Your company positions itself, Mike, as – to quote the home page – developing and selling clustered NAS based on a scalable file system that allows for multiple storage appliances (nodes) to be managed as a single pool for users in areas like "media and entertainment, genomics, Web 2.0, eDiscovery and oil and gas exploration". But then some of your branding is all about high performance compute (HPC) – what’s the link?
I’d say that up until about six years ago, the HPC label would have been correct. But we’d now say we address any problem users have around managing data at scale, in terms of number of users, I/O, throughput – especially if that’s unstructured data they are dealing with.
And this is all under the SiliconServer brand, right?
Well, we have a number of brands – Titan is our top end system, Mercury for the midrange and we have our Jet Centre VMware integration software suite.
We know that you have customers like Webfusion, Eidos Interactive and you have comments from media companies like your Los Angeles-based VFX [visual effects] user that bought a BlueArc solution with 48 TB of storage but within six months had increased its storage pool by 400%. These are big numbers but they are a bit niche customers, do you not think? Is being a BlueArc customer a "minority sport"?
Again, that’s partly historical. So media and entertainment companies and studios still today very validly use our solutions; we were part of the solution around movies like ‘Planet 51’ and ‘Avatar,’ for example. But we’re actually, according to Gartner, in the top five of all NAS market share statistics, which shows you that our appeal has broadened out significantly.
Perhaps you’d better talk a bit about your relationship with HDS, which you characterise as letting you get into "mainstream enterprise data centres" over the past three years?
Sure. We are sold under the ‘HNAS Powered by BlueArc’ brand by our partners HDS; we’ve had a full global OEM agreement with them for about four years. That’s put us into a whole new range of industries we’d not really been before, from manufacturing to finance, and all across the world.
You claim sales went up 40% for the fourth quarter compared to the same period a year ago and after four quarters of growth you just attained profitability for the first time in your corporate history. So I guess you’ve been in start up mode for some time. For ten years, in fact?
That’s one possible way to characterise the journey, I suppose. But we’d also say that the kind of problems we’ve developed expertise in solving are now much more mainstream, are where the market as a whole is headed, so it’s been investment in learning how to do things the competition just can’t.
We have an uncanny knack at CBR of talking to niche storage companies just before they get acquired. Is this another example?
Well, there’s a lot of consolidation activity in the storage market, that’s true. There is interest as best of breed players achieve a level of criticality where they become very interesting to a certain level of customer, as well as to companies looking to grow their own market share. In the storage market, the game’s all about being one of the big dogs.
Yes. So you are looking to be acquired, at least potentially?
We have had some tremendous organic growth on our own. A year after launching a midrange product set we’d grown that segment of our customer base 250%. And like I say, the market has found its way to us; we are no longer of interest only to folks in media or life sciences, the problems of scale when dealing with things like big virtualisation projects are applicable everywhere now. But if you are flat out asking me ‘are you looking to be bought?’ I will only say that we have passed a major milestone [with achieving profitability] and are readying ourselves for whatever the market may have in store for us next.
Tell us about customers who aren’t specialist media studios, or have specific rendering problems; something that may be more applicable to the majority of the CBR CIO reader problem set, as it were?
I can’t name the client unfortunately but we are helping a major European air carrier with 35,000 desktops successfully transition to a VMware, virtual and consolidated environment, where we are proving to be a great solution in terms of storage. With Chevron, which is a global client I suppose, we’re looking at replacing 12 filers [NAS servers] with 2 BlueArc systems, a tremendous reduction for the customer in terms of reduced power, cooling and spend overall. I can also say that our UK customers right now include people like the London Stock Exchange, ComputaCenter and Atos Origin.
OK, great thanks. So to conclude for today – how can I shake off this feeling that you are really a very niche sort of company?
I’d say that we’re highly relevant to any CIO working with lots of unstructured data, file-based storage of any kind. Yes, we are a unique architecture and are unique for having learned to solve these kinds of problems at scale. But that’s great, as we have proved we can do that for one sort of problem – and can now help that CIO with his, too.
