Start-Up’s Profile: BridgeSTOR

Company
BridgeSTOR, LLC

Headquarters
Poway, CA

Date founded
May 2010

Financial funding
Privately funded

Revenues
Does not disclose figures; sales grew "over 350%" for 2011; goal to triple revenues in 2012

Main executives
 John Matze,
founder and CEO, who stated of numerous startups in the past 20 years;
was one of the original authors of the iSCSI protocol; was principal
architect at STAC from 1995 to 1997, director of Veritas from 1998 to
2001, and CTO of Overland Storage (through Okapi) from 2003 to 2005,
responsible for creating products including the Overland REO family and
the Siafu Software (acquired by Hifn) iSCSI Swarm: was CTO of Hifn
(acquired by Exar) from 2007 to 2009 and VP of systems products at Exar
from 2009 to 2010

 Dawn Matze,
president, with more than 20 years of experience in executive
management; was VP of marketing for Siafu Software and prior to that
president of Crossware Development for 15 years, where she supervised
multi-million-dollar custom projects; building fine homes being her
pasion

Number of employees    
10

Technology
Advanced Data Reduction (de-dupe and compression, thin provisioning,
encryption) for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 servers delivered as an
appliance and as ‘card and software’ solution.

Products description

       
AOS Appliances for Microsoft Systems Center DPM

The start-up is an HP OEM; appliances built on semi-custom HP DL180
server chassis equipped with BridgeSTOR Advanced Data Reduction hardware
and software.

   
De-Dupe Cards for DPM and NAS

Card and software solutions supplied to buyers who have servers in-place
into which the data reduction system can be installed; both appliance
and card and software products are focused on reducing the disk capacity
requirements of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM
2012) serving Windows shared storage (NAS); products also reducing
operational expenses by diminishing the electrical power required to run
and cool disk drives; also released recently a de-dupe ROI calculator
for Microsoft System Center DPM
 
Released date
Initial appliance launched in November 2010, card and software solutions starting in August 2011.

Price range
Card and software prices costing between $995 and $3,995 based on capacity, appliance MSRPs starting at about $25,000

Roadmap
Intends to further its de-dupe technology with support for additional
Microsoft System Center family of products; later in 2012 will introduce
a data protection service for delivery to the cloud; will be launching
cloud-based alternatives to traditional backup in 2012

Partners
Part of a community that includes HP, Intel, Arrow, Microsoft, VMware
and Exar; signed last year an OEM agreement with Symantec to
incorporated Backup Exec 2010 deduplication suite into its appliance
 
Distributors and OEMs
100% channel-focused with Arrow and Promark in the USA, in discussion
with Hammer in UK and with a distributor to cover ANZ, Singapore,
Malaysia and Indonesia

Number of customers
30 including CariNet

Target market
SMBs to enterprises depending upon the product