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Incipient has scored $20 million in third-round venture funding, bringing its total haul to $55 million.
Not too shabby for a company that has yet to ship its first product.
GrandBanks Capital led the round, with participation from existing investors Globespan Capital Partners, Greylock, HLM Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. The latest round will be used to put the finishing touches on Incipient’s intelligent storage software and to execute go-to-market relationships with current and prospective OEM partners.
“We will be shipping product sometime this year, through top-tier storage OEM business partners,” said Incipient senior marketing vice president Robert Infantino.
Nancy Hurley, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, calls Incipient’s Network Storage Platform Suite “a new breed of storage software that will enable intelligent switch platforms to deliver heterogeneous network-based storage management and copy services. The benefits of this network-based solution not only enable information lifecycle management strategies but it also improves capacity utilization and automates key management tasks such as data migration and copy services.”
Infantino said Incipient is “the only ISV that started developing storage software applications solely for the intelligent switch.”
What sets Incipient apart from competitors like EMC and Veritas, says Infantino, is its ability to provide storage services throughout the SAN from one central location and across multi-vendor storage arrays. “Today, storage vendors deliver these storage services within their high-end storage arrays, and typically cannot offer similar services cross-vendor,” he told Enterprise Storage Forum.
“We see the highest application drag in the area of data migration,” Infantino said. “This is a big pain point for most enterprise users where they are constantly moving storage in and out of their SANs. The data migration process is typically manual, time-consuming, and may be susceptible to error due to operator intervention. The Incipient solution will automate the migration of data volumes from one array to another while the application is still performing I/O. The aforementioned is just one storage service the Incipient product provides.”
End users will have to wait a while longer to check out those claims for themselves.
