Looking to jumpstart growth and significantly expand its international footprint, StorageCraft Technology Corporation, a backup and disaster recovery vendor based in Draper, Utah, has accepted a $187 million investment from TA Associates, a Boston-based private equity firm.
Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but include the appointment of Jonathan Meeks, a managing director at TA Associates, to the StorageCraft board of directors and the naming of Matt Medeiros as the company’s new chairman and CEO. A long-time industry veteran, Medeiros was previously general manager of security software at Dell SonicWALL, and served as SonicWALL’s CEO and president from 2003 until Dell’s acquisition of the company in 2012.
TA Associates’ capital will position StorageCraft to turn a consistently profitable and growing company into a larger, global player in the BDR market, according to Curt James, StorageCraft’s vice president of marketing and business development. “We knew that we had a lot of upside potential,” he says. “It just made sense for us to bring in some additional leaders as well as financial backing so we could accelerate those parts of the business.”
Medeiros points to three specific growth opportunities as priorities for the future, the first of which is radically enlarging the company’s product portfolio. “We have an opportunity to double the number of new products we deliver to the marketplace,” he says. Those new solutions will be “adjacent” to the company’s existing product lines rather than in entirely new categories, he continues.
StorageCraft resellers can expect some of those products to have a vertical industry focus, as Medeiros says that forging new alliances with vertically-oriented OEMs will be another of StorageCraft’s three key goals. Medical imaging systems and the “body camera” video systems that many police departments are now deploying are just two of many industry-specific solutions presently generating enormous amounts of data in need of protection. Working with manufacturers that know those markets and have existing solutions for them is a faster, more practical way for StorageCraft to pursue those opportunities than starting from scratch on its own, Medeiros says.
StorageCraft’s third area of emphasis under its new leadership will be adding overseas partners and customers. Though StorageCraft already has offices in major cities around the world, Medeiros notes, the bulk of its revenue comes from North America at present. “We’ve got to do better,” he says, adding that his goal is to grow the company’s global presence to the point that international business accounts for 60 percent of overall income.
Despite all the talk about expansion and change, James stresses that StorageCraft’s commitment to its current partners and solutions remains strong. “We’ll continue to be supportive of the segments we currently work in,” he says.
A global private equity investor with offices in Boston, Menlo Park, London, Mumbai, and Hong Kong, TA Associates has raised $24 billion since its founding in 1968 and has extensive ties to the technology sector, including a September 2015 investment in enterprise legal management solution provider Miratech. The company also made headlines last October when it bought Seattle, Washington-based global asset management firm Russell Investments from the London Stock Exchange Group for $1.15 billion.
“We are excited about this investment and to welcome a highly credentialed technology executive like Matt to the company,” said Meeks in a press statement.
Medeiros is excited about his new position as well, noting that StorageCraft has great people, great partners, and a $100 million annual revenue stream. “This is not a company that needs to do a turnaround,” he observes. It does, however, require fresh leadership to take the next big step in its evolution, he adds. “The difference between $100 million and $300 million is quite substantial,” says Medeiros, noting that his background running major technology vendors positions him well to manage a bigger, more global StorageCraft.
“The real thing is to stay focused on those things that matter most to our customers,” he says.
