The joint venture includes a utility financing facility of up to $100 million from Digital Alpha and its Limited Partners to enable flexible procurement options to accommodate customers’ rapidly growing storage environments. It also includes a $25 million equity commitment to support expansion of Cloudian’s sales, marketing, engineering, and customer-support organisations.
The $100 million financing facility will enable consumption-model procurement of Cloudian products. Today, IT groups are under pressure to deliver services on demand, free of up-front capital outlays. While the public cloud is right for some of these workloads, others are best kept on premises. Through this partnership, customers can take advantage of an on-premises solution that provides the data sovereignty, performance and control of enterprise storage together with the economics of a pay-per-use model.
Digital Alpha will also support the development of a partnership between Cloudian and Cisco covering relevant data-centre architectures. Cloudian's data-management features, integrated cloud-storage management and broad interoperability make it a uniquely differentiated solution. In 2017, the company doubled its installed base to more than 200 customers.
Managing Partner Rick Shrotri stated, “Digital Alpha spent months evaluating customer satisfaction with object-storage installations and found the ease of use, deployment and scalability of Cloudian to be highly differentiated. Moreover, we believe the firm is well positioned to leverage its leadership in Amazon S3 API integration in the emerging use-cases of IoT, analytic and multi-cloud environments. Finally, we believe the culture created by the experienced management team at Cloudian will be conducive to further growth, as it is an attractive destination for industry-leading talent.”
This joint venture will capitalise on the dramatic growth of object storage in 2018, which is driven by the convergence of massive data growth, the emergence of the Amazon S3 API as a de-facto industry standard and accelerating artificial intelligence/machine learning and Internet of Things (IoT) use cases.
“For our customers, this joint venture will enable flexible procurement models and new hardware options to accelerate their transition to next-generation object storage solutions,” said Cloudian CEO Michael Tso. “With emerging capacity-intensive use cases such as IoT and machine learning, today’s data management needs are rapidly outgrowing traditional platforms. Cloudian’s solutions offer the limitless scalability, superior ease of use and cloud integration our customers need to solve their largest-capacity storage challenges while saving time and cost.”