Diligent & the De-Dupe Rumor Mill

Diligent Technologies has added $10.5 million in Series D funding to its war chest, which now totals $46.5 million. Eastward Capital has joined previous investors Matrix, Accel, and Gemini in the leading the round.

No one is surprised to hear that Diligent will use the dough for "research and development of enterprise-class data protection technologies and... additional resources across its sales, support, and engineering staff." Data de-duplication is, after all, among the hottest technologies to hit storage in recent months, as typified by the successful IPO of Data Domain. (See Data Domain Goes Public.)

Which may go toward explaining the swift undercurrent of scuttlebutt that keeps tugging at Diligent and other rivals in the segment, most notably FalconStor and Sepaton.

By now, we've all heard that something's up (or down) with FalconStor's de-dupe capability, which isn't being picked up by OEMs EMC and IBM. (See VTL Vendors Ponder De-Dupe.) There's also a persistent rumor that Diligent might step into the breach at another FalconStor OEM, Sun, at least at the high end. At least one source says we'll hear more on that in September.

Diligent and Sun, however, refuse to comment on any of it. And FalconStor thinks it's poppycock, especially given that FalconStor plans an imminent unveiling of new, improved de-duplication.Sepaton could be dark horse in all this. While it hasn't been specifically tagged in any recent gossip, it seems to be doing well and, as one source puts it, "Anything's possible."

We'll see. If de-dupe continues to gather momentum, we can expect plenty of business action before the end of the year.