Software-defined storage vendor Scality today closed a $60 million funding round, bringing its total raised to $152 million. The company will invest the latest funding in its multi-cloud controller software, which it plans to launch commercially later this year. And it is already in talks with Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) about using the technology in their multi-cloud tools, said Paul Speciale, vice president of product management at Scality.
“Both Cisco and HPE have their own multi-cloud products: HPE has OneSphere, and Cisco has CloudCenter, Speciale said. “But neither of those products have the data management piece.” Bundling Scality’s technology into their respective products would provide the data management piece. “We’re in discussions with HPE, and I see it going down that path,” he said. “We’re a little bit closer with CloudCenter. We’re at the point where we can start integration testing with them.”
Scality has been around since 2009. Founded in France, its headquarters are now in San Francisco along with facilities in Paris, London, Germany, and Australia.
It launched its flagship scale-out object and file storage software called Ring in 2010. Customers include major companies in just about every vertical: Rackspace, Orange, KDDI, DMM.com, Telstra, Bloomberg Media, Dailymotion, Lancaster General Health (Penn Medicine), and Banque Natixis, among others.
Make Multi-Cloud Easy
In September 2017 the company launched an open source multi-cloud data controller called Zenko. It allows customers to store data on-site or in the cloud, and it supports Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Scality will release a commercial version of the product in the upcoming months, Speciale said.
“We will use the funding to fuel R&D around Zenko,” he said. “In conjunction with the Ring, it becomes our multi-cloud solution. The whole idea is it makes multi-cloud as easy as point and click.”
Bloomberg is the first Zenko beta customer, using all three public clouds to manage its video files, Speciale said. “They wanted to push to AWS, Azure, and GCP all at the same time,” he said, adding that the media company signed a “seven-figure deal with us, on top of the Ring deal from two years ago.”
Although the company’s software is sold running on top of HPE, Cisco, Dell EMC, and Huawei servers, Scality is considering developing a branded appliance of its own, Speciale said.
IPO Dreams?
When asked if there’s an initial public offering on the horizon, he said, “Anything’s on the table. At this point, you just have to build a company that gets the profitability, and I think we see that window rising in the next year-and-a-half to two years, whether that’s an IPO or an M&A. If the opportunity arises, we’ll go IPO. If an acquisition makes sense, we’ll do it. Both are on the table.”
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