Start-Up Co-Founded by Well-Known Mark Lewis, former EMC CTO and GM of HP Storage

Company
Formation Data Systems, Inc.

HQs and offices
HQ in Fremont, CA, and offices in Boulder, CO and San Francisco, CA

Date founded
September 2012

Financial funding
Raised $24.2 million in Series A funding in September 2014, with Pelion Venture Partners leading the round with participation from investors that included Dell Ventures, Third Point, Mayfield Fund and Square 1 Bank and from individuals including Aaron Levie, Box CEO, Steve Luczo, Seagate CEO, Jerry Kennelly, Riverbed CEO, and Kumar Malavalli, co-founder and former CTO of Brocade, co-founder, chairman and CEO of InMage Systems.

Main executives

•  Mark Lewis, co-founder, chairman and CEO, 51, is also senior advisor at technology company investment firm Silver Lake, and board member of Riverbed with total compensation of $333,220 in 2013. He served as chief strategy officer for the information infrastructure products business of EMC from 2010 to 2012. Prior roles at EMC included president of the content management and archiving division, chief development officer, CTO and co-leader of the EMC software group. Prior to EMC, he was VP and GM of Compaq enterprise storage group. From 1998 to 1999, he led Compaq enterprise storage software business after serving for two years as director of engineering for multi vendor online storage. Before that, he spent 13 years in storage-related engineering and product development at DEC.
• Andy Jenks, COO, co-founder and director, is also co-founder and general partner at Stage One Capital, and director of the board of Bottlenose.
• Jeff Alexander, VP software engineering, was previously at EMC, HP, StorageTek and Unisys.
• Kevin Chew, chief customer officer, worked at SAP, EMC, Documentum, Vignette and PropleSoft.

Technology
Built on new virtualization technology, the start-up offers a 100% software in beta, Formation eXtensible Virtualization, to create an open converged data platform that provides block, file and object storage across flash, disk and cloud storage media, with features like de-dupe, QOS, DR, tiering and archiving. The software-defined storage product solution, aimed to replace legacy hardware and software from companies like EMC, HDS, HP or NetApp with standard off-the-shelf hardware. It can manage capacities from terabytes to exabytes. APIs are open for development or reuse in other products.

Released date
2Q15

Target market
The company will begin to sell directly to end users and then through enterprise IT, SaaS applications and service providers

Competitors
Many storage firms are engaged recently in the new paradigm of software converged storage software or appliances like Atlantis, Avnet (with EMC hardware), Compuverde, Gridstore, LSI/Avago (with Supermicro), Maxta, Nexenta, Scale Computing, and not including the traditional big vendors in proprietary integrated structures including also network like Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp with Cisco (FlexPod), Oracle or VCE (Cisco, EMC and VMware.)

Editor: We used here some information published in an excellent article in CRN written by Joseph F. Kovar, Formation Data Systems Exits Stealth, Plans Storage Industry Disruption.