3PAR Inc. filed on Tuesday to raise  $100 million via an initial public offering. It has taken $183 million and eight years for the storage systems vendor to locate an exit, but investors can clearly see their opportunity in an IPO market frenzied by VMware Inc.'s public offering. Sadly, despite the fact that 3PAR's storage products do help with virtualization (can you feel the investor excitement?) its thus-far-unprofitable business is a little less exciting. The company competes against Dell Inc., EMC Corp., IBM Corp., as well as a constant spate of new storage startups. 3PAR has outlasted many of the fledgling firms, but with sales of $65 million in the first half of the year, it's not likely to send EMC  into spasms of fear over a newly public competitor. Still, an exit would be a boon for the longtime investors in 3PAR, which include Mayfield Fund (19.5%), Menlo Ventures (17.8%) and Worldview Technology Partners (15.3%). —Stacey Higginbotham

See 3PAR S-1
See April 2006 story from TheDeal.com

Tags: ipo, m&a, vc, venture+capital