Los Angeles – Storage Switzerland is at the Next Generation Storage Summit and today the focus is on solid state storage. The first part of the day was focused on the state of the storage industry, started by a presentation from Chris Mellor. One of the key topics of discussion was how All-Flash Array vendors will exit from their current start-up mode. My belief is that these vendors will have to exit the hard way; by going IPO, and not the easy way, by getting bought.
The large vendors have either all made their flash purchases (EMC, IBM) or else they think they have optimized their current storage systems enough to be good enough for flash (Dell, HP, Oracle). For any of these vendors to buy one of the current startup flash suppliers would essentially be an admission that their current flash strategy is an abject failure. That simply is not going to happen any time in the near future. This is partly driven by corporate pride but it is also driven by reality. Most data centers today simply don’t have the IOPS requirement to push these “good enough” flash solutions hard enough that their potential technological shortcomings will be realized.
As a result, it is my belief that all the current hybrid and all flash vendors will eventually go public prior to their being any significant acquisitions. I also think that many of these vendors will, and should, take a while to make the move to a publicly traded company. Why go through the scrutiny of being a public company until you are absolutely 100% ready for that?
What does this mean to an IT Planner looking to purchase either an All-Flash Array or Hybrid Storage System? From a technology standpoint it should make no difference. The technology either solves your problem or it does not. Understanding the company’s viability is more challenging. While not going public does make it harder to understand where a company is financially, most companies will at least expose some of their financial detail when pressed. For the most part, this should be good news since when a big company buys a small one, bad things tend to happen. Forcing a startup to become a viable stand-alone entity before they go public or get bought is better for everyone.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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I guess that would make Whiptail the exception that proves the rule?
You seemed to have left out the possibility that one or more of the all-flash companies will go out of business altogether!