The Year in Storage IPOs

In an unstable IPO market, storage-related companies are holding their own -- though some are doing better than that, and several are doing worse.

Table 1: Storage-related IPOs: September 2006 through December 2007

The dozen or so companies to go public in the storage space within the last year and a half represent a mixed bag of products and services, including data center automation software (BladeLogic); enterprise SANs (3PAR and Compellent); data protection software (CommVault); de-duplication (Data Domain); replication (Double-Take); clustered NAS (Isilon); data warehousing (Netezza); WAN optimization (Riverbed); virtualization (VMware); and InfiniBand components and products (Mellanox and Voltaire).

Of these newly public companies, eight have shown growth in their share price since launching their IPOs, as shown in the list below:

The four companies that have dropped in share price line up as follows:

Clearly, this year's IPO winner is virtualization leader VMware, which has been unstoppable since its meteoric debut on the NYSE in August. At the other end of the spectrum is Isilon, which has battled financial woes since its IPO in December 2006. Despite a management reshuffle, Isilon struggles to meet the expectations of a public firm, even as it faces angry shareholders.

Whose next? Dell's $1.4 billion acquisition of EqualLogic ended that startup's public plans. But GlassHouse filed its S-1 last week. And others, like ONstor and Force10, seem eager to take their own IPO shots.

With the markets in their present state of flux and the level of IT spending in question for 2008, nothing's certain. Still, if customers continue their demand for products that store and protect data, some storage hopefuls may get their chance in 2008.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.