Cloudian’s Joint Venture with Digital Alpha: an Investment in a Flexible Storage Future
The on-demand era has changed expectations. In years gone by, storage required a huge amount of planning –around cost, technology issues, office real estate, and how much storage capacity to over-buy to meet needs stretching into the future.
That was the past. Today, users expect IT to deliver services, including storage, on demand and free of up-front capital outlays. The public cloud is the right choice to deliver this in some cases, but other times the data are best kept on premises. Those expectations are not at all unreasonable.
On Feb. 28, Cloudian announced a $125 million joint venture with Digital Alpha that includes a $100 million utility financing facility aimed at enabling that vision of a flexible, utility-like future for enterprise storage.
Through this partnership, customers will soon be able to use an on-premises solution that provides “the data sovereignty, performance and control of enterprise storage together with the economics of a pay-per-use model,” as our press release stated.
Digital Alpha will also support the development of a partnership between Cloudian and Cisco Systems, Inc., covering relevant data-center architectures, and the funding also includes a $25 million equity commitment to support expansion of Cloudian’s sales, marketing, engineering, and customer-support organizations.
It’s hard to find the customer benefits in most funding announcements, but the benefits to our customers in the form of new consumption models, expanded support, and additional engineering firepower to keep evolving the Cloudian platform are clear and exciting.
To learn more about flexible, multi-cloud management, check out Cloudian’s HyperStore 7 page.
Looking Ahead: What This Means for the Future of Storage
This joint venture marks a significant milestone—not just for Cloudian and Digital Alpha—but for the entire storage industry as it adapts to a rapidly evolving digital landscape. By blending the flexibility and economic advantages of cloud consumption models with the security and control of on-premises infrastructure, Cloudian is setting a new standard for how enterprises manage their data.
This approach addresses critical pain points for organizations navigating regulatory requirements, data sovereignty concerns, and fluctuating workloads. It enables businesses to avoid the pitfalls of both over-provisioning and under-resourcing their storage, offering instead a dynamic model that scales in real time with demand.
Moreover, the partnership with Cisco will accelerate innovation in data center architectures, ensuring that customers benefit from optimized performance and seamless integration within their existing IT environments. With increased funding fueling research and development, Cloudian is well-positioned to bring new features, enhanced security, and improved ease of use in future platform releases.
Ultimately, this investment signals a broader shift towards consumption-based IT infrastructure, empowering enterprises to become more agile and cost-efficient. As organizations face mounting data growth and increasingly complex storage requirements, flexible solutions like those enabled by Cloudian and Digital Alpha will be essential for maintaining competitive advantage.
For IT leaders, this means a future where storage is no longer a fixed cost or a bottleneck but a strategic asset—one that can adapt fluidly alongside business needs and innovation cycles.
