History 2002: Storage Start-Ups Suffer, Even Expire

As was to be expected, there are far too many storage start-ups, and a good number of them are no longer able to find financing for their survival, particularly those who staked their fate on lnfiniband.

Siros Technologies, based in San Jose, CA, has vanished, its entire facility auctioned off last September 6. The company never managed to take off. Formerly known as Optitek, it received a total of $38 million in financing from investors including EMC, HP, Lucent and TDK. Last year it abandoned plans to design a hybrid technology to compete with traditional HDDs, in order to focus on a new kind of laser for telecommunications. The company filed some 50 patents. Dr. Barbara Grant was president and CEO, while Dr. Lambertus Hesselink, a Stanford University professor and holography expert, was chairman.

Omegaband, founded in Austin, TX in 2000 and specialized in IB-to-Gigabit switches, managed to raise $6.5 million, but failing to attract fresh money, was forced to call it quits. The compay has a subsidiary in Herzliya, Israel

Other ailing start-ups:

ProvisionSoft, in SRM software, is without a CEO following the departure of Joe Maloney. CTO John Cummings is now also president of the company. VP marketing Michael Gross is also vanished, replaced by George Khater.

Banderacom, working in IB switch technology, was forced to part with most of its employees.

Some layoffs at Mellanox Technologies and switch maker Sanera Systems.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 178 on November 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.