Data Domain Spends to Grow

Data Domain has an enviable problem: the company is growing so fast that it needs to hire salespeople to keep up with all the opportunities in disk backup.

“If we can compete, we can win,” boasts Data Domain CEO Frank Slootman, who calls his company’s products “the best deal in disk backup.”

To hire the sales force to compete for more deals, Data Domain today announced that it has secured $15 million in third-round funding, bring its total funding to date to $41 million. The round was led by Greylock Partners, with participation from New Enterprise Associates and Sutter Hill Ventures. The company will use the funds to accelerate its product roadmap and expand its global support and distribution network.

Data Domain’s numbers appear to back up Slootman’s claim, no pun intended. In the 18 months since it began shipping product, Data Domain has signed on more than 100 enterprise customers, and the company’s 60% sequential quarterly growth rate increased to 100% in the second quarter.

“All of a sudden, we’re growing faster than we’re resourced for,” Slootman told Enterprise Storage Forum.

The company’s technology uses existing backup processes and compression to deliver disk backup for “well below a dollar a gigabyte,” Slootman says, while boosting performance and reliability.

“The competition isn’t with tape anymore,” he says. “It’s with other kinds of disk.”

While recent revelations of lost backup tapes have helped business, Slootman thinks the company has simply hit its stride.

“We’ve gone from linear inquiries to critical mass,” he says. “We had a ferocious July. We did almost no business last July.”

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