Pavilion Data Ceases Operations

One more disillusion just raised in the industry with the Pavilion Data failure.

The IT Press Tour plans to visit Pavilion Data on October 12, but it appears that it will be their last day of operations and they obviously can’t join us in this situation.

We received a strange email a few days ago asking us to be on a call a few minutes on October,10. I have anticipated a potential problem for … the 3rd time as Pavilion already postponed 2 times its participation. We really hoped that this meeting would happen as Shridar Subramanian, the current and last CMO, confirmed having some good content to share a few weeks ago. Of course we tried to have some contacts with them but the company never replied following their last email received October 10 you can see below.

This story has some similarities with a few others especially Vexata, acquired finally by StorCentric, and this time the latter can’t save the story.

The various players all with some interesting dimensions such E8 Storage, acquired by AWS, Apeiron who has iterated several lives, Mangstor and its Exten “extension” finally swallowed by OVHcloud or Excelero who landed at Nvidia as a bargain, Violin, also finally acquired by StorCentric after several iterations, all these stories ended miserably. We could add StorCentric itself, with Nexsan and Vexata brand, also in deep difficulties for a few quarters now. And it could be considered as a big surprise as they all played in the NVMe/NVMeF space. Surfing on a hot standard doesn’t offer some sort of guarantee.

Here at least $360 million of VC money has evaporated. We continue to monitor carefully players like Ligthbits Labs, StorPool or Smart IOPS we met yesterday October 11. The opportunity window seems to be opened for just a few years until gorillas jumped into the domain as places for challengers are limited even for early “champions”.

In the case of Pavilion, we saw some difficulties in the past under several CEOs leadership and even the last round of $45 million raised at the beginning of 2022 didn’t change the destiny, just extended the life in a survival mode. Reasons could be multiple and for sure Covid had an impact especially coupled with others elements like long sales cycle and low market traction.

It seems that the current team was unable to raise a new round as the company already received $104 million. It was also almost impossible to find an acquirer, it is just a question of price so as it will become official and more visible, some entities could approach and make bids like StorCentric did in the past.

And the question remains open: was it an execution problem, a product problem, a team problem, a sales one or a mix of several, etc.? We’ll probably get some confirmation in a few weeks by some future ex employees or executives. Never a good story to tell.