Pliops, which makes a differentiated hardware and software accelerator that is also a media enhancer, started selling direct to hyperscalers, but now is expanding into the enterprise, and looking to work with partners with established connections in this market.
Marius Tudor, vice president of sales and business development for Pliops
Data acceleration startup Pliops has accelerated its transition from direct and hyperscale-focused to channel-centric with a new focus on the Fortune 1000, through the signing of a North American distribution deal with TD SYNNEX, which will cover Pliops’ enterprise-focused XDP offering, which launched in July.
Pliops was founded in Ramat Gan, Israel, and their technical bench and R&D is still located there. Their global business headquarters is now located in San Jose.
Their product can best be described as a high-end hardware and software accelerator that is also a media enhancer.
“We are not a storage device or platform, or a RAID controller,” said Marius Tudor, vice president of sales and business development for Pliops. “What we do is innovate at the confluence of compute, FPGA, DPU and networking, creating a new class of hardware and software accelerator, while also driving media efficiency, including SSDs. We provide massive acceleration of 3-15x. So we are a hardware accelerator that is also a media enhancer.”
Tudor spent time earlier in his career at Fusion-IO, which made flash-based insert cards to speed up servers. The company ran into financial problems and was ultimately bought by SanDisk in 2014. Tudor said that he frequently finds himself having to explain that Pliops is very different from Fusion-IO.
“I’m not doing Fusion-IO again,” he said. “Pliops accelerates all NVMe-speaking storage media – essentially enabling ‘Bring Your Own NVMe.”
Pliops started selling in Q4 of 2020, and built up what they term a solid roster of lighthouse accounts. They started out selling direct into the hyperscaler market. However in July they broadened that market out significantly with the launch of their Extreme Data Processor [XDP].
“The XDP launch in July was designed to support a broader range of clients,” Tudor said. “We started with a laser sharp focus on hyperscalers, leveraging the fact that we are both server and application agnostic. Fintech and HPC can make good use of this, as well as oil and gas. However, we also began working with Dell EMC, HPE, Inspur, and SuperMicro, with the idea being to move beyond hyperscalers into the enterprise.”
The newly announced deal with the newly rebranded TD SYNNEX is directed towards the same expansion into the enterprise.
“TD SYNNEX will allow us to take more of a targeted approach as we expand our channel,” Tudor said. “We are very channel aligned. As we move more broadly beyond hyperscalers into the Fortune 1000 – and potentially even broader than that – TD SYNNEX will play a key role. We expect that they will be an aggregator for us, and assist in a two-step channel Go-to-Market play, which we are fine with. We are also looking at joint marketing around events with them, as well as selective recruitment for partners aligned with our target accounts.”
Those events include OCP Summit in San Jose Nov. 9-10, and SC [Supercomputing] 21 in St. Louis, Nov. 14-19.
“We are planning to be at both,” Tudor said.
Pliops’ partner strategy revolves around strategic alignment with systems integrators and VARs offering database, analytics, ML/AI, HPC and web-scale solutions, as well as cloud deployments.
“We understand what type of VAR and SI we are looking for,” Tudor said. “Many large enterprises we would like to penetrate have already selected the SIs and VARs they work with – 90% of them in the Fortune 1000. We want to be part of these partners’ value stack as we present to customers. We are evangelizing our value to them while assuring partners we will not complete with them in building an appliance as others have done.”
