TidalData eyes VC funds to market new product

TidalData, a Bangalore-based storage products company founded by networking pioneer Kumar Malavalli, is looking at venture capitalists (VCs) for raising funds for marketing its soon-to-be released initial product offering UniVault "" XL1000.

"We will raise around $4-6 million towards the sales and marketing of the new product which is slated to be released in the next two-three months," said Adarsh Holavanahalli, CEO, Tidal Data Solutions. He said that the company was in talks with some VCs and is expected to raise the money over the next one year.

UniVault "" XL1000, which is primarily targeted at SMBs to provide them a solution for protecting the digital data by centralising these under a secured mode, is at present under Beta trial. The product will initially provide storage solutions for 5-10 users with a storage capacity of 250-500 giga bytes.

"TidalData UniVault storage appliances integrate varied data access applications into industry standard storage access protocols and will allow the customers to avoid frequent backups. This will also protect consolidation information and build information access infrastructure by enhancing digital data management," said Malavalli, chairman of the board of the company.

Malavalli had co-founded Brocade Communications, an established provider of storage area networking infrastructure, in 1995.

He said that there were huge opportunities in the information consolidation market with the branded PC installation base expected to reach 85 million units in Asia and 9.25 million units in India by 2010. Of these, 50 per cent of the installations are expected to be in the SMB and SOHO spaces.

"We are looking at the professionals and academic organisations with 5-50 employees. SMBs require platforms that directly exploit their applications by using co-opted storage and create homogeneous transitions of information to archive data," he added.

According to the company, TidalData will enable the SMBs to adopt and use the power of storage networking to improve efficiency of the organisations. The company was targeting legal firms, clinics, hospitals, accounting firms, architects, academia, libraries, publishing houses and construction companies as its probable customers.

TidalData was incorporated in 2003 with an initial investment of $500,000. The company, which has a development team of about 15 engineers in Bangalore, is working on delivering multi-functional storage platforms initially to organisations in banking, finance, legal firms and e-businesses.