StorageCraft Gets $187 Million Equity Investment

Channel-focused business recovery vendor StorageCraft Technology Corp. is getting a private equity investment of $187 million, as well as a new chairman and CEO in SonicWALL veteran Matt Medeiros, the company announced Wednesday.

Medeiros was the longtime president and CEO of SonicWALL when Dell bought the channel-centric security company in 2012. He had been at Dell as a vice president and general manager of security products since the acquisition.

The investment comes from TA Associates, a private equity firm based in Boston that has raised $24 billion in capital since it was founded in 1968. Some of the firm's previous technology investments include AVG, Nintex and Idera.

With a signed definitive agreement to invest, the deal is pending regulatory approval in Australia and is expected to close by the end of the month. As part of the changes, StorageCraft CEO Jeff Shreeve is retiring. Medeiros will have an ownership stake in the company, as will previous owner-executives Curt James, Scott Barnes, Brandon Nordquist and Mike Kunz. TA Associates Managing Directors Jonathan W. Meeks and Jason P. Werlin will join the StorageCraft Board of Directors.

In a telephone interview Wednesday morning, Medeiros said StorageCraft's channel partners should expect even more attention and commitment from the 300-employee company, which opened a new headquarters facility in Draper, Utah, last year.

"We are, in fact, a channel company. We only have one way to go to market, and that's through our channel," Medeiros said. Both directly and through relationships with remote monitoring and management (RMM) providers and OEMs, StorageCraft's products are in use by more than 10,000 MSPs.

"Part of the reason TA's investing in the company is how do we double our partner count globally in the next 18 months?" Medeiros said. While the biggest greenfields for partner count growth are in the Asia/Pacific region, Japan and Latin America, Medeiros said there are also still opportunities for expansion in North America.

StorageCraft has traditionally developed its technology organically, including the recent broadening of its ShadowProtect technologies from its Windows base to also cover Linux and the development from the ground up of a new architecture for cloud backup.

Asked if the infusion of private equity money would lead to growth by acquisitions, Medeiros suggested that would not be his immediate focus. One of the reasons the investment was attractive to TA Associates, Medeiros said, was because StorageCraft had a large amount of intellectual property for a company of its size.

"In the near term, I think we have a lot in our development pipeline, and we're very pleased with it. Our organic development is really working. It doesn't mean we won't be looking at inorganic opportunities," he said.

Meanwhile, the company is also planning to ramp up its resources for partners, with overhauls of the partner program and the partner portal in the second half of the year, said Curt James, vice president of marketing and business development. The company also plans to launch its first partner conference in 2016 and make the show an annual event.

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 13, 2016