18 2015 Tech Innovator Award Winners This year CRN’s Test Center’s Tech Innovator Awards program scrutinized products within 19 categories of IT and evaluated each based on their ability to increase worker productivity and reduce cost and complexity for solution providers, IT departments and end users through innovation and technical advancement. 2015 Tech Innovators Databank Scality RING: Honorable Mention — Storage How many North American channel partners are currently offering this product for sale? 10 What makes your product innovative? Scality’s RING 5.0, its general availability announced March 25, 2015, delivers a complete and seamless integration with the modern enterprise ‘Software Defined Data Center’. It is perfect for capacity-driven workloads such as cloud services, video, and enterprise archiving. Key features enable fast and simplified installation, UI driven configuration and provisioning, expanded use case and application workload coverage with significant performance increases, as well as additional client connectivity and RING deployment options for Microsoft Windows and Linux clients. Channel partners and resellers have access to an entirely new user interface for automated RING installation on any industry-standard server platform, thereby dramatically simplifying deployment and presenting a seamless installation experience for the enterprise customer. Why is this product important to your channel partners? Channel partners been moving to virtualization on the compute side of things, and they will soon be moving to virtualization on the networking and storage sides, too. Data centers are changing, and solution providers like Scality will be the ones helping customers design and operationalize these new infrastructures ‘ aka Software Defined Data Centers. For example, Scality’s ability to decouple hardware and software, gives hardware customers, like those from Dell, the flexibility to mix and match generations and different kinds of servers as they grow. Do channel partners need specific prerequisites, program memberships, badges, training or certification to sell this product? It is not required, but channel partners can receive further training and certification to allow for a broader range of services offered to end-users. Please nominate one of the individuals responsible for bringing this product or upgrade to market, be they the team leader or lead developer or engineer. Jerome Lecat CEO Jerome Lecat is the CEO of Scality and a key figure in the development of its petabyte-scale, software-based storage solution, the RING. Responding to an exponential growth in data, and the notion that only giants such as Google could meet the growing need for vast data storage capabilities (at high cost), Lecat founded Scality and created the RING, a solution that would deliver improved performance as it scaled to exponential levels. Thanks to Lecat’s continued oversite, the RING is a profitable product now used by half a billions users worldwide. Social Handles: @Scality, https://www.linkedin.com/company/scality, https://www.facebook.com/scality Company Founded: 2009 Product Introduced: 2/23/11 Product Released: 2/23/11 Source: CRN 2015 Tech Innovators Awards Photo by John Westrock on Unsplash
