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Tuesday, 13 Jan 2004
Melville, Long Island, NY

At the grand opening of its new world headquarters, Falconstor Chairman and CEO ReiJane Huai, (SBU M.S. '86) welcomed US Senator Chuck Schumer, who gave the opening remarks to a packed room full of well wishers.  It turned out to be a more 'auspicious' day than planned. FalconStor received notice that its award-winning software, IPStor, had been chosen for yet another award.  Since its first release, FalconStor's software has annually won awards and garnered accolades. When it won the 2002 PC Magazine and eWeek Innovation In Infrastructure (i3) Award, David Janowski, a PC Magazine editor, said it best: “FalconStor’s IPStor walks away from the world of proprietary storage by designing a truly open, interoperable solution with strong functionality.  ...IPStor truly is an innovator in infrastructure.”

FalconStor, only 4 years old next month, by last year had already made it into Newsday's annual listing of the top 100 public companies on Long Island.  ReiJane, former CEO of Cheyenne Software and head of CA's Asia Division, has gained a reputation for being a business leader with far more than acumen for product success.  His employees have traveled with him from Cheyenne to CA and now to FalconStor - giving up safe and lucrative careers to stay with a man they consider the best boss to work for.

The new facility, spanning over 40,000 square feet, triples the size of FalconStor's former space.  With 180 employees worldwide, 100 of them based here, FalconStor now has room to expand to over 400 employees on Long Island alone.

Wai Lam, VP of Engineering, (SBU B.S. '82), is standing at the entrance to the 24/7 Customer Continuity Center.  This is where FalconStor monitors and supports the mission critical storage infrastructures of IPStor customers worldwide.  The middle screen, enlarged on the left, is color coded to display the status of customer's systems and FalconStor can react instantaneously to any situation.

The new facility in the Huntington Quadrangle in Melville is the former site of IBM's Global Services.  FalconStor has also installed a state of the art enterprise testing lab to ensure the highest levels of interoperability between IPStor and each customer's software and hardware, and a special in-house customer staging center to test customer installations for rapid deployment. 

Herman Chin, Public Relations Director, explained what FalconStor does in John Q Public English; (the technical explanation is below.)  "We do a lot of things to protect and recover data, but here are two simple ways of looking at some of what we do.  If you have a computer running out of disk space and you add a second drive to it, you can do more but it is still two distinct drives and it operates that way.  Our software makes it work like one and that enables the other thing that we do that is life and death for companies - back-up, recovery and data replication.  Everything that a company does, we make sure that if any part of it goes down, we can restore that to them almost instantaneously because we not only have on site back-up and recovery, we have it remotely."       

FalconStor is not only headed by an SBU alumnus, many employees graduated from SBU too.  Tony Li, who just got his Masters in Computer Science, and Gary Wu, a current Master's student, went to the opening hoping to find out more about becoming one of those alumni employees.  They talked about the importance of internships and jobs for international students who plan to return to their native countries.  "It is not enough," said Gary, "to have a degree from an American university.  Businesses in my country [China] also want me to have learned American business techniques.  They don't just want to hear what I learned in classes, they want me to be able to say 'This is how it was done in this successful American company that I worked for.'" 

Wai spoke to Tony (left) and Gary (center) about their future plans.  Wai was the Keynote Speaker at the SBU Alumni Association's Planet Stony Brook Reunion Alumni to Alumni Networking session last June.  Having hired hundreds of techies in his career, and interviewed thousands, he is able to give students and alumni very worthwhile advice on their resumes and interviewing techniques.  [AA]2@SBU plans to have Wai back for a special session with SBU College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) students this coming Spring.

Formal FalconStor description for techies and investors:
FalconStor Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: FALC) is a leading developer of network storage infrastructure software solutions designed to optimize the performance and availability of today's complex IT infrastructures.  Deployed by a wide range of Fortune 1000 enterprises, FalconStor's flagship product, IPStor, optimizes storage utilization, accelerates backup and recovery, maximizes I/O performances and ensures business continuity via sophisticated data replication services.  It is available and supported through major OEM's, systems integrators and resellers worldwide.

Founded in 2000, FalconStor is headquartered in Melville, NY, with offices throughout Europe and the Asia Pacific regions.  FalconStor is an active member of the Technical Support Alliance Network (TSANet), Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA).  For more information visit http://www.falconstor.com or call 1-631-777-5188.

Special Report by Ja Young,
Alumni Advisor, SBU AA E-Zine