Nexsan, a specialist vendor in unified Storage is to spin out from Imation in a transaction with Spear Point Capital Management, that will make the company private. Imation leaders Bob Fernander, CEO, and Geoff Barrall, CTO will continue to run the Nexsan business and will have seats on the new board.
Going private and partnering with Spear Point Capital aims to strengthen Nexsan’s financial foundation ensuring continued growth and new product development. The investment from Spear Point will help fund engineering roadmaps, including plans for all-flash versions of Unity, and expansion of its block storage lines.
Additional investments in sales, marketing, and geographic expansion are expected. Continuing its 100% channel model worldwide, the newly private Nexsan will increase account coverage, including channel assistance and marketing initiatives to drive growth and customer adoption.
“This is a transformative move for Nexsan,” said Bob Fernander, CEO, Nexsan. “This will allow us to better serve our customers, enable our partners, and accelerate growth of our business. We’ve seen better than expected early traction with Unity and, as a private organisation, we look forward to being able to fulfill our vision at an accelerated rate; our vision of storage solutions that do more, cost less and provide greater value.”
Over the past year, Nexsan has been evolving as a company. In October 2015, it appointed Robert Fernander as CEO and acquired private cloud and file share company, Connected Data. Geoff Barrall, CTO of the new Nexsan led the development and launch of its flagship product Unity, a unified NAS & SAN storage product that adds enterprise file sync and share, multi-site sync and secure archive. The company invested in sales and marketing, and restructured manufacturing operations which increased gross margins by over 10%. As a result, the company is enjoying QoQ revenue growth, as seen in Imation’s most recent quarterly earnings report. The deal with Spear Point is expected to close in Q1 2017.