StorCentric expands its empire

StorCentric, an alternative player in primary and secondary storage, continues its acquisition journey with Violin Systems, its 5th one in less than 2 years. Mihir Shah is ambitious and is always looking for bargains, this time Violin was under the radar. And I have a few other names... it's just a question of price.

StorCentric was started in 2005, 15 years ago, with this idea of holdings of companies' assets with historically Nexsan, Drobo, Vexata and Retrospect Software serving SMB and enterprise with various offerings from capacity to high performance products and from hardware to data protection software.

On the Violin Systems side, it represents the end of a pioneer even if it was already the case a few times but finally virtually survived. What a failure, hope it will serve as an example. And even if the company was led by some famous leaders, one success doesn't imply successive ones. A lesson to keep in mind...

Different iterations for Violin as it was seen as a revolution player introducing super fast flash array for tier 1 storage needs for high demanding applications and then move incrementally to a more standard model limiting its market footprint and attraction. But the company still has some interesting IP especially with X-IO acquisition several questers ago.

For StorCentric, it's a very good deal accumulating expertise to unify with Vexata and Nexsan confirming that StorCentric gains a serious alternative vendor status to replace some other classic ones. Well done Mihir and team.