Tough Time for Formation Data Systems

We heard that Formation Data Systems (FDS) has some financial difficulties that invite the firm to close doors.

It was very short notice that surprised all the team except the management we hope.

It represents a new failure in the vast fuzzy software-defined storage (SDS) wave after Seanodes, Tonian Systems, MaxiScale, Infinit, Inktank or more recently Basho Technologies but we have heard of others. Three of these – Tonian, Infinit and Inktank – got some luck and finally a second chance being acquired – and saved – respectively by Primary Data, Docker and Red Hat, all at very good price.

FDS was founded by Andy Jenks and Mark Lewis. The LinkedIn profile of Jenks, who was co-founder, COO and board member until June 2015, indicates the company was founded in September 2012. Lewis was co-founder, chairman and CEO, was formerly CTO at EMC many years ago, and also spent some time at Compaq during the ENSA era, if some of you remember that initiative when SAN storage took off, and even before was at Digital Equipment.

The other executives were Kevin Chew, Jeff Alexander, Eric Chan and Rick Walsworth. This later, VP marketing, confirmed he left the company even if his LinkedIn page continues to mention Formation as we write this article. Vinay Rao, founding chief architect, Kiran Agrahara, chief solutions architect, and Fred Langen, customer success engineer are looking actively for new position according to their LinkedIn pages.

FDS had raised $24.2 million in three rounds from six investors, among them Dell Technologies Capital and Mayfield Fund. Dell who owns now EMC has already several SDS products in its catalog and Mayfield already invested in SwiftStack. Some individuals were also listed as advisors and investors of FDS such as Kumar Malavalli, CTO and founder of Brocade, Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, Steve Luczo, CEO of Seagate, and Jerry Kennelly, CEO of Riverbed.

Wow with all these brilliant people, top investors, and a hot market segment really promising, what happened? It’s a surprise for the industry and observers.

The company didn’t publish any tweets since November 2016, last PR was published on February 17, 2017 and last blog posted on March 6, 2017.

Companies has to pay attention to these indicators, some times old school executives forgot them…

Also, FDS’s management and career pages on its web site disappeared.

The visibility of the company was really limited and known only by specialists. This trajectory could serve to other companies to learn from this case and doing reiterate same mistakes.

The firm never took off even if, on the paper, the approach was almost compelling. It means that even with great DNA, track records and famous leader, starting, building and growing a start-up is different story.

It represents a new failure for SDS, in that case probably too generic, wishing to do everything as a multi-protocol and generic storage software solution instead of addressing specific use cases.

They tried to articulate this new position but, obviously, it was too late.