Four crucial deals to pluck Violin Memory away from the trash can During the Violin Memory quarterly results earnings call on Thursday, CEO Kevin DeNuccio talked about his company's strategic review with investment banker Jefferies LLC. The review "included both inbound and outbound inquiries of over 40 companies" that might benefit from using or selling "the technology and value proposition …
They did - back in 2012. But then they made the mistake of trying to license Veritas Volume Manager from Symantec and retrofit it into their box. Two years later it still didn't work and the market had moved on - their lead was irretrievably lost. Add to that the debacle of retrofitting (again) Falconstor and you get to a company doing that rarest of things: going out of business in a growth market.
Violin was dead when HP bought 3par and went with that for their flash and killed their OEM agreement with violin.
Strangely enough some 3rd party contacted me recently about what i thought of violin. They claimed to think I looked into violin in the past when i have not.
Seemed like some sort of market research. For sure wasn't a sales pitch
They are a hardware defined solution, which meant they had a substantial advantage for years. That advantage has since slowly gone away until now it is a significant liability. To develop the next platform on hardware, or to move to a software defined solution using COTS takes a lot of time and money to build, which they do not have--either of--and this is why they went from being a really great 1st gen AFA option to a almost universally ignored 2nd wave AFA.
Even if the FSP platform is good, they are so far behind the curve in almost every aspect business wise they probably can't recover and must sell. Whoever buys them will simply have a decent product that will have a really hard time competing in the marketplace against much better next gen tech AFA competitors, but I think still has some value in their existing install bases.
my 2c
>> and you get to a company doing that rarest of things: going out of business in a growth market.
Ouch... On point, but still... ouch!
Their tech is irrelevant in all but a sliver of use cases, and in even in those cases, Violin is no longer considered a viable option.
Unfortunately vmem does not have a differentiated edge. Once, they did, being the fastest fully fault tolerant storage array on the market. Now, IBM and Fusion/sandisk and HDS have them beat. As a customer I can not think of why I would buy vmem over all of the alternatives that offer comparable latency, IOPs, and datacenter footprint. And if it is my tier 0 and 1 that I am buying for the trust me, I'd buy from a big vendor. Seriously, the Fusion ION or whatever it is called has lower latency. Lame. 3par too. If only there was a real stock play.
Only option is their IP. Perhaps they hold some key patents around asic centric flash interfacing. I do think the market will move away from SSDs cus ssds are stupid. Maybe vmem has valuable ip around that.
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