Denver-based Faction, a leading managed provider of multi-cloud environments, announced it has raised $14 million in funding. This funding round was led by Dell Technologies Capital. Existing investors River Cities Capital Funds, Sweetwater Capital, Meritage Funds and Charterhouse Strategic Partners also participated in this round. And Faction also secured new debt financing from ORIX Growth Capital along with the equity financing.
With this funding round, the company is going to accelerate enterprise adoption of multi-cloud storage and managed services. And the funding will be used for broadening Faction’s Hybrid Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (HDRaaS) across public clouds and enabling multi-cloud storage via deeper integrations with leading storage portfolio solutions.
“Throughout 2018, Faction saw an explosion of interest in customers looking for cost-effective solutions for running VMware Cloud on AWS. We have experienced impressive growth in our Hybrid Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service and Faction Cloud Control Volumes for VMware Cloud on AWS offerings” said Faction founder and CEO Luke Norris in a statement. “The need for high-performance and scale-out storage that can expand with customers’ needs across clouds including Azure, AWS, Google Compute Engine and VMware Cloud on AWS is only going to increase. This investment will enable us to reach more customers faster with an even stronger portfolio of managed multi-cloud solutions.”
According to a Gartner report, the future of cloud adoption is going to be dominated by a hybrid and multi-cloud model. And the company states that 75% of organizations will have deployed a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud model by 2020. Plus the market size for the cloud is growing exponentially and is projected to be a $317 billion industry by 2022.
“Faction’s patented technologies and services provide a powerful best-in-class solution for enterprises looking to extend their data centers or migrate workloads to cloud,” added Dell Technologies Capital managing director Daniel Docter. “VMware Cloud Foundation and Faction, powered by leading storage platforms, are directly addressing customer demand for a multi-cloud world.”
This investment will enable Faction to seize on the opportunity with a portfolio of services for challenging enterprises experience as their environments expand across multiple hyperscale cloud providers. Specifically, there are three key product areas that the investment will be used:
1.) Hybrid Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (HDRaaS) — Faction’s HDRaaS offers a warm standby approach to Disaster Recovery with VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services. And the solution provides additional methods for replication and ways to land customers’ data in VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services while reducing the costs of disaster recovery.
2.) Multi-Cloud: Faction Cloud Control Volumes (CCV) — This enables cross-cloud storage for customers using Faction private cloud, public clouds, and VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services. The storage platforms are strategically located in data centers to deliver low cost and low latency connections to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Plus Cloud Control Volumes centralize data in a dedicated and durable location so customers can seamlessly share data between different applications across different cloud environments.
3.) Global Expansion of VMware Cloud on AWS — Faction is planning to rapidly expand its VMware Cloud on AWS availability zones throughout the U.S., EMEA, and APAC.
