DataGravity: Transforming today’s dumb storage into tomorrow’s information
DataGravity is poised to transform the storage landscape. The company represents a once-in-a-decade opportunity to create an entirely new category of storage by unlocking the value of data that today sits idle in a storage system. I call the category “Storage Intelligence” and the transformation will be profound.
The story starts with DataGravity’s incredible founding team: Paula Long and John Joseph. Paula is a technical visionary in the storage world and was the co-founder of EqualLogic, a storage company acquired by Dell in 2008 for $1.4 billion. John was also an early member of the EqualLogic team and brings great talent in sales, marketing and operations. Unsatisfied with the pace of innovation in the storage world, Paula and John have teamed up again to royally disrupt the staid storage industry.
DataGravity’s focus on storage intelligence highlights entirely new thinking in storage innovation. We’ve seen hundreds of new storage companies in the past few years and most have followed the well-worn path of incremental feature development, focusing on storing dumb bits of data at lower cost with faster access. Interesting and incremental—hardly transformative. A race to zero does not make for a killer new category.
Unlocking the next generation of storage requires looking at stored data not as a dumb repository of expensive bits, but as the foundation for usable, intelligent information. We’ve overlooked the data as the true asset to our business and we store it away without giving any thought to what it’s saying about our business, our customers and our users. The DataGravity team will take what is considered an idle operating expense and convert it to near instant business value.
We’ve only begun to see the explosion of data and its value to businesses of all sizes. DataGravity’s mission of turning dumb storage into meaningful information will give new meaning to storage infrastructure. As data centers evolve and information becomes central to the competitive advantage of organizations, DataGravity will fill a storage need that goes far beyond the current storage developments of today.
I am pleased to be joining the board of DataGravity and working with the team that is going to transform storage.
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Peter Levine is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on enterprise investing.