Aussie IT veterans launch start-up down under

Nimble Storage, a Silicon Valley start-up specialising in flash-optimised, hybrid storage technology, has opened its new Asia-Pacific headquarters in Australia which will deal exclusively in the channel. 

The Asia-Pacific branch is headed by former NetApp A/NZ boss Peter O’Connor, who takes up the role of Nimble Storage's Asia Pacific vice president.

Ex-EMC manager Rob Barton and NetApp's former director of technology and strategy Gavin Cohen have also jumped onboard the start-up, as director of sales and director of marketing respectively.

O'Connor told CRN he was "very optimistic" about the company's chances in the A/NZ region.

"[The business] is going to be fulfilled through the channel 100 percent, which is pretty unique for this industry," he said. "We’ve made a huge commitment towards the channel and I think that's paying off in terms of loyalty and return to Nimble."

Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage, said Nimble Storage's expansion into Asia Pacific came off the back of a new round of funding following exceptionally strong year-on-year growth.

"The hand-picked team that has come on board to run our regional operations in Australia has an outstanding track record of working closely with customers and the partner community to provide the technology solutions they need to do business successfully,” Vasudevan said in a statement.

Nimble Storage has recruited two channel partners in the past fortnight; Sydney-based reseller Nexus and IT solutions provider Southern Cross Computer Systems.

In addition, O'Connor said there was a "long queue" of resellers lining up to sign with Nimble.

"Many of them are already showing considerable interest and are in the process of getting agreements and processes out at the moment."

Nimble Storage is currently running without a distributor in the A/NZ region. 

"We're going to take all our resellers direct to Nimble Storage, which is a little bit different to other storage vendors in this country, O'Connor said. 

"The backend processes inside Nimble are unique and very channel friendly and I think the whole process justifies not having a distributor, at least not initially." 

Fast storage

The appropriately named Nimble Storage has installed one thousand systems in just two years, A/NZ marketing director Gavin Cohen told CRN.

"But what's really interesting is, quarter on quarter, we're adding to that at a really expediential rate."

Cohen attributed the company's speedy growth to its technology innovations, particularly in the area of NAND flash.

"If you look at what's going on in the macro landscape, flash technology has come along and it's really the first physical change in storage that's taken place since forever. So what you're seeing is, the incumbent vendors like NetApps, EMC, IBM, Hitachi and so-on are finding ways of adding flash storage to their existing architectures.

"Whereas [Nimble Storage] are starting from scratch without any sort of legacy of building disk-based only systems. …We're able to build our hybrid devices at significantly higher performance and capacity at a much lower cost than any of the incumbents." 

Between 2010 and 2011, the A/NZ storage market grew about 50 percent in terms of the total amount of data that needed to be stored, according to O'Connor. He said he expected the trend to continue.

"I think Australia and New Zealand will see another year of roughly 50 percent data growth. That's going to put a lot more price-pressure on IT budgets [which] I think stands Nimble in a really good position in terms of being able to store a lot more data a lot more cost effectively.

"So I think our value proposition is going to stand up well and I think it's going to be one of absolute attraction to a large number of companies and channel partners."