... and Nirvanix shutters ...

Traction, paying customers, revenue and cashflow are what matter to small businesses looking to grow up. In many ways we (the day job) were lucky as we built a sustainable business first, with real customers and real revenue. Most startups don’t do that. They have a change the world idea, and then try to evangelize this whilst building a business. Sometimes they have to “pivot” or … change focus to an idea that will work at turning into a business. According to reports, Nirvanix is giving customers two weeks to pull data off. They tried the cloud storage market, independent of a computing market. I seem to remember they had a gateway product of some sort. They were reasonably well regarded. A sobering reminder that this is a tough market. EMC, Iron Mountain and others have also left this market.