IT Europa is currently attending this week’s IT Press Tour of Denver and Silicon Valley, meeting a mix of cloud data management companies. Here’s what we found out from the first two, and how their plans touch the channel.
Hammerspace
Hammerspace allows large enterprises to make the most of their operational data in the cloud, supporting wide access to it across the organisation, and in an optimised way.
In early April it will be announcing two key enhancements to its Global Data Environment (GDE), that will build on its hyperscale channel service relationships and which will deliver further data management functionality through the technology it acquired from a recent acquisition.
More details on this will be publicly available on launch, but what IT Europa heard on the Tour will certainly give Hammerspace’s cloud and system integrator partners a new front to attack the market with.
What Hammerspace said: “Greenfields are the real sweet spot for Hammerspace in terms of avoiding deployment and legacy technology issues.
“It’s trickier when customers have been using NetApp forever, but Hammerspace can still run on top of it. It gets easier with the more big wins we get.”
Hammerspace maintains that using its file storage architectures means using two times less servers, racks and networking kit, and delivers two times less latency and uses two times less power. That’s some claim, and is obviously dependant on the size of the company and the number of users, among many other issues.
But what’s coming in April will definitely make Hammerspace’s position in the market sweeter.
Arcitecta
Arcitecta reported a big jump in revenues in the last year for its data tagging and data management technology, which is used by large organisations globally, including a number of leading public institutions.
The company’s revenue is still not huge, currently standing at around $15m, but IT Europa calculated it was well under $10m not so long ago in a previous report, so there has certainly been noticeable growth.
The company reported a “successful past year” with all regions being profitable. Its Mediaflux platform is the established offering, and the integrated Livewire data movement tool, which can also be bought separately, was recently added.
Metadata is needed to properly store, archive and access data when it is needed in an organisation, but it can be difficult to manage. Mediaflux is a database that makes metadata easier to control and manage. It does this by indexing it, making it searchable, and managing existing/legacy metadata. Arcitecta can also find metadata when it goes missing for new customers.
Interestingly, on the Tour, we heard there were no patents covering Mediaflux, and that it relies on “trade secrets”. The company said: “All code is written by us, which reduces the attack surface by not being open source. Who knows what happened with recent widespread attacks that have breached well used platforms that have used open source software.”
Asked whether this went against the grain, the company said: “Some organisations do ask us about this, but when they are understaffed and they don’t want their staff struggling in open source communities in trying to deliver something by 5pm, they want our power tools.”
It added: “When the swarm is goes one way, we want to go the other, that’s how you differentiate yourself in the market. If someone can figure us out [by working out the non-patented secret sauce], good luck to them. Patents are expensive, and time-consuming to register and manage.”
Arcitecta says it would rather concentrate on getting its product into the market and building brand recognition.
“This is not a trivial market, and we are in a good position in it. This is a company to watch in 2024,” it added.
The firm’s European footprint was established 18 months ago, and it is now looking to hire more staff to help run it.
More from the Tour to follow...
