Some hesitations for Qumulo

Qumulo just announced a new strategy around Scale Anywhere. I already noticed that Kiran Bhageshpur, arrived a few months ago as CTO, took the lead on all product oriented activities replacing Ben Gitenstein, former VP of Product Management, who moved to AWS.

This new strategy iteration focus on the run at any place - on-premises and cloud - on any hardware beyond historical partner of Qumulo that finally limited its expansion, with intelligent fast data movement across these locations exposing NFS, SMB and soon S3, I mean Qumulo S3 engine and not MinIO one like it was in the past with the gateway flavor. All these access methods point to the same data. The company extends the cluster to more than 200 nodes and we the current density, I’d like to know who is running 200+ Qumulo nodes cluster. The engineering team has updated its SMB support to offer SMB Change Notify and SMB Multichannel. Interesting stuff but it gaves me the feeling that Qumulo is now behind a few others players and wasted some time and its advance.

Many of us heard some negatives things about Qumulo these last few weeks even months with real difficulties to maintain its Cloud momentum. Sales are clearly impacted and we all remembered the lay-off of 20% of its workforce confirming tough times.

I hope Qumulo won’t change each year its strategy like it was the case for Igneous. With The IT Press Tour crew, we met 4 times Igneous - Dec. 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 - and each time Kiran pitched us a different story and new directions. Guess what, Igneous ceased its operations, disappeared and some IP assets got swallowed for a penny by Rubrik.

I will monitor Qumulo as I anticipate some moves and one of these could be an acquisition by HPE. The problem is the price for Qumulo and for HPE, they acquired companies to destroy and kill them… We all several examples in mind.