Unsung FalconStor Doing Quite Well as a Key OEM

FalconStor is like a great supporting actor in a movie — one who helps set the scene and tell the story, but who modestly eschews the limelight and graciously lets the leading actors take most of the applause.

FalconStor, which specializes in continuous data protection software, deduplication and VTLs (virtual tape libraries), has been a strategic OEM partner to a number of major storage-systems makers for several years. Thus, you won’t see the FalconStor brand name on products marketed by companies such as EMC, IBM, Sun Microsystems, 3PAR, CA, Microsoft, Hitachi, Quantum and several others, for instance.

However, the Melville, N.Y.-based company is finally starting to get some traction under its own brand name.

FalconStor’s latest news is that it and Australia-based Acer, the fourth-largest branded PC vendor globally, have co-introduced Acer Storage Repository — powered by FalconStor’s VTL with data de-duplication — into the mid-market. The new storage appliance should be ready for GA later this quarter, and it is likely to be very popular in the mid- to low-end storage market. FalconStor’s block-level dedupe secret sauce is among the most respected in the business.

FalconStor also announced financial results for its third quarter ended Sept. 30, on Oct. 25. It’s doing quite well: Revenues for the third quarter of 2007 increased 43 percent to $18.5 million, compared with $13 million for the same period a year ago. For a relatively young company, that’s not bad growth.

I wish all my investments improved by 43 percent each year. We’ll keep an eye on this company in the months to come.