Unstructured data manager StrongLink is pursuing OEM licensing deals for its technology and will no longer offer its software directly to end users, B&F has learned.
StrongLink is the renamed business of StrongBox, founded in 2008, which developed software to manage the lifecycle of unstructured data in multiple silos. Files and objects were managed in a single and multi-tiered namespace. The company was owned by Partner One Capital and, after running into problems, Andrew Hall, a Partner One portfolio manager, became the CEO in November 2021. The prior CEO and most of the exec team moved on.
Partner One put in more money and Hall briefed us that StrongLink would change focus from the high-end cross-silo file and object management market to the broader enterprise market. A new website was set up and the company said it was “the world’s most intelligent data management platform from petabytes to exabytes.”
The company’s engineers and leadership could see that businesses and other organizations had a problem in managing and keeping track of all their data in multiple silos, and were wasting expensive storage space when they didn’t need to. But many potential customers had no onbe person that has ownership of a cross-departmental issue. Basically it wasn’t enough of a problem for the potential customers to recognize it and then do something about it.
StrongLink developed its product and, in March this year, announced cloud support for things like AWS S3 multiple buckets, object lock, Glacier support and also Azure support. Hall said software like StrongLink’s was: “A universal, intelligent data management platform that enables security, enhances workflow, and eliminates the protocol barriers is critical in an era of cloud and web services, StrongLink is rising to the challenge of tomorrow’s infrastructure architectures.”
Two months later, and eighteen months or so after Hall took on the CEO role, Hall’s LinkedIn profile appears to say he moved out of the CEO role in May this year.
We contacted Andrew Hall to ask him about this and he mailed us a statement: “Stronglink LLC has made the decision to re-purpose its intellectual property and components thereof towards OEM licensing. As a result, StrongLink is no longer offering its software directly to end users. StrongLink is negotiating agreements to embed its technology within the product stacks of major enterprise software vendors, and the company’s focus is fully dedicated to licensing its valuable software assets as a core component of well established software in the market.”
