Datera Shakes Leadership Team

Several months ago, Datera, Inc. announced +500% Y/Y in 1H19 and last February the company confirmed a brilliant FY219 with +325% growth so we anticipated a positive FY2020 as Datera and SDS are hot.

Then the first doubt appeared with the departure of past CEO and co-founder Marc Fleischmann mid-April, it was the first surprise as the company he co-founded seemed to be in a good position.

And a few days ago, we learned that the CTO Hal Woods, Claudio Fleiner, chief Architect and co-founder, and Chris Cummings, CMO, disappeared from the orgchart and left the company. Woods writed a message on LinkedIn a few days ago saying he got laid off gave us strange feelings. Nicholas Bellinger, the third co-founder, is still there. Flavio Santoni, former CRO, is now president. We tried to contact Guy Churchward and Chris Cummings on May 7 but none of them answered.

We understand that executives represent highest salaries in a company so a cut should be possible but how can a company continue to develop product and introduce them to the market if the CTO, architect and CMO and many others left. Something is missing here.

Is it a strategy divergence at the executive and board level? Fleischmann was a board member.

Is it just a cash issue? Should we count days for Datera? Does the company enter a survival mode trying to find an urgent exit or enough money to delay the cliff with drastic constraints? One of the 2 investors – Khosla Ventures – was also a long time Panzura investor who finally found an exit recently. Does it mean something here?

Some companies love bargains so if problems are confirmed, Datera could reappear somewhere for sure especially at HPE who is a key Datera partner. Datera belongs to the HPE Complete partner program for Block SDS – and HPE did good deals with Nimble Storage and SimpliVity. It would be a good successor to continue in the direction initiated by LeftHand Networks.

Also this is pretty strange for a CEO to write a few sentences on Reddit forum to answer doubt public has, explaining a pivot … not even a blog on company website neither a PR. There is also a short LinkedIn message but nothing more. This strategy invites for a bigger doubt on the situation.

Churchward, CEO of the company since December 2018, explains that the goal is still to be cash flow positive by the end of FY20. He was CEO of LogLogic when Tibco acquired the company in 2012 for $130 million for $40million raised (announced April 3 and closed April 12, 2012), and more recently, also CEO of DataTorrent, the company closing its doors.