As you may have noticed from the recent press, after a 10-year journey as a UK tech startup, Storage Made Easy has been acquired by file data services leader, Nasuni Corporation.
Behind every successful start-up there is usually a smart, hard-working team and SME is no different. Along the journey I have had the privilege of working with bright, multi-disciplined people who have contributed to the company’s success. It has been a sincere pleasure working with all the people who have worked at SME, both past and present, and I look forward to continuing to work with all of them together along side the current team at Nasuni.
When I first started Storage Made Easy, I had a vision of a software product that did not ship with any storage offering, but one that provided a single access point for corporate data, which was typically spread in data silos across on-premises and cloud data solutions. The vision was to provide a single location where companies could easily enable access for their users to their unstructured content while also being able to set common policies across the silos.
With prospects we often joked that we don’t provide storage, but we do make the storage they have easier to use. In turn, our prospects and customers affectionately referred to us as ‘SME’ which can often also mean “subject matter expert” and, over time, the product evolved into The Enterprise File Fabric as it is today.
SME’s vision embraced multi-cloud early. The very first cloud connector we built was for Amazon S3 and this was long before AWS was the de-facto enterprise choice it is today. Way before multi-cloud had crossed the chasm, the company’s tagline was ‘the multi-cloud company’ and yet back then companies did not understand why they would ever use more than one cloud, they knew they wanted that choice to decide.
In those 10 years since inception, the growth of digital data has occurred at an unprecedented scale. Initially we were dealing with low-end Terabytes of data, which quickly moved to low end Petabytes. As we end our journey as an independent company, we find ourselves dealing with customers with mid- to high-end Petabyte storage requirements, while some companies are already thinking about Exabytes of storage.
As digital data continues to grow, companies have had to accelerate their transition to cloud. The pandemic of course accelerated this and post covid, ‘hybrid’ and ‘remote’ has become the normal way of working for many employees.
In that 10-year window the number of challenges facing enterprise organizations has also vastly increased. Concerns about cybersecurity, ransomware attacks, data compliance, remote working etc now dominate CISO and CIO conversations. All issues that the combination of Nasuni and SME help solve.
So why now? We started working with Nasuni as a partner about 3 years ago and the traction Nasuni has in the enterprise is far ahead of others trying to offer cloud-based file data services. When Nasuni approached SME about an acquisition, I felt that together Nasuni and SME had a real opportunity to disrupt the large legacy file services products that are used in the enterprise today. Being able to provide a globally accessible file system, whether in the office or remote, at speed, backed by best of breed object storage, with always on ransomware protection, is a game changer for many companies across many industries.
It is the end of one journey, but the beginning of another and I’m looking forward to being part of what our customers, partners and prospects will see from us moving forward.
Jim Liddle, CEO at Storage Made Easy.
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Jim Liddle
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