SiliconAngle has been covering the big data movement like a blanket since last May. It’s all about massive amounts of unstructured data, cloud computing and the confluence of compute, storage, analytics software and game-changing business models. Next week, we’ll be heading down to NYC and then on to London to find out what the big EMC, big data action is all about.

Last week on Wikibon’s  runningDATA, Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and Steve Kenniston were talking about cloud storage and other predictions and Nirvanix was mentioned. Vellante broke the news that Steve Zivanic, QLogic’s marketing head left the company. The speculation was that he was going to follow new CEO Scott Genereux to Nirvanix.

Dave Vellante and Steve Kenniston

Sure enough, yesterday Nirvanix announced a new VP of marketing – none other than Steve Zivanic.  If you thought cloud computing was hyped in 2010, wait until you see what Nirvanix does in 2011. We are hearing about some incredible traction. This company is poised for some major changes with new leadership.  For those of you who don’t know, Steve Zivanic was the man behind the Hitachi Mr. T YouTube videos. Back in 2007, at a time when most corporate ‘viral’ videos captured about 253 views max, the “I’m the T in IT” Hitachi videos were considered groundbreaking for the stodgy storage industry.

Zivanic commissioned a series of three videos that in total received nearly one million views on YouTube.  He spent a lot of dough to make the videos but not a dime promoting them. All the traffic was viral. Some people think these videos got Zivanic booted out of HDS because they were too edgy – go figure. Now Zivanic is the VP of Marketing at Nirvanix. Hopefully we’ll see some cool and edgy marketing from them.   The company isn’t known for their marketing power, so Zivanic should pump some new life into the brand.

After Hitachi, Zivanic followed Scott Genereux to DataDirect Networks, which is a company that no one had heard of before these guys took over the marketing reins. And most recently they were at QLogic together, completely transforming the company’s brand from HBA vendor to a provider of  critical data center infrastructure.

So what’s in store for Nirvanix you ask?

The situation at Nirvanix kind of reminds me of Storwize, even though they are in different market segments. I’m told that Nirvanix, like Storwize, is a do-over. The company’s previous management was booted and Genereux came in to shake things up, to get the valuation higher and position the company for growth in the “hot” cloud and private cloud space.

Personally, I think that Nivranix will be acquired. Why is Nirvanix a good target for acqusition? Nirvanix is like Amazon S3 on enterprise steroids. That is to say S3 is great  if you’re looking for a service that needs a techie to set up and you don’t care about enterprise support. But  for everyone else, Nirvanix is trying to be the service of choice. Cloud vendors are trying to evolve from test and dev ops to production environments. We are seeing lots of data pointing to that “production” trend. At VMworld we heard from folks like Randy Bias and Bernard Golden who are in the trenches helping companies get to a production environment – it’s not easy but that is the trend. If Nirvanix can deliver production-grade capability and build an ecosystem for the ever growing corps of system integrators and ISVS then it’s a winner.

Can it work? Well, these guys just raised another VC round and are approaching 1,000 customers. And there are some big names on the customer roster including NBC Universal. A source there told me that NBCU uses Nirvanix as the digital archive for its TV shows  and movies. I also hear that Cisco, Logitech and GE are using the Nirvanix service. As are the Royal Bank of Scotland and Comcast. These are some heavy hitters and evidently  there’s a good  chance they’ll tell some friends.

The bottom line is Nirvanix is trying to cash in on the unstructured data explosion with cloud storage services. We’ll be following Nivanix, Scott Genereux, and Steve Zivanic. Lets see if they can “bring it”.