Scality’s New U.S. CEO: We’re Looking For Partners That Can ‘Bring Solutions To Solve Business Problems’

‘I know it sounds very basic, but it is somebody who wants to help a client, not just provide hardware and software, but can also lay out a services solution with their customers, help them get the solution set up, but also operationally create the blueprint of how the client is going to run the solution and manage their data,’ says Peter Brennan, Scality’s U.S. CEO and global CRO.

Expanded Focus On The U.S. Object Storage Market

Object storage technology developer Scality, like most storage vendors, sees the U.S. as its biggest market. And for the fast-growing company, which was co-founded in 2009 by CEO Jerome Lecat, growth in the U.S. meant it needed to appoint its first U.S. CEO.

Scality didn’t have to look far. The company this month appointed Peter Brennan, who was brought on in March 2023 as its global CRO, to the position of U.S. CEO.

Brennan, who before joining Scality served as a vice president and managing director at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, told CRN in an exclusive meeting that his company is in a very competitive object storage market and needed a U.S. CEO to help take the burden off Lecat.

“There was nobody in the U.S. CEO position,” he said. “With the massive growth in revenue, our new partnerships, and our customer base and employee sides, it just became necessary to have a CEO running a business of this size.”

Scality directly competes with traditional storage vendors like Dell and NetApp, which have added object storage to their wider storage product portfolio, as well as a number of object-storage-focused companies, Brennan said.

However, the company partners closely with vendors on the data protection side like Commvault and Veeam Software to bring a scalable storage target to their customers, he said.

All of this, Brennan said, is focused on the channel where growing its solution provider community is one of its top priorities for 2024.

‘Now we’ve created very specific roles that are seeing huge engagement models with us,” he said. “It makes us crisper to our partners—the VARs, distribution—but also makes us crisper to Veeam, Commvault, HPE, Lenovo, etc., as to who does what. And we’re starting to see great things around account mapping between an OEM and a VAR and ourselves. We’re starting to do three-company events together. We’re very specific on account lists.”

Here is more from CRN's interview with Brennan.

Just to be clear, you are the new CEO of Scality’s U.S. operations, not for the company’s worldwide business, right?

I’m still the global CRO. But with our company and the explosive growth we see, the opportunity within the U.S. really warranted having a CEO running this business for us.

So prior to this, there was no CEO specifically running the U.S.?

That’s correct. At Scality, everything is rolled up to Jerome Lecat, my boss, who remains the global CEO and chairman. There was nobody in the U.S. CEO position. With the massive growth in revenue, our new partnerships, and our customer base and employee sides, it just became necessary to have a CEO running a business of this size.

How do you define Scality?

It’s one of the world’s premier object storage solutions for unstructured data and immutable backups.

It’s a very competitive space. What is Scality bringing to market that’s unique from the competition?

I think there’s two sides to that. One is, I would say that from a hybrid cloud point of view, we’re bringing a solution set that is industry-proven that is really helping clients act cloud-like with an unstructured data level they haven’t had to manage this way in their entire careers, probably. North of 60 percent of all the airline tickets in the world are on a Scality Ring. Some of the largest insurance companies, automakers, financial companies, health-care companies are providing real-time critical needs to their customers and patients. It’s run on Scality.

The second thing we offer, and it’s a very fast-growing business for us, and you probably see it every single day, is around immutable backups and the ability to really help keep clients protected. There was a great session on “60 Minutes” recently, a 15-minute presentation about how the hackers are really coming after U.S.-based companies with U.S.-based actors. Companies that have never had to think about if they get hacked—I think everyone’s kind of been worried—it’s now when they get hacked, what are they going to be able to do. That’s why we provide a very resilient solution that can really help clients of all sides with Artesca.

Scality Ring is the high-end, multi-site, high-availability solution that most of the big customers are using. The second product, which is quickly growing is Artesca. We launched it about three years ago. We’re expecting 5X growth on that product this year alone. Both products are channel-only. But Artesca really has a channel-led model where we’re helping clients who partner with ISVs like Commvault, Veeam and others to provide a one-stop solution for their clients as they’re laying out these cybersecurity solutions.

So you’re not looking to displace those companies?

No, sir. We partner with them every day.

Then who would you say are your top competitors?

The biggest are the big storage players. Companies like Dell or NetApp have a solution. [But] I’d say the cloud is No. 1. So you’re getting into where the data needs to sit, how resilient it needs to be, and how you have to access it. Those things really help us provide an operational road map to clients as much as a technology solution.

And then you have new upcomers. [Veeam co-founder] Ratmir Timashev and his team have built Object First, which is going after a very similar market with Veeam clients that we are with immutable backups. I think this is showing that there is a real need for a solution at the bottom of the market, the middle of the market, the top of the market. And we’re ready to take them all on, and we are today.

Scality was founded 15 years ago. Is the company profitable?

Yes, we are. We are funded for profitability. We had an excellent year last year. It was the strongest year we’ve ever had. This year, we’re expecting strong double-digit growth across the board. We had a very strong Q1 from a revenue point of view. And we’re expecting massive growth from an order point of view across both products.

Any numbers you can share with us?

Not right now. [But] it’s very strong. I will tell you I’m really pleased with the first year that I’ve had here. We did that by laying out the fundamentals and the basics of client engagement, being partner loyal, and being laser-focused on providing customer solutions. As a small company, we get excited to grow those things. We can sell our value to the customer. It’s amazing to see what clients want to talk to us about. We have one client who started with one important application for them. They now have over 200 on Scality Ring with us. We’re meeting with banks on Wall Street and around the world, and the banks are telling us that their No. 1 growth area for storage is all object-based. It’s their future. And as in many things, whether it’s hyperconverged infrastructure or file storage, when the banks start looking at it, generally the market starts to trend that way very quickly, within six to nine months. And so we know we have a very big market coming at us, and I think we’ve got our ‘A’ game ready to go.

Is Scality 100 percent channel-focused? Or do you also do some direct sales?

I would say in a sales motion we’re 100 percent channel. With every direct client that I have inherited coming on board, I have looked at every opportunity to bring a partner in to sell. There’s not one I will hold back. So we have clients and prospects in the exabyte scale that we’re talking to. They’re all with a partner.

Are you in channel recruitment mode? Are you looking for new partners?

One hundred percent. We just announced an agreement in the U.S. with Ingram Micro. We’re doing a very strong go-to-market campaign with them, with heavy recruitment to bring on dozens, and I do mean dozens, of partners every month that want to be focused on our solution with them.

What does Scality look for in a channel partner? What do they need to bring to the table talk to Scality?

It’s partners that are able to bring solutions that solve business problems. I know it sounds very basic, but it is somebody who wants to help a client, not just provide hardware and software, but can also lay out a services solution with their customers, help them get the solution set up, but also operationally create the blueprint of how the client is going to run the solution and manage their data. And then when bad things do happen, how they can recover.

What we’ve seen with some of these cybersecurity issues of late is that the clients realized that the data they have protected and stored isn’t usable, and now they’re having to build thousands and thousands of workstations, servers and data centers all over again because they didn’t lay out the right blueprint. Our value partners help us do that. We’re an important piece of it. But that overall strategy really is an amazing value that partners can bring to customers.

We are now in the second quarter of 2024. What are some of your strategic focuses or priorities for the rest of the year?

From a partner point of view, recruitment is really important to us right now. That is probably our No. 1 goal. In the midmarket, we launched an appliance late last year that I think is really another layer of protection for clients who probably haven’t had to make these types of cybersecurity decisions in the past. It’s an appliance based on Artesca that we sell through the channel. It becomes a very easy decision when a client is looking to get hardened backup software with a great immutable storage product. It's kind of the greatest burger and fries you’ll ever see. It makes it easy for businesses to choose their solutions with the small IT staffs and all the things that the midmarket has.

In addition to that, we have a real opportunity to help clients with a lot of this unstructured data as to where it sits. [Research firm] IDC is telling people that roughly 90 percent of the data being ingested right now is unstructured, and that clients need to be able to keep their thumbprint on it and understand where it is. That’s very new to customers. So helping them really understand in a very large scale where their data sits across sites, who can access it where and when, is a big push for us.

It’s also been very interesting for us to look at this and say we have a top account strategy with big opportunities as well as a velocity model. And I’m proud to say that in the last year we’ve been creating focus on this team on who does what. Before, everyone in a geo took care of whatever happened in their backyard, so to speak. Now we’ve created very specific roles that are seeing huge engagement models with us. It makes us crisper to our partners—the VARs, distribution—but also makes us crisper to Veeam, Commvault, HPE, Lenovo, etc., as to who does what. And we’re starting to see great things around account mapping between an OEM and a VAR and ourselves. We’re starting to do three-company events together. We’re very specific on account lists. So that has been a really good thing.

I’ve said it before: With great growth, it’s like putting gas on a fire. We are really pushing hard to do what we do best, being very specific in our messaging, and then going after the business knowing that we’ve got hundreds of thousands of customers to go after.

Has Scality ever made an acquisition?

I don’t believe so. We always look at the market. I’ve had those conversations since I’ve been here, but prior to me joining I don’t know of anything that we’ve done.

Could Scality someday make an acquisition?

I think it’s something that we always look at. As an overall corporate strategy, it comes down to how do we enhance what we’re currently doing? Like I said, we don’t want to get outside of what we do really well. So I’ll speak in broad terms that if we found solutions that really helped us layer in additional values and cybersecurity, I’m sure we would look at it. We’re in a great part of our company’s evolution where we’re able to look at things like that. And so we’ll see over time really what the market is pushing us to do. But right now I think our strategy is pretty strong.