Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

earnings

Lucky 7k, go vSAN!

· ·

VMware announced the Q4 earnings last night, one of the things I was most interested about was how vSAN did in Q4. Here is what was announced yesterday, for those interested in more detail check the full earnings call. (Hint, it isn’t just vSAN doing well.)

  • We’ve reached 7000 customers
  • 150% Year over Year growth

Awesome growth (5500 customers in Q3 reached) if you ask me. Really ramping up fast now, and I cannot wait for us to hit 10k. (That is going to be a big party Yanbing / Christos.)

Before I forget, I want to thank all VMware colleagues and all of our partners who are helping us making vSAN one of the fastest growing products within VMware. We couldn’t do this without you, lets kill it again in the upcoming months!

Oh, I just noticed a great post by Lee Caswell on LinkedIn on these numbers, make sure to read that one.

Another major milestone, 5000 customers reached for VSAN!

· ·

Yes, new quarterly results are out, and this is crazy, Yanbing (SVP/GM for Storage & Availability BU) dropped the news on twitter last night:

Yes that is correct, VSAN customer count grew with 1500 in just 1 quarter and the license bookings also grew > 200% Y0Y. Crazy numbers if you ask me, and some serious traction. Considering how well VxRail is doing I can only see this ramping up faster even. Just some quotes from last nights earnings call, you can find a transcript here and audio here if you are interested.

Pat Gelsinger:
Our hyper-converged license bookings, including VSAN and VxRail software, grew over 200% year-over-year. The new VxRail appliance we jointly developed with EMC was launched earlier this year and has enjoyed an impressive start, benefiting also from Dell’s decision to resell VxRail.

The rock stars of Q2 were NSX and VSAN and they were just fabulous

Yes, clearly the VxRail and the momentum that it is seeing was a piece of that. But a lot of the customer count was non-VxRail. So this product has now hit a point of inflection, as you suggest, that really was thrilling. And if I would call out one product in Q2 that just blew their numbers away, VSAN is it, and it was the rockstar of Q2 above all others. And what we’re seeing is that the product maturity, the channel momentum, I commented on the transactional channel before, and that really is well fit to VSAN. But also some of the enterprise use cases have clearly seen momentum, as well. And then we add to that the incremental benefits of VxRail that we jointly developed with EMC and Dell now reselling that VxRail product. It was also geographically balanced, as well. We saw VSAN growing across all of the geos, large customers, major wins, in healthcare, also mid market wins across different geos. So really, really excited about the VxRail, as well as the overall hyper-converged category for us and VSAN, the rockstar of Q2.

You know what, I will give away 5 “Essential Virtual SAN” books to 5 random people who leave a comment (and retweet / share this post on linkedin) to celebrate this great achievement. Please leave comment with your real name and correct email address so I can reply for your home address! I email winners Wednesday 19th of July end of day. [UPDATE: Winners have received an email from me, or will within the next 10 minutes]

How is Virtual SAN doing? 3500 customers reached!

· ·

Are you wondering how Virtual SAN is doing? The recent earnings announcement revealed that… Virtual SAN is doing GREAT! Over 3500 customers so far (21 months after the release!) and 200% Year over Year growth. I loved how Pat Gelsinger described Virtual SAN: “VMware’s simple enterprise grade native storage for vSphere”. It doesn’t get more accurate and to the point than that, and that is how people should look at it. vSphere native storage, it just works. Just a couple of things I wanted to grab from the earnings call (transcript here) that I think stood out with regards to VSAN:

and I – having been three years at EMC as a storage company, part of it is it just takes a while to get a storage product mature, right, and that – we have crossed the two-year cycle on VSAN now. The 6.2 release, as I would say, checks all the boxes with regard to key features, capabilities and so on, and we are, I’ll say right on schedule, right, we’re seeing the inflection point on that business, and the 6.2 release really hit the mark in the marketplace very well.

I’d say we’re clearly now seen as number one in a hyper-converged infrastructure space, and that software category we think is going to continue to really emerge as a powerful trend in the industry.

I think Zane mentioned a large financial services company. We had a large EMEA retailer, a large consumer goods manufacturer, a large equipment engines company, and each one of these is really demonstrating the power of the technology.

We also had good transactional bookings as well, so it wasn’t just in big deals but also transactional performance was good. So the channel participation is increasing here.

So we really left Q1 feeling really good about this area, and I’m quite bullish about its growth potential through the year and 2017 and beyond.

I think I don’t need to add anything other than… Go VSAN!