(Old) Start-Up’s Profile: Object Matrix

Company
Object Matrix Limited

Headquarters
Cardiff, Wales, UK

Date founded
2003

Financial funding
YFM Venture Finance invested £250,000 in September 2007; total now at £500,000

Revenues and profitability
Under £1 million in 2011, at least £2 million projected in 2012; profitable since 2011

Main executives

• Jonathan (Jon) Morgan, CEO and co-founder, is an entrepreneur in designed software solutions, and was developer at FilePool.
• Nick Pearce-Tomenius, director of sales, marketing and alliances, co-founder, has a development, project management, commercial and sales background with EMC, Lucent and Qantas. Former player and fan of rugby.
• Spanish Francisco Ontoso-Ramos, CTO, has a background in software development, having studied and worked for over 15 years in the industry. He was with companies from start-ups to large corporations such as Sony and EMC where he was in charge of Centera’s APIs.
• Mark Andrews, head of sales, built sales from scratch for small IT companies such as FileTek and Honeywell Control Systems. Previous to Object Matrix, its position was senior account manager for HDS.
• Roger Fawcett, chairman, has recently retired from director of HP Network and Service Providers business unit across EMEA. Previously, he held senior executive roles in the IT and telecoms sectors including CEO of the Telecom Media Network division of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, CEO of Eircom UK as well as VP Lucent and AT&T.

Number of employees
10

Technology and product
Secure product to archive digital data on HDDs, MatrixStore is a data vault appliance positioned behind a tier-1 SAN to protect archives. The object-based software runs on Ubuntu and commodity hardware: a Supermicro computer with RAID-6 using Hitachi GST enterprise HDDs and LSI controllers.

MatrixStore scales from 12TB to multiple petabytes in a cluster with a minimum of three nodes communicating with each other using a local network through 1GbE or 10GbE connections. Every time data is stored in a vault, the API generates a hash (digest, digital fingerprint) of the content on the client and also on the two nodes the content lands on. Each time a new node is added to a MatrixStore cluster the performance improves.

Objects are stored in vault, a secure virtual storage space within a cluster that allows 256-bit encrypted data to be treated according to the policies that are provisioned upon that vault. It allows several departments within an organization to share the cluster whilst keeping their data protected from unauthorized access.

Vaults automatically make use of any new storage capacity that is added without manual intervention thus providing a scalable platform.

It includes a distributed index and search to find data instantly. DropSpot is an asset manager that allows to quickly copy data between any storage device and MatrixStore as well as to handle, add to and search on meta-data.

The MatrixStore File System is a local mounted file system representation of a vault. It allows data stored with other applications to be viewed as files in a file system interface.

Being an object-based storage solution, it can be utilized as a Digital Preservation System for long term archiving of digital media assets.

MatrixStore sits in digital production workflow using Avid, Adobe or Apple applications.

Released date
Software in November 2008, with appliances since 2009

Price range
£500 per TB, starting at £900, 12TB for $29,000

Roadmap
Automatic tagging; single-instance de-dupe as an option; automatic migration to LTO tape libraries with the help of XenData for file system

Partners
Marquis, Vidispine, MOG Technologies, Phoenix7, Avid, Apple, Ivory (in France, for sales strategy)

Distributors (no OEM)

• In UK: NMR, The Picture Exchange, Root6, ERA, Tyrell, Altered Images, Digital Garage
• Other European countries: Tyrell (Ireland), Video4 (Norway), DID Technology, Ivory, Nausica Media (France), Grupo Vitelsa (Spain), Media Online, Wellen Noethen (Germany), Telmaco (Greece), Fofic (Netherlands), Amptec (Benelux), Avision (Switzerland), JR-PVP (Poland)
• Rest of the world: MultiSale (Brazil), Spescom (South Afirca), Draco (Israel), Eurkea Pacific, Video Craft (Australia)

Number of customers:
The company had 3 two years ago, now 32, mostly in UK, deploying a total of 2.5PB including 1.5PB the last twelve months.

Main customers
EDF UK, British Telecom, Sony Pictutes, Nomura Bank, then Boomerang, Sumners, Avanti, Piranha Bar, BBC Cymru Wales, UTV, Mwnci, TV2 Norway, TV3 Ireland, ViaSat

Target market
First try to market in all the industries, then concentrate on customers that accept more easily new technology from a small company: broadcast, post-production, utilities, banking and creative agencies

Competitors
"Isilon and LTO", said Nick Pearce.