Sepaton continues to thrive even as the global economy falters, proving that data protection solutions, including virtual tape libraries (VTL) and deduplication, remain a strong growth area for solution providers.
Advanced data protection technologies such as data deduplication and VTLs are at the top of IT’s ‘must-have’ list for 2009, says Bob Iocono, COO of Sepaton.
With the current economic downturn, customers are looking to make technology investments in solutions such as Sepaton’s VTLs with deduplication software that enable enterprises to backup larger volumes of data without adding administration cost, data center space or power requirements, he says.
“Most solution providers will admit that their customers’ storage and data protection budgets have been reduced somewhat, but they are still projecting growth in those areas,” Iocono says. He says for customers, there is a shift toward solutions like Sepaton’s that can deliver not only speed and scalability, but also generate quick ROI and also create physical asset savings.
Sepaton’s growth accelerated after its June 2008 launch of the DeltaStor v5.0 data deduplication software. DeltaStor v5.0 includes new deduplication capabilities, and is optimized for large, data-intensive enterprises, which is Sepaton’s target market, says Iocono.
Enterprise administrators who need to scale their infrastructure's performance and capacity can use Sepaton solutions to control data growth and to protect petabytes of data in a single system, says Iocono. While many competitors like Data Domain target SMBs and midmarket customers, Iocono says Sepaton will continue to focus on the growing enterprise market.
“This market will be the springboard for our future revenue and earnings growth,” says Iocono. “We’re not focused on going down market right now. We are really focused on the enterprise space where we are differentiated and we know we can maintain a competitive advantage,” he says.
Jay Livens, director of marketing for Sepaton, says focusing on the enterprise is the growth strategy for Sepaton, since many small and midmarket businesses quickly outgrow smaller-scale data protection solutions.
“As some of those SMB customers grow, they find they are outgrowing their SMB solutions, and they didn’t want to have to keep adding new boxes and having the complexity of management,” says Livens.
That kind of growth is keeping Sepaton flush with customers, and customers are purchasing larger data protection systems than ever before, says Iocono.
During the fourth quarter, Sepaton added to its customer base in vertical industries including financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, government, education and healthcare, and customers including the Department of Homeland Security, Hubei Power Group and Kenneth Cole.
Record sales in the fourth quarter of 2008 resulted in Sepaton’s strongest quarter in the company’s history and also ensured that the company passed the profitability mark, says Iocono.
“We came out of 2008 with a strong backlog of orders, and we view the record sales that we achieved as an affirmation of our strategy,” he says.
