Incipient Is All Potential

Former Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) storage exec, Joel Reich, now vice president for marketing at SAN software company Incipient Inc., says this startup is just a vision thing,” so far.

The company name sums it up nicely. The dictionary definition of Incipient is: Beginning to be, or to show itself; commencing; initial; as, the incipient stage of a fever; incipient light of day.

This definition appears on Incipient’s Website, slightly edited, mind you (someone has understandably cut out the “incipient stage of a fever” bit).

Unfortunately Reich was unable to tell Byte and Switch when it will be anything more than a vision thing. “We are locking down plans, it’s still very early for us,” he says.

According to Venture Economics, Incipient has secured some early financing from Greylock Ventures, which has stumped up $2.6 million in seed funding to get the company on its feet.Based in Waltham, Mass., Incipient is renting an office in a Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) building along Route 128. Reich says the company has no affiliation with Microsoft, other than renting the space, which is apparently the cheapest on the block.

Incipient claims to be developing “software that eases SAN administration and supports advanced fabric silicon, while complimenting existing storage hardware and management software."

Not much of a clue there. And Reich’s lips are sealed on the company’s technology plans. But any firm starting out in the SAN software field faces a tough battle competing with Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) and EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), as well as other startups already having a go, like OTG Software Inc. (see OTG Software: Growing in the Shadows).

Still, Reich believes it's a good time to launch a startup. “Two years ago it was almost impossible to hire good people on the developer side, as they were all earning tons of money on stock options; that’s not the case anymore."

Moreover, “Just because a lot of money has already been poured into this sector, that doesn’t mean it has been well spent."Incipient is currently looking for engineers with expertise in storage, distributed systems, clustering, device drivers, and networking -- a fairly broad brush of skills.

In the meantime, Incipient needs to get through this feverish stage and "the vision thing" and decide on a product to develop. It's interesting that it has still managed to secure funding, given the current economic climate, without all that.

— Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch
http://www.byteandswitch.com