What does it do?
Tarmin claims to have a fresh approach to dealing with the explosion in structured and unstructured data generated by people and machines.
It has eschewed the idea of committing to spinning-disk media or SSD by taking the path of data-defined storage, claiming to solve the problem of storing big data and making it a form of insight into your company at the same time.
Its Gridbank data management platform works by being storage agnostic, meaning it can help companies choose the best way of storing their data, while it works on top of any of the above storage platforms (along with public or private cloud) too.
The Gridbank software then aims to turn storing big data from a business cost into something that actually brings in money, by drawing insights from the data itself with analytics capabilities. Tarmin claims its approach makes information distributed across data centres to be immediately transparent and useable, turning a business cost into something that drives economic potential by arming companies with more information about their products and customers.
(Pic: Tarmin founder Shahbaz Ali)
Who does it work with?
Tarmin has signed an agreement with IBM, making its software compatible with the latter’s range of storage solutions. It hopes the deal with the tech stalwart (which still has a surprisingly low share of the storage industry at 5%, according to Tarmin) will see it gain leverage in key markets – but some wonder whether the agreement undermines the startup’s storage agnostic approach.
Tarmin says it has talked with other giants – Cisco and Dell being two – about similar agreements, but nothing has come out of those talks yet. The startup says it is aware of the risk of being bought out by IBM unless other agreements are in place – but perhaps that could just create a bidding war if the company’s software is as good as it claims.
Which industries is it targeting?
Tarmin has only signed 12 customers so far, but is targeting in particular the finance and healthcare industries, as well as education – all of which generate vast amounts of data. It’s worked with Queen Mary University of London and is hoping that will drive further business in the UK education sector, while work with FTSE 250 firm Premier Oil may help cement its reputation in the oil industry.
What’s new?
The company. It’s just moved into some small but pleasant offices in Boston and has hired sales people to start getting customers. It’s very early days but Tarmin believes it has a game-changing idea and hopes to grow fast.
