Finis(ar) for InterSAN

Less than three years after occupying the top spot on Byte and Switch's Top 10 Private Companies list, InterSAN Inc. has gone down the gullet of Finisar Corp. (Nasdaq: FNSR), which gobbled it up for around $9.5 million in stock this week (see Top Ten Summer Tweak and Vonage Announces UK Launch).

The news was no surprise, given that InterSAN was long ago relegated to a minor player in the SRM field. But InterSAN's purchase price compares sadly with its $31 million in venture capital funding. At least InterSANs Pathline SRM software and its employees will go on as part of Finisar, which already had an OEM deal to sell Pathline along with its testing tools.

“Our investors were still willing to support us, but this is the better choice,” says InterSAN CEO Chris Melville. Melville will join Finisar as a VP of its Network Tools Division.

InterSAN was among the first standalone SRM software vendors to make a splash, rising to No. 1 on the B&S list of private companies in July of 2002 after closing a $17.8 million funding round. By the end of that year, it had a reseller deal with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), interest from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), and designs on becoming the de facto standard in SRM software (see InterSAN Lands $17.8M, HDS Resells InterSAN, CommVault, and Sun Into InterSAN?).

That plan worked -- for someone else. Soon after it relaunched its company around standards-based SRM in October of 2003, rival startup AppIQ Inc. scored a reseller deal with Hitachi (see AppIQ, Take Two and HDS Expands Software, Services).