New Atempo owners bet big on Miria as large-scale data movement engine

The new owners of Atempo say the company will focus on massive data set movement.

Atempo has been bought by HorizonH, which aims to acquire “control positions in great European software companies and help them grow their revenue by helping them expand internationally.” Austin, TX-based Jeremy Smith and Paris-based Côme B. de Crisnay set up HorizonH in May last year to help French companies grow. They say: “We’re bringing American growth playbooks to help make sure your business thrives.”

Côme de Crisnay has previously overseen 24 acquisitions at STUDIA, a French business expansion company, and was most recently the interim CEO of a 300-plus person organization with more than €30 million annual revenue in France. He is now Atempo CEO with Smith as president.

Smith told us: “I twice started a company from scratch with an idea and made it a multi-hundred-million-dollar-business. So [the] first business I started was in the world of helping people reserve a discounted parking spot online. And I started that by getting $5,000 in personal parking tickets. And so I have been on this journey of having an idea [and] scaling it.”

What made Atempo interesting is that it has established technology, with its Miria, Lina, and Tina products, but has not thus far made any significant impression outside its European heartland. This is despite having Miria partnership deals with Panasas and Quantum.

Miria enables data archiving to on-premises or public cloud storage, including Quantum’s ActiveScale environment. Smith positioned Atempo and Miria at the convergence of HPC and AI: “There’s unprecedented growth in unstructured data that needs to be moved. This nascent data could become someone’s core competency. Organizations are realizing, ‘I can actually do something with this.’ That creates strong tailwinds for the underlying business and proven product.”

Why has Atempo underperformed? Smith said: “I think there’s been a real lack of focus.” What should the focus be? “What’s our DNA? We really, really think that the next step of what we’re doing is that we’re betting heavily on Miria as the migration engine for massive data sets.”

On that basis: “We’re trying to rebuild the core of Miria’s migration engine… so we can scan faster, handle more objects in parallel, and let partners run these projects more on their own instead of having in our professional services. So we really want to come in here and do a facelift on what we think we’re best at, which is being a great data movement tool.”

With Atempo, Smith said: “There’s a product with a brand that people at least know and the opportunity to generate awareness, but there’s a lack of marketing. And one of the things that I’m good at is go-to-market.”

He characterized the initial approach like this: “If our core competency is data movement, let’s become really, really good at that. Let’s try to make it solid for the enterprises. And that ultimately will help all the suite of products that we have. And if we nail that and do really well, then I think it will open the door for us to start growing into other products.”