12 Data Centers represents the Holy Grail of IT since large and visible internet companies demonstrate their capability to redesign and revolutionize the heart of corporate IT. They also promote, validate and build real high-end infrastructure on commodity hardware. This ange represents the first dimension of the ecosystem for large scale IT environment, the capability to be hardware agnostic meaning that the difference comes from software. Scality is a software only solution deployed on x86 “classic” servers transforming a rack of servers into a large storage pool. The second point for successful adoption is the GoToMarket strategy and oems continue to have a key position in that space. Innovations for most part come from small agile startups with dedicated team pushing in one direction. Their problem is still the credibility of be chosen and adopted by large companies. Hardware vendors in that particular case are the perfect vehicle for such adoption. Scality chose to partner with SGI – the product is named OmniStor – and Penguin Computing – Icebreaker CS –. In addition to this, Scality continues to partner with some vertical ISVs such Openwave Messaging. The other path to market is the collaboration with System Integrators (SI) often in the loop of large project especially for large enterprise. Low TCO and the Ecosystem The 3rd and final component of the Ecosystem is the vertical justification of the solution or the real value the solution can bring to the potential user. Users don’t buy infrastructure just to have a new system or be considered as an early adopter. It exists for sure but it doesn’t represents a significant number. Does the solution really boost their agility and productivity ? does the solution delivers a fast ROI, represents a low TCO and is able to accelerate business ? these are real questions and to be qualified by this community, the application integration is a must. You touch vertical IT or vertical industry so you need to validate software solutions from the key top 3-5 leaders in these segments. It boosts market adoption, you get credibility and solve real pains. Scality continues this effort with currently several key partner integration, it represents 80+ partners globally. Visit our software partner page to see official current validations. Ecosystem in our space is a 3 dimensions approach with a pure commodity HW approach, a realistic but ambitious GTM strategy (oem and SI) and applications/ISVs integration.
