Customer value proposition stands up
There is a clear and increasing requirement for this class of technology. While customer adoption hasn't accelerated quite as quickly as Violin might have forecast - or Headcount costed into their P&L - I don't see any other vendor in it's space offering more. This is exciting hardware, a wholly new market and the use case and applications for this technology are changing very quickly
Violin's S1 is interesting - in so far as it declares where they are today and forces transparency around their business model. Three things stand out from the filing for me (1) They need to invest much more deeply in ecosystem plays to recover the opportunity they lost with HP - Fujitsu looks interesting and they need to find and work through others like Cisco to similar scale (2) Fix EMEA with a new leadership team that understands partner led business and can rebuild trust with the re-seller and SI communities. I would note a new leader has been appointed to do just this and that it will take time and a lot of heavy lifting to address the channel piece pan EMEA (3) Align value with the Applications that people run their business from and sell to this audience effectively. Recent hires from VMWARE, working with the Microsoft ecosystem, really driving the SAP opportunities home all look like strong next steps within their grasp
They have taken miss-steps along the path in terms of GTM in EMEA, managing HP and leadership choices but I don't doubt their ability to get this technology into the hands of customers and build a sustainable, profitable business. It's still early days and way too early for the negative comments above. I don't see anyone else with a more credible story than Violin's right now or a better choice of Technology investor than Toshiba