Start-Up Seanodes Closed its Doors

After Hi-Stor at the end of last year, France has lost one of the best local storage company, Seanodes SA, that entered into bankruptcy protection (liquidation judiciaire) in December 10, 2009. Following this judgment from the Tribunal de Toulouse, assets of the start-up have been acquired for an unknown amount by new company, Seanodes IT, owned by Eric Bueno, a firm named Deletec and apparently an investor from London that will try to expand the Seanodes’ product, Exanodes.

Based on its Shared Internal Storage technology, it’s an innovative software under Linux that got a lot of awards to aggregate and share disks and arrays directly attached to, or embedded in application or ESX servers as if they were part of a virtual external storage array. It was one of the first company designing this kind of architecture in the world.

Eric Bueno, now in charge of Exanodes, is based in London, UK and was formerly EMEA sales and business development manager EMEA for Microsoft and previously manager of EMEA global ISV alliances at Sun Microsystems.

Deletec, based in Paris-La Défense, is not unknown in the storage industry as it is a partner of DataCore, EMC, FalconStor, NetApp, Symantec, SyncSort and Veeam, but is mainly a distributor of virtualization software coming from VMware, but also Citrix, Microsoft and VizionCore.

The main Seanodes’ executives left their company including CEO Jacques Baldinger, GM Frank Gana and Marc Descamps, and founder and CTO Christophe Guittenit. The company had 30 people including 25 in R&D. Five engineers have joined Deletec.

Formerly Storagency, the French start-up was born in 2002 and based in Paris and Colomiers, near Toulouse, where was located its R&D team, with a small office in Cambridge, MA to get a foot in USA. It got around $14 million in several rounds of financial founding but it was not enough because the company signed few customers and then accumulate tiny revenues. A partnership was engaged with Lenovo to resell Exanodes for customers using three to five servers with storage hardware.

To try to reactivate and expand Seanodes’ activity, Eric Bueno and Deletec will have to find new customers to justify the arrival of new investors. It’s possible but today’s competition in much intense than few years ago.