StrongBox Data leadership team disappears

Archiver and cross-silo data manager StrongBox Data appears to have lost its exec leadership team, and a new CEO has been appointed.

The company’s StrongLink software provides a single file and object namespace across on-premises and public cloud locations with policy-driven tiering, migration, business continuity and disaster recovery. Data can be indexed, ingested and accessed via a variety of protocols, such as NFS, SMB, S3 and LTFS.

Update: Andrew Hall has been appointed as the new StrongBox CEO. 10 November 2022.

Its CEO is — or was — Floyd Christofferson, and the company numbers NASA, the Library of Congress, Bosch, Canon, Amadeus and numerous other well-known organisations as its customers. In October it was functioning normally, and announced a distribution agreement with Titan Data Solutions — a value-added distributor in the UK and Benelux, offering end-to-end data management solutions and cybersecurity services.

Now the company’s leadership web page has disappeared. The CEO is still in post according to LinkedIn and the cached SBDS leadership web page, but has vanished from the up-to-date StrongBox website.

History

StrongBox Data Solutions (SBDS) was a privately owned, multi-vendor data management and tiering company. It was bought out by CEO David Cerf in March 2016 from ETI-NET, which had bought Strongbox and Sphinx products from crashed and burning Crossroads. The main product was then StrongLink which harvested stored file metadata and provided cross-storage tier data movement to optimise file storage performance and cost.

In late 2017 The Quebec-based Fonds de solidarité FTQ, a C$13 billion development capital investment fund, put $20 million into SBDS’ parent company, along with $7 million from SBDS controlling shareholder Partner One Capital. This was intended to help StrongBox expand around the globe. 

Christofferson was appointed CEO in February 2019 with Erik Murrey becoming the CTO a month earlier. Anne Murrey, the CMO for PartnerOne, was StrongBox’s marketing head but resigned in July this year.

PartnerOne Capital presents itself as a leader in Big Data management through hyper-automation, virtualised cloud tiering, metadata and artificial intelligence. We view it as a private equity operation with Big Data management being its investment focus. It says it is a portfolio company and owns several companies specialising in enterprise tape, virtual tape, and storage management solutions. PartnerOne lists portfolio company CEOs on its own company web page. Examples include Brian Hawley, Luminex Software president, Riz Khaliq, Assima CEO, and Cort Dougan, CEO at FSMLabs. There is no overall PartnerOne CEO. There is a board of directors of course, and Andrew Hall is listed as its Portfolio Manager.

With all this in mind it rather looks as if SBDS is going through an executive namespace reorganisation of its own with some execs tiered out to cold storage, so to speak. We have sent off an inquiry to the company’s spokesperson and a spokesperson said: “There have been a few changes at StrongBox. … Andrew Hall [is] the new CEO …PartnerOne is putting additional investment into StrongBox, driving some improved product enhancements and leveraging PartnerOne’s resources.”

Andrew Hall was the overall PartnerOne portfolio manager before assuming the StrongBox CEO role.