Press Releases

3PAR Secures $32 Million in Financing

Menlo Ventures Leads the Round With Significant Participation from Insiders, Giving Strong Endorsement to 3PAR's Utility Storage

FREMONT, CA, US — February 10, 2004

3PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage, today announced that it has added $32 million in a fourth financing round. The round was led by Menlo Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's oldest venture partnerships. Menlo joins fellow venture capital firms Mayfield and Worldview Technology Partners, and high technology leaders Oracle, Sun and Veritas as 3PAR investors. The round was oversubscribed, and included significant participation from 3PAR's existing investors.

The funds raised in this round will finance further expansion into the U.K., Europe and Asia. In 2003, 3PAR announced partnership agreements with Source Consulting and CSF group in the U.K.

"What attracted us to 3PAR was the company's big name customer traction, proven product, excellent customer satisfaction, and a solid path to profitability," said Mark Siegel of Menlo Ventures and 3PAR's newly appointed board member. "3PAR is delivering utility computing capabilities today to a number of large global accounts, and we were impressed by their customers' enthusiastic endorsements."

3PAR customers include seventeen Fortune 1000 / Global 1000 companies and major government agencies in the U.S., U.K. and Japan. American International Group (AIG), American Management Systems (AMS), Hitachi ULSI, Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Matsushita, NIWS (a Nomura-IBM joint venture), Unique Solutions, Veritas, and Merrill Lynch are some of the companies that have deployed 3PAR Utility Storage. More than half of 3PAR's customers have already made repeat purchases, indicating their satisfaction with the value Utility Storage can deliver.

Investors are recognizing that utility computing represents the emerging IT infrastructure wave, as evidenced by the mergers, acquisitions and investments made by both venture firms and large IT vendors over the past several months. While the major enterprise storage vendors are forced to point to futures, 3PAR is delivering the storage cornerstone of utility computing today through its proven Utility Storage platform. 3PAR's marquee Utility Storage deployments substantiate this fact. The company is well positioned to capture IT spending on utility computing using its first mover advantage.

"Three major platform elements are required for utility computing: utility-capable server, networking and storage platforms," said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. "Our successes to date with large enterprise customers demonstrate that 3PAR is the leading choice for the utility storage element. This successful financing round validates that our investors agree."

About 3PAR
3PAR® (NYSE Arca: PAR) is the leading global provider of utility storage, a category of highly virtualized, tightly-clustered, and dynamically-tiered storage arrays built for utility computing. Organizations use utility computing to build cost-effective virtualized IT infrastructures for flexible workload consolidation. 3PAR Utility Storage gives customers an alternative to traditional arrays by delivering resilient infrastructure with increased agility at a lower total cost to meet their rapidly changing business needs. As a pioneer of thin provisioning — a green technology developed to address storage underutilization and inefficiencies — 3PAR offers products designed to minimize power consumption and promote environmental responsibility. With 3PAR, customers have reduced the costs of allocated storage capacity, administration, and SAN infrastructure while increasing adaptability and resiliency. 3PAR Utility Storage is built to meet the demands of open systems consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management, and performance-intensive applications.