New chapter for Igneous

Same place and same month since 2016 for Igneous as we meet Kiran Bhageshpur, CEO, regularly at NEA in Menlo Park.

Kiran took time to summarize the company evolution with different phases finally pretty aligned with our meetings. It's a good exercice to fix developments and pitch development progresses.

Act 0 was the era of the IP-based disk drives object storage, we all remember the data Box with the Marvell CPU board at the back of each drives in the chassis and managed remotely. I invite the reader to check past articles: . This persistent data layer established, it was time for the company to build data services on top of it.

The second phase i.e Act 1 in 2017 was about the first data services and fundamental ones with backup and archive.

And the last and current initiative - Act 2 - is about UDMaaS i.e Unstructured Data Management as a Service, a comprehensive set of functions to manage enterprise unstructured/file data.

The business opportunity is real and huge as data protection is still for decades a must-have solution especially with the explosion of data volumes with unstructured content such audio/video, IoT, satellite, M2M logs or AI/ML...

The goal is to address the diversity and complexity of these environments with a transversal approach and three core functions beyond backup and archive with data visibility, mobility and protection:

• Visibility is represented by Data Discover with advanced file analysis of multiple files instances with files ages, metadata tagging and classification and chargeback information.
• Mobility is related to Data Flow providing an intelligent automated API-based logic to mov data between computing tiers.
• and Protection is about Data Protect supporting any NAS, file servers and public clouds.

Igneous has developed these services thanks to 3 innovations: InfiniteINDEX, AdaptiveSCAN and IntelliMOVE and doesn't use any resident agent.

The company creates its own quadrant to position its unique approach and lists its own competition - Cohesity, Commvault, Rubrik, Veeam and Veritas - and their relative drawbacks.

In term of business, Igneous targets enterprises customers with a subscription model with a 100% channel mode led Shaun Walsh who joined recently the company.

The product is already a multi-cloud approach and officially supports Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo, NetApp and Dell EMC Isilon plus AWS, GCP and Azure.

The next Act seems to be already scheduled for December 2019 for a new Igneous development iteration.