Storability Snags $7M

Storage resource management software vendor Storability Inc. has landed $7 million in what it claims is its very last funding round.

The Southborough, Mass.-based company announced today that its existing investors, Battery Ventures, Technology Partners, Sprout Group, and Lee Munder Capital Group (LMCG), participated in the round, which brings its total funding to date to $66 million.

"This financing will carry us beyond our cash-flow breakeven point next year," says Storabilty CFO Mike Levinger.

The SSP-turned-SRM software vendor will use its latest cash injection to help boost sales of its Global Storage Manager software and add new features, as well as bring new versions of GSM to market, says Levinger (see Storability Upgrades SRM).

Among the new features Storability is planning to integrate into future versions of its SRM software are the automated, policy-based SAN and server management assets it acquired from ProvisionSoft in July (see Storability Mops Up ProvisionSoft). Supposedly, the ProvisionSoft software is able to automatically determine the need for storage and server resources and then provision the resources accordingly.While some industry analysts have speculated that Storability might take advantage of its new assets to move into the server provisioning space, Levinger insists that the company intends to stick to the space it knows best. ProvisionSoft has some interesting capabilities in server provisioning,” he says. “But we’re focused at the storage space.”

Storability was founded in early 2000 as an SSP (storage service provider) but decided to change paths last year after the SSP market was declared dead in the water (see SSPs: RIP, Storability Finesses $12M Round, and Storability Lands $30M Second Round).

Since becoming a pure-play SRM company, Storability has struggled to carve out a space for itself in an over-overcrowded space. Levinger, however, insists that Storability’s hardware independence, as well as what he calls a superior feature and capability set, has allowed it to stand up to such formidable competitors as Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA), EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS).

Levinger says Storability has signed up about 15 customers for different versions of its GSM software to date, with contracts ranging from $100,000 to millions of dollars. Its customers include Deutsche Bank AG and Cox Communications Inc. (NYSE: COX) (see Storability Wins Deutsche Bank, Storability Upgrades, Gets Cox).

And, after shaving its headcount down from 250 at the peak of its SSP days to about 50 today, Storability is preparing to add a “substantial number of people” over coming months, mainly in sales, marketing, and engineering, Levinger says.— Eugénie Larson, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch