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Infinidat slims down in UK: Storage upstart has just handful of Brit staff

One sales head left and no country manager in Blighty, industry sources say

Infinidat has slimmed its UK office from 17 heads to just four since January 2016, and has not won a new customer in that time, we're told.

The company, headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, is Moshe Yanai's creation that eschews an all-flash design. It sells monolithic storage arrays in competition with EMC VMAX kit, DS8000 and XIV boxes from IBM, HDS VSP arrays, and HPE's Hitachi-OEMed equivalent and 3PAR hardware.

We've heard that Infinidat has four UK customers: BrightSolid, Pulsant, BT and Barclays. BT, its biggest client worldwide followed by Barclays, is the most active, and is looked after by a director for enterprise sales. There are three technical and professional services people alongside him in the London office. Thirteen others have been let go.

For example, acting country manager Jasper Gundry-White was axed recently, as was Scott Hunter, regional lead for finance and insurance, and solution architect David Gaen. Strategic account director Alan Sharpe left in August. Isabel Rivero, who looked after strategic business development in the UK, left in December.

We understand Computacenter used to resell Infinidat arrays, however following a dispute over unpaid commission, it no longer does so.

With BT having accounting problems in its Italian operation, its propensity to buy more kit may have to be cut back. We also understand that SMB file access support by Infinidat's InfiniBox arrays is not due to arrive until 2018, and there is no sign yet of object storage support.

Infinidat's marketing supremo Randy Arseneau came out fighting, saying: "The UK is our fastest growing market outside of North America. Our UK customers – including BT, who incidentally are one of our top ten largest customer deployments worldwide – deployed over 75PB of Infinidat storage in 2016 alone.

"Our London-based team – like all of our EMEA-based teams – is experienced, smart, aggressive and by all accounts they are quite enjoying taking marketshare away from EMC, Pure, Amazon, and the other usual suspects, despite being outnumbered 20-to-1 on the street.

"We also plan to keep pace with our growth momentum by tripling the size of our UK sales and solution architecture teams this year, and we'd be delighted if your readers who are black-belt engineers and love taking care of happy customers would check out our openings at hiring.infinidat.com and consider joining this incredible team."

Brian Carmody, Infinidat's chief technology officer, added his two pence: "SMB support is coming in 2017, and both object and HDFS are already running in our labs. Our customers are split on which protocol should come next. If any Register readers have opinions on this, please leave a comment in the thread or hit me up on Twitter @initzero." ®

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