StorMagic’s move into the video market follows up their entry into encryption key management a year ago, also through an acquisition, and continues their strategy of dramatically increasing their TAM.
ARQvault search capability
Today, edge-focused hyperconverged infrastructure [HCI] vendor StorMagic is announcing the acquisition of digital storage and asset management provider SoleraTec. With the acquisition, SoleraTec’s technology has been reworked somewhat and rebranded as ARQvault, an active intelligent repository and video surveillance solution which StorMagic will now take to market through their own channel.
The SoleraTec acquisition comes almost exactly a year after StorMagic’s acquisition a year ago of Victoria B.C.-based encryption key management provider KeyNexus – and the two are closely connected from a strategy perspective.
“When I first came on from Spectra Logic and joined StorMagic, during that first quarter I was sent on a mission to scour the industry with an edge focus in mind,” said Brian Grainger, StorMagic’s CRO, who joined the company in January 2019 after almost 18 years at Spectra Logic. “We were strong in the HCI space, but we wanted to know what the other areas were in which edge customers experience pain.”
Grainger said that two things came out of this.
“One was a pain point around data security at the edge, including encryption and encryption key management. That led to our KeyNexus acquisition a year ago, which has done very well for us.”
The second issue, Grainger noted, has been the massive explosion of video growth stemming from the growth of massive amounts of unstructured data like video, audio, images and sensor data through digital transformation and IoT implementations.
“When I was at Spectra, I spun up a whole video surveillance division,” Grainger said. “The video market in general is something customers were seeing grow, and didn’t know how to manage.”
Grainger said that while StorMagic moved forward on security first, behind the scenes, they we were building their video strategy.
“This is the first stepping stone into video management for us,” he emphasized. “SoleraTec is based out of San Diego, and their product has been in GA for a while, with 4,000 installations around the world. They are a relatively small company with fantastic IP. Their name is not well-known however, because their business is almost 100% OEM, so the customers aren’t under the SoleraTec name. Those OEM relationships will continue to remain in place, but we are branding the solution as StorMagic ARQvault, and we are pushing that through our channel.”
Multiple live windows in same view within ARQvault
StorMagic ARQvault lets customers to gather this video, audio, and sensor data from anywhere, and store it as objects on any type of storage, including all-flash disk arrays, SAN, NAS, tape, optical or any public cloud. It can then be quickly searched so that customers can find any type of data fast, regardless of when it was written or where it currently resides. StorMagic estimates that this can save them at least 50% on their total storage expenditures.
“This is about us getting into the data management space in all kinds of video and media,” Grainger said. “The only difference between video and media is that with video you aren’t SUPPOSED to alter it later.”
The ARQvault platform reworks SoleraTec’s former offering, as well as rebranding it.
“We have repackaged it into multiple products,” Grainger said. “Some customers only want the video capture piece, which is ARQvault. Some also want analytics, so we packaged it into an ARQvault VMS, with the surveillance cameras, a scalable video wall and third-party analytics integration like license plate and facial recognition. By using additional modules on top of that, it lets us lower the price point, which is the most aggressive enterprise class VMS price point in the industry.”
The other modules coming out and available now are: File Ingest module; which lets users ingest any type of file into ARQvault, such as mugshot, fingerprint, 911 audio, images, and other evidentiary files; In-Car module, which is designed for police, delivery, and transportation organizations to capture and store footage from in-vehicle cameras; Body Cam module, which collects video captured from body-worn cameras; and Interview Room module, which is used in interrogation settings where in-room video and audio recording is desired.
“In addition to law enforcement, commercial accounts have also seen the need for Interview Room from an HR perspective,” Grainger indicated.
SoleraTec has had a media and entertainment product, but StorMagic’s media and entertainment module is not yet ready.
“It’s a roadmap item, along with some other products,” Grainger said.
All of the SoleraTec assets and people have been integrated into StorMagic.
“This was an asset purchase, including all the IP and software, and their engineering team is now part of StorMagic,” Grainger indicated.
This acquisition, like the KeyNexus one before it, fundamentally expand StorMagic’s Total Addressable Market [TAM], Grainger emphasized.
“Before KeyNexus, our TAM was a $10-15 billion dollar market,” he said. “KeyNexus increased our TAM by $8-10 billion – almost doubled it. This almost doubles it yet again. Video is roughly a $10 billion TAM globally. Underneath the video is a whole data management platform for us. Our future roadmaps in the next 12-18 months will likely double the size of our TAM from where we are today.”
