Inktank: Driving valuation with brand equity and community

When we started working for Inktank, they told us they wanted to be the Red Hat of storage. Now, as it turns out, they are the storage of Red Hat, and that’s just as good.

In Summer of 2013, Inktank was a dynamic young startup with an expensive suite of branded marketing products that were not useful to them. Launch Module Media worked with the existing brand system, and quickly took it in a bolder, more updated and functional direction. Working closely with Inktank product and marketing leadership, Launch Module designed new investor and sales presentations, overview datasheets, Web visuals and iconography, and brandings for Inktank’s signature products Inktank Ceph Enterprise v1.2 and Inktank University. In May 2014, Red Hat, Inc. acquired Inktank for $175 million. Inktank by Red Hat, Inc. continues to change the radically expanding world of software-defined storage.

Inktank by Red Hat presentation logo design

From TechCrunch:

Red Hat Buys Inktank For $175M In Cash To Beef Up Its Cloud Storage Offerings

“[Inktank has] built an incredibly vibrant community that will continue to be nurtured as we work together to make open the de facto choice for software-defined storage,” said Brian Stevens, executive vice president and CTO, Red Hat, in a statement. “Inktank has done a brilliant job assembling a strong ecosystem around Ceph and we look forward to expanding on this success together. The strength of these world-class open storage technologies will offer compelling capability as customers move to software-based scale-out storage systems.”

Inktank, based in San Francisco, had raised some $14.4 million since opening for business in 2012, with investors including Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, and New Dream Network, owners of the cloud hosting company DreamHost. New Dream Network was co-founded by Sage Weil, the CTO and founder of Inktank. Weil was also the person behind the development of Ceph. What the deal will mean for Inktank is the opportunity to grow its product with more direct integration with Red Hat’s other open source products.

All in all, a pretty amazing result from our favorite Client so far.