SEPATON Exits 2006 with Record Revenue, More than 230% Growth, and More than 500 Customers for Advanced Data Protection Solutions

Business Wire, Feb 7, 2007

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. -- SEPATON, Inc. advanced its leadership position in the high-performance data protection market as it today announced that it has grown revenue more than 230% over the past twelve months compared to last year, expanded its user base to more than 500 customers, and completed a multitude of company and product accomplishments that have poised the company to further grow its leadership position in the advanced data protection marketplace.

In 2006, SEPATON achieved many company and product goals that have enabled it to extend its dominant position in the virtual tape library market, while laying the groundwork to rapidly take the lead in other strategic market segments including data de-duplication and off-site data replication. Among its accomplishments, SEPATON:

* Grew its customer base to more than 500 customers in key vertical industries including consulting, financial services, government, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and utilities securing new accounts such as Baptist Health, Carillion Healthcare, China Construction Bank, Coach, Colgate, Golub Price Chopper, Hyundai, Kindred Healthcare, Maine Medical, Nalco, New York Board of Trade, Ricoh, Samsung and Suburban Propane. SEPATON's technology now protects 18 PB of data worldwide.

* Expanded its installed base. Over 50% of SEPATON customers added capacity or performance due to the flexibility of the S2100[R]-ES2 architecture and ease of upgrade capabilities. During the most recent twelve months of SEPATON market success, customers are deploying larger systems more quickly and as a primary component of data protection. The average SEPATON system deployed in 2006 features more than 40 terabytes, 2.4 times the average capacity of the previous twelve months.

* Announced ContentAware[TM] DeltaStor software that exponentially increases the amount of data that can be stored on a SEPATON S2100-ES2 VTL appliance. DeltaStor software eliminates the need to store unchanged or duplicated data within files so users can store more data online at significantly lower cost, delivering the highest level of data de-duplication ratios without affecting the backup window.

* Shipped new Site2 electronic vaulting software designed to run on the S2100-ES2 VTL appliance and protect a company's business-critical data. SEPATON Site2 cost-effectively replicates data from data center(s) over a WAN to remote location(s) for maximum data protection and security. Integrated with a backup application, Site2 eliminates labor-intensive tasks, automates error prone manual tape-handling processes, and reduces recovery time due to unplanned interruptions.

* Attained industry-wide certification for the SEPATON S2100-ES2 VTL to ensure seamless integration with popular backup and recovery applications.

* Strengthened its domestic sales organization to support market demand by adding new talent to serve the federal market, new sales and engineering teams in North America, and additional director-level talent in systems engineering and professional services.

* Expanded its international market reach with new sales and support teams based in the United Kingdom. Also added two new resellers in the United Kingdom, Redstor and S3.

* Formed strategic alliances with best-of-breed technology providers to extend the benefits of its virtual tape library technology. These included partnerships with ONStor Inc. to enable rapid NAS backup and restore using virtual tape technology; Decru, a NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) company, and NeoScale to enable wire-speed encryption of backup data on VTL appliance; and Luminex to bring disk-based backup and recovery to mainframe environments.

* Received the Rising Star recognition in Deloitte & Touche USA LLP's Technology Fast 50 program for New England. The Rising Star award is a special designation for fast-growth companies that have been in business just three or four years. SEPATON was also named the fifth fastest growing Rising Star in all of North America. Rankings are based on percentage revenue growth over three years.

* Won product excellence recognitions for the S2100-ES2, which offers data de-duplication and remote replication. These included a storage product of the year award by Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com, Government Computer News Best of FOSE Award and being named a finalist in the "Backup Hardware" category of the Most Valuable Product (MVP) Awards sponsored by InfoStor magazine and the Association of Storage Networking Professionals (ASNP).

"The market is maturing and customers are looking to add value to investments in virtual tape library technologies," said W. Curtis Preston, vice president of data protection at GlassHouse Technologies, Inc. "Specifically, enhanced technology around data de-duplication results in greater storage capacity, lower costs, and no negative impact on the backup window. The potential impact data de-duplication can have for an enterprise's data protection strategy is significant."

"SEPATON executed against its business and product plans with precision this year," said Mike Worhach, president and CEO, SEPATON, Inc. "We are very proud of the growth in our new customer ramp as well as the continued expansion within our existing install base. We expect this growth rate to continue, assisted by the recent availability of our DeltaStor software and unique approach to data de-duplication. Early customer reception has been very positive and we look forward to rolling it out on a wide-scale this year."