Hammerspace nails an EMEA office

Hammerspace
Hammerspace

Hammerspace has strengthened its Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMA) presence with a London-based office and distribution deal with Spinnaker.

Surprisingly, more than 35 per cent of the Hammerspace customer base is in EMEA, with that enabled by the availability of Hammerspace software in local regions of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.  Having more feet on the street is expected to help grow Hammerspace sales in the territory.

David Flynn, Hammerspace CEO and co-founder, used the announcement to promote the Global Data Environment (GDE), its software-defined platform for unstructured data.

“The Hammerspace Global Data Environment is a game-changer for the global economy, solving the challenges of today’s data-driven businesses… We are excited to expand our European presence with a world-class team and distribution and channel partnerships.”  

Hammerspace believes data is increasingly being created and stored in a variety of locations – at the edge, in multiple data centres, and cloud regions. It needs to be a globally consolidated and consumable resource. The GDE has file metadata shared between local and remote sites on a peer-to-peer basis so that all the users everywhere in the GDE see the same files in their file:folder structure. There is no need to replicate a full copy of the data at each site.

The sales pitch is that applications can access data stored in remote locations while using automated orchestration tools provide fast local access when needed for processing. 

The EMEA sales infrastructure will be focused on selling into data-intensive industries and organizations such as autonomous vehicle, electronic design automation (EDA), high-performance computing (HPC), visual effects (VFX), animation, post-production, and life sciences – genomics, microscopy, and pharmaceutical research. 

It is being headed up (remotely) by Chris Bowen, SVP of global sales, with London-based Iain Malins as sales director and Ian Marcroft as technical director. Through Spinnaker, Hammerspace get access to a reseller network and all Hammerspace sales are go via the channel.

Marcroft said: “Most of my customers want to maintain on-premises storage for regular workflows and burst to the cloud when larger 8 and 16K projects are needed. They also have a multi-cloud strategy and need to quickly build systems using infrastructure as code. Hammerspace will give them the ability to quickly orchestrate workflows in different regions and across cloud vendors to enable cloud hopping.” 

Hammerspace intends to continue adding EMEA local sales, technical, and support heads throughout 2022.  

All this augers well for an increase in Hammerspace revenues in 2022 and builds upon its sales and marketing recruitment that took place last year. Bowen is now setting up a regional sales presence in EMEA and we might expect a similar expansion in Hammerspace’s APAC region.