McAfee, Compellent Rise Above the Mire

"With our size, we can increase our pipeline easier than a big NetApp can; we can cover up the slowdown," said Compellent CEO Phil Soran, explaining that the firm uses a 100% channel model. "We have done a good job of getting our business partners to understand the financial [benefits] of our feature set."

Compellent, which competes mainly with Dell(Dell), Hewlett-Packard(HPQ) and EMC, touts "tiered" storage products that shift older data onto less expensive storage media. The firm is even developing a version of this technology aimed specifically at solid state disks (SSDs), according to Soran.

"We have talked about early customer shipments this quarter, so [the launch] is in the next couple of months," he said.

At least one analyst thinks that Compellent's strong momentum bodes well for its prospects in 2009.

"While the macro-economic conditions are challenging and are clearly impacting many IT vendors, we believe Compellent is firing on all cylinders and will continue driving top-line growth throughout 2009," wrote Troy Jensen, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, in a note this week. The analyst also reiterated his "Buy" rating and $14 price target on Compellent shares.

McAfee shares were up about 0.1% to $30.35 in Tuesday trading, and Compellent shares were up about 1% to $13.91, while the Nasdaq was down 3.4%.

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