Big Payday or IPO for Scality?
Well, the interesting piece of the story is who provided Scality with the recent $35M in additional funding. With approx. 219 employees and approx. $31M in annual revenue, Scality's revenue per employee is low at approx. $142K per employee. Scality's revenue may be less than what it needs to operate, hence the unattributed $35M in additional funding. Scality's competitors, IBM Cloud Object Storage (Cleversafe) and Cloudian have approx. $35M and $24M respectively in annual revenue and 214 and 123 employees respectively. IBM Cloud Object Storage and Cloudian have revenue per employee of approx. $164K and $195K respectively. These revenue per employee numbers are better than Scality's with Cloudian's being much better. On the surface, this would seem to indicate that Scality is not closing enough sales relative to the number of employees on the payroll. Back in the day when Novell was riding high, CEO Ray Noorda used a revenue per employee metric $250K to determine whether the company had too many employees. So the question is how much longer can Scality continue to increase employee headcount without a commensurate increase in revenue before it burns through its funding? Scality could be acquired for some multiple of its funding or it could go public, which CEO Lecat has mentioned in the past. The safer bet might be an acquisition by HPE since it already has $10M invested in Scality and they haven't bought an object-based storage software vendor yet.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
