Komprise also announced the appointment of two new senior execs, Chris Moore as SVP of Worldwide Sales and Randy Hopkins as VP Global Systems Engineering and Enablement.
Krishna Subramanian, Komprise’s COO
Intelligent data management provider Komprise has announced that it has joined the HPE Complete program. This integrates Komprise into HPE’s direct and channel sales motions, significantly expanding their route to market as the company ramps up their global expansion.
“We are now growing very rapidly, and are investing very heavily in sales and marketing, including planning to more than double our field sales force,” said Krishna Subramanian, Komprise’s COO. Earlier this year, they announced a new Series C funding round of $42 million. That came on the heels of last year’s more than doubling of sales each quarter compared to the quarter before.
Komprise sells entirely through channel partners. They work closely with the big storage OEMs. This includes a reseller relationship with IBM, and they regularly have a booth at the major shows of companies like Dell EMC and NetApp. They have had a relationship with HPE before now, but it was rather less high profile than the others.
“We had not had a booth at HPE Discover before, but we have had a good relationship with them in the field,” Subramanian said. “We worked with them before as a technology partner and worked with them in the field to close deals. That caught their interest, and they wanted to formalize the reseller relationship.”
The HPE Complete program is designed to validate strategic vendor partner designs and take them to market, through both their direct and channel sales teams. Most of the vendors are startups like Komprise, although they also include established companies like Commvault and NVDIA. HPE Complete solutions are typically sold bundled with HPE hardware, on HPE price lists. Under this particular agreement, combined Komprise and HPE solutions are available now throughout the Americas and EMEA.
“HPE Complete has two categories of products,” Subramanian said. “One way is a product sold only on HPE hardware. The other is where HPE has the freedom to sell it with or without HPE hardware. We are in that second category, because we don’t necessarily require a hardware solution. We are in cold data management.”
The Komprise joint solutions available to HPE and its partners are presently available in three reference architectures, one for the HPE Apollo high-density server alone, and the other two including software-defined storage vendors Scality, or Qumulo.
Many startups who become part of HPE Complete have it become their main channel to market, but that isn’t the case here.
“We believe that this will become a significant channel for us, although how significant remains to be seen,” Subramanian said. “It is not our only channel. IBM also resells us and we have strong channel relationships of our own. For us, it’s a way to strengthen the ecosystem, and it could become very significant for us.”
HPE Complete will expose Komprise to a new reseller channel.
“HPE has a very loyal partner base and this will make it very easy for them to sell Komprise,” Subramanian said. HPE did a lot of work validating this solution. Their field architects are very excited about it, and we spent a lot of time training them. We are very optimistic about the potential of this relationship.”
Komprise also announced the appointment of Chris Moore as SVP Worldwide Sales and Randy Hopkins as VP Global Systems Engineering and Enablement. Moore’s predecessor, Tony Craythorne, left Komprise this spring to return to the United Kingdom and a CEO opportunity there, and the company is confident that Moore will be an able replacement. He has more than 25 years of senior sales experience at startups, several of whom were successfully acquired – Codenvy (by Red Hat) Kace Networks (by Dell) and AvantGo (by Sybase).
Hopkins has over 25 years in technical leadership roles creating enablement programs for enterprise companies, including startups Data Domain and Nimble Storage. He has also had senior roles at Pure Storage, EMC, Dell, and HPE.
