Start-Up Profile: Axcient

Location
HQs in Mountain View, CA, offices in Austin, TX, and Smolensk, Russia

Date founded
2006

Financial funding
$113.5 million total including:

$6 million in series A in September, 2008
$2 million in series A in May, 2009
$10 million in series B in July, 2010
$15.5 million in series C in October, 2011
$5 million in October, 2012
$50 million in series D in January, 2013
$25 million in series E in February 2015

Investors are Industry Ventures, Allegis Capital, Peninsula Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Thomvest Ventures and Silver Lake Partners.

Acquisition
The company acquires in 2014 DirectRestore to support broader DR capabilities and expand R&D by 30%.

Main executives
Founder and CEO Justin Moore is a serial entrepreneur, early-stage advisor and angel investor. He is an authority on cloud computing, SMB business market strategy and start-ups. In three years he has secured more than $30 million in funding for Axcient and is a mentor for young entrepreneurs. In 2002, he started MK Global, which introduced an international approach to addressing the surplus of secondary market telecommunications equipment following the dot-com collapse. While at MK Global, he acquired exclusive rights to more than $1 billion in telecommunications equipment from Qwest, Level 3 Communications and more. Under his leadership, he grew MK Global’s profitability in the first 12 months and grew revenue to nearly $15 million per year.

VP of product and engineering Todd Scallan leads product vision and engineering execution of the company’s platform, and has more than 25 years of product management and engineering experience. Most recently, he was VP of product management for Interwoven, where he spent eight years overseeing the definition and delivery of enterprise software products for content management. Before Interwoven, he worked at Segue Software and start-up Black & White Software, which Segue acquired. His roles included VP of engineering for Segue’s functional testing and software metering solutions and VP of business development for Black & White’s distributed application development products. Prior to Segue, he spent 11 years at IBM. He holds a Master of Science in computer engineering, a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering.

Number of employees
200

Technology and product
Axcient Fusion is a cloud-converged platform for IT resilience. It enables businesses of all sizes to deliver QoS with RTOs and RPOs of under one hour for all workloads. In addition, it is based on an on-demand service model, reducing data center infrastructure and IT costs by up to 80% for customers. The simple interface enables businesses to deploy and begin replicating their data in under ten minutes, and its built-in orchestration automates processes such as spinning up entire data centers or deploying test and development environments in the cloud, reducing the time and effort required by legacy, on premise solutions. This all results in IT organizations being able to recapture budgets and redeploy IT resources on strategic initiatives.

With Fusion, IT teams benefit from:

Five critical non-production workloads consolidated into one cloud-converged platform.
Less than 60mn from catastrophic infrastructure failure to full IT productivity.
One-click, on-demand testing and development environments using real-time data.
30x reduction in storage footprint with global de-dupe.
10x reduction in network and compute requirements.
90% reduction in bandwidth consumption with in-line WAN optimization.
Snapshots replicated to the cloud in 90s.
Customizable retention policies for regulatory compliance.
10mn to setup and deploy.

Released date
June 28, 2016

Price range
Starts at $79 per VM.

Roadmap
Fusion currently supports environments virtualized with VMware, and will support physical server configurations and Hyper-V environments later this year. It will also support the ability to connect to analytics platforms in early 2017.

Partners

MSPs: AllCovered, IronEdge, Alvarez
VARs: Technology Alliance Partners (VMware Elite Partner)

Recent licensees
Arcserve, Druva

Number of customers
5,000

Main customers
Robinson Oil Corporation, Rotten Robbie, AllCovered, Sabra Dipping Company, LLC.

Applications
Fusion consolidates and converges five non-production workloads into a single cloud-based platform: DR, data protection, testing and development, archiving, and analytics.

Target market
U.S. midsize enterprise

Competitors
Fusion competes with hyper-converged infrastructure offerings (e.g. Nutanix, Pivot3), legacy data protection and BC/DR vendors (EMC, Commvault, Veritas), as well as DRaaS offerings from companies like IBM and Sungard. It brings convergence and consolidation into the cloud. Unlike Cohesity or Nutanix, who require additional boxes of infrastructure to be placed on premise, Fusion connects directly into an IT department’s virtual environment and replicates a single copy of their data to the cloud, according to Axcient. From this single copy of data, businesses can then leverage this data for data recovery, BC/DR, testing and development, archiving and compliance purposes, and to drive business intelligence with data analytics. Fusion isn’t just storage consolidation, it brings the automation and orchestration layer and the on-demand compute/networking needed to run all IT resilience workloads seamlessly and at scale. Fusion is beyond hyper-converged platforms like Cohesity and Nutanix, which are scale-out secondary storage boxes. It is a cloud platform.

Axcient stated that Fusion also brings a level of automation and simplicity that is not offered by other DRaaS solutions, such as Sungard and IBM Resiliency Services. It enables businesses to automate their entire failover process from applications to network configurations, eliminating the manual effort required to get a business up and running after a catastrophic event. With orchestration and automation, Fusion can take businesses from catastrophe to full IT productivity in under one hour – regardless of the number of VMs and network topology. Businesses can also benefit from leveraging a single copy of their data in the cloud to drive business value through on-demand testing and development. In addition, Fusion enables businesses to bolster their resilience by testing their DR and failover processes quarterly without incurring any additional fees.