFS is a unified operating system software layer that powers all of Isilon's award-winning family of IQ clustered storage systems including the Isilon IQ 200, 1920, 3000, 6000, 9000, 12000, Accelerator, and EX 6000, 9000 and 12000. Isilon also provides a robust suite of software applications including SnapshotIQ(TM), SmartConnect(TM), SmartQuotas(TM), MigrationIQ(TM) and SyncIQ(R) that leverage OneFS and clustered storage, providing the highest levels of data protection and automated data management.
About NBC Olympics
NBC, "America's Olympic Network," owns the exclusive U.S. media rights to the Olympic Games, television's most powerful property, through 2012, which includes Beijing in 2008, Vancouver in 2010 and London in 2012. From August 8-24, 2008 NBC Universal will present an unprecedented 3,600 hours of coverage, highlighted by NBC in primetime with live swimming, gymnastics and beach volleyball. In August 2004, 203 million viewers watched as the networks of NBC Universal-NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, USA, Bravo, Telemundo, and NBC's HD affiliates-offered a then record 1,210 hours of Olympic coverage from Athens. For additional information, go to NBCOlympics.com, a year-round destination for fans of Olympic sports, featuring news, Beijing previews, athlete features, expert blogs, photos, Olympic video from the NBC archives and social tools enabling users to build communities around their favorite sports, post comments and blogs.
http://www.knobias.com/story.htm?eid=3.1.5ef16eaa4ddc9fe88a083e7b75a5b1acb3c87283c2a7ae36b087c8b4d0c24d12
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