CreekPath Nabs Money, Veritas Exec

CreekPath made a splash this week with the announcement of $22 million in new venture funding and the appointment of a former Veritas executive as its vice president of engineering.

CreekPath’s third round was funded by new investor Lehman Brothers Venture Partners and existing investors New Enterprise Associates, A.G. Edwards Capital, TeleSoft Partners and Sequel Partners. The storage operations management startup has raised $54 million to date.

The company also announced the appointment of Mark Sutter as vice president of engineering. Sutter was most recently in charge of development of storage, server, and cluster management products for the Veritas CommandCentral product line.

Not one to let storage editors rest, CreekPath also launched the CreekPath “Path to Value” solution, a combination of the CreekPath Storage Operations Management suite and a delivery methodology that helps enterprise customers quickly achieve business value from their storage infrastructure investments. The launch coincides with the latest release of the company’s CreekPath suite.

“I think the most impressive thing about this company is their execution,” says Nancy Hurley, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “The management team has been very focused on targeting enterprise accounts, and have built not only a scalable, effective solution, but they have also built up a support team that makes sure users get the most out of their product and use its full capability. The solution is very strong, with a great deal of depth to help administrators reclaim capacity, automate provisioning tasks and more effectively manage their storage environment. But beyond that, CreekPath provides users with a plan to move to an automated environment, and will assist them every step of the way.”

The result, Hurley says, has been a number of “large-scale, high-dollar implementations,” and repeat business as users expand the amount of storage under management. “Their average initial deal is in the area of $750,000, with a great deal of repeat business, and that’s the kind of business that attracts VCs and high-level execs from the competition,” Hurley told Enterprise Storage Forum.

CreekPath CEO Dennis Grant says the company found that there was demand for services from its enterprise customer base, so it spent the last year developing a professional services team to help customers get the most out of their investment.

Grant says the company’s neutrality and software focus help it with customers because it has “no conflict” and no hardware to sell, and its ability to find and utilize “orphan storage” can delay new hardware purchases. “Our independence seems to work well,” he says.

CreekPath helps storage utilization by integrating discovery, visualization, reporting and management of storage resources to simplify and automate management tasks while improving return on investment and reducing total cost of ownership.

The Path to Value roadmap illustrates the technology and steps organizations should follow to take advantage of their storage solutions while achieving benefits and cost reductions as they move toward “business-driven storage supply chain management.”

Version 3.2 of the CreekPath suite adds a managed element dependency view that gives customers a view from any perspective. This allows clients to see interdependencies and relationships between all elements in the storage supply chain and provide on-the-spot troubleshooting, the company says.

CreekPath claims “the most extensive storage array and interconnect device support in the industry.” New in 3.2 is the discovery, visualization, monitoring and reporting on Sybase databases.

CreekPath is compliant with the existing Storage Management Initiative (SMI-S) specification. The company supplements the SMI interface with native APIs to expose features and capabilities of the installed storage elements.

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