Back-up and recovery software vendor StorageCraft Technology got a shot in the arm to the tune of $187 million in investment from private equity firm TA Associates today. With that investment comes a change in leadership at the Draper, Utah-based company. Former SonicWall CEO and president Matt Medeiros has been installed as StorageCraft CEO replacing Jeff Shreeve.
Medeiros told CDN in an interview that StorageCraft is at a pivotal point in its history. The company has been successful with year-over-year double digit growth and profitability, but it’s currently in a critical plateau.
Matt Medeiros
“We have to take this $100 million company and grow it to $300 million and then to $500 million. The core technology is some of the best around, but its global reach has to expand. This is not a company that needs to be turned-around. It is successful in its space and they have technology that customers need every day. That was the allure of joining StorageCraft,” Medeiros said.
With a new CEO also comes a new game plan for the company. Medeiros said the TA investment enables the vendor to expand its innovation cycles and double the number of net new products in each of the next two years.
Curt James, co-founder and vice president of marketing and business development at StorageCraft, said the company has products in the market that are cross-platform with Linux and can add-on to for the virtualization space.
Secondly Medeiros will look to improve the onboarding of channel partners. The company exclusively sells through the channel and Medeiros wants to put into action better ways of managing and fine-tuning the technology through partners that would increase profitability.
The third priority is recruiting and retaining staff.
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A new area of focus for StorageCraft under the Medeiros plan is to deliver more subscription-based revenue generating products. He believes these types of subscription products provide solution providers with additional presence inside a customer.
StorageCraft will initially look to adjacent technology to grow its product base. Medeiros told CDN that not all data has the same level of importance or priority.
“We need to make sure we have a recovery process for mission critical situations. If I am a retailer the most important data to back-up is the POS system. That’s not how the industry treats data today. We treat it all on an equal footing. We don’t want to re-invent back-up and recovery, but offer tools that create a recovery situation that is dependent on what is most important to the customer,” he added.
Medeiros also emphasized that the channel will continue to be an important part of StorageCraft’s go-to-market strategy.
“StorageCraft will live and thrive with channel partners – full stop.”
One channel area that Medeiros wants to work on is improving lead generation for partners.
“We want StorageCraft to be first of mind with the channel. Getting the right leads to the partners will help them install and manage the products throughout the live cycle. That means training and more training of the channel partners.”
Steve Jobs and Medeiros
In his career Medeiros directly reported to Steve Jobs for 14 years at Apple first then on to Next Computer. Medeiros called Jobs one of the best leaders in technology because he had a crisp vision of perfection. Striving for perfection is a hallmark, he said, that he wants to bring to StorageCraft.
“We can put perfection out there and achieve it. Steve Jobs had an uncanny way of putting that out there and creating new markets with it. We did not reach perfection at Next but it was always a common, constant approach were perfection was defined and a plan was put in place on how to reach it. The number of times we reach it was remarkable,” he said.