3Par float

3Par finally floated on Friday this week. You can read the official announcement here. 7.5 million shares were released at a target price of $14 (about £7 in real money). In total, there are 60,015,700 shares of common stock now outstanding, valuing the company at a shade over $840 million. This isn't bad for a company with just over $66m in revenues for 2007, with a $15.5m loss.

It's interesting that loss has been running at $15-17m per year from the figures quoted on the SEC filing, despite the rise in revenue. At the end of the first day of trading the shares were up by $1.75 or 12.5%. To be honest, I would have expected the shares to rise higher than this however on reflection, perhaps not.

3Par sell themselves as "utility" storage and have majored on the concept of thin provisioning. Unfortunately this isn't a USP for them any more. HDS have this on their enterprise products, even EMC have announced thin provisioning is coming to DMX. So, what is 3Par, than just another modular storage provider?