In 2006, Incipient, Inc. made storage industry history by bringing to market its switch-resident storage virtualization software for Storage Area Network (SAN) environments. This accomplishment further established Incipient as an innovator and leader in the storage virtualization market. With the 2006 release of its flagship product, the Incipient Network Storage Platform™ (iNSP™) software suite, the company is poised to meet the growing enterprise demand for data migration, automated storage provisioning and copy services. These iNSP capabilities, now delivered from the network, allow companies to reduce the overall cost of managing, deploying and operating SAN-based storage, resulting in a lower SAN Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
“Eventually all data layer functions such as storage, databases, and file systems will sit below a unified virtualization layer, which is critical to making the promise of IT as a service oriented infrastructure real. Incipient is certainly playing a key role in this vision with the release of iNSP for enterprises,” said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “iNSP automates and delivers storage services consistently across the SAN – making time consuming and error prone tasks such as data migration and storage provisioning, simple and strategic. It is only a matter of time until service oriented architectures within IT are commonplace.”
In 2006, Incipient took several steps to further establish itself as a storage industry innovator and leader highlighted by these significant accomplishments:
- Completed iNSP Beta and Early Access Programs with successful deployments at large enterprises within financial services and healthcare sectors.
- Displayed iNSP software at the Storage Decisions conference in New York City in September. An InfoWorld article dated October 5, 2006, referred to the iNSP announcement as “one of the most significant releases in recent storage news.”
- Announced GA of iNSP in December supporting Cisco MDS 9000 Series of intelligent Fibre Channel (FC) switches with the 32-Port Storage Services Module (SSM).
- An Incipient customer participated in the storage virtualization panel discussion moderated by Arun Taneja, Taneja Group, at the Storage Decisions conference.
- Participated in the Storage Virtualization Hands-On Lab at Storage Networking World Fall 2006 in Orlando, FL. The standing room only sessions gave end-users unprecedented direct access to the benefits of iNSP software.
- Expanded sales and service teams to provide 24/7 support for Incipient’s growing customer base. This included the opening of a new sales office in New York City to better serve the needs of financial services industry customers and establishing an in-country presence in the United Kingdom.
- Certified iNSP’s interoperability with arrays from top tier storage vendors including EMC, HP, HDS and IBM
- Secured two additional patents to protect various storage virtualization innovations, bringing the total number of core-issued patents held by Incipient, Inc. to four with several others pending.
- Enterprise Strategy Group published a Storage Virtualization Report dated September 2006 which states that Incipient is delivering to customers what they have long been asking for – a storage virtualization software solution that runs natively in a leading SAN switch.
- Raised $24 million in Series D financing bringing the total equity capital raised to $79 million.
- Secured its initial customers for its iNSP breakthrough solution.
“For the storage industry, 2006 marks a turning point in the development of intelligent SAN solutions. It is the year Incipient established itself in the market by delivering the industry’s first true enterprise-class data mobility and automated storage provisioning solution which uniquely leverages the Cisco MDS platform. We also made significant inroads with enterprise prospects and closed our initial set of customers,” said Ric Calvillo, co-founder and CEO of Incipient, Inc. “The market has demonstrated a renewed demand for enterprise-class storage virtualization solutions similar to what has happened already with the server virtualization market. Customers continue to look toward reaping considerable benefits of a virtualized environment. With the delivery of iNSP, we believe 2007 will be a breakthrough year for the market and for Incipient.”
About Incipient, Inc.
Incipient, Inc. is a leading provider of patented network storage virtualization technologies that deliver scalable storage services to mid-sized and large enterprise SAN environments. The Incipient Network Storage Platform™ (iNSP™) software suite leverages intelligent Fibre Channel switches to deliver its network-based storage virtualization solutions. iNSP provides companies with an intelligent SAN infrastructure that scales to meet business growth while simplifying the management of complex infrastructures. Incipient is a privately held software company with corporate headquarters in Waltham, MA. For more information about Incipient, visit http://www.incipient.com
