Michael Thompson CEO, NooBaa

NooBaa Inc., into the object storage market, announced the appointment of Michael Thompson as CEO.

With a track record of driving startups to growth and successful exits, he will lead NooBaa to deliver on its vision of providing businesses with flexibility in the storage of massive amounts of unstructured data.

The company has also raised an early round of funding from its existing investors Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and OurCrowd, with a strategic investment from Akamai Technologies, Inc., in cloud delivery platform.

The funds will be used to bring NooBaa’s recently announced Enterprise Edition product to market, and scale the company in the United States.

“Mike Thompson has proven he can launch and grow new technology companies, and I am confident he will build a highly successful business at NooBaa that solves critical data storage problems for customers,” said NooBaa founder Yuval Dimnik. “We are also pleased to have the confidence of both existing investors and new investor Akamai as we bring our vision to market.”

“NooBaa’s approach to managing unstructured data across hybrid storage infrastructures, in an automated and intuitive way, provides a much-needed fabric for enterprises to optimize for efficiency and security in data placement and access,” said Andy Champagne, CTO, Akamai Labs. “As enterprises adopt multiple storage infrastructures for varied use cases, addressing the needs around automated management and vendor lock-in will become even more important. Akamai is excited to participate as a strategic investor in NooBaa, and to join Jerusalem Venture Partners and OurCrowd in helping NooBaa scale and realize its vision.”

Prior to joining NooBaa, Thompson was president and CEO of Sepaton, which was acquired by HDS/Hitachi. Prior to that, he served as executive chairman and CEO and president of Egenera, a pioneer of infrastructure virtualization, where he grew the company to $100 million in five years.

The hiring of  Thompson and the new funding come as the company achieved milestones:

• NooBaa Enterprise Edition launched: In early April the company announced availability of NooBaa Enterprise Edition, a software-based object storage solution that delivers the ultimate in infrastructure and business flexibility. The solution allows enterprises to consolidate unstructured data management across multiple locations and cloud environments in a simple and elastic manner. It provides full scale-out and high availability, public cloud integration, and a pay-as-you-go subscription license.
• New customer: Clouditalia Telecomunicazioni Spa, a cloud and telecommunications services provider in Italy, is deploying NooBaa across their datacenter network as part of a new storage-as-a-service and cloud archival service offering. It selected NooBaa over alternatives because it offers flexibility, could be deployed in their existing infrastructure, is simple to manage, and has a licensing model that enables businesses to start small and scale seamlessly over time as capacity needs grow.