Bill Evans CEO of Arkeia

Arkeia Software announced the appointment of software industry veteran Bill Evans as its new Chief Executive Officer. Evans brings more than 20 years of leadership in global technology companies to Arkeia, including management positions with Gateway, Blue Martini Software, and Objectivity.

“I was attracted to Arkeia by its proven products, its terrific technology pipeline, and its impressive customer base,” said Evans. “Arkeia is unique in offering backup solutions both as system software and as appliances. Even more impressive is the passionate customer base of more than 5,000 organizations, including Bacardi, Boeing, EADS, Greenpeace, International Paper, Lockheed Martin, Mitsubishi, Porsche, Stanford, Toshiba, RTL Group, and Schlumberger.”

Most recently, Evans served as CEO of cloud storage start-up Parascale. Prior to that, he served as SVP of Gateway’s International Business Unit, responsible for a $500M business in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. As co-founder of Blue Martini Software, he drove the company from inception through IPO to $75M in revenue as SVP Marketing and, later, served as general manager Asia-Pacific operations.
Prior to joining Blue Martini Software, Evans launched Objectivity’s Aziza Business Unit where he served as general manager, following his tenure as Objectivity’s vice president of Marketing. Earlier he held management roles in product management at Red Brick Systems and Oracle. Evans holds an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business, an MS in Electrical Engineering from MIT where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow, and a BS, summa cum laude, in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Santa Clara University where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Frederic Renard also joins Arkeia Software as vice president of Marketing. Renard was recruited back to Arkeia Software where he earlier led European marketing and channel programs. Prior to Arkeia, Renard co-founded VEO, a business development firm helping major US-based Internet firms expand into Europe. Renard has also held management positions with Apple Computer and Micro Warehouse. Renard graduated from the Lincoln International Business School in France and studied at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Comments

We follow this French-born company since many years. Arkeia Software was born in 1996 and put on the market one of the first Linux backup and recovery software, a remarkable product. Its first CEO, Phil (in U.S.) or Philippe (in France) Roussel, co-founded Newlog and started Knox Software in 1990 that became Arkeia Software. He understood that he was obliged to enter into the U.S. market to succeed, opening an office in Carlsbad, CA, but he was ejected from the company in 2005 and replaced by Alain Pechon who was a beginner in the storage industry. The background of Bill Evans is more serious. He comes from a storage start-up, Parascale., and knows what an IPO means.

To our opinion, Arkeia did a mistake by launching EdgeFort, an all-in-one data protection appliance in 2007. The first product was not competitive and it was later enhanced. But the sales were poor with the exception of a big deal with 100 U.S. Government customers this year. Encryption, yes, but no trace of compression, de-dup or CDP on EdgeFort. Today, the only chance to sell a backup product without these technologies is to find a customer ignoring them.

If you look at all the big backup software companies, they succeed by concentrating on their core business. Atempo, BakBone, CommVault, Symantec/Veritas or Yosemite don’t sell any hardware. Legato is less powerful since its acquisition by hardware vendor EMC. If you enter into hardware, you are immediately in competition with most of the OEMs needing backup software.

The other difficulty for Arkeia was to get enough financial funding to expand. In 12 years, it got only around $7 million, even if few days ago, the company announced a follow-on investment (the amount was not revealed) by a syndicate of California private equity investors.