More to flash market than Violin's crash or Nimble's soar

 

Dec 17, 2013, 12:33pm PST

There's more to flash market than Violin's crash, Nimble's soar

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Former Violin Memory CEO Donald Basile, center with the blue cap, was on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Friday when his company's stock started trading for the first time.

Cromwell Schubarth

Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal

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The dismal failure of Violin Memory since its September IPO and the remarkable success of Nimble Storage's public offering last week makes the flash storage world appear bipolar.
But a report on Tuesday from Sterne Agee analyst Alex Kurtz suggests it is too early to leap to any conclusions about how the battle between the Davids of the storage business will turn out against Goliaths like EMC, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
Flash storage is seeing double digit sales gains as the mobile device explosion increases the volume and speed that data centers need to operate at. But most data doesn't need to be accessed at the "hot" rates that flash can provide. The disc storage that the legacy companies built their businesses on isn't disappearing any time soon.
Flashy startups are raising tens of millions but the big companies are also developing flash offerings, either through M&A or from their own development teams.
"Brands can change quickly in this market as the Violin Memory and Nimble Storage juxtaposition demonstrates," Kurtz wrote after visits with Nutanix in San Jose and Pure Storage and Tintri in Mountain View. While some startups can point to rapid adoption of their products in the growth stage of flash storage, Kurtz thinks the road ahead will be more challenging.
"(A) key challenge isn't just competing against EMC or NetApp but finding mind share with channel partners," he wrote.
The CEOs of all three upstarts are buoyed by the success of last week's Nimble IPO, which raised more than expected and then saw its stock soar by about 60 percent in its Wall Street debut. An important factor for Nimble appears to be that it isn't a pure play, though, since it offers customers both flash and disc storage.

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Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1823.

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