Start-Up's Profile: Sonian

Headquarters:
Needham, MA

Born in:
2006

Funding:
$5.6 million Series A round from Prism VentureWorks and Summerhill Venture Partners in September 2009

Main executives:

President and CEO George Nichols was formerly group VP for Dialogic Communications, a provider of hosted critical messaging systems acquired in late 2006 by Plant CML, a Golden Gate Capital portfolio company.
Founder and CTO Greg Arnette had previously the same titles at IntelliReach, in integrated messaging management products and services, that was acquired by Infocrossing in 2006. Prior to that, he created messaging products and services for AlertWare, bought by Netpro.
VP sales and business development Jeff Richards was responsible for sales and business development at IntelliReach.

Number of employees:
32

Technology:
Sonian Archive is a SaaS hosted archive solution created with grid computing infrastructure technologies for better reliability. The company’s services run atop cloud infrastructure run by Amazon.com.

Main features:

Pure hosted service as no software or hardware is required
Archives data for compliance and storage management
All data is searchable at all times
Customer specific data silos – No co-mingling of customer data
Replication to eight data centers
Supports Exchange, GroupWise, Notes, IMail Server, Zimbra, Scalix

Technology Partnerships with:
Amazon Web Services, Doubletake, Nirvanix, Oracle, Novell, Rackspace, Axway, IBM and others

Number of customers:
1,900

Applications:
Cloud-powered archiving/storage, e-discovery and compliance services

Market:
SMBs with 5,000 to 250,000 mailboxes, ISPs and hosting companies for their customers

Competitors:
LiveOffice, Global Rely, MessageOne and Google Postini