In this blog I look beyond the obvious and try to find out why people and companies do what they do - and what it means for the rest of us. 
I’ve long been a proponent of proper marketing as an often neglected or overlooked critical success factor for startups. When done right, proper marketing identifies market opportunities, product specifications, and aligns sales efforts. Most of the time, however, these are not done right. They are afterthoughts and are only invoked after a company screws up nine ways from Sunday.
Nirvanix did the behind the scenes parts well–they figured out what market opportunities exist for cloud storage, they figured out the products/technologies required to serve that market, and then they did a strange thing – they forgot to tell the world about it.
You can have the best thing ever, but if no one knows about it, it often doesn’t matter.
Thus, I was stunned when I had a recent update from the company once new CEO Scott Genereux came aboard and dragged long time marketing sidekick Steve Zivanic with him. I was stunned at just how much the fledgling entity had going for it, and more stunned that I didn’t know.
The Discovery:
- 700 Customers, and I’m not talking mom & pop shops. I’m talking huge enterprise accounts including GE, Comcast, NBC/Universal, SwissCom, Fox, Cisco, VMware, Logitech and a ton more.
- Big Quantities–several multi-PB consumers including NBC/Universal–putting all of their movie inventory on their sites.
- Interesting Applications–Cisco (and others) keeping their Global Tech Support log files for open cases for customers and accessing them in real-time.
- All the right consumption models–via a cloud gateway, via the public cloud, or via a hybrid software offering that even lets you add your OWN existing storage into your hybrid cloud. You pick and choose what’s right for you, not what’s right for your vendor.
- They have 7 (5 Nine) data centers operational.
The company claims to outperform every competitor, from the poor man’s cloud (Amazon) to EMC’s Atmos offering and everyone in between. Most customers have done an evaluation of the alternatives, and still come back to Nirvanix.
So, while it remains to be seen who the runaway victor will be (the market has really only just begun after all), it’s clear that early on–for storage services–these guys are kicking butt and doing it despite the fact that they haven’t bothered to tell anyone along the way. The new team will change that–they are nothing if not aggressive promoters–and I suspect that we’ll be hearing a lot more success stories soon.
What’s the prognosis now that I’ve been blown away? If they can reach critical mass–which they are well on the way to doing–someone is going to take them out. That’s just too much of a head start, too many marquee customers to let them continue to make others look bad. Every account they land at this point is one that looked at the big boys and made a business decision to go Nirvanix. Hit a couple thousand customers and the bankers will come sniffing.
Finally, one major reason they are winning these deals is that they have designed the services to be “enterprise” ready. Secure, multi-tenant, high-performance, distributed services that can support the mission-critical nature enterprises demand is what separates them from that pack at this point. Others are still “tinkering” with production offerings, Amazon isn’t interested in playing the enterprise game, and the market is ready to consume. If you shut the market down today, it’s hard to show how anyone would beat Nirvanix.
Imagine how well they would be doing if they told someone?
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