In an interview with Byte and Switch last July, Soran divulged that his new company was working on a product in the SAN management software space. Today, however, he insists that the product isnt limited to software. And while he said last year that the company expected to launch its mystery product in the first half of this year, he now refuses to say if it's even in beta-testing.
Soran and co-founders John Guilder and Larry Aszmann were also the trio behind XIOtech Corp., the high-end SAN disk array and software maker that was sold to Seagate Technology Inc. (NYSE: STX) in 2000, and then spun out again late last year (see XIOtech Hot-Swaps CEO and XIOtech Snatches Rash of Cash).
The former XIOtech team's being at the helm of Compellent is the main reason Cargill Ventures decided to lead this latest round, according to the venture firms managing director David Patchen. We are very excited about this, he says. The company has a management team that has worked together in the past, and was very successful, [and] has a deep knowledge and experience in the storage space.
And of course, the management team isnt the whole story. Patchen, who sits on Compellents board, says he actually knows what theyre up to, and he is very impressed. What theyre doing is quite novel, he says. No one else has done it before.
So what's the point of all this secrecy? Soran says Compellent wants to build up customer demand before it goes out boasting about what its product can do. The company is going about spreading the word to potential customers through its Compellent Customer Council (C3), a group of network storage resellers and their customers that provide Compellent with feedback on its technology. Soran says that the startup has been in active discussions with dozens of companies over the past several months. Its really, really going well, he says.
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