Pivot3 Acquires NexGen Storage

Pivot3 announced that it will acquire NexGen Storage, a privately held leading provider of hybrid storage appliances, dynamic all-flash arrays and Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities. By adding NexGen’s portfolio of products, Pivot3 will deliver the industry's most complete set of dynamic hyper-converged solutions. For the first time ever, enterprise and mid-market companies will have access to a suite of solutions that will allow them to apply the right infrastructure and priority to each workload, application or business service according to business value.

NexGen makes hybrid flash-storage arrays capable of supporting multiple types of storage media. Pivot3’s chief executive Ron Nash said in a phone interview that the two companies have technology based on similar architecture, making the merger of the two a natural fit.

The combined company will operate under the Pivot3 name, though Nash said the NexGen products will keep the names they have. All employees are expected to stay onboard with the company in their current locations. In addition to Austin and Louisville, Pivot3 has an office in Houston, as well as sales and marketing outposts around the world.

NexGen employs 86 people, a little more than half of who are at the company’s office at 361 Centennial Parkway in Louisville. Pivot3 employs 130.

John Spiers and Kelly Long — who helped start LeftHand Networks before selling it to Hewlett-Packard in 2008 for $360 million — co-founded NexGen in 2010. After raising a $10 million round of venture capital, the company was sold to Fusion-io in 2013 for $119 million. When SanDisk acquired Fusion-io 18 months later, NexGen’s offerings were seen as somewhat of a competing product to SanDisk’s own, and Spiers and Long were given the opportunity to spin the company off and take their technology with them, which they did in January of last year.

Pivot3 executed a definitive agreement to acquire NexGen following the unanimous approval of the Boards of Directors of Pivot3 and NexGen. The transaction is expected to close in February 2016.

More: http://bizwest.com/homegrown-nexgen-storage-merges-with-texas-based-pivot3/