Storage Services Specialist Gets $6.4M In VC Funding

GlassHouse Technologies, based here, said it received the B-round funding from return investor Sigma Partners, as well as from new investors GrandBanks Capital and JAFCO Ventures. With this round, total investment in the company is $8 million.

Mark Shirman, president and CEO of GlassHouse, said the company focuses on storage consulting but does not sell any products. Services include design and implementation of SANs, with implementation either done by in-house people or via the professional services teams of vendors such as EMC or HP.

GlassHouse has developed its own intellectual property, including Solution Maintenance, a service which sits on top of software from vendors such as Veritas, Legato or Tivoli to monitor the health of the SAN. The company does not plan to shrink-wrap this service, Shirman said.

Since the company was founded about a year ago, it has become a profitable business that currently has about 30 customers and has participated in over 50 projects, said Shirman.

Getting funding today is difficult, Shirman said. "It's tough out there," he said. "But we put together a good management team, and we talked to vendors and others to validate our market to our investors. We were actually oversubscribed and had to turn money away."

Shirman said his company plans to open an office in New York or New Jersey with the next month or so, as it already has several customers in the area. Future expansions include offices in other geographical areas, depending on how the customer base changes. The company is in a hiring mode, he said.