Mendocino Seems Out of Business

After a key role for several years in CDP storage segment, it seems that Mendocino Software is out of business. Its web site is closed.

The start-up was founded and led by a few storage veterans coming from various horizons like Veritas, and raised a total of $33 million, including $15 million in 2003 and $18 million in 2005.

It introduced one of the first enterprise-class CDP solutions, called Realtime. OEM agreements with EMC and HP seemed to boost their business but no real market attraction allowed the company to become profitable.

Realtime was based on technologies acquired from StorageCom and Vyant founded by Michael Rowan who became CTO and founder of Revivio, another famous CDP start-up. Mendocino then decided to introduce RecoveryONE and more recently InfiniView, but none of these products received good market acceptation, though key agreements or validation with Sybase, SAP and other.

Mendocino was one of the rare players who built and understood the application-aware need for CDP. All their product philosophy was for enterprise and out-of-band.

EMC later replaced Mendocino technologies by the solution coming from Kashya acquisition. Mendocino has an impressive technology but missed some waves.

Some of its competitors accepted to be swallowed to survive: Revivio by Symantec, Kashya by EMC, Alacritus and Topio by NetApp, TimeSpring by Double-Take, Storactive by Atempo, FilesX by IBM, LassoLogic by SonicWALL, ConstantData by BakBone, Availl by GlobalScape or XOsoft by CA.

Who are the last independant pure-CDP players? Not a lot. We can mention Asempra and InMage Systems (founded by Kumar Malavalli) who seem to have fantastic technology, but their capacity to survive is also under question.

So what is the status of CDP on the market? CDP has disappeared as an independent product, as it’s now integrated in more global solutions like backup or replication. Hum, when gorilla wake up, mouse are to run fast, very fast…

Jim Woods