SageCloud, Stealthy Start-Up in Cloud Storage

Established in 2012, SageCloud Inc., in Marblehead, MA, has closed a $3.2 million in equity investment coming from nine investors, according to SEC filing published in August 2012.

Individuals listed in this offering include Jeffry Flowers, David Friend and Susan E. Pravda, managing partner of the Boston office of Foley & Lardner.

What’s is doing this start-up in stealth mode? On its web site, you can read: "SageCloud is a new generation of backup, archive and big data storage," and "Our mission is to provide enterprise with cloud storage in excess of one petabyte with a cloud storage that include hardware, software, support and consulting services."

Also, according to the company, the scalable solution is designed for long-term retention of unstructured data, with write-once, data retention policies and time stamping of data for regulations, with automated management and open compute platform compatibility. It allows to tier different performance levels and it’s possible to share disk space among company’s users.

That’s all the firm revealed and it’s not enough to know what it is preparing, probably a service like Carbonite as the big majority of its executives are coming from this public company:

• David Friend, COB: He has been a technology entrepreneur for over 25 years. After serving as president of ARP Instruments, he co-founded four companies: Sonexis, FaxNet, Pilot Software, and Computer Pictures. He is currently chairman and CEO of Carbonite. He is an avid marathoner, distance cyclist, windsurfer, and hiker.
• Jeff Flowers, CEO:  He co-founded Sonexis, FaxNet, Pilot Software and more recently Carbonite with David Friend. In 2009, while at Carbonite, he was named CTO of the Year by the Mass Technology Leadership Council. He left Carbonite in April 2012 yet remains a member of the board of directors. In addition to the three companies he co-founded, he served as VP of engineering at Computer Pictures. He also served as VP of development at ON Technology Corporation, a software vendor that provided groupware and utility products for Apple and Novell Netware operating environments. During Jeff’s tenure, ON Technology completed its IPO.
• Mark Rees, CTO: Its 35-year career in the software industry included several years at Prime Computer back in the 80s where he met Flowers. Since then he has collaborated with him in a number of start-ups including Pilot Software, FaxNet and most recently Carbonite. He has also run his own software companies in Europe.
• Yaron Naor, VP business development: He has been helping global technology-centric organizations fine-tune their GTM strategy and develop strategic partnerships for over 16 years. His industry experience includes communication, wireless, networking and security solutions at hi-tech companies such as Radware, Telcordia (acquired by Ericsson), and Guardium (acquired by IBM). At Comverse, he led the design, sale, delivery and support of several telco-grade products.
• David Skok, board member:  He worked as an investor at JBoss, Netezza, AppIQ, CloudSwitch, Tabblo and Diligent Technologies.

From left to SageCloud’s team members Mark Rees, Andy Brown, Robert Myhill, Jeff Flowers, and Jim Koschella, all of them but Koschella being formerly at Carbonite.