Nirvanix Closes $10 Million B Round

Nirvanix Inc. announced the appointment of Scott Genereux as President and Chief Executive Officer and a capital infusion of an additional $10M from primary investors Intel Capital, Mission Ventures, Valhalla Partners, and Windward Ventures.

The company expects that this combination of executive leadership and additional investment will expand market penetration of its Storage Delivery Network (SDN) on a global scale.

With clusters of powerful data centers from Los Angeles to Frankfurt, multiple petabytes of capacity under management, and unparalleled high availability technology with greater than 99.999% uptime, Nirvanix’s SDN is highly differentiated from the scalability-challenged offerings in the marketplace today. It provides companies with the ability to flexibly store, protect, and access their large content files in the cloud with bulletproof levels of security and data protection.

  Genereux joins Nirvanix from QLogic Corp. where he most recently served as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing. While at QLogic Genereux spearheaded an aggressive sales push to expand the company’s presence in Fibre Channel and InfiniBand switching, forging design wins at tier-one OEMs such as Dell, EMC, HP, and IBM.

Prior to QLogic, he was at DataDirect Networks (DDN), as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Support. At DDN, Genereux increased revenue in 2008 at a rate twice as fast as the prior year; expanded the company into new market segments; significantly raised its profile in the industry and introduced its first-ever indirect channel organization.

Prior to DDN, Genereux headed up a $2.7B global storage business for Hitachi, Ltd.’s Data Systems unit (HDS) as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Support. Genereux spent 18 years at Hitachi in strategic sales, marketing and support roles with increasing levels of responsibility. He is credited with significantly expanding the company’s addressable market by focusing the global sales organization on midrange storage platforms and heterogeneous virtualization solutions while diversifying its revenue stream through HP, Sun and over 1,500 VARs worldwide.

"The cloud collision is going on now," said David Ryan, Managing Partner, Mission Ventures. "Once customers sift through the barrage of offerings from vendors that simply appended the ‘cloud’ label to aging products and services designed for a different era, we are confident that they will see the tangible business benefits of Nirvanix’s SDN, with its massive scalability designed to handle millions of users and billions of files under a single global namespace."

"There is a confluence of multiple factors that are driving customers to adopt public cloud services for their data and content storage needs," said Scott Genereux, President & CEO, Nirvanix. "The need to reduce annual capital expenditures for IT equipment; the need to reduce energy costs across the enterprise; the fact that private data centers are simply running out of physical floor space – coupled with significant advances in virtualization, network bandwidth and security – is leading many emerging and established companies to look to cloud service providers to obtain their IT resources based specifically on actual business usage. I’m confident that superior economics and superior technology will enable Nirvanix to penetrate new markets and take market share in the coming year."

"Nirvanix is well positioned to further expand its cloud storage service lead, particularly in the entertainment and health care sectors and Fortune 1000 enterprises," said Charles Curran, General Partner, Valhalla Partners. "Scott brings a history of consistent, systematic execution and proven sales management skills balanced with an aggressive, dynamic approach that will be a strong addition to the Nirvanix executive team."

Genereux succeeds Jim Zierick who will continue to serve on Nirvanix’s Advisory Council.