StorMagic, a niche hyperconverged software vendor, has hired Spectralogic sales boss Brian Grainger as chief revenue officer and board member.
Grainger spent 18 years at SpectraLogic, a leading tape library vendor, ending up as chief sales officer. John Glendenning, StorMagic’s previous SVP for sales and business development, retains his place on the board.
Why did Grainger join? He said it was time for a career change and StorMagic shares two qualities with his previous employe – it is smallish and flexible.
He reckons storage costs are too high, storage is too complex and StorMagic’s SvSAN can radically lower costs. The technology is “extremely price-competitive,” and simple to manage: “set it and forget it.” The SvSAN features a claimed zero downtime and hot upgrade capability.
Do you believe in StorMagic?
StorMagic was founded in 2006 by CEO Hans O’Sullivan and CTO Chris Fahey. Headquartered in Bristol, UK, the company sells its SvSAN software to large and small enterprises needing remote and branch office systems. This is edge computing in modern IT parlance.
The company has had six funding rounds from angel investors and has more than 1,000 customers in 72 countries. It sells through its own channel and via partnerships with Cisco and Lenovo.
StorMagic is one of several specialist hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software vendors that include DataCore, Maxta, Pivot3, Scale Computing. Dell EMC and VMware, and Nutanix dominate this market, followed by HPE, Cisco and NetApp in the second tier.
Specialist HCI software vendors all compete with these larger players and their Gartner Magic Quadrant rankings seem fairly stable. But in November 2018 StorMagic featured in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for HCI systems for the first time, as a niche player. Let’s see if Grainger and co. can raise the company to MQ “challenger” status.
.
