TECHNOLOGY I CHANNEL
The Zycko management can take the credit for moving the company away from its Cisco roots, a move that seems particularly smart as the ICT giant finds itself under attack from all sides. Galton-Fenzi’s analogy: “Cisco is like the Roman Empire. The company has opened up on too many fronts, and the barbarians are gathering on the borders…” There’s no doubt that Cisco will adapt to changing circumstances, but there will be significant fall out for the Channel.
And the Channel is also struggling to cope with the disruption that smart new start-ups, with their game-changing technologies, are causing to the traditional vendors and technologies – whose financial models cannot survive this new wave. Zycko might not be immune from the inevitable mergers and acquisitions cycle that follows a start-up wave, but by leading the market, rather than following, the company is giving itself the best possible chance to thrive in the present, volatile climate.
Storage success set to continue? “Storage is a messy place right now” states Galton-Fenzi. “You’ve still got four or five major providers, and then lots of little vendors – and no real clarity.” The venture capitalists are becoming active, and there are plenty of start-ups to be used as investment vehicles, but are there any really new technologies? For Galton-Fenzi, I/O virtualisation is an exciting opportunity – unsurprisingly Zycko has Xsigo and Next I/O in its portfolio; mentions that Hitachi Data Systems’ approach to storage virtualisation continues to hit a chord with end users – ‘the sales throughput is astonishing’; suggests that Asigra’s approach to cloud storage is worth investigating; and predicts the emergence of Huawei Symantec as a major player in the storage space. Virtual Instruments’ SAN optimisation technology also receives a name check – ‘an interesting play’.
Interesting to note, while other vendors such as IBM, EMC and HP continue to grow through acquisition, HDS has focused on its core competencies and grown organically – and there’s a new partner programme to enforce this approach. As for Virtual Instruments, ‘an interesting play’ barely does justice to the company’s offering. The company helps IT organizations maximize the performance, utilization and availability of Fibre Channel SANs and virtualized IT infrastructure. In doing this, Virtual Instruments helps to eliminate the risk of deploying I/O intensive business-critical applications in complex physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. The company does this by offering a combination of advanced monitoring hardware, software and services to help its customers realise the full benefits of server and storage virtualisation.
But not too much to get excited about, then? Far from it. Galton- Fenzi’s enthusiasm is palpable as he starts to talk about a brand new approach to storage networking, established in the US, and, through Zycko, currently bursting into Europe. “It’s storage for dummies,” says Galton-Fenzi. “When the Zycko engineers first examined the technology, they were dumbfounded. With a management team gleaned from Data Domain, VMware and
30 SEPTEMBER 2011 |
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NetApp, this new start-up is just about to ‘go large’. Based entirely on Flash memory (SSDs + SATA), the technology offers a combination of scalability and performance that is, quite simply, unrivalled - $65k list price for an 8.5TB block.”
The company in question? Tintri - the leading producer of VM- aware storage appliances. The company has appointed Marcus Chambers, formerly of Riverbed and Cisco Systems, as vice president of EMEA-APAC Operations, and announced a formal partnership with Zycko, the international value-add distributor of leading edge IT solutions, which has offices in 13 countries across EMEA. Zycko will integrate Tintri VMstore into its suite of leading-edge IT products and provide support to sales operations in the EMEA market. Tintri will also be employing an EMEA-based high-touch sales force to complement these efforts. “It’s been impressive to see the inordinate amount of attention Tintri has received since its March launch. It’s indicative of the market’s readiness for a VM-aware storage appliance,” says Marcus Chambers, Tintri VP of EMEA-APAC Operations. “There’s a tremendous opportunity in expanding to the European market and I’m excited to be a part of that.”
Kieran Harty, Tintri CEO, adds: “Our stated mission of helping enterprises overcome storage-centric pain points to broaden virtual deployments, has been extremely well-received to date. While it was important for us to initially focus on fostering regional and national growth, we now see the potential to expand our operations to the EMEA and APAC markets. Marcus Chambers has a proven track record in EMEA and we believe that both he and the Zycko team will be an integral part of our growth there and beyond.”
“The storage market is undergoing a radical transformation and Tintri has positioned itself at the vanguard of next-generation solutions,” says Galton-Fenzi. “There’s a growing demand for VM-aware storage and Tintri has the potential to make both an immediate and lasting impact in the European market.”
Networking gains momentum Those familiar with the Zycko Solution Model know that another of the company’s major strengths is its ability to offer a complete portfolio of products and solutions across the data centre, virtualisation, storage and networking markets. As a case in point, Zycko has had a great deal of success with the Huawei Symantec file storage products in the NAS and clustering space sweet spots that include the media industry. Lo and behold, the fastest growing market for Zycko right now just happens to be the whole video conferencing, video streaming, and related management, sector – in other words, video networking. So, not only can Zycko provide the hardware on which all of the video data resides, it also provides the mechanism to deliver this content to the customer.
True to type, Zycko’s interest doesn’t lie with the traditional vendors within this space – Cisco/Tandberg and Polycom, for example – but with the smart new start-ups, such as LifeSize, Snom and VBrick.
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