Start-Up's Profile: Talon Storage Solutions

Locations
HQ in Mount Laurel, NJ; offices in Boston, MA; San Jose, CA; Noordwijkerhout (Amsterdam), Netherlands

Founded in
2010

Financial funding
Privately funded, less than $2.5 million

Revenues and profitability
Less than $5 million in sales, profitable

Main executives

Shirish Phatak, chairman and CEO: was COB and co-founder of Velocius Networks, a creator of network performance management solutions, was instrumental in the technical direction, enterprise requirements and vision leading to an acquisition by Akamai in 2013; prior to that, lead technologist in the advanced technology group at Bluecoat; also co-founded Tacit Networks, in WAFS, sold to Packeteer, later sold to Bluecoat
Andrew Mullen, SVP sales and marketing: was a member of Velocius Networks‘ management and advisory board; prior to Talon, was VP of global sales at Visible Technologies, in cloud-based social media intelligence solutions to Fortune 500 customers; priorto that, was the VP sales, Americas at Expand Networks, and director of North America sales at Tacit Networks.

Number of employees
12

Technology
The company provides Microsoft File Aware application acceleration and storage solutions for branch office infrastructure.

RemoteFAST solution ensures scalable and reliable application performance along with business collaboration across distributed workforce environments. It is a native Windows-based solution that addresses geographically distributed Microsoft File Server environments by enabling full-scale branch office consolidation and eliminating performance bottlenecks while preserving enterprise file sharing and security mechanisms.

Talon FAST is delivered in physical and virtual appliances or as installable software on Windows Server environments and embraces Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012 technologies such as Domain-Based DFS for scalability and BitLocker encryption for security. Branch offices can deploy multiple edge appliances to distribute load between users and data sources thereby enabling branch office consolidation.

Products description

RemoteFAST delivers infrastructure for Windows file sharing and collaboration, storage centralization and server consolidation. It optimizes File-Aware applications using Microsoft-based technology and enables real-time collaboration for remote offices. The solution is engineered to solve the problems of enterprises with distributed Windows infrastructures by combining WAFS, WAN optimization, virtual storage and branch office IT services such as Active Directory, DNS/DHCP, Software Distribution and local File and Print services in a single framework. It overcomes the barriers of latency, bandwidth and network reliability to solve the enterprise-wide branch office IT issues. It scales from the large HA data center deployments through large branch offices down to individual users.
MobileFAST, available for iOS, Android and Windows clients, provides mobile access to private and public (cloud) datacenters.

Released date
December 2012

Price
TalonFAST software solutions ranges in price from MobileFAST for smartphones, and tablets less than $100/year to RemoteFAST, from $2,500 annually for small branch office environments with up to 10 users, to $6,500 annually for large enterprise branches with up to 500 users.

Roadmap

Web-based centralized management for better manageability
Cloud as data center
Windows client support in MobileFAST
Single panel access to private, public cloud and data center

Partners
VADs in Europe – like Cloud Distribution – that touch over 200 partners, direct channel relationship in USA

Distributors
In UK, France, Australia, pending OEMs

Number of customers
65

Main customers
Lego, Virgin Trains, KLA Tencor, Foster & Partners, Robert Bird & Son, CardnoTec

Applications
Office, AutoDesk, PTC ProEngineer, Dassault Catia, Solidworks, Bentley Microstation, and Adobe.

Target market

AutoDesk AutoCAD, Revit Architecture, Adobe Creative Suite, Bentley Microstation, Microsoft Office
1-500 people per branch and mobile workforce
Business process challenges around real-time collaboration and IT challenges such as branch office replication/backup/server consolidation
Microsoft-based environments with customers that have file servers and need to collaborate
Consolidation of data from edge to core, virtualize branch services, or refresh.
Customers with 5 or more branch locations

Additionally, meet one of the following criteria:

Challenges with file sharing to multiple branch offices in architecture, engineering and general file sharing environments
Consolidate branch office servers and storage (Microsoft infrastructure)
Large file size sharing with performance Issues (AutoDesk, BIM, MS Office, and Adobe Creative Suite Publishing software)
Need to simplify complex backup and branch infrastructure (Filer servers, replication and backup servers)
Active Directory
DNS/DHCP
Print Server
SCCM or 3rd party Software Distribution

Competitors
Providers of backup and replication and Microsoft DFS-R solution