B&S Top Ten Recast

NEW YORK CITY, March -- Ah, spring! What better time for a renewal of the Byte and Switch Top Ten Private Companies list?

Our latest iteration reflects a fair bit of change, with four new entrants. Actually, make that three new entrants and a returnee. After being jettisoned from our list in 2004, BlueArc Corp. returns to the top slot, thanks to its recent progress.

BlueArc takes the place of CommVault Systems Inc. , which ruled our last three Top Ten lists but took itself off by filing for an IPO that should make it a public company by summer. (See CommVault's Taking the Plunge.) If successful, CommVault may serve as a role model for others on our list that have held back on a public bid until the time was right.

Then again, some Top Tenners are as likely to be acquired as to take the public plunge. A couple of years back, the storage industry was like a season of Survivor -- it was a question of which companies got voted off the island and out of business. Now its like Deal or No Deal. It’s a matter of who's getting bought and by whom.

Some startups won't get what their founders feel they deserve. Lots of acquisitions these days are technology buys, where large vendors pick up pieces they are missing from companies that have good engineering but haven’t made a strong go of the business yet. Blockbuster deals like Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ)'s grab of AppIQ last year are likely to be relative rarities. (See HP Chomps AppIQ & Peregrine.)Of course, the companies we've picked for our Top Ten are ones we think capable of standing alone as businesses. They are also involved in what we feel are the hottest areas of storage networking. Included in this round are makers of virtual tape libraries (Sepaton Inc. ), continuous data protection (Revivio Inc. ), and de-duplication software (Data Domain Inc. (Nasdaq: DDUP)).

At the same time, we're putting three of our past list out to pasture -- Acopia Networks Inc. , Asigra Inc. , and GlassHouse Technologies Inc. -- in part, because their particular market niches have cooled or stabilized.

So how do we determine who's most in tune with the forward progress of the industry, both in terms of their focus and the strength of their business? Our basic criteria for consideration are as follows. Each company must be:

Beyond these basics, it's our own subjective evaluation, plain and simple.

So without further ado, enjoy our latest list. For a writeup on each company, click on its name in the table below:Table 1: Top Ten Private Storage Networking Companies

— The Editors, Byte and Switch