Software-Defined Storage Company SwiftStack Raises $16M
SwiftStack is preparing to expand its marketing and sales efforts with a new round of venture capital funding.
The San Francisco-based software-defined storage company has secured $16 million in Series B financing from OpenView Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, Storm Ventures and UMC Capital. The new investment boosts SwiftStack’s total funds raised to $23.6 million.
SwiftStack released its OpenStack Swift-based object storage platform in July 2013.
“We’re using our Series B funding to help scale our company across the board, with specific emphasis on sales and marketing strategies to help address today’s buying paradigm and engagement model where customers understand readily what their needs are and are seeking an immediate cure to solve them,” SwiftStack CEO Joe Arnold told Talkin’ Cloud.
Arnold noted his company will use the most recent investment to improve its go-to-market and customer engagement strategies as well.
“There’s been a sea change in the adoption of enterprise storage solutions, and object storage is a front-seat technology poised to be general purpose storage likely to supplant today’s use of expensive SAN and NAS devices,” he said in a prepared statement. “With this new infusion of resources, we’ll be able to significantly scale on our vision to give customers an affordable, scalable, manageable and simple storage solution.”
SwiftStack also will add OpenView Operating Partner Daniel Demmer to its board of directors as part of the investment.
“This new round of financing allows the team to continue ushering in a new era of reliable, cost-effective, redundant and highly scalable storage solutions,” Demmer said.
What does SwiftStack offer customers?
SwiftStack offers a software platform that “allows operators to deploy, integrate and scale on standard hardware,” and eBay (EBAY), HP (HPQ) and Time Warner Cable (TWC) are among the global heavyweights that currently leverage SwiftStack’s OpenStack Swift-based private cloud storage platform.
This San Francisco-based software-defined storage provider, meanwhile, could further extend its market reach thanks in part to the Series B financing.
“Our goal is to enable enterprises to deploy, manage and scale petabytes of data simply and cost-effectively. Our technology fits the bill for enterprise customers both with their existing infrastructure and long-term goals of building an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model within their organization,” Arnold said.
MarketsandMarkets recently predicted the software-defined data center (SDDC) market, which includes software-defined storage solutions, could be worth $5.41 billion by 2018, up from $396.10 million in 2013. The market research company also said it expects North America to be the biggest market for SDDCs, and the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is expected to grow at a significantly faster pace in the coming years as well.
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