SAP plays with Violin

SAP's investment arm, SAP Ventures, is latest in a long line to plough funding into growing memory vendor Violin Memory

SAP is the latest industry giant to throw its weight behind memory vendor Violin Memory as global demand for storage continues to grow.

Violin Memory announced today it had secured a further $50m (£31m) in series D funding, pushing its value up to $800m, with one of the investors being SAP’s independent investment firm SAP Ventures.

Other heavyweight investors include Toshiba, Juniper Networks and Highland Capital, prompting the firm to claim it is one of the fastest-growing storage companies in the past decade.

Don Basile, chief executive of Violin Memory, said: “At the intersection of big data, virtualisation and business-critical applications, Violin’s flash-based primary storage puts us in a unique position to capitalise on the hyper-growth of flash in the enterprise datacentre."

This is a multibillion-dollar market opportunity and the latest funding enables us to accelerate our aggressive go-to-market strategy and enhance our data management software portfolio to bring the benefits of Violin’s technology to customers worldwide.”

Guarav Tewari, director of SAP Ventures, who will be joining Violin’s board as an observer, said: “IT leaders in the enterprise are embracing the in-memory database movement and the ‘speed-of-thought’ business benefits it brings."

Nino Marakovic, managing director of SAP Ventures, added: “By supporting Violin Memory and its disruptive flash technology, we can help to accelerate this trend, remove today’s memory limitations and open the field to all applications.”