SimpliVity is a vendor in the hyperconverged infrastructure market. What that means in plain English is that SimpliVity offers a product that is both hardware and software. Essentially it's about specific software tailored to the infrastructure on what it sits.
The hyperconverged space is a busy one with several vendors all trying to justify their existence and differentiate themselves from the commodity way the large webscale vendors think about their infrastructure. The continuum is very stark. On one end lies Google, Facebook, et al., which consider physical servers to be replaceable, generic items that they think little about, focusing instead on the software that sits on top of them. At the other end, lies vendors such as HP, VMware and SimpliVity, which articulate the extra value that comes from converging hardware with software.
It's a busy space—and a big opportunity, as SimpliVity's $276 million in funding illustrates. The company, which employs around 750 people globally, has no direct sales force but relies on a network of resellers and distributors to push its product, which is relevant when seen in the context of today's news. You see those resellers and distributors are often involved in particular vertical areas. As such, they're not really looking for a generic product but rather one that has a strong story to tell within a particular use case. Hence the news today that SimpliVity is rolling out a bunch of new capabilities that, at least to an extent, tick the box for particular use cases.
SimpliVity's offerings
What is SImpliVity offering? Well, first they have a new, all-flash solution designed to deliver predictable performance for data intensive operations. Think online transaction processing and big data analytics. There's a one-click disaster recovery solution, useful for those partners looking to provide business continuity solutions to customers. And then there's a specific VDI offering that is tailored to delivering virtual desktops in the most efficient manner possible (notwithstanding my personal feeling that VDI is entirely the wrong way to approach application modernization).
SimpliVity's vice president of product strategy, Jesse St. Laurent, speaks to the customer applicability of this release, saying: "These new solutions get at the heart of some of the most common issues plaguing our customers—workload, data protection and scalability—and will greatly benefit both enterprise and midmarket customers."
My POV
It's not about technology; it's about results. All too often we hear vendors wax poetic about feeds and speeds and, in doing so, lose sight of what their solutions is actually intended for. When you're selling through a partner channel, there's a fairly good chance that those same partners will take you to task for not giving them a use-case driven suite of products that they can take to market. After all, if you're 100 percent focused on channel sales as SimpliVity is, the success of your channel is the one thing that delivers your own success. It's so good to see SimpliVity aim in this direction. Their partners will thank them for it.