Scality has been around for awhile now, founded back around 2010, the storage player was the first to build a commercial storage offering with a full fidelity interface to Amazon S3 – back when Amazon S3 was still largely unknown. Since then Scality has continued to deliver industry firsts – it was first with native scale-out file system interfaces in 2013; first to adopt Docker in 2015, and first to introduce multi-cloud data control with Zenko in 2017.

And while Scality was arguably early to be building a multi-cloud platform for distributed file and object storage, the market has matured to the point where Scality’s value proposition is actually needed by many organizations. The increasing complexity of enterprise applications, the increasingly hybrid nature of where and how those applications are deployed, and the increasing volume of data that organizations need to manage all plays into Scality’s value proposition.

but being early is arguably worse than being late, and Scality has had to manage its spend in lockstep with the early nature of the industry. Today, however, there is no need to throttle back on the spend – the market is ripe for a massive amount of disruption and Scality and other new-age players are scaling up to take lots of revenue off the legacy storage vendors out there.

And so the news today that Scality has secured another $60 million funding round, will be music to the ears of the entire Scality management team and especially Jerome Lecat, its CEO. That new-found cash will help Scality to ramp up the sales aspects of its operation – they are, in Silicon Valley parlance, able to prime the pump ready for all those lucrative enterprise sales to come rushing in. That $60 takes the total cash raised by Scality to over $150 million and it is also noteworthy that this is Scality’s first raise since 2015.

In commenting on the raise, Lecat takes the opportunity to put in a well-aimed marketing pitch for the company, replete with some references to a utopian world which Scality apparently enables:

We are very proud that our customers are delighted by the reliability, performance and cost-effectiveness of our solutions, and at the same time, they praise us for our forward thinking. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a real force, challenging every company in its business model, and challenging every IT department. We help our customers be ready. Technology is not the goal; innovation is what allows us to deliver what seemed impossible: freedom and control at the same time. Thanks to Scality, Enterprises and Service Providers can avoid hardware lock-in and cloud lock-in; while accommodating massive amounts of data growth and extract value from data.

IN slightly more aggressive style, Scality claims some scalps from competitors, suggesting that it has converted opportunities from a bunch of different platforms, including Veeam, Commvault, Oracle RMAN and IBM Spectrum Protect for backup; Broadpeak, Aspera, and Vizrt for M&E content distribution; and Philips, McKesson and Carestream for medical imaging. According to the company, the customer list includes such names as Rackspace, Orange, KDDI, DMM.com, Telstra, Bloomberg Media, Dailymotion, Lancaster General Health (Penn Medicine), Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Banque Natixis, and Franco-rail company SNCF.

MyPOV

Scality has done well to bide its time until the market was really ready for what it offers. That time has come and Scality seems to be doing a good job of scaling (pun intended) its platform and user base. This cash will come in handy – enterprise sales are expensive and $60 million goes a long way to priming a big pump.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

1 Comment
  • Well, the $60M in Scality’s latest funding round comes after some turbulence within the company. Since the beginning of the year both the COO and CMO left the company without replacements being hired. Scality’s head count appears to be out-of-line with its revenue which was probably accelerating its burn rate. So having another $60M to work with will give Scality a longer runway. That said, with only 200 customers acquired over 9 years, it seems like most of the $60M is going to go for global sales and marketing. A couple of years ago, HPE put $10 into Scality to get a look at the books and didn’t buy Scality even though HPE doesn’t have an object-based storage software product to call its own. Cloudian is Scality’s major competitor in the list of non-public, privately-funded providers of object-based storage software vendors. Cloudian has added 100 new customers in the past year alone, and recently announced another $25M in funding and $100M in debt financing (Digital Alpha Advisors) to introduce a combined hardware and software, pay-as-you-grow consumption model for private storage clouds. Cloudian has very little executive churn. In fact the last CMO at Scality, Paul Turner, left Cloudian to move to Scality less than two years ago. Mr. Lecat has spoken in the past about taking Scality public, but hoping to do that in 2023 is just a wish at this point. Scality needs a lot more in annual revenue to support an IPO. The $60M question is will it be enough to increase revenue so an IPO can be realistically considered?

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