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SANgate Shuts Israel R&D: Page 2 of 2

Finding a permanent CEO is on the agenda, but SANgate says its focus is on product delivery and its selling effort. "Right now, a new CEO is not critical for us," Feresten says.

Its product direction has shifted a couple of times over this period. Its latest design, the SANblaster S1000, is an offline (or out-of-band) data migration appliance (see SANgate Ships Data Migration).

SANblaster competes with software from DataCore Software Corp., FalconStor Software Inc. (Nasdaq: FALC), Fujitsu Software Technology Corp. (Softek), NSI Software, Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO), and Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS), all of which offer host-based software for data migration and replication. In addition, several hardware vendors have their own software, such as EMC Corp.'s (NYSE: EMC) Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)'s NanoCopy.

SANgate says it views companies like Veritas and Legato as potential partners rather than competitors. "In the future we want to do backup/restore and mirroring but will partner for this technology," says Feresten. It's hoping that as network-based storage takes off, its appliance will become another platform for software vendors to piggyback on.

SANgate has cash reserves for another year of operations, and it began generating its initial revenues this month. However, the company is still in the process of closing an additional round of funding -- any day now, executives say. It has raised $25 million to date from Jerusalem Venture Partners, and Battery Ventures