Will DataCore Rebound With New CEO and Management Team?

Privately-owned DataCore Software got in the past $117 million in financial funding from 1998 to 2008, but now is owned essentially by employees as the company wanted to direct its own future. And the nine founders are always in the firm.

There was a big event just one year ago when legendary founder and CEO since the very first day of the company George Teixeira, was replaced by much younger CEO Dave Zabrowksi, 54, former founder and CEO of Cloud Cruiser, CEO of Neterion and VP and GM of Hewlett-Packard servers, storage and PCs, even if Teixeira remains as executive chairman and continues to be deeply involved in his baby and cannot stop to work.

Big bang: the new team recently hired represents 70% in management, including 50% coming from outside and 20% from inside.

But will it help to see finally the firm rebound under the sun of Ft. Lauderdale, FL?

After more than two decades, the storage software firm, with 220 employees and currently 10,000 customers in the world, remains a relatively small one even if it was probably historically the first one into SDS enabling for customers to change their hardware while keeping SANsymphony software – even if at this time the term SDS was not employed -. According to Zabrowksi, revenue are “more than $100 milion” and privately he told us that it was “less than $200 million“. (estimated revenue by owler is $61.2 million). DataCore is profitable since several years, “and in term of net income, not only operating profit,” precise us Zabrowksi. And no IPO to come to raise money, not to be bothered by stock exchange shareholders.

France is the fastest growing country in term of revenue but globally behind USA and Germany.

Recent changes were the move from complicated pricing to a single one and renewed focus on Europe -, keeping its strategy 100% channel oriented.

Parallel I/O technology is the other offering of DataCore, continuing to be part of its flagship software SANsymphony and hyperconverged Virtual SAN (both starting at $833/TB) to accelerate them, and also not offered to OEMs.

Roadmap is bright:

adding AI
encryption at rest
archiving
optimizing any workload
HCI appliance (first hardware offering from the company)
compression and in-line de-dupe
entering into files for NAS and not only blocks for SANs for better performance
being essentially in primary storage, adding plug-in for Veeam – a company excelling with lot of OEM partners and big ones -, partnership already mentioned by Veeam for SANsymphony and announced in 2015 by DataCore, like with Commvault.