Tintri shares reformatted by investors: 85 per cent plunge in mere weeks Troubled Tintri admitted it may run out of cash within the next six weeks and go broke – and its shareholders are bailing out fast. Background context Tom Barton became the storage array hardware and software maker's chief exec in March, replacing Ken Klein, who was at the wheel when the Silicon Valley upstart's problematic …
...."Get bought, or die trying".
Whiptail (cough)
Solidfire
Nimble
XtremeIO
Of the flash generation of startups, only Pure made escape velocity, but their balance sheet is ruby red, so you have to wonder whether they'll make a profit ever before the money runs out.
I was almost a customer last year. their tech is extremely nice looking and I saw a huge amount of value in it, however I was looking at their financials and while I didn't understand everything, I could tell they were bleeding cash...and they were not a cheap unit (I bought a NetApp AFF 200 for the same price eventually (which in hindsight was a smart move)
You guys will be fine. Kevin at Violin squeezed 8 more quarters out after everyone declared that company was already dead and bankrupt. Through bankruptcy and Soros acquisition, Violin IS STILL SUPPORTING CUSTOMERS. Tintri has 3x the customer count Violin had, and all Tintri customers seem quite happy, unlike Violin's. Tintri also has Tier 1 data services that actually work, unlike Violin's.
Tom Barton is a calculated, capable guy who just came from PE. He is not going to take the job on April 2nd to declare bankruptcy 3 months later for a measly $450k salary. That is a really short and low-paying stint to be only damaging his great reputation. He only took the job because he was 100% sure he has a life-line to use when he needs it. He saw the cash and burn and knew he would have to come up with money, and waited until KPMG signed off on the audit of the 10-k before his official start date. Tom will only make his base salary if he declares bankruptcy. He can make 3-4x that base somewhere else. He has funding and M&A options right now and all Tintri customers need to remain calm and, if you want Tintri around, buy more. Don't let your pu##y procurement people spook you out of doing business with them. Ken and Ian ramped the company structure for growth, and when revs went flat, they lost a lot of money. Tom Barton has plenty of operating leverage to improve burn rate and move towards profitability.
Remember, Tintri's input costs look just like Pure's and Pure is basically at profitability, so Tintri can turn around. Ken and Ian were not storage guys. Tom ran Rackable Systems and that was a razor-thin margin business. Put your faith in this guy. The fact that there has been utter silence from a PR perspective, and no ER date announcement is part of Tom's plan. He is letting this stock trade down to a $14mil market cap on purpose.
The same customers who are afraid to give POs are like the investors who all sold on the way to a $14mil market cap. Fear is not helping Tintri but Tom has options and all customers will soon feel relief. I just acquired about 450,000 shares of their stock last week. Customers will have good news soon. Tintri will not go the way of Violin. I hope this helps customers feel better. The fear-mongering going on right now is unfounded.
As you said, "trouble-free" times 1500 customers has value. Fear not.
"I just acquired about 450,000 shares of their stock last week. Customers will have good news soon"
Oh dear, Im very, very glad that you are not my financial advisor. The exact opposite of your every comment has come true.
You are Tom Barton and I claim your 450,000 shares, or £5.00 in real money.
Maybe from the sales side of the house. Most of the good engineers have ended up at the usual suspects these days -- Google, Facebook, Uber, Lyft, and on down the line.
This train wreck has been 10 years to the month (come June) in the making. $480 million in investors' capital down the drain.
The simple, obvious in retrospect answer is that Kieran and the board should have taken somebody's offer back in 2013. The product would have done better on the market as a special purpose offering within a larger portfolio. Also, the valuation then was already north of $500MM. But, of course, Kieran wanted to run a public company and be an industry luminary. Meanwhile, hiring Ken Klein and his stooge Ian Halifax was a disaster of epic proportions. I wonder if the plaintiffs' lawyers will manage to shake those guys down. They certainly deserve it. And they have money.
In other news, creating a storage business is hard. Storage software is really complex and takes a lot of work to get right. Storage hardware is really expensive to get started and difficult to sustain differentiation against deep-pocketed competitors.
And way too many of the recent startups don't really have a product, they have a feature that needs to be folded into a much bigger solution...
I interviewed with them back in 2011 and didn't accept their offer. My gut told me something just didn't seem right, and it would be a waste of time going there.
So glad my intuition was right!
What a waste of four years that would have been. I hope that the people left there are actively looking to jump off that sinking ship and find a new job somewhere else.
And your point? A lot of comments on here, some positive, some negative, but most offering some fact-based opinion. Your post is 100% devoid of any factual data - you were offered a position in 2011? My simple calculation makes that 7 years ago, not 4 ... instant credibility loss. Tintri went to market with product in 2011 - are you really claiming that at that time you knew more than the VC's, the 100's of fine intelligent folk who joined since then, and the 1,500+ customers who invested in their unique technology. If your intuition really is so fine tuned, do us all a favour and reveal next week's Lotto numbers.
I'm all for free speech, healthy debate and provocative journalism - but please spare us this kind of self-serving, unsubstantiated gloating. Your second post just reinforces your lack of humility: "LOL; somebody made a better decision than they did" ... presumptuous, self absorbed and adding nothing to a debate which matters deeply to many thousands of human beings and organisations.
perhaps they would have been great if they started about 10 years earlier. They may have had the jump on the storage game as VMware was going mainstream and probably would have been purchased for a lot of moola by EMC, etc. Unfortunately, the problem they solved was not really compelling enough when during their peak was also the max flood of other storage players. Worst possible time to be in storage when they were trying to sell the hardest.
Frankly, with the added flavors of SW defined, HCI, and now cloud, their virtualization centric value prop is effectively gone. Not to mention the consolidation of Dell, EMC, HPE, etc where compute and storage bulk volume enterprise agreements can easily squash a new 1- trick competitor trying to peck into an enterprise account.
Also took calls about working there about 1-2 years ago. After being in the storage business already that was a quick no thank you.
Tintri was one of the 2nd generation Flash startups, like Nimble and Pure. So, if they would have started 10 years earlier, they would have been waiting a long time for Flash prices and capacity to hit the inflection point that made them possible.
I know in 2012 Tintri was the company that worried Nimble the most, but (IMO) they made a couple of strategic design decisions that impacted early adoption. The singular focus on VMWare meant a much smaller addressable market than the Nimble or Pure block storage play.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
