Every storage start-up is up for sale - NetApp vice president
NetApp boss swipes at storage vendors big and small has he unveils "new NetApp"
Every storage-focused start-up in the world, either public and private, is up for sale today, according to NetApp executive vice president Henri Richard.
Speaking at NetApp's Partner Executive Forum in Tallinn, Estonia, Richard opened up on what he referred to as "the new NetApp", while taking the time to swipe at other vendors in the storage space - particularly the start-ups that have emerged over recent years.
"There is series of companies struggling to justify their existence," Richard said. "Wall Street has become extremely critical of the unicorns, the start-ups [and] the promise of profit one day, maybe. They really are finding themselves in a bit of a pickle.
"I can tell you, and I won't give you names, but any of the still viable storage-based start-ups, private or public, that you can think of are in the market for sale, and they are in the market for sale at a price that is way below their last round of funding or their market capitalisation. Those are all distressed assets."
The storage market has seen a degree of consolidation over recent months - with Hewlett Packard Enterprise snapping up Nimble Storage for $1bn and SimpliVity for well below its previous valuation.
Expanding on the storage landscape, Richard said at the other end of the spectrum from the start-ups are the two "department store" vendors, which he said can never provide the same quality of service as the dedicated storage players.
In the middle of these two opposites, Richard singled out IBM and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) - pointing our IBM's diminishing storage portfolio and claiming that HDS cannot continue to invest at the same high-level they currently are on storage R&D.
"And then there is us," Richard said.
He claimed that NetApp's "dark period is somewhat over" with the launch of its hyper-converged offering last week, and a stronger hybrid cloud message following an extension of its partnership with Microsoft Azure.
While not expanding on further announcements, Richard promised "the best is yet to come".
"It's proverbial the tip of the iceberg," he said. "You are about to see some very interesting announcements, not just with Azure but AWS, GCP (Google Cloud Platform), IBM Bluemix and others.
"Three, four, five years of the old NetApp - if you want to call it that way - was under pressure in the marketplace, where a lot of people were concerned about our execution and what the cloud was going to do to us, what the mergers in the industry were going to do to us - this dark period is somewhat over.
"Yet I guarantee you that you haven't seen the very beginning of the hard work that took place when we needed results in that period - but it's coming and it's going to be extremely significant.
"If you think of NetApp over the last four or five years there was a lot of negative press and a lot of concern. Many of you were probably quite worried about this relationship and it's very important because everything we report - financial results share prices - was unfortunately not very encouraging. However that masked something extremely important that was happening none the less, which is thousands of hours of engineering and development on products that of course contributed to no revenue or profit."