Continuing our coverage from last week’s IT Press Tour of Denver and Silicon Valley, here’s a channel update from a very established data management player.
Quantum Corporation is a hardware and software storage vendor which is seeking a new direction. It leaked details of various new products to the Tour, with full details of these to be made public on 2 April.
These products follow the firm’s new Myriad software-defined storage operating system being made generally available recently. Myriad is seen as a further step towards Quantum moving from its legacy tape business to new storage sales.
Nasdaq-listed Quantum Corporation also recently fell into regulatory difficulties about the revenue reporting of some of its products, leading to the posting of its results for the second and third quarter being delayed. The company is still working to finalise these figures by the end of this month, IT Europa learned.
As for the new products set to appear, Quantum said: “Both products will be shipping this second quarter after launch, and efforts have already been made to prepare the channel – we didn’t want the new features to go to waste. Once you get the first 30 customers in the market signed up it gets easier.”
On the direction of the company generally, Jamie Lerner (pictured), CEO and chairman of Quantum, said: “The last few years was about helping customers manage their unstructured data, as well as the heritage archival stuff. It’s now about getting the most out of unstructured data using AI.
“Customers are asking us to design an ‘AI pipeline’ to help add value to their business and stock listing, as well as to their end customers.”
As customers are increasingly using Quantum to provide data services, Lerner added that growing numbers are choosing to store their data in the vendor’s various data centres, for both backup and data workloads, instead of going to established co-location providers.
“We’re not Equinix, but it’s a growing services business for us. Customers are exchanging data with us as part of the customer relationship anyway, so why not?”
On legacy technology, Lerner said: “Even though our company has pioneered plenty of technology to support established ways of working, we have had to let some go.
“We no longer support hard drives, and I don’t think customers should have to use a GUI [graphical user interface] to set up systems. Set-ups should be done automatically to enable different platforms to talk to each other.
“Myriad updates every three weeks – we’ve never had to ‘drop’ a new product every three weeks before. Quantum is inventing again, when I joined the company we hadn’t invented anything for ages, now we’re generating patents once more.”
More from the Tour to follow...
