
Customers
Do they have any customers?
Infinidat is the Moshe Yanai founded and led storage supplier building high end Infinibox arrays. Kenniston's LinkedIn profile shows he left in March, having joined in October 2015 from Catalogic Software. We note Nina Manor, Infinidat’s VP for Human Resources, left in February. In January Infinidat slimmed down its UK office …
Quite a few. Are you being snarky or just lazy? Asking for a friend, thanks! But yeah.. .they have a number of large accounts and use a few of them as references. It's always good to know a fortune 100 is using your kit and more than happy. Punishing for rivals too. I mean when push comes to shove and pencils are sharpened and the Infinidat solution is half the cost, there is a lot of screaming and shouting for fanboys of the incumbent followed by toys tossed from the pram. . .
I don't believe AC's comment was a snarky comment - a genuine one, although I may be wrong :)
There is a lot of difference between the 3 stages of a storage startup:
1. giving the gear away
2. sell it significantly below cost to mitigate incumbent and lessen risk
3. selling on its value and merits - for profit.
1 is easy - the VC's fund (1) and partially (2)
I trust they are profitable based on Moshe's reputation alone. We might guess they are already at 3 and sustaining profitability.
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/2016/11/16/start-up-profile-infinidat/
The start-up is "profitable since last quarter," according to CEO.
It's COTS and not hard to come pretty close to being able to price out all the hardware components to see they are selling at a substantial profit. Yeah, they have to run a business so this isn't an easy thing and that's why they pay Wall Street analysts a lot of money to figure these things out - that ain't me.
Their large customers are indeed large enterprises that were practically given these systems and relied upon Moshe's good industry name.
Collectively, their installed base is less than 300, and that maybe reaching.
You will typically find them in IBM accounts chasing XIV refreshes.
This Moshe adventure has no legs though...
They've barely got started. They've recently added (and soon to ship) compression. That brings their "effective" cost per GB down in the $0.50/GB range. They are working on dedupe (google it). With an ingest rate of 10 GB/sec it will make for an even better initial primary backup target. If nothing else, they should dominate that space ... never mind the Enterprise space you intimate is "going away." They could hang their hat on backup growth alone if nothing else. And yes, there are a number of larger players that started using them as backup targets as they kick the tires. Large Enterprises don't often swap out their data vendor of choice on a whim. The big player groupthink, trinkety trinkets obtained, etc. slow that process down considerably even with the CFOs beating on them. B^)