Ibrix is nonetheless up against some stiff competitors in the clustered NAS space, where vendors such as NetApp and Isilon are jostling furiously for position. (See Isilon's Counting on Clusters.) The level of one-upmanship was evident earlier this year, when Isilon accused NetApp and Ibrix's reseller partner EMC of failing to make inroads into clustered NAS, prompting an angry reaction from NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven and further stoking the competitive fires. (See NetApp Stokes Competitive Fires, Isilon's Counting on Clusters, NetApp's GX Targets HPC, and Ibrix Joins EMC Select.)
Compounding this situation, recent months have proved a lean spell for vendors in this corner of the storage market, marked by a slowdown in enterprise spending. (See NetApp Announces Q4 Results, Storage Spending Knocks NetApp, and Isilon: The Honeymoon's Over.)
Although Ibrix's Gilbert would not reveal his firm's recent revenues, he says that the vendor now has more than 100 customers. "I expect to be cash flow positive around the end of this year, and profitable around the third quarter of next year."
To achieve this, Ibrix is looking in the future to break out of its traditional niches in media and entertainment and start selling its clustering technologies in new markets such as financial services and pharmaceuticals.
To support this push, the vendor is planning to grow its 100-strong workforce to somewhere between 130 and 150 by this time next year. "We're actively hiring in all functional areas," says Gilbert, adding that the firm's "next big product announcement" is scheduled for later this year.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
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IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
