DataCore ready for a new era

We met a few times DataCore several years ago at heir HQ in Fort Lauderdale and the company seemed to manage pretty well its installed base but had some difficulties to go beyond its storage virtualization comfort zone.

The meeting early today during The IT Press Tour was the opportunity to meet the new team, at least part of it, especially Dave Zabrowski, CEO, Gerardo Dada, CMO and Steven Hunt, Product Management.

But a sad event has changed completely DataCore. The death of Ziya Aral, Founder and CTO, and technical hero of the company, early 2017 was a shock and served as a real trigger for the company to imagine a new future wishing to leverage its strong recognized expertise for two decades. Ziya co-founded DataCore in 1998 with his close friend George Teixeira, now chairman of the company.

After several months of shaking heads, the new DataCore landed on earth again. As you may have seen for severals months, the company name is the same but the logo, mission, strategy and management have changed under the leadership of Dave Zabrowski, arrived in April 2018.

The company has made a serious exercise to study end-users and partners needs especially their customers to understand their expectations and above all consider them. First, a clear cloud strategy is missing as DataCore is an on-premise player so the public flavor was out of their scope. Does it mean they will announce something, we'll see. Considering this domain, the pricing strategy will require an change to match the now common practice which is a subscription model.

The second direction could be to leverage the SANsymphony SDS software and start an HCI offering. This needs a hypervisor choice and other software adherence.

We then expect of course a new iteration for SANsymphony and what about what a few others developed overtime like Nimble Storage InfoSight, Kaminario Clarity, NetApp OnCommand Insight or Pure Storage Pure1. I mean a SaaS Analytics an Insights platform to understand end-users' storage environment getting more and more complex and large. We'll see but we heard that DataCore have some plans on these few product directions.