The typical organization doesn’t maintain more than one data network, but when it comes to storage, there are often numerous disparate silos with different interfaces that are difficult to access and even harder to manage. Formation Data Systems Inc. CEO Mark Lewis returned to theCUBE at Amazon.com Inc.’s recent re:Invent 2014 summit to discuss how his firm is helping to untangle that status quo with SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier.

Brought out of stealth only two months ago, Formation Data has developed a storage virtualization technology that exposes information in whatever format a particular application requires, whether it’s low-level blocks, files or abstracted objects, using the most appropriate media type for the workload. “We’ve got all these things, and they’re all good, but in aggregate it’s too expensive and it’s too complicated,” Lewis said. “If you look at the new players – Google’s infrastructure and Amazon’s infrastructure – they’re built around more singular platforms with modern software-defined principles running on top of bare-metal hardware.”

Formation Data promises to bring that value proposition into the traditional enterprise with its software, which unifies under a common access layer capabilities that are otherwise only available separately. The platform also extends that functionality to major public clouds, Lewis added, making it easier to implement the much-coveted hybrid model of provisioning infrastructure.

There’s more to building hybrid clouds than merely enabling interoperability among on- and off-premise environments, he pointed out: Formation Data’s software also bridges the efficiency gap between the two sides of the cloud divide.

That’s what ultimately sets the platform apart from the software-defined storage solutions currently available in the marketplace, according to Lewis. In fact, Formation Data doesn’t use the term software-defined storage because it infers an additional layer of complexity added over existing storage solutions. While that may provide the same programmatic management that the likes of Amazon boast in their environments, it doesn’t change the economies of the underlying components.

Formation Data’s pitch centers on helping organization matching the operational efficiency of the web-scale crowd. It’s why the startup decided against adding comparability with legacy arrays to its platform and instead opted to build it specifically for running on commodity servers. That approach is by far the best-suited for truly large-scale environments, Lewis said, not only compares favorably to legacy storage appliances but also to the hyper-convergence solutions that are making waves in the industry today.

“You have Nutanix and SimpliVity doing the hyper-convergence approach – which is great and I think it’s going to be very successful – but they want to bring compute, network and storage together in a single box,” Lewis said. “We’re about converging the data platform in a larger-scale implementation where it doesn’t make sense to converge all three.”

Lewis said Formation Data’s unique approach made it difficult to attract investors initially due to what he described as the venture capital community’s tendency to put companies into well-defined buckets. However, the startup eventually found a backer in Third Point Ventures and later raised $24.2 million as part of a Series A round that was announced alongside its launch out of stealth in September.

Today, Lewis revealed that Formation Data has three Fortune 100 companies piloting its platform. “We’re not about competing with EMC, we’re not about competing with NetApp; you have those products instantiated, they’re there, you’re not going to rip and replace,” he summarized. “But you’re probably looking at your economics and you need to get competitive with these public clouds in price, so if you want to go with us on that journey, that’s where we want to partner.”

Watch the full video (16:19)