The high-flying startup, which sells entirely through the channel, also announced a Series B funding which raised $12 million.
Krishna Subramanian, COO at Komprise
Campbell CA-based Komprise makes an analytics-driven data management solution that addresses unstructured data management problems. Now they have released a new version of the product which adds the capabilities of the Komprise Data Management Grid – the ability to scale out linearly.
Venture-funded Komprise was created in 2013. The three founders – CEO Kumar K. Goswami, COO Krishna Subramanian, and CTO Michael Peercy, are now on their third company, following Kovair, and Kaviza.
Komprise brought Komprise Data Management 1.0 to market last summer. It was designed to reduce the cost of managing data – which is typically greater than the cost of storing it. Open standards-based, it runs as a virtual machine with no central database or agents, learns from the customer’s environment, and doesn’t interfere with their use of their storage.
“Komprise doesn’t require any hardware, but just runs as a virtual machine,” Subramanian said. “It sets policies and moves data based on these policies. It is very simple to install. The UPS guy who delivers it could set it up.”
What is new now is that Komprise has added the Komprise Data Management Grid to the product. It extends functionality to the core product, and is part and parcel of it, with no additional charge.
“We have now launched the new version of the product, which adds the ability to scale it out linearly,” Subramanian said. “We are finding that some of our customers use us on many petabytes of data with billions of files, so we needed the ability to manage even large scales of data. The Data Management Grid adds this ability to scale out linearly.”
While all customers will benefit from this added capacity, the benefit is obviously greatest for organizations with very large amounts of data.
“The need is clearly greater higher in the enterprise,” Subramanian said.
Komprise also made a momentum announcement, that the company has raised $USD 12 million in Series B funding, led by Walden International, with participation from existing investor Canaan Partners. They also announced the participation as investors of well-known tech people Bill Moore, the co-founder of the ZFS file system, and Sanjay Mehrotra, ex-CEO of SanDisk.
“We have gotten strong traction in electronic design, financial services, and media and entertainment, and have also signed some customers in oil and gas,” Subramanian said.
A key part of Komprise’s strategy is vendor partnerships with storage players, even though some of these also sell management products that compete with Komprise. NetApp, HPE, Spectra Logic and Quantum were among their early partners, who also include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure, EMC and Scality.
“All these storage partners understand that selling Komprise is a good way to ingest data into their secondary storage platform, and also give their customers choice,” Subramanian said. “We meet in the channel, selling through the joint channel, and are doing a lot of channel enablement with them. We had a channel webinar with Quantum last week, where we trained over 100 partners. We are doing another one with Google next week.”
Komprise does not sell direct, and in addition to adding more partners to their vendor partner ecosystem, they continue to add more reseller partners. SYNNEX handles their North American distribution.
