Incipient ‘Launches’ with Cash, Partnerships, and Plaudits

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Intelligent storage networking firm Incipient has sucessfully completed a $15 million Series B financing round and also recently announced partnerships with industry heavyweights Brocade and Hitachi Data Systems.

The two-year-old company is calling the announcements its “official launch,” but we won’t quibble. Incipient has raised $25 million to date,
the latest round led by Globespan Capital Partners.

Incipient says its technology is built to take advantage of advanced intelligent storage networks, enabling enterprise users to manage, move,
and protect data more seamlessly. “This new model transforms the fabric from a passive component in the storage network to an active component that
simplifies data management and provides enhanced storage services,” the company says.

“We believe Incipient is well positioned to execute on its vision of optimizing storage management on intelligent switch platforms for two
reasons,” says Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst of Enterprise Storage Group. “First, Incipient has an experienced management team with
a record of success in the enterprise storage industry. And second, they have the good fortune to be able to start with a clean slate and not
have to retro-fit old code onto a new platform. They designed to execute on a switch from day one.”

Incipient founder and CEO Ric Calvillo launched Conley Corporation in 1992. Conley developed the multipathing software product later called
PowerPath by EMC, which acquired Conley in 1998. After the acquisition, Calvillo served as general manager of EMC’s Cambridge Software Center.
CTO Tony Rodriquez also hails from EMC.

“Incipient is building flexible software that takes advantage of the latest advances in storage networking platforms to seamlessly enable
data management, movement, and protection, regardless of where and on what platform it is stored,” contends Calvillo.

Dave Stevens, Brocade’s director of business development in the Fabric Applications Division, says Incipient “is bringing to market a software
solution that leverages the capabilities that we are building into our hardware. Incipient’s flexible software, combined with our SilkWorm
Fabric Application Platform, will help us usher in a new, distributed approach that will significantly eliminate today’s data management pain.”

“Hitachi Data Systems is pleased to support Incipient in their move to build more features and functionality into networked storage solutions,”
states Steve East, vice president for Storage Integration at Hitachi Data Systems.

With plaudits like that, you wonder what took Incipient so long to launch.

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Paul Shread
Paul Shread
eSecurity Editor Paul Shread has covered nearly every aspect of enterprise technology in his 20+ years in IT journalism, including an award-winning series on software-defined data centers. He wrote a column on small business technology for Time.com, and covered financial markets for 10 years, from the dot-com boom and bust to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. He holds a market analyst certification.

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