Andrew Hall CEO, StrongBox Data Solutions

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Following the news unveiled a few days ago, we spoke with Andrew Hall, the new CEO for StrongBox Data Solutions, to learn more about the next steps of the company.

He confirmed that several people left the company following the decision from Partner One Capital. He insisted that the strategy is not an exit even if he agreed that this path is just a question of price.

Seen as a specific product aligned with high-demanding environments especially in HPC and scientific domains, StrongLink adoption hit a wall opening the door to competitors.

The second difficulty is the resistance of the previous team to facilitate integration with the rest of the VC product portfolio. And this created some friction for quite some time.

The financial firm has decided to reorient the product to a more generic world to boost revenue and accelerate its ROI and thus its potential multiple. They wish to reposition the company to address enterprise needs and, obviously, it will require some work around product deployment and ease of installation.

We were surprised by a small mistake made by Hall when we asked if a partner like Fujifilm will continue to promote StrongLink. Andrew Hall answered mentioning Fujitsu instead of Fujfilm creating some doubt in our mind but it's probably a simple miss.

The updated roadmap reflects this new direction and the business go-to-market has to be redesigned with a strong channel to penetrate various geos.

We'll see how the new team will execute on this plan both in terms of product refresh and market adoption.