Honey, I shrank the company: Tintri's dire third quarter presages a worse final one

CEO Ken Klein is having to eat dust after Tintri's poor IPO saw sales staff leave. Third quarter results are dire, the fourth quarter looks even worse, and Tintri is considering selling itself. We'll let the numbers talk first and see what Klein and his CFO Ian Halifax said in the earnings call. Revenues in its third fiscal …

[SniperPenguin]

Ouch

Tintri is a classic example of "not doing enough when you have the lead" - Which is a shame since I like the product.... They were doing VM reporting before some others were even vSphere aware.

As for a buyer? Nimble went around the houses before being bought by HPE. The only place I could really see them going to is Lenovo (where they would die a slow, horrible death).

Dell? - EMC thank you

NetApp? - Solidfire

HPE? - Nimble / InfoSight

HDS / Huawei? - They Prefer to develop in-house.

Cisco? - They have been burnt before (Whiptail) and personally I think NetApp would be a better option for them...

[Naselus]

Re: Ouch

It's been a complete strategic fail. In engineering terms, Tintri products are top-notch, but their entire market strategy has been an abortion from start to finish - their entirely targeted at massive blue-chips who are never going to be confident buying from a startup in it's runway phase.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ouch

That's one reason why we didn't buy their products when they pitched it to us. That, and their price point was kind of ridiculous for the amount of storage we were looking at.

Anon for obvious reasons.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was offered a job with them in early 2011, but turned them down to go elsewhere. So glad I did! What a waste of four years that would have been.

[Anonymous Coward]

not a bad product

but not differentiating in the market.

When you're a me-too and your competition is established, large and just as good, you're going to lose most of the business, unless you're greasing the channel better than your competitors.

Anon, because...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always liked the product...but just like some others out there...not investing my IT budget into a company that is a going concern. I like new and shiny just as much as the next guy, but not losing my job over it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unwarranted negative sentiment!

Tintri is a classic example of how pseudo negative publicity and unwarranted negative sentiment in the market could cause catastrophic results. I've been working with Tintri Engineering for over 3 years and these have been the best days of my career; challenging work, passionate, smart and nice people to work with and a great product to work for. There might be some gap in execution, product could have been staged, marketed and sold better, but definitely execution model is way better than how it is being perceived. Employees are still very optimistic and focussed on delivering, lets see how it goes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Unwarranted negative sentiment!

Yeah it's totally unwarranted because those numbers are just lying, aren't they?

Listen, Mr. Engineer--the product was technically far far superior as a VM only platform when it was introduced, nothing else came close to it performance or simplicity wise.

That technical lead has been eroded by legacy players catching up, and all flash players eliminating a lot of the advantages Tintri once had through sheer brute force. Tintri is still in the lead in many ways, but the VALUE of that lead continues to shrink every quarter. It's still just a small appliance for SMB/SME.

C suite management and marketing have been a TRAIN WRECK from day one, and many Tintri people I know who left the company over the last 4 years have said exactly these things as reasons for leaving. Great product, terrible management.

Now, the problem is, there is no more cash to raise, and the burn rate means Tintri = Tegile in 2018. A buyout for the balance sheet (debt) and picking up payroll when the stock craters (further) to delisted status. THAT is the reality, when you're a public company, you cannot spin these things endlessly.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, love, Anon.

[Anonymous Coward]

great product but fell behind...

as an ex employee I have to say that Tintri is a great product that just wasn't driven in the right direction from management

it performs great, its easy to use, and the customers love it but the problem is that the management wanted to take it in a different direction than how the customers wanted to use it so eventually there were lots of closed doors because of the lack of feature sets and the mis directed road maps...

the big mistake the management made is that they didn't listen to the feed back from the customers and they tried to turn a storage company into something else (a cloud company) which confused customers and eventually drove them away

and now sadly even if a customer likes Tintri, smart ones won't bet their careers on it (like in the previous comments) because of it's horrible market performance

I honestly believe that if the management could realize their mistakes and try to provide customers the features they need, which are table stakes for most storage companies, they could easily turn it around but it could be too late at this point based on the current market ratings...

maybe one positive quarter would be enough to get them more cash but when the CEO says they are looking for a buyout that typically isn't a good sign and he is probably just trying to keep the current employees from abandoning the ship

It will be interesting to see what happens in the next qtr

[Anonymous Coward]

My gut tells me Tintri will be done in six to nine months. Probably by cutting costs and reducing staff to nothing more than a skeleton of its current size. Just enough to keep the lights on while it pursues a pennies-on-the-dollar distress sale to a company that's only interested in some of the IP to incorporate into their own products. Not much of a prediction I guess since this has been played out in the storage field before.

I'm so glad I'm not in the storage field anymore (thank God) because after working for a few storage startups, I firmly believe there is zero financial upside for a worker bee peon like myself at a storage startup. If you're an investor, founder, or executive, there's always some money to be made because those people always make out and look after their own. But if you're a cube dwelling peon like me, I think it's time to move on from storage because there are no more pots of gold at the end of the storage rainbow. I abandoned the storage field after being in it for about 20 years, and I'll never look back.