COPAN Records 60 Installations During the Year

COPAN Systems announced a series of strategic investment and company milestones as a direct result of a significant increase in customer demand for solutions to store and manage their exploding persistent data – data that’s written once and read infrequently.

To accelerate growth and sustain its leadership position in providing persistent data solutions, COPAN Systems has invested $3 million in new development facilities at both its Longmont, Colorado headquarters and a new east coast engineering center in Southborough, Massachusetts. The company has also made a number of strategic executive hires in the U.S. and across the globe to further accelerate its international expansion.

Over the last 12 months, COPAN Systems has seen a step change in market demand. This has resulted in 60 new enterprise customer installations in 17 countries across five continents. These installations, ranging from 100 TBs to an increasing number of multi-petabyte solutions, tripled COPAN Systems’ revenues in the last year.  

COPAN Systems’ sales in North America continue to expand rapidly with large enterprise-class customers including Comcast, Warner Brothers, Time Warner, Western Union, Qwest, Hewitt, NASDAQ, Facebook, MySpace, NASA and multiple federal accounts. In EMEA, the company is also seeing significant growth with customers such as British Telecom, Arup, Sony, Credit Agricole, Canal+, Novartis and Credit Suisse (Asset Management). COPAN Systems’ emerging Asian sales now exceed 25 installations, including Toshiba, Tokyo Metro Bank, NRI and Beijing Met Office.

According to research firm TheInfoPro, a typical Fortune 1000 enterprise will need to expand their data storage by up to 230 percent by 2010, and according to Taneja Group, 60 to 75 percent of that enterprise data will be persistent in nature.

“It’s time for change,” said Garry Veale, chief sales officer, COPAN Systems. “Enterprise customers are screaming out for innovation and change. They are frustrated that ILM has delivered an unnecessary number of storage tiers. It’s tiering overkill; it’s tiering overload; it’s tiering abuse! It has to stop as it’s no longer affordable or economically viable, due to spiraling costs and the unnecessary complexity it creates. Customers are looking for a new, cleaner, simpler and more effective approach to data management. And COPAN Systems is now delivering it – an Enterprise MAID platform that has been purpose built to allow them to deploy best practices for their increasing persistent data challenges.”

New facilities open
The opening of COPAN Systems’ Enterprise MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) Solution Center (EMSC) at its Longmont headquarters will further bolster efforts to integrate with over 25 persistent data application technology partners such as FalconStor, Symantec and Rocket Software and application partners such as Bycast and Pharos. The center will provide these partners with a state-of-the-art lab environment for product integration and joint customer demonstrations.

“We’ve had a long standing partnership with COPAN Systems,” said Bernie Wu, FalconStor vice president of business development. “Their announcement today reflects the progress and growth they’ve experienced thus far, plus their commitment to continue investing in MAID technology. FalconStor will continue to work with COPAN to deliver superior virtual tape and deduplication solutions that exceed market expectations.”

Placed at the heart of the northeast’s storage technology corridor, the new COPAN Systems’ Southborough technology development center will enable the company to tap into a deep pool of New England engineering talent. COPAN Systems anticipates dramatic growth in the center’s first year as it recruits engineers focused on forward-looking developments related to the COPAN Systems’ Enterprise MAID platform.

Seasoned storage technology professionals join the fold
David Dew, vice president of engineering, joined COPAN Systems in January and has taken a new position to lead development. With almost 20 years in the storage industry, his background includes senior and executive roles such as director of NAS technology at Sun Microsystems, and senior engineering positions at StorageTek, Storage Networks, WinStorage and BMC Software.

Two former Sun Microsystems storage veterans also join COPAN Systems in the US as software development managers. Gus Barillas will be responsible for the development of file based systems from the new Southborough facility, while Michael Madigan will be responsible for the platform team and management software at the Longmont headquarters.

In the US, Jeff Hines is now appointed as a new regional sales vice president.  In EMEA, Stefano Manna joins as regional vice president for Southern Europe. He will be based in Rome and will be responsible for growing COPAN Systems’ business in Italy, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal.

In Asia, two new country managers have been appointed, David Wong in China and Daniel Kim in Korea. The recently announced China and Korea office openings brings COPAN Systems to 15 worldwide offices, joining the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Singapore and Japan.