Panzura Acquires Moonwalk In Bid For Hybrid Multi-Cloud Data Management

‘We can look at all data. We have API-driven technology that allows us to scan, view, expose and protect billions of files every hour to very quickly assess and report on the data and then, using policies, to place that data exactly wherever it should go,’ says Panzura CEO Dan Waldschmidt about what the acquisition of Moonwalk will bring to the company.

Panzura, a developer of a cloud-based file system for hybrid multi-cloud end-to-end data management, Thursday unveiled the acquisition of Moonwalk Universal, which develops technology for advanced data assessment, mobility and storage optimization.

With the acquisition, for which no dollar value was provided, Panzura will be able to take its AI-based data management capabilities to hybrid multi-cloud environments, said Dan Waldschmidt, CEO of the Dallas-based company.

“Now we have Moonwalk, which allows our customers to have visibility over all of their data, not just Panzura data,” Waldschmidt told CRN. “So think about it. We can look at all data. We have API-driven technology that allows us to scan, view, expose and protect billions of files every hour to very quickly assess and report on the data and then using policies to place that data exactly wherever it should go.”

The acquisition, which comes just a week after rival Nasuni closed a funding round that valued it at $1.2 billion and just days after rival Ctera closed an $80 million funding round, will also be a major part of Panzura’s AI strategy, Waldschmidt said.

“[AI is forcing businesses] to put together data pipelines, data pathways that consolidate and aggregate data from all the different ways they’re doing business into a common location,” he said. “And it’s forcing the digital transformation that we’ve all been talking about and then adopting at different paces. It’s been forcing us to get really serious about it.”

Here’s more of CRN’s interview with Waldschmidt.

How do you describe Panzura?

Our core mission is to empower enterprises to do their best work. We’re a platform of data visibility, mobility and security tools that allow enterprises to solve the three biggest challenges they have: data loss, data delivery and data costs. And that’s the leadership role that we’re taking in this space.

Is Panzura a profitable company?

We are well on our way to becoming cash-flow-break-even in October.

Any plans to dip into the funding well again?

There are lots of opportunities that are red-hot given what Nasuni has scared up in the market. There’s been lots of conversations on our end. But look, we’re building a company strategically that’s built to last. And so for us, that’s great culture, strong recruiting and profit leading us to healthy growth year over year.

Any plans for an IPO?

Oh, that would be juicy news. No, not at all. If I can answer that, I would like to tease you with something else: We are building a company that is stable and highly performant. We’re the leader in the enterprise space. You’ve gotten Nasuni, who does a fantastic job in SMB and midrange. You’ve got Ctera, which owns the government space. Our customers count on us to be here 15 to 20 years from now or more. And so we’re building a company that not only listens but is stable enough to take whatever the economy throws at us and be profitable.

Nasuni just last week unveiled a huge new $1.2 billion valuation and a big round of funding. What does that say about your industry in general? And does it give you any ideas?

We’ve been hearing from our enterprise customers for a while now that they want to do more with moving their data around. If you look at the three big pains we solve—data loss, data delivery and data costs—that second one, data delivery, there’s a lot of conversation about ransomware, how you stop exfiltration, and things like that. But the most challenging issue is data delivery. How do you get all the data from the edge into a centralized repository so you can do things like AI? Also, how do you get information from the core delivered out to the edge? It’s a multibillion-dollar problem that enterprises are facing. It’s requiring them to spend money on duplicative data sets and on storing data that’s gotten stale and is rotten. And so you may have too much data, but you can’t delete any of it. And it’s a serious issue. Panzura fills that gap in the market with what you need: the right data at the right place at the right time, all wrapped in a blanket of the world’s most immutable security.

How is AI impacting how Panzura works with customers?

It’s exposed an issue that AI is forcing enterprise leaders to figure out how to get all this data that they know exists because they stumble across it anecdotally. It’s requiring them to put together data pipelines, data pathways that consolidate and aggregate data from all the different ways they’re doing business into a common location. And it’s forcing the digital transformation that we’ve all been talking about, and then adopting at different paces. It’s been forcing us to get really serious about it.

How does Panzura use AI as part of its own technology?

We look at AI a little differently. Again, our core, because we’re going after the enterprise, is stability and performance. These are the two guiding lights that we’re always using: how stable can we be and how performant can we be. Our customers are also looking at security and privacy. We need to deliver a combination of these four factors to them that listens to where they’re headed directionally and provides the tools to get there. We’ve been using AI and are investigating additional ways to increase the desirability of our platform. For a very complex RFA [request for assistance] that a customer has that would normally take 14 or 15 days to solve due to environmental impact, bandwidth limitations, all kinds of things that organizations have in their environment, we now can use AI to crunch through many millions of lines of log files and target a solution in minutes or hours. We’ve already seen our support times come from days down to hours. And if you look at our average time for solving a P-1 [top priority] ticket, we’re 300 percent faster using AI-driven and AI-informed solutions, our own home-built solutions, than we were four months ago.

Talk about Panzura’s Moonwalk acquisition.

It made fantastic sense. Listening to our enterprise customers, we’re building a platform. Most people know us as the makers of CloudFS, the most secure, fastest way in and out of hybrid environments. But customers were also saying, wouldn’t it be nice if you also did these other things? And since January, we’ve expanded our portfolio beyond CloudFS to include Panzura Data Services and Panzura Edge. Now we have Moonwalk, which allows our customers to have visibility over all of their data, not just Panzura data. So think about it. We can look at all data. We have API-driven technology that allows us to scan, view, expose and protect billions of files every hour to very quickly assess and report on the data and then, using policies, to place that data exactly wherever it should go.

Moonwalk has been around for how long?

Ten-plus years.

And is it a profitable company?

They’re not very far from it. The job Moonwalk was primarily focused on was tiering and archiving solutions for a long time. But recently, the focus for that company, both from the customer base perspective as well as from the internal development product perspective, was to gain visibility of what is actually going on in the entire data footprint in an enterprise and make sure customers can prove the dependability of their data sets. That’s one angle. Moonwalk also made sure customers can stitch together data pipelines and make the data available in the right place at the right time for any AI workloads. And we are building on that theme.

Will Moonwalk’s technology continue to be available as a stand-alone offering or will it be completely integrated into Panzura?

Initially, there will be more announcements and some of the road map will be visible in the future. But for now the focus is making sure that the Moonwalk customers have a transition path, a clear transition via the wider support that we can provide. There are a lot of interesting pieces underneath the Moonwalk technology that will be nicely brought into the product portfolio.

Panzer is a 100 percent channel-focused company, right?

We are. We also have distribution through Climb Channel Solutions as well. Moonwalk will be 100 percent channel, like we are, and we’re excited about that. Actually, they have strong channel relationships on their own and have their product available as OEM products in the markets. They’ve extended their channel in a bunch of different ways and embedded their technology in a couple of different key spaces. So there’s a lot of alignment between their go-to-market and our existing go-to-market.

Has Moonwalk technology been embedded with any products that might be considered competitive to Panzura’s?

No, no, no. It’s super complementary, for sure. We will talk with Moonwalk customers about our product portfolio, and with our extensive customer base about the Moonwalk product technology. It’s super complementary. We are not seeing any real competitiveness anywhere there.

So existing OEM relationships will be kept going forward?

Existing OEM relationships will evolve, but the relationships will be maintained, for sure. … As we incorporate it into the U.S. with our sales base and support base here, obviously some of these relationships will further evolve.