Completing our round up of the IT Press Tour of Denver and Silicon Valley earlier this month, here are some more channel updates from the cloud data management firms we met.
Solix Technologies
Solix Technologies provides a cloud data platform for enterprises, and has a number of partners to get its technology into the market.
These partners include technology partners in the database space, the largest cloud service providers, and system integrator partners like Kyndryl, DXC and NTT Data.
Solix says it saw 50% growth last year, with turnover in the “$20m to $30m range” – the private company doesn’t want to give out an exact figure. It is completely private financed, with no VC money involved.
It’s direct European operation is limited with only two sales reps and a manager, mainly serving the UK market and Central Europe region, but Solix told the Tour it wanted to scale up its European efforts.
It is planning to open a European headquarters, and is currently deciding between the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands, with “Brexit factors” being considered in the mix.
The Solix Cloud incorporating enterprise AI features in the company roadmap, and an AI co-pilot is expected to appear later this year to drive the AI effort.
80% of the company’s leads are currently coming from partners, so the European and AI efforts may well drive up channel sales opportunities here.
Qumulo
A cloud storage software firm we’ve covered before, Qumulo reported channel progress since the last time we saw them in 2023.
The vendor is a channel-only company and reported the number of its customers globally had now reached 1,000, up from 900 last year. These are only across 20 countries, so there is clearly room to expand the channel footprint further.
In November last year, at Microsoft Ignite, the firm launched ANQ, its next generation File in the Cloud product. Post-launch, it signed up 26 customers in a 12-week period, so it has high hopes in that segment, with its pay-as-you-go “progressive pricing”.
WEKA
WEKA now promotes itself as the “AI data platform” for large enterprises, and says is has seen 100% year-on-year growth. Its headcount has jumped from 350 to 400, and its customer count now stands at 275.
Having raised a total of $275m in VC funding, its growth journey has clearly just started, as the firm goes to work on its “four pillars of a data platform” – multi-workload, multi-performant, multi-location and multi-scale.
The prime use cases for WEKA’s data platform are AI/ML and GPU cloud processing; financial services and trading; pharma, health and life sciences; and media and entertainment.
On the AI/ML and GPU side of things, the Tour was briefed on an impending product announcement that will go public later this month. It involves an alliance with two of the largest technology companies in the world, watch this space.
StoneFly
StoneFly is a software-defined storage vendor that builds products around its StoneFusion operating system.
Its products are sold through the channel with the world’s leading distributors pushing them to resellers. After the Synnex merger with Tech Data, the profile of the company is going up in Europe thanks to Tech Data’s wide footprint here.
Its software stack offers full SAN, NAS and object storage support, meaning most data loads can be supported at organisations in one go.
With around 10,000 end customers and about 50,000 StoneFly systems in the field already, StoneFly’s expanding services offering means it is going to need more partners.
It is expanding its cyber security and ransomware protection features, as well as its data backup and archiving services, meaning there is a clear opportunity for resellers and MSPs.
Picture: Mo Tahmasebi (left) CEO of StoneFly
