INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Cloudian, a company that specializes in helping businessesstore petabytes of data, today announced that it has raised a $94 million Series E
Investors in this round, which is one of the largest we have seen for a storage vendor, includeDigital Alpha, Fidelity Eight Roads, Goldman
Sachs, INCJ, JPIC (Japan Post Investment Corporation), NTT DOCOMO Ventures and WS Investments
This round includes a $25 million investment from Digital Alpha, which was first announced earlier this year.
With this, the seven-year-old
company has now raised a total of $174 million.
As the company told me, it now has about 160 employees and 240 enterprise customers
Cloudian has found its sweet spot in managing the large video archives of entertainment companies, but its customers also include
healthcare companies, automobile manufacturers and Formula One teams.
What important to stress here is that Cloudian focus is on
on-premise storage, not cloud storage, though it does offer support for multi-cloud data management, as well
&Data tends to be most effectively used close to where it is created and close to where it being used,& Cloudian VP of worldwide sales Jon
&That because of latency, because of network traffic
You can almost always get better performance, better control over your data if it is being stored close to where it being used.& He also
noted that it often costly and complex to move that data elsewhere, especially when you&re talking about the large amounts of information
that Cloudian customers need to manage.
Unsurprisingly, companies that have this much data now want to use it for machine learning, too, so
Cloudian is starting to get into this space, as well
As Cloudian CEO and co-founder Michael Tso also told me, companies are now aware that the data they pull in, no matter whether that from IoT
sensors, cameras or medical imaging devices, will only become more valuable over time as they try to train their models
If they decide to throw the data away, they run the risk of having nothing with which to train their models.
Cloudian plans to use the new
funding to expand its global sales and marketing efforts and increase its engineering team
&We have to invest in engineering and our core technology, as well,& Tso noted
&We have to innovate in new areas like AI.
As Ash also stressed, Cloudian business is really data management — not just storage
&Data is coming from everywhere and it going everywhere,& he said
&The old-school storage platforms that were siloed just don''t work anywhere.
