Permabit sees partnerships as key to success with enterprise customers. "The whole idea is to create a Tier 2 storage pool," says Rich Vito, the startup's COO. Vito says more teamups are on the way, but he's mum on the details.
Permabit probably shouldn't keep quiet for long, as competition is fierce. Its chief rival, EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), has made a priority of purchasing or aligning itself with software vendors to boost sales of its Centera disk-based repository (see EMC Swings Into Software Big Leagues and Centera Hits 300 Partners, 10 PBytes).
There's plenty of other partnership activity in this space, too: Examples include the purchase of Archive-It by Connected Corp. last month (see Connected Gets Into Archive); and the pairing of IXOS Software AG (Nasdaq: XOSY) with a range of players, including Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), Hitachi Ltd. (NYSE: HIT; Paris: PHA), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) (NYSE: STK) (see Connected Gets Into Archive).
Permabit's strategy has been to tout its advantages aggressively, in David-and-Goliath fashion, to would-be buyers and partners. For example, the startup claims to have a better "total cost of ownership" than EMC (see Permabit Steps on the CAS), thanks to lower prices and use of NFS and Windows-based Common Internet File System (CIFS) interfaces. It says these interfaces obviate the need to use proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) to link various applications with the storage software. Other players, it says, require these APIs.
EMC spokesman Rob Callery says applications can link to Centera through a gateway, without APIs. But customers, he says, often prefer the control that EMC's interfaces provide. Further, he says, since Centera doesn't work with specific file systems like NFS, manageability is simplified.
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