InMage CEO Out, Replaced By Co-Founder Malavalli

Malavalli, who quietly took over the CEO position about a month ago, is best-known as one of the co-founders in 1995 of storage and IP networking giant Brocade Communications.

Malavalli declined to state why Ferraro left the company. "He was brought in to increase sales," he said. "It was a mutual agreement for him to leave."

Malavalli said he was closely involved in strategy and business development in the early days of InMage, but had stepped back for some time. "But we're getting traction in the market," he said. "And we have some new initiatives to focus on."

InMage develops disaster recovery software solutions which can also be used for local backups. The company's software includes such capabilities as continuous data protection (CDP), asynchronous replication over IP, application failover and failback, and WAN optimization, all using disk as the recovery media.

The company's single software-based platform supports Windows, Linux, and Unix environments along with heterogeneous storage platforms and storage architectures including direct attached storage, SAN, NAS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel.

InMage was founded in 2003 with an initial focus on SMB customers, but has become more and more involved in mid-tier and enterprise markets as well as in cloud and managed services storage environments, Malavalli said.

The company currently has about 100 channel partners worldwide, as well OEM relationships with strategic vendors such as Hitachi Data Systems and Pillar Data, Malavalli said.

One of the company's top initiatives for 2011 is to increase the number of channel partners, he said. "Our revenue is growing, and we are profitable," he said. "But we can grow more with direct sales to our partners, and by going deeper with them," he said. "And we want to do more with the channel partners of our strategic partners."

Rajeev Atluri, CTO and another co-founder of InMage, said the company will unveil specific information about its channel initiatives, including program and recruiting plans, later this year as the company rolls out new versions of its software.

These include the InMage Scout CDP-based backup software for remote disaster recovery and high availability, InMage vContinuum unified backup and disaster recovery solution for VMware virtualized environments, and ScoutCloud Platform for cloud and managed service providers multi-tenant operations, Atluri said.