Launching Volterra from Stealth, 10Fold Helps Propel Deep Tech Startup to $500 Million Acquisition in Just 15 Months
Apps and data are increasingly becoming highly distributed, moving from traditional data centers or centralized clouds to multi-cloud and edge environments. The distributed cloud is an emerging approach to managing these disparate deployments as a single, unified cloud. This is a new, evolving concept that few in the media were familiar with. For this approach to come to fruition, distributed cloud vendors must educate the market on the value of their technology and vision while establishing themselves as a leader in the new category.
Situation
Apps and data are increasingly being spread across multiple clouds and edge sites rather than traditional datacenters and centralized clouds. Managing these highly distributed deployments comes with massive operational, security and performance challenges. With 10Fold’s guidance, Volterra recently emerged from stealth with a new vision to address these challenges: A distributed cloud platform, enabling organizations to manage all these disparate components – edge, multi-cloud and legacy datacenter environments – as one unified cloud. 10Fold faced steep challenges: Very few reporters and influencers were familiar with the concept of distributed cloud, and Volterra’s technology was extremely complex.
The startup needed their multi-faceted approach to resonate with the media while substantiating the necessity of their technology and validating themselves as a leader in the space. In addition, Volterra had no customers available to speak to reporters.
From Launch to Acquisition
Objectives
- Establish Volterra as an innovator leading the push to distributed cloud.
- Educate the market about the trends reshaping where data and apps are deployed and introduce the industry to a new approach for managing this evolving landscape.
- Create media buzz around Volterra and garner rich feature coverage across a wide range of trade and business media.
- Position Volterra for a major exit.
Communications Strategy and Challenges
- Educate the industry: Distill Volterra’s message into an easily digestible story that would resonate with media, analysts, influencers, customers and investors. No other company had a vision like Volterra’s or a platform that was directly competitive. And without any customers available to speak to the media, 10Fold had to leverage a variety of analyst and survey data points that prove that multi-cloud and edge deployments are surging and that customers need a revolutionary new way to manage these disparate deployments, resulting in a more convincing narrative.
- Execute surveys: Since Volterra’s distributed cloud platform was new to the market and the company had no customers available to talk to media, 10Fold recommended Volterra attain powerful data assets to establish itself as a thought leader addressing a real problem faced by DevOps and NetOps teams. To this end, 10Fold helped Volterra create two surveys demonstrating the need for their technology, then identify the key results, and weave that data into Volterra’s core narrative and leverage it for media buzz.
- Engage the media: Secure briefings with industry media based on both news announcements and creative proactive pitching, explaining the trends driving apps and data to multi-cloud and edge sites, and illustrating why a distributed cloud approach is needed to manage these deployments.
Key Wins
During Volterra’s launch in November 2019, 10Fold exceeded its forecast of 12 stories (including features and briefs) by 233% with 28 articles . Business press coverage included TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Axios. Top tech press coverage included CRN, Light Reading, SDxCentral, SiliconAngle, Fierce Telecom and Container Journal.
In 2020, 10Fold also exceeded its media forecast of 50 feature stories, securing 72 feature articles (144% of forecast). 10Fold generated strong coverage for Volterra’s news announcements on their product and survey results. Moreover, in between news launches, 10Fold was able to consistently garner coverage in key tech pubs through proactively pitching new story angles and placing contributed articles related to the distributed cloud. Top press included: InformationWeek, The Next Platform, The New Stack, ComputerWeekly and Datanami.
Top Coverage
- TechCrunch – Volterra announces $50M investment to manage apps in hybrid environments
- VentureBeat– Volterra emerges from stealth with $50 million to automate distributed app management
- InformationWeek – Finding Balance in Dev vs. Ops for Site Reliability Engineers
- The Next Platform – The Birth of the distributed Cloud
- The New Stack – What COVID-19 Means for Microservices, Multicloud and Kubernetes
- CRN – Volterra, Backed By Microsoft And Samsung, Emerges From Stealth With $50M Haul
- ComputerWeekly – Portrait of the software developer as an artist
- Light Reading – Startup Volterra Takes On VMware, Red Hat With Its Multi-Cloud Pitch
- Datanami – Is Kubernetes Overhyped?
- EnterpriseAI – Kubernetes Deployments Plagued by Security, Networking Issues
- SDxCentral– Former Contrail CEO Launches Volterra With $50M, 30 Customers
Outcome
Over a short 15 month period, 10Fold rapidly achieved Volterra’s key goals: 1) Defining the distributed cloud and demonstrating a clear need for this new approach, 2) Establishing Volterra as a leader and innovator in distributed cloud, 3) Creating buzz for Volterra by securing a broad range of business and tech media coverage, and 4) Illustrating that Volterra has already had market success through major customer wins like SoftBank and Cdiscount.com.
Under 10Fold’s guidance, Volterra eventually came to define and dominate a critical new category of technology. As a result of this growing momentum, Volterra was acquired by F5 Networks in January 2021 for $500 million. 10Fold helped the company achieve this milestone barely a year after emerging from stealth and without any customers available to media.