Sepaton Has Passed Profitability Mark

SEPATON, Inc. announced that record fourth quarter sales drove the strongest quarter in the company’s history and that the company has passed the profitability mark. These milestones capped a year that set new records across the board in all functional and financial areas of the company. SEPATON’s growth accelerated after its June launch of DeltaStor v5.0 data deduplication software featuring Scale-Out Deduplication capability, making it uniquely optimized for large, data-intensive enterprises. Sales in the second half of 2008 were up significantly compared to the first half of the year.

“Our outstanding financial performance in one of the most challenging economic environments of our time illustrates the power of SEPATON’s virtual tape library (VTL) and deduplication solutions in helping large enterprises to protect their critical information and ensure a rapid return on investment,” said Mike Worhach, president and CEO, SEPATON, Inc. “Our data deduplication technology is unique in its ability to scale performance and/or capacity to enable large enterprises to control data growth and to protect petabytes of data in a single system. This powerful capability provides the springboard for our future revenue and earnings growth. Customers are purchasing larger systems than ever before. As a result, our average S2100®-ES2 system price in the fourth quarter of 2008 was $360,000. We exited 2008 with a strong backlog of orders and we view the record sales that we achieved in 2008 as an affirmation of our strategy and proof of the value we deliver to our customers.”

During the fourth quarter, SEPATON added to its customer base in key vertical industries including financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, government, education, healthcare, and utilities, securing new accounts including Armstrong World Industries, the Department of Homeland Security, Hubei Power Group, Kenneth Cole, and a major federal civilian agency, among others. Customers cite the SEPATON VTL’s ability to backup enormous volumes of data onto a single system and to deduplicate it at industry-leading speeds as a key reason for choosing the S2100-ES2 VTL.

Additionally, SEPATON’s OEM channel continues to strengthen driven by rapid adoption of its enterprise technology. To date, more than 1,300 companies have selected SEPATON solutions to protect their business data. As a result, SEPATON has more than 100 PB of data currently under management.

SEPATON continues to see great expansion within its installed base. One third of SEPATON customers have added capacity or performance during 2008 due to the flexibility of the S2100-ES2 architecture and DeltaStor software and the ease and cost-effectiveness of scaling these systems. For example, several customers have scaled their system capacity and performance to protect as much as 150 TB of data using four processing nodes to maintain wire speed performance throughout backup, deduplication, and restore operations.

Data protection is an essential business requirement in today’s enterprise. Core business functions are creating tens of petabytes of new data annually. State and federal regulations require longer data retention and faster restore capabilities. End user productivity is tied closely to data availability. As a result, enterprise data center managers are implementing technologies that help them to meet the challenges of protecting enormous volumes of data, control that data growth, deliver high levels of service to their business users, and meet strict regulatory requirements. Advanced data protection technology such as data deduplication and VTLs are at the top of IT’s ‘must-have’ list for ’09. With the current economic downturn dictating investments in technology that delivers rapid ROI, solutions like SEPATON VTLs with deduplication software that enable enterprises to backup larger volumes of data without adding administration cost, data center space or power requirements are in high-demand.

“This has been an exciting time for those of us who believe in the power of large scale, enterprise-class data deduplication,” said Worhach. “Our significant sales growth, ability to execute, and the recognition we have received from the IT community has been very rewarding. We are pleased to see the tremendous value that our customers are realizing from the S2100-ES2 and DeltaStor software with Scale-Out Deduplication. Going forward, SEPATON is well positioned to further penetrate the high-end of the data protection market with solutions that deliver strong ROI.”