The era of big  vendors dominating the enterprise market may not be over quite yet, but new players such as Nimble Storage are rapidly improving their ability to compete against incumbents.  That accelerating phenomenon and the company in particular have both already made their mark on the industry, shaking up the balance of the power to make room for new ideas.

Rodd Bagg, the vice president of customer support for Nimble, appeared on a recent episode of the CubeConversations series to discuss his firm’s role in driving change within the marketplace with SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier.

Established by former employees of backup specalist DataDomain, now a part of EMC, the six-year-old Nimble started out developing a flash-based caching appliance designed to increase the performance of traditional disk-based storage solutions like the kind developed by their previous employer.  A year and a half into the project, the startup pulled the plug on the initiative and set out to disrupt the old world from which it founders hailed  with a hybrid offering that combines solid-state memory with mechanical storage in an integrated platform for supporting mission-critical workloads.

And so the new Nimble was born. Since that fateful decision to go after the high-performance disk market, the company has gained thousands of customers and went public on the New York Stock Exchange. But although it’s practically unrecognizable from its startup days, Bagg said that the firm still keeps flash-based caching at the top of the agenda.

Efficiency through automation

Another early priority that continues to be a prime focus for Nimble is automation.  It boasts of helping customers eliminate many of the repetitive manual tasks normally involved in managing storage environments with its cloud-based InfoSight platform, which collects data from each individual array in the field to provide insight into performance optimization opportunities. The resulting reduction in administrative overhead is not only saving CIOs money but also redefining the role of practitioners within the IT organization, a change that Bagg sees as a natural part of any major paradigm shift.

Nimble is setting an example for customers to follow. “Building a new product based on any new technology makes you think differently, so the engineers we’re hiring are not the typical old-school file system engineers,” Bagg said. “These guys are real computer science guys that are there creating secret sauce that has a lot to do with in-depth topics such as how you design data structures to be efficient. They’re very nitty-gritty.”

Another driving factor behind the transition to new operating and development models is the convergence of IT silos, which is occurring as a result of the growing pressure on CIOs to make data more accessible throughout their organization.  That increasingly critical requirement is placing more and more importance on storage administrators, Bagg highlighted, which are finding themselves in the center of their companies’ efforts to catch up with the accelerating pace of change.

“The storage guy is becoming the focus point at this point, and you relegate all  of the performance requirements and everything else to day one you converged,” he explained. “So you don’t want your DBAs having to worry about performance, they already got enough things to worry about.”

The bigger (cloud) picture

The disruption happening at the storage layer is part of the broader trend towards hybrid computing wherein on-premise infrastructure is extended to the public cloud for more flexible service delivery. The way Bagg sees it, the rapid adoption of the model, which  only surfaced a few years ago, points back to the importance of hiring the right people for the job.

“You really are looking for talented people, not necessarily the skillset, you want talented people because things change so fast,” he said. “You might think you’re skilled at X and you won’t fit in line but that’s not necessarily true.” That approach has paid massive dividends for Nimble, which saw revenues more than double last quarter compared to the same period 12 months ago.