Code42, a Minneapolis software maker, decided to stop selling a product called SharePlan that launched last fall and was expected to drive new growth.
The move, announced last week by new Chief Executive Joe Payne, was weeks in the making and underscored other steps taken to focus the company on data security.
Payne, who arrived last month after leading a Canadian software firm called Eloqua, said Monday that executives were already discussing whether to continue the product before he arrived.
"When you build something new and it doesn't quite hit the mark with the market, it's sometimes hard to move past it," he said. "I just helped the team move a little faster."
The company is supporting customers who began to use the product, which swiftly synchronizes and shares large data files. It is refocusing the developers and sales reps who worked on SharePlan to other products.
When Code42 rolled out the product, executives said they were putting themselves more squarely into competition with bigger firms like Dropbox and Google.
In a blog post for customers, Payne wrote that the data-sharing market is "hypercompetitive and rapidly commoditizing." He said Code42 has instead built "cloud connectors" to other popular data-sharing products, including Dropbox and Google Drive, so that corporate security teams could keep track of "data flowing inside and outside the organization."
The company's main product, called CrashPlan, is a data backup system that can be used by both companies and consumers. Over the past year or so, corporate customers pressed the company to develop add-on products that performed analysis and forensics on data, raising the security effectiveness of CrashPlan.
As a result, Payne said, the decision to drop the SharePlan product "probably seems like a bigger deal on the outside than inside" the company. "We had mostly moved to focus on the security space," he said.
Evan Ramstad • 612-673-4241
