Russ Kennedy Chief Product Officer, Nasuni

Nasuni Corp., i.e “NAS UNIfied”, one of the few historical cloud gateway players with Ctera Networks, Panzura, TwinStrata (acquired by EMC in 2014) and StorSimple (acquired by Microsoft in 2012), just recruited Russ Kennedy.

He came from IBM where he stayed two years following Cleversafe acquisition in 2015. He was before at CA Technologies, ThinIdentity, Cleversafe (1^st period), Pillar Data Systems, Sun and StorageTek.

The market is clearly now oriented towards a “cloudification” with a transition model based on hybrid schema.

Nasuni has morphed from a pure cloud gateway play to a real NAS play bridging on-premise storage to cloud entities providing an unlimited file storage experience. ESG has named this approach a Cloud Integrated Storage.

Founded in 2009, Nasuni has raised so far $116 million.

Comparing the management layer we saw a few years ago and the one today, the compay has clearly solidify the management and is ready to accelerate in the next few quarters as the opportunities window is not so large.

With cloud offering like Azure Stack or Oracle Cloud at Customer but also players such Avere Systems, Elastifile, Qumulo or WekaIO, we understand that Nasuni, and a few others, could be out of the picture rapidly. Also for a company of that age, it starts to be urgent to articulate a clear next step: IPO or exit, as we have doubt about becoming a billion dollars company alone. Without clear visible future steps, we’re afraid these few companies will join a zombie group reducing value for users and investors. In other words, we won’t be surprise to see one of them acquired as they represent a strategic component for some large IT vendors.