Cleversafe Inc.

Cleversafe Inc. was an object storage software and systems developer company.[7] It was founded in 2004 by Chris Gladwin, an American technology entrepreneur.[8][5] The company was acquired by IBM in 2015,[9] and became an integral part of IBM Cloud Object Storage.[10]

Cleversafe
TypeFor-profit
Cleversafe Inc
Industrydata storage
FateAcquired by IBM on November 6, 2015 (2015-11-06)[1]
Founded2004 (2004)
FounderChris Gladwin
HeadquartersChicago, Illinois
Area served
worldwide
Key people
  • Chris Gladwin (Founder and CEO, 2004-2013; Founder and Vice Chairman 2013-2015)
  • John Morris (President and CEO, 2013-2015)[2]
  • Robert Joy (VP:Finance & Operations)[3]
  • Russ Kennedy, SVP Product[4]
  • Jason Resch (Software Engineer)[4]
Productsdispersed data storage
Number of employees
125 - 210 (2014 - 2015)[5][6]

History

Cleversafe Inc was launched as a startup company in 2004[10] by Chris Gladwin, an American inventor, computer engineer and technology entrepreneur.[11]Gladwin created Cleversafe because his prior company, MusicNow, Inc., deployed systems to store all digitized music and he felt that approach used by the enterprise data storage products could be vastly improved.[12] Cleversafe had its headquarters in Chicago, Illinois, and was originally based in Illinois Institute of Technology incubator, where the company matured for the first years of its existence.[13][14] From the beginning, Cleversafe's initial focus as a startup was on developing new dispersed storage technology for unstructured data in the petabyte-plus range, which the company called " Dispersed Storage Network" or dsNet.[2][15]According to New York Times and other sources, Cleversafe's approach was to break the data into pieces and then disperses it in multiple locations around the world in order to additionally enhance data security.[7][16] [17] The initial funding was provided by OCA Ventures.[18]In 2008, Cleversafe was a winner of the Chicago Innovation Awards in the category "Data Backup and Security". [17] In 2011, it was also supported by In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm related to the government.[19] Forbes notes: "In 2013, the company was the 2nd largest cloud storage vendor by volume and received over $100 million in venture funding from NEA, OCA Ventures, Presideo, Motorola Solutions, BVC and Alsop Louis Partners.[5]

Technology application

Cleversafe developed and commercialized a method for storing data by virtualizing the data using information dispersal algorithms and distributing slices of data across a number (N) of different servers where only a threshold (M) of those servers needed to be available in order for the original data to be fully available. This method allowed a configurable number (M-N) of servers to fail while maintaining complete data availability. With a low overhead of 1 – M/N, information dispersal provided very high data availability and reliability as comparted to making multiple copies.[20][21][22] Unlike traditional file systems that use a tree-like hierarchical structure that can be difficult to scale as the file system grows into the millions or billions of files, Cleversafe provided an object storage system using the REST protocol to store very large amounts of data in a flat system where files are identified by unique object IDs.[23]Cleversafe developed a technology called SecureSlice – a confidentiality feature that virtualizes and encrypts unstructured data, stores the key with that data and then breaks up that data, making the slices unrecognizable and inherently secure by placing it on several different storage nodes.[20][24]The company also develop PerfectBits, a technology to ensure that every bit in a digital object is read exactly as written, even when reading massive amounts of data where the number of bits read is greater than the bit error rate of computer hardware.[20]

Patents

Cleversafe developed a significant patent portfolio for large object storage systems. In 2013, the company was listed on IEEE Spectrum’s Patent Power index.[25] At the time of its acquisition by the IBM, the company had 318 patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office.[26][27] Jason Resch was the most prolific inventor at Cleversafe and was a named inventor on 139 issued US patents and 315 patent applications in 2015.[28]

Acquisition by IBM

In November 2015, Cleversafe was acquired by IBM for $1.3 billion and became an integral part of its IBM Cloud Object Storage division.[1][6][29][30] The acquisition was made to fill a technological gap of the IBM's cloud storage capability, specifically by applying its dispersed object storage technology, which "encrypts unstructured data, stores the key with the data, and then breaks up that data and puts it on several different storage nodes."[31][32][33] As Network Computing stated: "With the acquisition of object storage and erasure coding technologies, IBM bolsters its cloud position."[34]

References
  1. IBM Completes Acquisition of Cleversafe
  2. VCapital: Cleversafe
  3. Bloomberg: Cleversafe Inc
  4. Payment Week: Exclusive Q&A With Cleversafe’s Russ Kennedy, Senior VP Of Product Strategy And Consumer Solutions
  5. Forbes: Chris Gladwin's Cleversafe Seeks To Lead the 100+ Petabyte Storage Market
  6. Chicago Tribune: IBM to acquire Chicago cloud-storage firm Cleversafe
  7. The New York Times: A Move to Secure Data by Scattering the Pieces
  8. Harvard Business School of Chicago: Chris Gladwin, founder and CEO, Cleversafe
  9. Bloomberg: IBM Paid $1.3 Billion to Acquire Cleversafe in Hybrid-Cloud Push
  10. ChicagoBusiness: Gladwin's $1.3 billion Cleversafe win could change the face of Chicago tech
  11. SB: How Chris Gladwin founded a new storage process with Cleversafe
  12. Founders' Stories: Cleversafe's Chris Gladwin
  13. Illinois Tech: Cleversafe, UTP Announce Innovative Open Source Storage Project
  14. CB: The mother (hen) of invention - IIT has raised quite a brood of startups in its tech incubator
  15. VIDEO: Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin
  16. CNet: Cleversafe launches dispersed-storage products
  17. Chicago Innovation: Cleversafe
  18. Batterson, Leonard A.; Freeman, Kenneth M. (2017-07-05). Building Wealth Through Venture Capital: A Practical Guide for Investors and the Entrepreneurs They Fund. John Wiley & Sons. pp. vii. ISBN 9781119409359.
  19. Wired: SpyCloud: Intel Agencies Look to Keep Secrets in the Ether
  20. InfoWorld Tech Watch:Cleversafe slices up storage to increase big data reliability
  21. Cleversafe Overview presentation
  22. Storage Review: Cleversafe And HP Work Together to Expand Object-Storage Solutions
  23. ComputerWeekly: Ad agency that rejected cloud boosts Cleversafe object storage
  24. TC: Cleversafe Brings Storage To Hadoop-Driven Big Data Analytics
  25. IEEE Spectrum: Patent Power 2013
  26. Justia Patents: Patents Assigned to Cleversafe, Inc.
  27. USPTO: Cleversafe Patents
  28. Chicago Business: Meet Cleversafe's Jason Resch, the kind of talent you build a company around
  29. Techchrunch: IBM Acquires Cleversafe To Accelerate Hybrid Cloud Storage Strategy
  30. MarketRealist: IBM Targets Big Data Space with Cleversafe
  31. PCWorld: IBM's Cleversafe storage platform is becoming a cloud service
  32. ChannelFutures: IBM Builds on Cleversafe Acquisition with New Cloud Object Storage Service
  33. StorageReview: IBM Uses Cleversafe To Bring Object Storage To The Cloud
  34. Network Computing: Why IBM Bought Cleversafe
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