UK staff abandon storage vendor Coraid
Scale-out storage vendor trying to rein in spending, say sources
A number of top UK staff have left storage vendor Coraid at the start of this year amid speculation it is reining in the rate at which it is burning through investor cash.
The US-based firm claims to reduce the cost and complexity of storage to enterprises and cloud customers through its Ethernet products, and employs around 200 staff globally from its five offices - three of which are in the US.
The firm's UK-based vice president of global sales Peter Godden left the company at the end of last month, and is just one of many who have parted ways with the firm.
Godden joined the company back in April 2012 as its vice president for EMEA, according to his LinkedIn page, and just a year after he was promoted to taking care of global sales on top of his local job. He held the worldwide role for just nine months before he left for disaster recovery firm Zerto, taking one of his top sales staff with him, CRN understands.
On top of the duo's departure, UK-based senior systems engineer Max Brown left at the same time, according to his LinkedIn page. Brown joined Coraid in 2011 as its third EMEA employee and said on his social page that he grew the UK business by 80 per cent annually and doubled the number of deals of more than $100,000 within just a year.
In November 2011, Coraid secured $50m of venture capital (VC) funding from a range of investors led by Crosslink Capital, and it is understood that the numerous staff departures are partly down to the vendor wanting to rein in the speed with which it splashes the cash.
"There is an exodus," said one source. "The reason is that they had a lot of VC money which they are getting through at an alarming rate, but the sales just aren't there. They want to reduce the burn rate of that VC money."
The UK departures come after Coraid shuffled its top management at the end of last year as Dave Kress replaced Kevin Brown as chief executive and a new vice president of global sales, Keith Carpenter, was appointed. On top of this, it recently brought in new vice president for human resources, Gail Boddy.
CRN understands some partners have been upset with its channel strategy too, describing its approach as erratic.
"[Coraid has] behaving erratically from a channel perspective for some time," a source said. "They are doing anything they can to go direct... and that's upsetting lots of people. They seem to be in a desperate state, there is an implosion [happening]."
Coraid declined to comment directly on the flurry of staff changes globally and in the UK, but said confirmed that Godden had left "to pursue other opportunities".
"With regard to our channel programme, we remain committed to our channel partners and look forward to working with them in 2014," it added. "We have no funding news to announce at this time."