Compelling Purchase

I really like Compellent; I think that they are a great little storage company, they are a great bunch of people and their latest set of announcements are great; technically they continue to innovate and push their capabilities further into Enterprise territory.

Fluid Data, Live Volume all appear to be great technologies; lets not forget that Compellent blazed a trail with their data progression technologies which probably forced the big boys to announce and in some cases implement half-arsed solutions before they were ready. 

Compellent have also implemented some really rather bonkers solutions like 'Portable Volume' which just make me giggle. And I am waiting for EMC or NetApp to copy that! 

And yet for some reason, they've not managed to get the traction in the Enterprise that they probably deserve and I suspect that the changes that we've seen over the past couple of years means that they will continue to do so.

'Bare is the Stack with no Server'

Now, whether the converged infrastructure stack is going to win out in the long term is probably a contentious issue but it's certainly a door opener at the moment. More and more, CIOs are looking at infrastructure solutions and they are looking for vendors who can do it all. Whether they actually buy those solutions is another question but if you don't at least the ability to do so, it is increasingly hard to sit down at the table.   

'Bare is the Stack with no Storage'  

The answer appears to be smacking us all in the face and that answer is Dell. Yet until today's announcements, I didn't think Compellent were the answer that Dell were looking for. Dell want to be playing in the large Enterprise infrastructure space, building out clouds and dynamic data-centres; whereas I felt that Compellent were really an SME solution. I think that now they are much closer to where Dell want to be and it's almost a match made in heaven.

 Dell need Compellent and Compellent need Dell

There are a number of big infrastructure RFIs floating about at the moment and a number due next year; it seems that there are a number of large Enterprises who are heading into a refresh cycle pretty much at the same time; some of it driven by Cloud and other developments, some simply because they've held off for nearly too long. This is Compellent's chance to get a seat at the table but as a storage only vendor, it's going to hard. There's really only space for one storage only vendor; that's NetApp and unlike Compellent, NetApp's storage picture is much more complete (and yes, they can always partner with Cisco on FlexBlock).

Much as I like the Compellent storage story; like 3Par before them, acquistion seems to be the best way for them to meet their potential.  I really hope that they do succeed and thrive!