It may not be the biggest name in the converged infrastructure space yet, and it may not be the newest either, but SimpliVity Inc. is growing so fast that the market has no choice but to pay attention. The Massachusetts-based maker of data center modules has tripled its headcount to 300 since last August and shipped hundreds of machines within less than a year and a half of hitting general availability, according to new data shared by founding CEO Doron Kempel on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE.

Speaking to Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante and principal research contributor Stu Miniman, the entrepreneur pinned his company at the uppermost of the three layers  he perceives as making up the segment  where it competes. The first tier is made up of first-generation converged infrastructure vendors such as VCE, which ships boxes that bring together existing – or as Kemel referred to it, legacy – hardware from parent companies EMC Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. under a common management layer.

Companies in the second tier, what he termed the “convergence 2.0” space,  have opted to swap out the proprietary components for commodity  compute and storage that provide superior economies but don’t include the value-added software capabilities available with proprietary alternatives.  The third and topmost level in Kempel’s market layout is where SimpliVity is positioned with its OmniCube, which it claims combines the best of both worlds in a neatly-wrapped turnkey package.

“What we see now, delivered by SimpliVity, is ‘convergence 3.0’. That’s hyperconvergenece, whereby you get cloud economics – you run on x86 – but on the other hand you get all the enterprise capabilities,” he explained. The firm also pegs the OmniCube as versatile on top of everything else, claiming that it can support a broad spectrum of enterprise workloads ranging from mission-critical databases to Exchange servers and Sharepoint deployments.

Market traction

Over 65 percent of SimpliVity’s customers run all of their applications on  the platform, according to Kempel, including major banks and municipalities. Yet with those exceptions, he majority of the firm’s fall into the category of companies that generate between $250 million and $2 billion in annual revenue, the so-called “fat middle” of the IT market accounting for more than half percent of overall corporate technology spend. They’re typically drawn to OmniCube in equal part for its general-purpose nature and affordability.

“The way that we enter accounts is look for cases where customers are looking for a storage refresh, or a backup refresh,” Kemp detailed. “Why is that? Because the budget that they have assigned just in order to renew their storage or backup is sufficient for us to tip the boat and replace the whole infrastructure with OmniCubes.”

It took SimpliVity three and a half years to achieve that cost-effectiveness, he added, about twice as long the average  infrastructure startup spends building its product. The effort produced a PCIe accelerator card that combines a customized field-programmable gate array (FPGA) with speedy NVRAM to deduplicate and compress data before it’s stored on disk, thereby greatly lowering processing requirements.

“It saves you all the Intel processors that you otherwise would need to put into your infrastructure to dedupe the backup, dedupe the WAN, dedupe the traffic to the cloud, dedupe the data that goes into SSDs, etc. So we reduce everything,” Kempel said. Topping it all off is built-in integration with Amazon.com’s EC2 service, which enables organizations to move data to the cloud and control  off-premise deployments from the same pane of glass they use to manage their in-house OmniCubes. The cloud uplink is useful for a wide range of use cases, but he said that customers are not as hard-pressed to ship workloads outside the firewall as they once were.

“We have customers telling us, ‘with the OmniCube infrastructure, a lot of the workloads that I thought I may send to the cloud, I’m actually gonna keep in house.’ There’s a cost to moving workloads to the cloud and SimpliVity is making the cut-off point higher,” Kepel explained.

Keeping up with the competition

By all accounts, SimpliVity has proven itself as a force to be reckoned with in the converged infrastructure space. But the company only raised $101.5 million in funding to date, a relatively small sum compared to  how much other industry fast-risers have received and certainly in relation to what established data center vendors have in the bank. But Kempel is nonetheless confident that his firm has what it takes to compete in the big leagues.

He divulged that he opted to raise only as much as required to keep SimpliVity on its current growth trajectory.  Instead of trying to match the scale of its incumbent rivals, the firm is sticking to its original goals and turning to the channel for help with reaching customers. According to Kempel, the OmniCube is presently available through more than 250 partners worldwide, including some that are entirely new to the value-added reseller market. The platform is so simple that it doesn’t require VARs to possess the skills needed to sell and support traditional hardware products, he said, which  has greatly contributed to its popularity in the ecosystem.