CreekPath Systems Secures $23 Million in Venture Funding.Business Editors and High-Tech Writers BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 8, 2001 CreekPath Systems, a developer of advanced technology solutions to enable the deployment of managed storage services, Monday announced that it received $23 million from TeleSoft Partners, Sequel Venture Partners and Exabyte Corp. in its first round of venture funding. The funding, which includes $17 million in equity, as well as up to $6 million in debt financing Debt Financing When a firm raises money for working capital or capital expenditures by selling bonds, bills, or notes to individual and/or institutional investors. In return for lending the money, the individuals or institutions become creditors and receive a promise to repay , reflects investors' recognition of CreekPath's unique position in the growing managed storage services market. Dataquest Gartner projects that companies will spend $7 billion a year on outsourcing information storage by 2003. The investments are slated to finance continued product development and market rollout of CreekPath's products. The funding will enable CreekPath to substantially increase its software development staff, as well as build its sales and professional services (job) professional services - A department of a supplier providing consultancy and programming manpower for the supplier's products. organizations. CreekPath has recently entered into agreements with a number of global service providers (GSP GSP Good Scientific Practice GSP Generalized System of Preferences GSP Gross State Product GSP German Shorthaired Pointer (dog breed) GSP Geometer's Sketchpad (KTP Technologies geometry software) GSP Georges St. ) to produce advanced solutions that will automate common storage functions and integrate those capabilities with the GSP's overall business platforms. This development is accelerated by the equity financing Equity Financing The act of raising money for company activities by selling common or preferred stock to individual or institutional investors. In return for the money paid, shareholders receive ownership interests in the corporation. CreekPath received. "Our investors quickly recognized that CreekPath has built significant differentiation in the storage service market by creating advanced tools that make managed storage services easy to deploy and easy to integrate into a set of global service offerings," said Michael Koclanes, president and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of CreekPath Systems. "In the recent past, we've seen a lot of companies jump in to provide storage services by brute force (programming) brute force - A primitive programming style in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small problems directly , independent of other IT services. CreekPath views that market environment as short-lived. Our GSP partners want to install, maintain and sell storage infrastructure as part of their overall services. They need us to provide the tools to do it right." CreekPath's technology addresses the market demand for scalable managed storage architecture at an affordable cost. Instead of purchasing and maintaining storage hardware on their own, many companies are looking to outsource their storage needs. This minimizes hardware and IT operation costs, allowing companies to focus on their core competencies A core competency is something that a firm can do well and that meets the following three conditions specified by Hamel and Prahalad (1990):
GSPs are emerging in this market to add storage services to their line card of IT services ranging from wireless networks to Web site hosting to e-mail management. CreekPath has built a powerful set of solutions that GSP partners can use to add outsourced storage services to their offerings. The CreekPath i-SAN shared storage configuration provides true public storage with the security of dedicated server storage. The i-SAN Attendant(TM) software monitors the storage architecture remotely, as well as provides a host of automated, "lights out" storage services. The CreekPort(TM) storage service portal provides an interface for customers to both request storage services and monitor the provider's quality of service from any Web browser The program that serves as your front end to the Web on the Internet. In order to view a site, you type its address (URL) into the browser's Location field; for example, www.computerlanguage.com, and the home page of that site is downloaded to you. . "Companies are finding that because there is an extreme shortage of IT personnel in the U.S., they are not able to scale their businesses at the pace they want," according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. a November 2000 Morgan Stanley  To comply with Wikipedia's , the introduction of this article needs a complete rewrite. Dean Witter Dean Witter may refer to:
CreekPath Systems was formed as a subsidiary of Colorado-based Exabyte, a designer of data storage tape drives and tape automation and was spun off as a separate company on Dec. 28, 2000. As part of Exabyte, the CreekPath team invested considerable development resources building and testing its storage services software products. Exabyte transferred this intellectual property to CreekPath, provided initial equity funding Equity funding An investment consisting of a life insurance policy and a mutual fund. The insurance policy is paid by the collateral value of fund shares, giving the investor the advantages of insurance protection with the growth potential of a mutual fund. and supplied additional investment in this first round of venture funding. "We are very happy with CreekPath Systems' evolution from an Exabyte subsidiary to a VC-funded start-up," said Bill Marriner, chairman, president and CEO of Exabyte. "While operating under our wing last year, CreekPath was able to produce some exciting software and create early partnerships with some major service providers. This new infusion of capital will allow the CreekPath management to execute the next phase of their business plan -- integration of CreekPath technology into the GSP's infrastructure." TeleSoft Partners manages $700 million in venture capital funds Venture Capital Funds An investment fund that manages money from investors seeking private equity stakes in small and medium-size enterprises with strong growth potential. Notes: focused on next-generation communications, software and Internet companies, including Calient, Cerent (acquired by Cisco), ConvergeNet (acquired by Dell), Cosine, Promatory (acquired by Nortel), Triton, Vina and VxTel. "TeleSoft is excited to add CreekPath Systems to our portfolio of advanced technology companies focused on communication," said Arjun Gupta, TeleSoft's CEO. "CreekPath brings a historical knowledge of the managed data storage business as well as a vision for the future of storage technology. Their expertise and growth will take managed storage services to the next level." Sequel Venture Partners is a Boulder-based venture capital firm specializing in early-stage funding for emerging information technology, telecommunications, biotechnology and health care businesses in the Rocky Mountain region The Rocky Mountain Region is a floristic region within the Holarctic Kingdom in western North America (Canada and the United States) delineated by Armen Takhtajan and Robert F. Thorne. . Sequel's $400 million investment portfolio includes MatchLogic, netLibrary and Requisite Technology. "CreekPath maintained an excellent record of research, development and technological forethought fore·thought n. 1. Deliberation, consideration, or planning beforehand. 2. Preparation or thought for the future. See Synonyms at prudence. throughout the past year while working as a subsidiary of Exabyte," said Tom Washing, CEO of Sequel Venture Partners. "They have tapped into a market that will continue to multiply due to its importance to small- and medium-sized businesses. The combination of CreekPath's record and the demand for secure, intelligent managed storage services, made Sequel's investment an easy decision." About CreekPath Systems CreekPath Systems (www.creekpath.com) is a Colorado-based developer of advanced solutions that enable the economical delivery of managed storage services. CreekPath provides sophisticated storage network management software and expert integration consulting to businesses supplying data storage from a shared network to multiple customers simultaneously. Internet data centers, application service providers (ASPs), storage service providers (SSPs) and corporate data centers working as independent profit centers use CreekPath technology to monitor and manage their storage networks, to automatically service their customers' storage requirements and to integrate the storage services into their total service infrastructure. About TeleSoft Partners TeleSoft Partners (www.telesoftvc.com) manages $700 million in venture capital funds focused on next-generation communications companies Communications Company is a communications unit of the United States Marine Corps. They are part of Combat Logistics Regiment 37 , 3rd Marine Logistics Group (3MLG) and III Marine Expeditionary Force (III MEF). The unit is based out of the Marine Corps Base Camp Smedley D. . TeleSoft focuses on nine core segments: next-generation carriers, routing and switching, servers and storage, transmission and opto-electronics, network termination Network Termination - (NT, NT1) A device connecting the customer's data or telephone equipment to the local ISDN exchange carrier's line. The NT device provides a connection for terminal equipment (TE) and terminal adaptor (TA) equipment to the local loop. , middleware Software that functions as a conversion or translation layer. It is also a consolidator and integrator. Custom-programmed middleware solutions have been developed for decades to enable one application to communicate with another that either runs on a different platform or comes from a and services, network applications, broadband wireless See wireless broadband. , and components and tools. To date, TeleSoft has invested in 40 portfolio companies, including Cerent (acquired by Cisco), ConvergeNet (acquired by Dell), Promatory (acquired by Nortel), Cosine (COSN), Triton (TNSI TNSI Transaction Network Services Inc. TNSI The Natural Step International ), Vina (VINA), Calient and VxTel. TeleSoft's value-added network A communications network that provides services beyond normal transmission, such as automatic error detection and correction, protocol conversion and message storing and forwarding. Telenet and Tymnet are examples of value-added networks. includes its GP team, industry and technology advisors and corporate partners. About Sequel Venture Partners Sequel Venture Partners (www.sequelvc.com) is a Boulder-based venture capital firm specializing in early-stage funding for emerging technology businesses located primarily in the Rocky Mountain region, home to a significant concentration of technology-based businesses. The firm manages more than $400 million in capital with investments focusing on information technology, telecommunications and health care. Sequel's investment portfolio consists of 42 companies and includes many of the region's leading high-tech companies such as: Allos Therapeutics, ColoradoMicroDisplay, DataPlay.com, MatchLogic, Myogen, netLibrary, Persona, Requisite Technology, The Petroleum Place and Xcare.net About Exabyte Corp. Exabyte (EXBT) (www.exabyte.com) is the leading supplier of tape storage devices and network storage solutions for the data intensive application and database server markets. Exabyte engineers and manufactures the Mammoth family of tape drives, premier storage media and libraries for MammothTape(TM), DLTtape(TM) and Ultrium(TM) tape technologies. Note to Editors: CreekPath Systems(TM), CreekPath i-SAN Attendant(TM), CreekPort(TM), CreekPath StorageStream(TM) and the CreekPath "bobber" logo are trademarks of CreekPath Systems. Other marks are the property of their respective owners. |
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