Aarohi Advances Action Plan

New funding, new products, and new investment in India are on the agenda for Aarohi Inc., according to comments made by CEO Ameesh Divatia at a conference in Bangalore on Monday.

While Aarohi's headquarters remain in San Jose, Calif., Divatia told press and analysts that he plans to double his investment over the next three years in the R&D center the company already has established in Bangalore, where a sizeable chunk of the company's 65 employees work. Up to now, Aarohi's investment in its India center has been about $10 million.

According to a press report from Bangalore, Divatia hopes Aarohi, which shipped its FabricStream controller series last month, will hit $1 million in revenue for 2004 (see Aarohi Delivers FabricStream). And he aims to close a new funding round of roughly $15 million in March 2005, including input from one existing investor and one new investor. Aarohi has $36 million in funding to date.

Will the upcoming re-investor be McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA)? While the switch vendor jumped the gun on making its initial investment in Aarohi known, it's keeping mum on any involvement this time (see Aarohi Announces Funding... Again). "At this point, we couldn't confirm or deny," says spokeswoman Kathleen Sullivan. McData's still on track to include Aarohi's chips in upcoming switches, though nothing's been unveiled.

Whether or not McData kicks in, though, won't affect its stake in Aarohi, which at $6 million fluctuates around 15 percent. One of the five Aarohi board seats is held by McData senior VP of engineering Jean Becker.Other past investors in Aarohi include Infineon Ventures, Intel Capital, Kennet Capital, and TeleSoft Partners.

Meanwhile, Aarohi's looking forward to OEM deals with more than McData. In 2005, the vendor will announce agreements with new switch vendors, as well as makers of arrays and appliances, according to Joel Warford, Aarohi's senior director of marketing and strategic alliances.

"Sometimes we are perceived as chip makers only, but we also make controllers and subsystems that fit into PCI slots for appliances and arrays. We're not limited to chips," Warford says.

Aarohi needs to make the right moves, both financial and in terms of alliances, in order to survive and thrive. Presently, a slew of vendors new and old is vying for position in controllers for a range of storage networking applications (see Agilent's FC Controller Hits 4M, Broadcom Unveils iSCSI Controller, and Maranti Integrates AMCC). At the same time, however, one controller maker with sizeable funding, Candera, recently bit the dust (see Candera's Closed).

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch0