Tegile squares up to Nimble in flash fight
Vendor launches head-on marketing campaign against Nimble, claiming competitor is 'getting long in the tooth'
Flash vendor Tegile has launched an assault on Nimble Storage's customer base with an aggressive marketing campaign, encouraging customers to abandon Nimble and defect to its own products.
On a web page titled "Tegile versus Nimble", Tegile boasts of its own product's superiority to Nimble's, claiming that Nimble's all-flash portfolio is "getting long in the tooth" with many of the components used "no longer available for sale".
Tegile also name drops analyst DCIG to back up its argument, claiming that DCIG recommends Tegile over Nimble "every time", while also providing a specifications table that pits Tegile against Nimble.
In response to Tegile's campaign, HPE suggested its competitor was intimidated by its own market position, telling CRN that Nimble saw revenue growth of over 80 per cent in HPE's last quarter.
"It is not surprising that our competitors are reacting to Nimble's leading position in the market, made even stronger by HPE's extensive channel network," an HPE spokesperson said.
"Nimble revenue grew over 80 per cent in our fourth-quarter results reported last week and HPE was just named a leader for its completeness of vision and ability to execute in Gartner's 2017 Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays."
The magic quadrant referred to by HPE saw the vendor placed further into the top-right corner than any other vendor, followed by NetApp and Dell EMC. Tegile was placed in the bottom-right visionaries corner.
Nimble is no longer featured in the research following its acquisition by HPE, but in last year's report Nimble was placed in the top-right leaders corner, with Tegile again in the visionaries corner.
On the rationale behind the campaign, Jonathan Lassman, managing director at Tegile and Nimble partner Epaton, said that customers may have started to become disillusioned by Nimble under the ownership of HPE.
Tegile itself was acquired by Western Digital in August for an undisclosed fee, but Lassman said the new parent company has not meddled in the vendor's affairs.
"We go through cycles of new start-up vendors and there is a selection of people who buy next-generation technology," he explained. "The reason they buy it is that they like the agility of the vendor, the fact that they're ahead of the game, and the fact that they feel special as part of their customer base.
"Then they get acquired and these vendors lose a lot of that agility and that innovation. Tegile has been acquired but they're still retaining their flexibility."
Lassman went on to suggest that HPE's strategy has become confused following the acquisitions of Nimble and SimpliVity, creating an opportunity for competitors to swoop in.
"There's a battle internally about which products they sell," he added. "They have SimpliVity and we haven't come across them in one deal since the acquisition, so even staff inside are torn about which product to sell because the strategy has not been defined by the organisation above.
"Every user I've gone to that is using Nimble likes it, but what they might not like moving forward is to be part of the HPE juggernaut. If they're going to lose some serviceability and accessibility to the right people, they will end up walking away.
"Also, if they start comparing what you can do with Tegile with what you can do with Nimble, you can actually do a bit more with Tegile. If it's a refresh and they're going to need new kit rather than just a renewal, they might look around."