Data Center Disruption

Skyport Systems is set to grow sales by more than 300 percent in 2017 year as businesses are displacing competitors with the startup's cloud-managed hyper-converged infrastructure platform.

Leading the data center disruption for the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup is Art Gilliland, who spent a decade as a top executive for Hewlett Packard and Symantec before joining Skyport in 2015. Skyport SkySecure is a secure hyper-converged system that runs and protects businesses-critical applications. The offering fully integrates hardware, software and services components to simplify the assembly, deployment and operations needed to manage servers.

In an interview with CRN, Gilliland talks about how his startup will disrupt vendors like VMware and Nutanix, as well as Skyport's 100 percent channel strategy. "When a channel partner brings us into an account, they will get 20 percent of the revenue from the customer for the rest of that customer's license," he said.