SimpliVity Expects 100 Customers of OmniCube by Year’s End

SimpliVity Corp.‘s market adoption continues to show that OmniCube provides benefit to IT organizations that can now capitalize on the economics and simplicity that the new era is ushering in. 

OmniCube combines standard x86 servers with its OmniStack technology, to become economical and simple to operate IT infrastructure platform; delivering a broad scope of infrastructure functionality that displaces up to 12 disparate proprietary products. The underlying technical enabler of OmniCube’s data mobility, scalability, and optimized performance – and therefore the force behind OmniCube’s market adoption – is the Data Virtualization Engine (DVE), an accelerated, deduped, compressed and optimized data architecture. While OmniCube customers vary widely, they all have common requirements for simplicity and reduced costs that DVE addresses.
 
At the end of the first half of 2013, following a pace of customer deployments that span a range of company sizes, industries, use-cases and geographies, OmniCube has now proven itself a flexible and functionality rich IT infrastructure platform. The range of customer deployments shows a diversity of usage. The market demand, coupled with customer and partner reception, has fueled growth and has SimpliVity poised to accelerate growth further in the second half of the year.
 
"In designing OmniCube, we realized that all IT organizations – whether staffed by 5 people or 5000 – have the same underlying needs to reduce operating costs, simplify their environment, and deliver higher QoS to their customers," commented CEO Doron Kempel. "We intentionally set out to deliver the technology that could address these needs, regardless of the size of the environment. We are now seeing that our ability to deliver clear, differentiated value across a very wide range of use cases is fueling extraordinary demand for OmniCube."

Customer Base Growth
This demand quickly translated into a rapid growth of the OmniCube customer install base during the first half of 2013. Now with a customer base well into the double-digits, and shipments already approaching 100 systems, the company expects the total number of customers to exceed the original projection of 100 by year’s end. The appeal of OmniCube is reflected in its current set of customers, which span major industries including healthcare, finance, manufacturing, technology, insurance, telecommunications, and education.

Customers range in size from mid-sized companies, represented by Wausau Coated Products, Inc., a manufacturing company in Wisconsin, to Global 100 firms including T-Systems International GmbH, Europe’s 3rd largest telecommunications firm.

By deploying two OmniCube systems in its primary data center, and another two in its DR site, Wausau Coated was able to decommission all of its legacy infrastructure systems including servers, SAN storage, SAN switch, backup device, and 3rd party backup software – essentially achieving their goal of running a ‘data center in a box’.

Chad Lemmer, IT manager, Wausau Coated Products, describes the process of deciding to go with OmniCube as an easy choice. "We compared the complexity of our existing infrastructure – servers, SANs and switches in multiple locations with multiple panes of glass – with the simplicity of OmniCube where all of those elements are converged into one box and behind a single pane of glass… and it just made perfect  sense. SimpliVity takes so much complexity and cost out of it, while introducing tremendous functionality. After researching all options, SimpliVity was the clear choice."

By contrast, T-Systems, in a project led by Czech-based SimpliVity distributor SIT, is using OmniCube across three major datacenters to provide the flexible and scalable infrastructure for its massive public and private clouds that enable its customers to consume computing and storage resources on demand.  

"Our primary objective is to continually increase the value that our customers gain from our services. The collaboration with SIT and the implementation of OmniCube technology are the next step that will allow us to cement our place as market leader in Public and Private cloud services," explains Jan Drbohlav, delivery VP of T-Systems Czech Republic.

T-Systems exemplifies a growing segment of SimpliVity customers, cloud services providers, who see OmniCube both as a competitive differentiator, and a catalyst to their growth. Using OmniCube at the heart of their cloud services offering has enabled Corporate IT Solutions to go head-to-head against the giant cloud providers and win when competing for new cloud services business. 

"OmniCube provides us with a huge competitive advantage when bringing in new customers to our private cloud," commented Josh Dinneen, VP sales for corporate IT solutions.

Like many SimpliVity customers, Jon Bartelson, assistant CIO at Worcester Polytechnic Institute of Massachusetts, is primarily motivated by the native data protection functionality of OmniCube, which provides simplified local and remote backup. "We’re always looking to improve the services to our students, faculty and staff, while finding ways to be more efficient with our resources. With OmniCube we can improve our SLAs for application uptime, RPO and RTO while reducing our infrastructure costs by more than half." 

While the use cases vary widely, all customers benefit from the underlying technology which allows them to deploy a simplified, scalable and dynamic infrastructure that delivers all of the functionality that the modern IT organization requires while lowering the TCO.

"SimpliVity’s base of customers demonstrates the flexibility of OmniCube, and the underlying OmniStack technology, which enables customers to deploy scalable pools of shared resources for their virtualized environments – a goal of large and small companies alike," notes Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. "All of SimpliVity’s customers are benefiting from higher levels of data protection, uptime and reliability and doing so at a fraction of the cost of traditional alternatives."

International Expansion
Another factor fueling the growth of the customer install base is SimpliVity’s international expansion. Responding to high levels of interest in Europe, SimpliVity opened its German Sales office in April and has since seen customer and partner activity balloon.  

SimpliVity currently has three customer implementations deployed in production environments in Europe and since April, SimpliVity has gained 12 reseller partners in Europe, to join its long-standing partnership with distributor SIT, with the number of partners growing weekly. 

But what most impresses Klaus Seidl, SimpliVity’s regional sales director in Germany, is the speed with which partners are bringing in new OmniCube customers. Several of Siedl’s recently signed partners went from first introduction to OmniCube, to selling systems to new customers in the span of 3 months. In his years as VP sales with NetApp, in which he drove sales to an annual rate of $350 million, Siedl never witnessed the same kind of market enthusiasm for a data center infrastructure product. "The enthusiasm and rapid adoption of OmniCube is remarkable, but not entirely surprising given that this is what the European enterprise market has waited for: the simplified, multi-functional infrastructure building block that allows them to build out their customized clouds for private and public customers."

Beyond Europe, SimpliVity is engaged in commercial activities in AsiaPac and Latin America as well, signing on new partners and distributors.
 
Partner Network
A significant contributor in bringing on new customers is its expanding network of channel partners. 100% of sales are through its channel partners, all of which bring a range of data center and virtualization expertise to their customers. SimpliVity has grown its total reseller network to 55, on the strength of OmniCube’s differentiation, the value it delivers to the partners’ customers, and SimpliVity’s partner program which fosters and enables partner success in selling and deploying OmniCube.

The differentiated value of the product was a motivator for Ruud van Heusden, manager of Allsystems BV, a Netherlands-based reseller. "As a system integrator we are always looking for the best possible solutions to offer our customers. SimpliVity’s OmniCube stood out in the market. We were so convinced of OmniCube’s potential that we added it to our portfolio quickly after our first introduction. Now we can truly offer our customers an infrastructure solution that is easy to set up, manage, support and delivers great performance. SimpliVity’s OmniCube is a winner."

Industry Awards and Accolades
Industry awards captured in the first half of 2013 by SimpliVity signify the market’s recognition of OmniCube’s differentiated value and market leadership position. Recent awards include: CRN 5 Star Partner Rating Award, 2013 CRN Channel Chief Award, Red Herring Top 100 North America, Network Products Guide Best Products Award (Data Center), and ComputerWorld Top 100 Best Places to work in IT 2013.

Company Growth
To keep up with demand, SimpliVity itself is in growth mode. Its employee base has doubled since the beginning of 2013, and is expected to double again by year end in order to respond effectively to the ahead-of-schedule customer, partner, and geographical growth that the company is now experiencing. 

"The customer and partner traction that we see today is clear evidence that OmniCube is addressing a real need in the market," commented Kempel. "This gives us confidence to further invest in the growth of the SimpliVity team which will allow us to further capitalize on this market opportunity and more rapidly bring OmniCube to all corners of the globe."