High performance computing storage specialist Panasas sees itself moving into the mainstream. With a technical approach and appliances, it has tended to be the preserve of media, oil and gas and analytics specialist resellers, but sees the demand for its product rising in more standard verticals. The sweet spot for the products seems to be in the 100Tb to multi-petabyte data level, either with large files or lots of small files.
Global VP sales and field operations Martin Eves has been in London to talk about channels. IT Europa was keen to probe him on its relationship with global distributor Ingram Micro in the US. But he sees it as early days for any European relationship. He is waiting to see how the relationship with Ingram Micro works out before thinking about working further with it outside the US. Panasas is already using Cambridge UK-based media specialist Global Distribution but this tends to cover the media and surveillance industries with offices in Germany and Sweden as well.
With around 20 resellers in Europe – a number which it plans to at least double in the next year, it will probably stay a niche play for a while. “But this market is changing,” he says. There is a need for high speed storage in a range of industries and enterprises as things continue to speed up. “The users of traditional NAS systems are coming towards us as performance issues arise.”
And it is not just the major markets with media and other large data industries, such as Germany and the UK, he says “ “We're quite strong in Italy and Spain.” But he wants new partners to open up these new markets and reach that 40-50 partner level. Another way could be through the close ties Panasas has with HPE and some of its resellers in the big data field.
But what about cloud? “We are looking at the cloud business, but we don't see everyone in HPC going there. And since Panasas sells on ease of management and a scalability where performance actually increases with size, he does not see an immediate competition issue here. “The issues with cloud are not about putting data there, but getting it back and changing it to another place or system.”
There is some way to go in this business, he says, and the privately-owned business could yet be looking for acquisitions or IPO itself, but at present the emphasis is on building the new markets.