Springpath

About Springpath

Springpath, established in 2012, specialized in hyperconvergence software before its acquisition by Cisco Systems. The company was founded by Mallik Mahalingam and Krishna Yadappanavar, both former VMware executives who leveraged their extensive backgrounds in the field to create the venture. Mahalingam had prior experience at Intel and Hewlett Packard Labs, while Yadappanavar worked with EMC systems; they met during their respective tenures at VMware and left in 2012 to start their own company, initially named Storvisor. The firm operated in stealth mode for three years from Sunnyvale, California, before rebranding as Springpath and emerging in 2015 with a significant $34 million funding round from investors including Sequoia Capital.

The core of Springpath's business was its data platform, which provided a distributed file system purpose-built for hyperconvergence. This software-centric solution aimed to eliminate the need for traditional network storage by tightly integrating compute, storage, networking, and virtualization into a single, software-defined infrastructure. The platform ran on standard servers, offering clients elastic scaling and simplified, autonomous management. Its proprietary Hardware Agnostic Log-structure Objects (HALO) architecture was designed to support various environments, including virtualized workloads, containers, and big data. Revenue was generated through a subscription-based pricing model, which included licensing and support.

A strategic partnership with Cisco began in early 2016 to launch HyperFlex, a fully integrated hyperconverged infrastructure system that combined Cisco's hardware with Springpath's software. This collaboration was a significant milestone, leading to Springpath focusing almost exclusively on the partnership. The success of the HyperFlex system, which garnered over 1,800 customers, culminated in Cisco announcing its plan to acquire Springpath. The acquisition was finalized on September 22, 2017, for approximately $320 million in cash and equity awards, integrating the Springpath team into Cisco's Computing Systems Product Group to bolster its data center portfolio.