Edge-focused hyperconverged infrastructure supplier StorMagic recently appointed a new CEO, Susan Odle. She initially joined the company in July 2024 as chief growth officer. Her plans were impressive enough for CEO Danial Beer to relinquish the role to her, while staying on the board as a non-exec.
Odle, based in Ottawa, was previously founder and CEO of 8020CS, a change management company helping client businesses pass through complex transformations, COO of BDO Lixar (acquired), and VP of operations at both GFI Software and Youi.TV (acquired). Odle has written a book, Successful Change, which provides a blueprint for effective business transformation.
We interviewed her to find out more about her plans for StorMagic.
Blocks & Files: Can you talk about the transition from chief growth officer to CEO and enterprise sales?
Susan Odle: It really is about making sure that we understand the motions required to appropriately support particularly larger enterprise customers from being curious about StorMagic to actually committing to StorMagic as a trusted partner. And that is not a transactional type of growth strategy. You really do need to bring everyone from our sales engineering team, to our product team, to our chief architects to the table, to these large organizations so that they get the full understanding of how StorMagic will support them for the long term.
That was my mission coming in. And so we’ve been very successful at building that whole company trust with an increasing number of large prospective customers as well as doing a very good job with our existing enterprise customer base of helping them understand the path to VMware migration with SvHCI. And that is not a transactional product sale.
Blocks & Files: An impression was that StorMagic was a niche HCI company selling to relatively small enterprises. And you said a couple of things that made me prick up my ears. One was that you had existing large enterprise customers, which was a surprise. And then you were talking about the selling motion in going to large enterprise customers. This is not a reseller-type operation. This is all your people involved in talking to a substantial large enterprise because there’s a lot of trust involved, as you said, and putting a large amount of trust and money your way and they want to ensure it’s well spent. So does this mean that a comparison with Scale Computing is possibly relevant?
Susan Odle: So I’ll break those two pieces apart again for you. So you could call us niche in that we are purpose-built for onsite and edge applications. And that’s really important because of the way our technology has been developed from day one understands the technical requirement and expectations at the edge, but it also understands the fact that there are no IT people living at the edge. And so from day one, we’ve been purpose-built for onsite virtualization. And so we’re not just niche HCI because we do have SvSAN, which is storage-only.
And that gives our customers the option to look at a storage solution on top of VMware or on top of Hyper-V or to go with the full HCI stack from StorMagic. So we give our customers that flexible opportunity, but we are absolutely niche in that we are purpose-built for onsite and for the edge. So I just want to clarify that piece.
We co-sell with our partners. So even when we go and we sell directly to a customer, we’re identifying the channel partner or the systems integrator that customer trusts and works with and then we go in together, we have to do that. So even when we’re on the road visiting those big customers or those mid enterprise customers as well, we always do it in conjunction with a partner that the customer trusts and wants us to work with. So definitely we are not practicing channel conflict. Our mission is to make sure that the customer understands our support and our commitment in a pre-sales context all the way through support that we’re there for them and part of being there for them is working with the people that they trust, which would be resellers, systems integrators, those types of partners.
Blocks & Files: Does this mean that you are probably going to be looking to recruit more enterprise-class partners to sell through?
Susan Odle: That is an absolute expectation, yes.
Blocks & Files: The second part of that first question, which was Scale Computing. How would you compare and contrast StorMagic with that company?
Susan Odle: Yes, so Scale Computing, great company, we are absolutely in the same space. We have a software-only solution that gives our customers an advantage of deciding what hardware they would like to run on, but we absolutely do compete within the same space. And so a customer needs to decide against their requirements, what is the appropriate solution for them, but have a lot of respect for Scale. They’ve been around not quite as long as us, but certainly a long time. And yes, we look forward to winning our customers respectively based on the right fit.
Blocks & Files: Do you think that StorMagic can go down to a smaller hardware configuration? You do support Arm processors with two servers only compared to Scale?
Susan Odle: So are we able to even reduce, we are talking to other vendors that are smaller in size and I won’t name them at this time, but we are certainly exploring relationships with hardware vendors that are being disruptive in the space and getting smaller. So at the appropriate time, Chris, I would love to come back and have that conversation with you.
Blocks & Files: Am I thinking Raspberry Pi or is this ridiculous?
Susan Odle: There are implementations where our witness, for example, when we’re looking at high availability and failover, that is today a truth. I’m not naming Raspberry Pi as a target relationship, but I think that the direction that you’re going in terms of imagining smaller devices that can run StorMagic is absolutely an accurate way of thinking and we certainly are thinking about those things in growing our OEM practice from an ecosystem point of view.
Blocks & Files: StorMagic has been slightly difficult to grasp in its entirety. I think you’re putting it in a very clear state for me and I appreciate that a lot.
Susan Odle: You’ve hit on a really important point, Chris. So one of my priorities for the next 12 months, and even sooner than that is we need to do a much better job of educating the market about specifically what it is that we do. And our business value at a foundational level is we keep the lights on, we keep operations running at the edge. We’ve built simple, reliable tech that is not overinflated with things that are not necessary to keep virtual environments running. And what does that mean? It means our customers can focus on innovation, can focus on more profitability at the edge, and not be just worried about “is my infrastructure going to be up and running” and that it just needs to work.
And I think that that’s one gap that we are aggressively closing and you’ll see evidence of that in our website, in our marketing, as we move forward because, you’re right, we’ve been focused on telling stories about products and not elevating that to the business value that we deliver to market. And so when we do that and then we’re able to follow that through with this proven technology, whether it’s virtual storage or whether it’s full HCI, that even underneath that, is supported by 24/7 support that goes directly to an engineer. And when you underpin that with this extreme level of customer service that we provide from the first day that we talk to a customer through support, then there’s a narrative there that makes it easier for customers to understand what it is that we do and where we play and how flexible we are in terms of being able to help them address their business needs.
Comment
StorMagic is entering a new chapter in its development and a focus on providing highly reliable and focused smallish edge deployments for enterprises. We’ll watch with interest to see how this develops.
