Sonian Raises $13.6M From OpenView, Summerhill, Prism

Sonian™, the pioneer in cloud-powered archiving and search, today announced that it has secured $13.6 million in Series C funding.

New strategic investor OpenView Venture Partners led the round, which included participation from existing investors Summerhill Venture Partners, and Prism VentureWorks. The investment — which marks nearly $27 million raised to date — will be used to scale sales and marketing, and accelerate innovation of the company’s flagship cloud archiving products. In addition, Scott Maxwell, OpenView’s Founder and Senior Managing Director, will join Sonian’s Board of Directors.

Following four consecutive quarters of record growth and a doubling of its customer base in each of the past two years, Sonian’s innovative approach to cloud-based information archiving helps companies of all sizes overcome the many storage and operational challenges inherent in managing data in today’s digital world. The volume of e-mails alone grew by 500 percent over the last decade and Gartner expects the e-mail archiving market to reach $2.2 billion by 2014 — a 20 percent annual growth rate — with cloud-based solutions accounting for more than 50 percent of total market revenue.

Addressing this tremendous market opportunity, Sonian already supports more than 9,000 customer organizations with its single reference architecture running across multiple public clouds. The company has quickly established itself as a public cloud pioneer and innovator for its scalable, channel-ready solution for storage management, regulatory compliance, and eDiscovery.

By pairing its innovative solutions with one of the strongest channel partner networks in the cloud industry, Sonian enables its rapidly expanding customer base of Fortune 1000 enterprises and small- and medium-sized businesses in financial services, healthcare and other information-intensive sectors to accelerate their transition to the cloud. Other recent highlights include:

• Key partnerships with Independent Systems Integrators (ISI) and Tech Data Corporation (NASDAQ: TECD)
• The January 2012 acquisition of Webroot’s Email Archiving business, extending the company’s email archiving capabilities
• Industry accolades and recognitions including anAlwaysOn OnDemand Top 100 award and inclusion in the December 2011 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving by Gartner, Inc.
• Expanding its global reach and support with the opening of its EMEA office in the UK

“We are excited to work with Sonian,” said Maxwell. “It’s a dynamic company that is capitalizing on the opportunities that Big Data presents by offering a cost-effective, scalable e-mail archiving solution that maximizes the benefits of the cloud. Almost every company faces challenges regarding mailbox management and many of them are looking for a cloud-based solution like Sonian’s.”

“Sonian has enjoyed a very successful year, as validated by our customers, partners and industry analysts,” said Jeff Dickerson, CEO of Sonian. “Our number of customers has more than doubled to nearly 10,000 and these organizations are currently ingesting over 14 million documents a day; we have added over 35 new partners such as IBM, ISI and Tech Data; Gartner has strategically placed us in the Magic Quadrant; and we now run on multiple public clouds such as Amazon, IBM and RackSpace. By teaming OpenView with our current backers, Summerhill and Prism, we now believe that Sonian is properly positioned to exceed our goal of archiving and making searchable, the world’s digital information.”

Follow Sonian, Additional Resources
Blogs: http://blog.sonian.com/, http://blog.sonian.com/cloud-buzz-blog/
Twitter: @sonian
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sonian
Video: http://www.sonian.com/resources/#6

About Sonian

Sonian’s cloud-powered information archiving platform enables organizations to address eDiscovery needs, achieve regulatory compliance, and reduce IT costs. Sonian’s archiving services can be deployed in minutes, require no hardware or software, and are compatible with many email, instant messaging, and social media systems. Sonian provides the only archiving offerings in the market built from the ground up using advanced cloud computing technologies.

Over 9,000 customers benefit from Sonian’s industry-leading security, performance, and usability. Boasting strong partnerships with the world’s leading technology companies, Sonian combines innovative technology with deep archiving expertise to satisfy customers of all sizes and industries. For more information, please visithttp://www.sonian.com/.

About OpenView Venture Partners

OpenView Venture Partners (openviewpartners.com) is an expansion-stage venture capital fund based in Boston that is focused on high-growth software, Internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies quickly optimize their product, go-to-market, and organizational and operational functions. Founded in 2006, the firm invests globally and has approximately $445 million in total capital under management.