When VAST Data bought Red Stapler earlier this month, it acqua-hired a company staffed entirely by NetApp leavers – just 4 months after they quit NetApp’s Iceland operation, and gained a cross-public cloud control plane architecture to help provide its AI OS as a public cloud service.
Had the six people simply left NetApp and joined VAST then it would have appeared to be VAST poaching NetApp staff. Iceland does support employment non-compete contracts, called restrictive covenants, which can restrict employees from joining competitors after leaving employment. Having left NetApp and joined Red Stapler, and then joined VAST Data, any such restriction has effectively been by-passed.
We have asked NetApp if the six ex-NetApp Red Stapler staff had non-compete clauses in their employment contracts, and would these non-compete clauses have prevented them leaving NetApp and joining VAST Data directly?
The six Red Staplers all previously worked at an Icelandic startup called Greenqloud, which NetApp acquired in August 2017 for $51 million in cash. Greenqloud had developed Qstack software for orchestrating and managing cloud services in hybrid cloud environments, and improving cost-efficiency, scalability and sustainability. It had a Service Delivery Engine (SDE) built on-top of Kubernetes, fitted in with NetApp’s hybrid Data Fabric ideas, and worked across public clouds.
NetApp had hired Anthony Lye to set up a Cloud Data Services Business Unit and he acquired 10 companies, that we know about, between 2017 and 2022, to get the software technology needed, with Greenqloud the first.
The total publicly known cost was half a billion dollars, with NetApp selling off five of them this year, for $100 million, one bought for $450 million, as it exited the Cloud FinOps area.
Here are the six Red Stapler people:
- Jonsi Stefansson – CEO, ex- Greenqloud CEO, now GM of Cloud at VAST
- Eirikur Hrafnsson – Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, ex-Greenqloud, now VP Cloud Engineering at VAST
- Tryggvi Larusson – CTO and co-founder, ex-Greenqloud, now Cloud Architect at VAST
- Pall Helgason – Distinguished Engineer, ex-Greenqloud, now at VAST
- Þórhallur Helgason – CSS Wizard, ex-Greenqloud, now Principal SW Engineer at VAS
- Grímur Jónsson – Senior Developer, ex-Greenqloud, now Principal SW Engineer at VAST
Red Stapler was operating in stealth, without a website, and had no publicly-revealed external funding. Dun & Bradstreet shows it having $180,000 in revenue in its short life. It is surprising that it was acquired just four months after being founded. The development software must have been highly impressive.
Eirikur Hrafsson said in a LinkedIn post: “We started Red Stapler to create the ultimate cloud native SaaS engine to help companies transform their products into fully-managed, multi-tenant, scalable cloud solutions. And now we will focus our efforts bringing that to VAST AI OS.“
Thus VAST intends to make its AI OS software a “fully-managed, multi-tenant, scalable cloud” offering. It says it has a “commitment to deepening alignments with the world’s leading hyperscalers.”
The VAST AI OS is already available on AWS, Azure and GCP. What Red Stapler’s SW will bring is further API integration to provide billing, monitoring, observability and scalability for each host cloud. This will provide consistency across the clouds and enable VAST’s customers to temporarily move workloads – burst – to these hyperscale public clouds. They should be able to “burst into any hyperscaler with business-critical workloads while maintaining data integrity, observability, and cost-efficiency.”
Our understanding is that VAST would like the public cloud giants to partner with it in this regard and provide “a unified platform that consolidates data services, database capabilities, and agentic execution” to their customers.
VAST CEO and founder Renen Hallak stated: “With Jonsi and team joining VAST, we gain proven expertise in working hand-in-hand with hyperscalers to deliver services that meet the demands of AI at global scale, and accelerate the path to a truly unified, multi-cloud, data foundation.”
The description of the Red Stapler software is similar at a broad outline level with the Greenqloud QStack software.
