Natick's Nasuni Seeks To Disrupt Storage Market
Nasuni, a startup based in Natick, is bringing its cloud-based data storage to automobile components maker Inteva Products, it announced.
Nasuni marketing director Connor Fee said Michigan-based Inteva is not Nasuni's largest client. But with 42 locations spanning 18 countries, it is on the larger end for the growing Nasuni.
"Most of our clients have five to 15 locations," Fee said.
Growth Presented Storage Challenge
Though the Inteva name was created in 2008 after Delphi Automotive spun off its interior business to the Renco Group, a New York City-based holding company, it's comprised of a handful of auto companies dating back as far as 141 years.
Inteva traces its earliest corporate heritage to German carriage supplier Traugott Golde in 1872.
After Renco bought Delphi's interiors division, Inteva's growth went into hyperdrive — more than doubling by 2011.
Inteva manufactures things like sunroofs, interiors — like consoles and glove boxes — electronics and motors for automakers. It also serves the defense and consumer markets.
With more than 9,000 employees, it became time for a more streamlined way to store and access data, according to Fee. The current setup was becoming unsustainable, he said.
"They were constantly running out of space in one of their 42 offices," he said. "I mean, I could watch my own hard drive, but watching 42 is not easy."
Fee said Inteva engineering teams in Germany and India would have situations where they would need to access large files for their work. Transferring those files between the two offices could take six hours, he said. Backing up data was an equally cumbersome endeavor.
"This (system) was unsustainable," said Fee.
Now, he said, Inteva's IT team doesn't have to worry about its expanding data volume because it's using a storage-as-a-service (Saas) model through the cloud.
"They can tap into a service and never have to deal with that problem again," he said.
Name Describes Mission
Broken down, Nasuni's name describes what it does.
"Nas" is network attached storage, with the cloud as its back end. And "uni" symbolizes the company's unification of storage backup, off-site data protection and access.
Nasuni focuses on enterprise companies that are spread across the globe, said Fee. Its buy-space-as-you-go approach allows companies to scale their storage according to their needs.
Fee compared Nasuni's SaaS product with buying electricity, or with file-sharing through Dropbox. You just upgrade if you need more space. "You just buy more terabytes," he said. (Each terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes.)
Nasuni also features a mobile-access component to its system. While that alone isn't the draw for most of its customers, Fee called it the "cherry on top."
Five to 10 percent of Inteva employees travel all the time, he said, and need this capability.
For Inteva, rollout of the new IT infrastructure is underway. Fee said they were at a little over a terabyte late last week, starting with headquarters. From there, the system will continue to roll out across its manufacturing plants, engineering, finance, sales, and marketing offices.
Nasuni has received three funding rounds to date totaling $43 million. Its Series C Round came in October from existing backers as well as a new, unnamed investor.
Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez had this to say when announcing a $20-million round in late October:
"Before Nasuni, it simply was not possible to give dozens of offices across the globe high-performance access to a single storage volume, and customers have responded enthusiastically. This is not storage tiering or cloud archive, but primary storage delivered as a service. Combining this type of true innovation with the fact that our revenue has grown year over year by a factor of ten, and you can understand why investor interest was so strong."
WBJ Web Partners
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