DataCore made a big mistake acquiring ridiculous assets

DataCore, a recognized software-defined storage player, just announced a crazy news with the acquisition of Arcastream from Kalray, the file storage business, acquired in 2022 by the french company from the UK Arcapix entity. The news was postponed 2 times and the call I had with Dave Zabrowski, CEO, and Abhijit Dey, CPO, confirmed that they live in a different world and are disconnected from the reality and file storage forces, presence, trends and drivers on the market. The image below illustrates the trajectory of the company, they made 2 good acquisitions, MayaData and Caringo, others are just gadgets. They had an agreement with Hammerspace for the product vFilO, probably too early, but it was a good choice, of course they didn't own it.

Regarding Arcastream, the IP is ridiculously weak adding light software and service on top IBM Storage Scale. They have Ngenea, an old HSM model using stubs that can generate traffic to Swarm, yes potentially, but for how many accounts.

Don't be abuse by this, DataCore doesn't acquire or owns any file system with this move. The transaction is between $15 and $20 million according to the details which represents a third of what DataCore raised a few months ago.

The race to grow the valuation to sell the company is a fair mission but picking this one is just incredible. What a big mistake.

As I wrote on StorageNewsletter, DataCore management would have been better inspired to target players, even very different from their offerings, such as Egnyte, JuiceFS, LucidLink, MooseFS, Peer Software, Quobyte, Resilio, StorONE, ThinkParQ, Tiger Technology or Tuxera... Rozo Systems has been acquired by Hammerspace in 2022, Compuverde by Pure Storage in 2019 or Elastifile by Google also in 2019 and DataCore missed these 3 interesting solutions. And we don't mention Sanbolic bought by Citrix in 2015 before Zabrowski's era. But none of them would have been cost less than $20 million, sorry, I should only 2, one already gone but one still available at that price in my above list. What a brilliant due diligence they did...

We'll see and we'll speak again about that move, I will follow carefully that new solution within DataCore.