When you say 'strategic advantage,' how do you describe it for Qumulo?
For us, it‘s all about the software and the cloud, this whole file data challenge. And no one can do that like we can. There are really big incumbents, some of whom I’ve worked for, that are good at selling boxes, but their software-defined stories are non-existent, and their cloud stories are as well. And when you look at what’s happening in the world in 2020, customers want real cloud services for all these challenges. Qumulo’s software can run on x86 servers in the data center. But unlike any of the major incumbents, we run as a native service on public clouds, not as a [colocation] or a half-job. We run as a native service on AWS and GCP [Google Cloud Platform], and soon on [Microsoft] Azure. If you and I wanted to, inside of the next 10 minutes, we could deploy on AWS and have a petabyte environment set up for customers to be able to run an at-scale file application. And that’s the strategic advantage.
Where will you use the new funding?
Global expansion. We‘re going to be adding more and more go-to-market resources, more marketing, more investment in the channel, more development of OEMs, and more geographies. For example, today we’re just in North America and EMEA, and we’re very keen on opening up Asia and the other territories where we see clear customer demand.
In fact, through our OEM relationship with HPE, we already have a dozen to 20 customers across Asia. And we don‘t even have any employees there yet. So that’s an area where we know we have to develop.
Is HPE Qumulo's only OEM partner?
HPE‘s our most mature OEM. And we’re looking at others, including Fujitsu.
