Tintri has also switched to a 100% channel model, and is currently restructuring their channel program.
Brock Mowry, Tintri’s CTO
LAS VEGAS – Tintri originally came out of stealth in 2007 with a unique VM-aware flash technology that managed at the VM level, rather than LUNs or volumes. Now they are a subsidiary of DDN. They were at the VMWare Explore event here, demonstrating the current version of its products, and releasing two new ones. The company is also eager to prove to the market that it is back in the game, with enhanced technology that fits well with VMware. This comes following a disastrous 2017 IPO, and the subsequent failure to hit its projected numbers the following quarter, which led to DDN buying it for a song the next year.
“After the acquisition, there was an effort to try and combine services and gain efficiencies with DDN,” said Brock Mowry, Tintri’s CTO. This strategy was not particularly successful.
“I came in two years ago,” Mowry stated. “Phil Trickovich came back to Tintri at the same time. He had been VP of Global Sales before, went elsewhere for a couple years, and is now the new Senior VP of Revenue.”
Since that point, Tintri’s product and channel strategy have both been entirely reworked.
“We revamped the strategy,” Mowry said. “I set the technical direction. Previously, it had just been a lot of maintenance tasks and tactical fixes. There was no strategic direction. I put together the road map for Tintri, where we had a new type of platform and the rest were complementary. Traditionally, we were a physical appliance that went into the data centre, but we want to support multiple platforms. We have a global plan and a VMstore, but we needed to get our technology into locations where you can’t place an appliance. We containerized the software to do this, and it opened up a lot more flexibility for us.”
At the VMware Explore event, Tintri made two new product announcements that let customers leverage a cloud infrastructure powered by Tintri.
“We are announcing them here to better spread the news of the changes, while being present in the community,” Mowry stated. “People will see the emerging technologies that are being announced and coming around the corner.”
The Tintri Cloud Engine [TCE] VMstore platform runs in the cloud as a container, and decouples from the VMstore hardware platform, to allow customers to add a hybrid cloud deployment to their existing infrastructure.
“Tintri Cloud Engine is the first example of us separating our software IP away from a physical device running on AWS or Azure, and VMCloud, Mowry said. “Holding true to the VMstore story, we focus on the VMware virtual machine level. All of our products fundamentally focus at the VM level
“In addition, since the original product’s inception in 2012, we have always had auto-QOD as well as tunable capabilities,” Mowry continued. “So we have a good understanding of the infrastructure beneath us, and about bringing it into hardware environments that are unknown.”
TCE provides enhanced data protection that replicates snapshots of on-prem workloads to cloud-based storage leveraging Tintri Native Async Replication. This TCE snapshot replication lets customers leverage the cost-efficiencies of cloud storage while increasing disaster recovery capabilities and ransomware protection.
“This is a platform with its own road map, adding in features to complement multi-cloud architecture,” Mowry said. “The bottom of the market for this is the midmarket, while it is also a strong enterprise product.”
The other new announcement is the Tintri Cloud Platform [TCP].
“The TCP is a turnkey cloud platform which has our intellectual property underneath it,” Mowry indicated. “Most platforms have standard storage within QoS lanes or a VM focus, so we get very consistent focus compared to some of the other platforms out there. It also means very high levels of flexibility, efficiency and transparency.
“We are also leveraging existing VMware technologies like Cloud Director, so that you can marry your on-prem to a Cloud Director interface,” he added.
Justin Jimenez, VP of Channel Sales and Global Presales Engineering at Tintri
The channel and Go-to-Market strategy have also been revamped as well.
“We are now straight channel,” said Justin Jimenez, VP of Channel Sales and Global Presales Engineering at Tintri. “We have done business with about 100 partners but we now consider that we have about 25 strategic partners in North America and about 10 elsewhere. There are three partners in Toronto that we are laser focused on right now.”
Most of Tintri’s partners are regional ones,
“The partners we want focus on applications in virtualized environments,” Jiminez said. “Traditional storage partners aren’t always a good fit.”
Jiminez, who started at Tintri in January this year, has spent the last 15 years working for channel companies.
“We are now revamping the entire channel program,” he said.
