Releases

posted on 14 February 2008 13:27

MARLBOROUGH, MA — February 13, 2008 — Record customer acquisition and corporate expansion across key functional areas of the business and geographies fueled SEPATON's growth and continued dominance in the high-performance data protection market during 2007.

SEPATON reported today that its user base has expanded to more than 900 customers with over 57PB of data, a 180% percent increase in the number of customers and a 320% increase in overall PBs shipped compared to this time last year. Additionally, its enterprise-class virtual tape library is now installed in more than 25 countries around the world, demonstrating SEPATON's ongoing commitment to expanding its international business, and developing the virtual tape library market in new regions around the world.

"SEPATON delivered another year of hyper-growth based on balanced execution across the company,” said Mike Worhach, president and CEO, SEPATON, Inc. "Our record new customer wins and near 100% retention rates by large enterprises show that SEPATON is becoming entrenched in the data center. Our unique vision for the enterprise, differentiated product family including DeltaStor(TM) de-duplication, and our nimble execution as a new breed of storage company have us very well positioned for 2008 and beyond.”

"2007 was the year of disk-based data protection,” said Steve Duplessie, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "The market came alive and everyone has bought into the promise of what disk-based systems have added to the data protection continuum. 2008 will be an even better year as customers move from putting in their first disk-based systems to making it the defacto standard for protection and archiving. This is a great market to play in.”

In 2007, SEPATON achieved many company and product goals that have enabled it to further its dominant position in the market for enterprise-class virtual tape libraries and advanced data protection software, including data deduplication and remote replication.

Business Accomplishments:

Corporate Highlights
• SEPATON received $22 million in venture funding, led by new investor HarbourVest Ventures, to fuel expansion in EMEA and APAC, as well as to accelerate new product development.
• SEPATON strengthened its international operations by opening new offices around the globe in regions including Beijing, China and London, England. The London office opening followed the establishment of distributors and resellers in the UK, Scandinavia, South Africa, UAE, Poland, Israel, and Turkey. Partners in Germany, France and Benelux were also added in 2007.
• SEPATON bolstered its executive management team with the appointment of Fidelma Russo as executive vice president of engineering and development; and Asim Zaheer, vice president of marketing. Fidelma is highly regarded for her outstanding ability to map product innovation and design to business and customer requirements. Previously, she served in executive capacities with HP, Sun Microsystems, EMC, Data General, and Digital Equipment Corp. Asim has vast entrepreneurial experience introducing disruptive new technologies to market, and has held senior marketing positions in the storage industry with Software, and Archivas.
• SEPATON received the Rising Star recognition in Deloitte & Touche USA LLP's Technology Fast 50 program for New England and for all of North America for the second straight year. Rankings are based on percentage revenue growth over three years.

Customer Highlights
• SEPATON expanded its customer base by adding 400 customers in 2007, bringing its total customer count to more than 900. Particularly strong adoption was seen in vertical industries including financial services and manufacturing, securing new accounts such as BMW, Federal Reserve Bank, Frankford Hospital, MIT, Perot Systems Corporation, Sirius, Tyco Electronics, Union Bank, University of Miami, and Vodacom. SEPATON's technology now protects over 57 PB of data worldwide.
• More than 33% of existing customers expanded the capacity or performance of their S2100®-ES2 VTL, proving its flexibility and ease of upgrade capabilities. The average SEPATON system deployed in 2007 features more than 69 terabytes, 1.6 times the average capacity of the previous twelve months.
• In the UK and Ireland, SEPATON achieved sales figures of more than $1 million USD through its new distributor Hammer plc just six months after selecting the storage specialists as its sole UK distributor in April. More than 30 new European customers were added in 2007.
• Asia Pacific, Japan and Korea continued to yield a strong return on SEPATON's investment in this geography with 14 new customer wins in 2007. The S2100-ES2 was also honored with a 2007 product of the year award by IT168.
• In addition to its commitment to the enterprise, SEPATON has made great strides in the small and medium size business (SMB) market via its recently signed strategic distribution agreement with Tech Data Corporation to extend access of its virtual tape technology to SMBs across North America.
• SEPATON continued its successful collaboration with HP to enhance the HP StorageWorks 6000/1200 Virtual Library System (VLS) products as well as the new multi node scalable HP StorageWorks 9000 VLS.

Product Highlights
• SEPATON shipped the next generation of its enterprise-class S2100-ES2 Series 750 VTL, which is twice as fast with three times the capacity of the nearest competitor. The S2100-ES2 scales to 1.2 PB's uncompressed usable capacity and data rates up to 9600 MB/second.
• SEPATON introduced its enterprise-class de-duplication solution DeltaStor, including installations across a number of large multi-national corporations. The ContentAware(TM) nature of DeltaStor enables this unique feature to achieve de-duplication ratios unmatched in the industry.
• An independent analyst firm, Enterprise Strategy Group's (ESG) lab testing facility, ESG Lab, validated the benefits offered by SEPATON DeltaStor deduplication software as a solution that reduces disk capacity by an impressive factor of up to 50:1 at outstanding performance levels. Specifically, it confirmed that a SEPATON S2100 VTL solution can sustain more than 600 MB/sec of backup throughput per node and that performance scales in a linear fashion as nodes are added. Based on ESG Lab's experience testing a number of VTL solutions in recent years, this is an outstanding level of performance.
• Forrester Research named SEPATON a leader in the January 2008 Forrester Wave(TM): Enterprise Open Systems Virtual Tape Libraries, Q1 2008 report, citing it has one of the most scalable architectures of any open systems VTL.
• SEPATON partnered with Hifn to combine Hifn's Express DR 1000 hardware compression solution with its DeltaStor data deduplication software to achieve industry leading data reduction ratios with no performance impact to the backup and recovery process.