Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

3PARdata Snags $100M: Page 2 of 3

Judging by the size of this funding round, 3PARdata’s product is an expensive machine to build. Scott was unwilling to divulge much on the technology side, as 3PARdata is still operating in stealth mode. He did say it will reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) for those implementing either internal or external service provider business models and will be protocol agnostic in terms of the network infrastructure it supports. TCO is obviously a key concern for customers implementing storage networks.

Based on our research, 3PARdata is planning to go head-to-head with EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC). (For more on this see Top Ten Private
Storage Networking Companies
.) Scott says the company should have products ready for commercial release sometime next year.

3PARdata’s funding round isn’t good news for everyone, of course. Cereva Networks Inc.

and Yotta Yotta, the other two obvious startups going after EMC, will face much steeper competition from 3PARdata now.

And there are downsides to such a big round. “$100 million is only a lot of money if it gets the company to revenue positive; otherwise it’s a rather hefty debt burden. As always, execution is king,” says William Hurley, storage analyst with the The Yankee Group.

Scott is a 17-year veteran of Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HWP), where he was former General Manager of HP’s Enterprise Storage division. He is looking to hire a CFO and a VP of operations, having already been joined by several industry experts to form 3PARdata's executive team. These include: Ashok Singhal, CTO, who was the chief architect of three generations of Sun servers; Jeff Price, VP of engineering, Sun's former head of engineering for servers; and Bob Rando, VP of sales, who previously held senior executive sales management posts at Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Data General Corporation, and EMC Corp.