SimpliVity looks to stand out in 'noisy' hyper-converged market
Hyper-converged systems are 'nowhere near' as common as people think, says analyst
While Nutanix stole the hyper-convergence headlines in 2016 with its IPO, rival SimpliVity was waiting in the wings to pounce on the opportunity that the mainstream attention was bringing to the hyper-converged market.
Who are they?
The basic principle of hyper-convergence is pulling together infrastructure functions including compute, storage, networking and virtualisation into one hardware box.
Founded in 2009 and headquartered Massachusetts, SimpliVity claims its mission is to "simplify" modern datacentres with its "revolutionary and disruptive innovation".
In March 2015 a valuation of over $1bn was reached after the vendor raised $175m in Series D funding - taking its total amount raised to $276m.
Recent high-profile UK client coups include the signings of Merlin Entertainment and Red Bull Racing.
Partner community
Speaking to CRN SimpliVity channel sales VP George Hope said that the vendor operates a two-tier 100 per cent channel strategy worldwide, and currently has around 50 UK partners.
He explained that there are currently no active plans to recruit new UK partners, with the majority of channel investment set to be ploughed into growing existing relationships.
"We're in decent shape in the UK in terms of partnerships," he said. "We have about 50 partners signed up - not all of them are active but our strategy is to invest resources, time and energy into the biggest opportunities where we have the most bidirectional commitment.
"That's not to say we're not recruiting new partners - as we add new platforms new partners stand up and take notice and want to join the mission, but we are working a lot on making the ones that have made early commitments to us as successful as possible."
Neil Jelley, sales director at Birmingham-based SimpliVity partner UK IT Corp, said that SimpliVity being slightly later to market than the likes of Nutanix has proved to be an advantage.
"[SimpliVity is] a massive step forward in the hyper-converged space and the opportunities it creates are enormous," he said.
"We know they're pretty new to the market and we know that they're a little bit behind the curve to some of the others like Nutanix, but the big advantage is that there are some limitations to Nutanix, picking on them as an example, which SimpliVity, because they're a little bit later to market, have ironed out.
"With the whole hyper-converged messaging, depending on who it is and how they put it across, there are still layers of complexity to it. SimpliVity seems to have taken all of that out and delivered it in such a simple way that when we've engaged with clients and explained how it works they can't quite get their head around how obvious it is."
Channel strategy
A key part of SimpliVity's go-to-market strategy is its meet-in-the-channel relationships with vendor giants. A Huawei alliance was announced at the end of last year in addition to existing partnerships with Cisco, Lenovo and Dell.
Hope said that the role of the vendor's three UK distributors - Arrow, Comstor and Exertis - helps reseller partners integrate these solutions.
"The beauty of 'meet in the channel' is that the VARs can buy our technology on whatever platform they choose, but if you're not buying it as an appliance it has to be integrated.
"You get to choose your server and choose the SimpliVity software, but what distribution has brought to the table, which has helped us tremendously, is there integration capabilities.
"If you're a VAR in the UK and you want to buy SimpliVity on Lenovo we have distribution there set up to source the Lenovo, source SimpliVity and do the integration so VARs have the ability to buy the appliance but in their own flavour."
What the analysts say
Despite the hype around hyper-convergence and some of its market leaders Tony Lock, analyst at Freeform Dynamics, said that its presence so far is relatively weak.
"The penetration of hyper-converged systems is nowhere near as great as people think it is," he said.
"Hyper-convergence has had a huge amount of publicity over the last couple of years and everyone believes that the world is using it every day of the week.
"There is lots of interest but not much real use of it yet - it's still very early days."
He explained that one of the big obstacles facing potential users is deciding how they should purchase a solution - as an appliance from one vendor or to build it themselves.
On top of that he said that while a number of vendors use the term hyper-converged, their products can often be very different to each other in how they work.
"It's a very noisy market," he said, "There are some reasonably small companies that have got very high profiles, Nutanix being one, and then you have all the existing gorillas that have offerings as well so one of the big challenges is to convince people why they should pick them.
"SimpliVity does do some things very differently to others and when I first met them I took some convincing, particularly for some of the compression ratios that they talked about, but the way they do that is architecturally different to many others so that is something that they need to do a bit of education around."