Viking Enterprise Solutions, one of four business units of the $9 billion turnover Nasdaq-listed Sanmina Corporation, says it is looking for new distributors and resellers across Europe.
Viking specialises in integrated design and manufacturing solutions for data centres and various industry verticals globally. It provides OEMs with systems for high performance, high density compute and storage; data centre liquid cooling solutions; and rack scale systems.
While the majority of its sales comes from hardware still, it is ramping up its software sales, covering AI, power management, anti-ransomware protection, IoT, edge, and open source software like Ceph and Kubernetes, along with other areas.
It markets itself as the “brand for the brand” in the OEM space, with a large number of very well known data centre product providers badging Viking’s systems.
Mark Devincent (pictured), SVP and general manager of Viking Enterprise Solutions, addressed the IT Press Tour of Silicon Valley data management companies last week, which IT Europa attended. Devincent said: “We have started putting our product to the channel, and that business has started to grow. Traditionally, we had not been in the channel. We had kept all the platforms really to the Tier one OEMs, our name was really not out there, which inspired this discussion to try and get our name and brand going.
“We have some value added resellers and partners, and distribution, distribution partners at a global level that we have engaged with. But when we started creating these software platforms and putting that on hardware, we thought it made total sense to be able to sell that through the channel.”
Devincent continued: “So we said, Okay, if we're going to go to market with these platforms, these appliances, what's the best way to do it? We do have a direct sales force, but we also have this channel now to sell the whole solution. We know we're not a commoditised hardware provider in the market. We tend to be more specific and very deliberate in the performance and the system we offer. So we want partners who can actually sell that value.
“If you guys have any recommendations for us on resellers or distribution partners in Europe, that might be helpful.”
While the firm sells into Europe, most of it is distributed and shipped from the US, with Climb Channel Solutions, ASI and TD Synnex already involved with the Viking distribution channel. While it has product development centres across the world, the lion’s share of that work comes out of Colorado and San Jose (where Viking has its global headquarters).
The company has come out with a solution called Cloud Native Orchestrator, that has allowed it to develop its software for storage and to help build a framework around deploying AI and ML workloads, which will be launched in the “next 60 days or so”, for customers to start testing, said Devincent.
From listening to the company it was clear that Viking was now seeking to dictate what the market needed, in a progressive way.
Devincent said: “It’s true to say that, in the past, you would build systems specified, defined by your client. But now you promote yourself with some use cases to build on your stuff directly, and not only, let's say, defined by your customers, but defined by you that can be immediately deployed.
“As an example, we had started engaging with a Tier One OEM to cloud service providers, and they got excited about it, they have now engaged, so they have become a lead customer. And we typically use the customers to help define us, to find a product and also take it to market, and then we'll branch it out to the rest of the industry.
“We're so close with our technology partners, we're looking for the next generation. We come up with concepts, and then we'll take it to customers.”
In this vein, the company has recently designed a new software power management system to help deliver sustainable power usage; has invested in a company that designs AI-driven server liquid cooling systems, that will be introduced to Viking customers; and Viking has designed a GPU fractioning system – a sort of “VMware of GPUs” – that will help users reduce the amount of GPUs they need for data processing, while enabling them to get the most out of the ones they have managed to buy in an oversubscribed market.
This is certainly a big opportunity for distributors and resellers looking to carve a niche in the evolving markets of data processing and management.
