A Matter of Time

I’m doing a lot of traveling these days and the one thing I never have enough of is time. Running from meeting to airport, airport to meeting, ad infinitum, it really makes me appreciate how scarce and precious a resource time is. The more important your role is it seems, the less time you have, which makes tools that facilitate strong time management critical to your business’ success. This brings me to the point of this note on GridBank™ - it is all about time!!!

GridBank is exciting to customers not only because it reduces storage capital expenditures, provides military-strength data and storage security, and delivers comprehensive E-discovery, but because it efficiently utilizes your most precious of resources: Time. In IT departments, time is always in short supply, there is always more to be done than there is time available, forcing hard decisions.

With today’s turbulent economic times, this is now true more than ever. GridBank’s policy-based automation efficiently manages the most demanding of IT processes: storage and data management. From automatically migrating and tiering data from high cost primary storage to low cost secondary storage and cloud storage environments to automatically encrypting 100’s of TB’s of data to seamlessly and rapidly searching 20 million files for a specific set of text, GridBank dramatically reduces the time your IT team will spend managing your exponentially expanding volumes of data.


GridBank, it’s a matter of time.

Tarmin is HOT!

After a grueling week, I was in need of some revitalization. Through the recommendation of a friend, I found myself at an acupuncturist’s office. Welcome to California. The acupuncturist felt my pulse, looked at my tongue and proceeded to tell me I was “hot”. Typically, that might not be considered a good thing, but I couldn’t help immediately associate my being “hot” with all the great progress we are making at Tarmin.

Following on our “One to Watch” award in June from Storage Magazine UK, Tarmin was named one of the “Nine Storage Companies to Watch” by CIO and Network World magazines. Now, that is HOT!!! The strong endorsements of Tarmin’s vision just keep coming, as ESG’s Lauren Whitehouse commented:

“Tarmin’s GridBank not only helps companies comply with a multitude of corporate document retention requirements, but its grid-based architecture enables capacity and performance scalability, as well as cost-effectiveness. GridBank’s intelligent storage software design allows organizations to manage the full lifecycle of their information, while automating all storage management processes.”

Pretty good, and that is only a piece of what GridBank is all about. To learn more about GridBank, visit our Resource Library

Read why Tarmin is so HOT at CIO and NetworkWorld

Tarmin Wins Storage Magazine Product Award 2009

Tarmin is experiencing very exciting times. Customer wins, distributor wins, channel wins and OEM wins. On my return from Phoenix on Friday, I was happy and pleasantly surprised to hear that Since our GA in February (in 4 months time), we have been honored with Storage Magazine - One to Watch Product award for 2009.

This means a lot to our team. This validation is an excellent news for us - Both from Sales and Engineering perspective. Our engineering team has been working exceptionally hard to prove that earlier versions of the software can be highly quality assured and ready for deployment.

GridBank - Early Product Adoption

Early Product Adoption drives the ecosystem, which drives more adoption and more expansion... It's a virtuous cycle, a cycle that starts with early adoption. But adoption needs robust software and There's always some system platform underneath software - in a data center or it's just as likely to be into a Fortune 500 company, attached to servers, storage and networking equipment. All told, this data center systems market is more than $150b annually.

At Tarmin We believe in these data centric times where the storage and networking are converging, both the storage and networking industry's proprietary approach, and their gross profit streams, are now open to those with sophisticated network aware storage software solutions such as GridBank. That's good news for customers, and for Tarmin.

However, this brings to what should be our preference when we drive this opportunity? The words (driving preference) are used by the advertising industry when talking about branding. Businesses brand or advertise to drive awareness of or preference for their products. In the case of a Toyota, they have to spend fortunes to buy media or acquire the ad space (or airtime) through which they'll present, free of charge to customers, the images or content they feel best represents their brands. Why doesn't Facebook advertise? Because Facebook itself is a branding experience. Using Facebook drives preference for Facebook. And their audience, in users, outreaches just about every media company on earth. It would make no sense for them to buy media, they are media.

For the audiences Tarmin cares about, those building, deploying or buying technology, we are building a similar reach. By being Channel Centric and distributed by partners, GridBank is building its own audience. And using GridBank will create a branding experience (and a wildly positive one, if we're doing our jobs well). The key for our partners success however lies in our Early Product Adoption which is well underway at Tarmin.

GridBank goes GA with Arizona City

Everyone who has been involved in a distributed service oriented software, they would instantly agree that any new Product proposition requires the accurate customer requirements in the PRD, mapping to right architecture and finally ensuring there is right performance and quality metrics planning.

Any startup from Sillicon Valley to China and India faces 2 big challenges

• Quality Assurance of the Product and Performance
• Customers - Early Adoption !

I have been involved in 2 successful startups and having observed many startups, most startups cannot get even one of them right. Most founders and startup CTOs are not good engineering managers and very optimistic on timescales. As a result Products are delayed, Sales force and management teams are hired early on and lot of investment dollars are spent.

At Tarmin we took a different approach. We researched GridBank Product for 3 years (customer research, technology research and accademic research) before we even went to raise our first dollar (okay we were lucky to have a succesful exit from the previous startup. That helped in survival). When we raised our first round, we had the whole story right. Core Parts of the product was developed and even then it took us further 2 years to go GA with GridBank.

But the results are Outstanding and All I have for my small but extremely focused and very smart engineering team is 2 words - Standing Ovation. Keep it up guys. We have a very comprehensive roadmap to finish.

Reducing OPEX - Storage Management with GridBank

Like the market for traditional networking, the storage marketplace is characterized by very high prices, proprietary software and restrictive hardware platforms - exactly the environment in which GridBank storage software platform and commodity components create choice and competition, welcome changes for customers seeking budgetary and technical relief.

Managing Storage is a risky business. Tough times create unique opportunity for those who innovate - although we see customers under stress across the world, that pressure is opening their eyes to the alternatives Tarmin provides, across our ubiquitous software innovation - GridBank Platform. For our OEM customers, Tarmin can draw upon the most pervasive software platform, the growing user community, and among one of the most powerful products and distribution assets to drive more aggressive growth in the future.

The growth in storage (recent survey from StorageExpo) is an interesting phenomenon in the computer marketplace, which strikes some as counterintuitive: if you double the performance of a machine, customers don't buy half as many, they tend to double their order. Same goes for utilization, if you can double server utilization via standard OS or VMWare, people don't buy fewer computers - they buy more. The value of innovation, at least to many customers, is growing so fast that if the price declines, the overall return (value/price) goes through the roof - encouraging a feedback loop. Moore's Law and Grid Computing software's such as Tarmin GridBank Platform drive relative pricing down, and customers accelerate their growth.

GridBank - Making It Ready for OEMs

The Holy Grail for storage companies, especially the early stage type like Tarmin, is OEM deals. Everyone is looking for the OEM deal, the one that will fund the company's early activities, provide market credibility and momentum in the marketplace. Of course, if it goes well, there can be nothing better.

Despite GridBank going GA End of this month, Interest in OEMing Tarmin GridBank has been massive. Tyically companies looking for large OEM partners are often blinded by the potential of what the OEM can do FOR their business. They often fail to pay any attention at all to what the OEM deal would require.

The most important factor in any OEM deal is Excellent Support. Tarmin has implemented an excellent support program for OEMs, VARS and Distributors. Selling through sales and distribution channels of various types is very important to Tarmin. Yet channel programs, and specifically discount structures, are often thrown together quickly and haphazardly, without looking at any real hard data. However at Tarmin, we launched the Reseller Program considering Support, Training, Comprehensive Discounting schemes and Incentives for Resellers. Infact our reseller program has been very successful that one of our partner recently asked if they could help find us OEMs of the GridBank Platform.

Tarmin will do a ton of business through OEM's - from network storage providers to Cloud Storage Providers, all the way down to ILM software vendors. It's a key focus of our revenue. In doing so we will also integrate with many products such as Microsoft SharePoint, SAP and many others. It's becoming increasingly difficult for any company to be religious about not buying or supporting another's products. It's a big industry, but a small world.