* VCs pump money into storage start-ups
As far as investment money for start-ups is concerned, while the good times may not exactly be back, the bad times to a large degree seem to be over. Here is what I mean.
Framingham, Mass., GlassHouse Technologies, which offers a broad suite of strategic and operations consulting services to enterprise storage users announced a $20 million financing round. This is its “D” round of funding – for the benefit of those of you who may not often deal with the venture capital community, “A” and “B” investment rounds are typically used for R&D, while “C” and “D” rounds are used to address “go-to-market” challenges.
GlassHouse has achieved significant success by marketing itself as a vendor-independent third party consultant, a position that seems to have achieved resonance with many IT managers. As a result, the company has had good success supplying storage-related services to commercial IT organizations in North America and in the U.K., through its acquisition of two U.K. technology companies. Expect that a good chunk of this new investment round to be funneled into helping GlassHouse expand into several areas of the federal government marketplace.
Last month, Waltham, Mass., Incipient pulled in an identical amount in a “C” round. Incipient’s products, which sell via the OEM route, are storage management software that sits on the new generation of switches that effect storage-area network (SAN) connections. The Incipient software resides on the SAN, and provides data management, data movement and data protection services across heterogeneous storage assets.
Another recipient of “C” round funding is Southborough, Mass., NSI Software, which has been providing data protection software for several years, and has landed $7 million in investments. Its Double-Take data replication product provides data protection in Microsoft environments, and is part of the Windows solution set for such companies as Dell, HP and IBM.
Revivio of Lexington, Mass., raised another $25 million (“C” round) to further the marketing of its continuous data protection software. The software, delivered as a fault tolerant appliance, drops into existing storage environments and offers rapid recovery at both local and remote sites.
All of this has been announced within the last 30 days, and all of it within the state of Massachusetts. It appears that if you are looking for venture capital and are a Massachusetts storage start-up, in many cases the good times may have already started to roll.
Just as important however is the fact that Massachusetts, being a technology center, may also prove to be a bellwether for the rest of North America. We already know that what is happening in and around Boston is also taking place in San Jose and Austin. Other technology centers – San Diego, Houston and Denver, for example, and many smaller ones besides – may well be close behind. And some, below the standard industry radar, may even be way ahead.
It is nice to know that judicious industry investment is becoming part of the storage industry landscape again. Let’s just hope that this time around the investors and company management focus more on delivering useful products that drive them toward IPO. Time will tell.
In the meantime, with apologies to our friends at Mardi Gras, laissez les bons temps roullez!
