96 Last week, Scality announced that it is now a Preferred Solution Partner within the Cisco Solution Partner Program. In case you missed it, you can see the full announcement here. This is Scality’s third major announcement about partnerships with major hardware vendors. To recap: October 16th, 2014 – Scality and HPE Enter Global Reseller Agreement August 18th, 2015 – Scality and Dell Enter Global Reseller Agreement January 12th, 2016 – Scality and HPE Strengthen Relationship with Strategic Equity Investment, Engineering Collaboration and Sales Programs April 19th, 2016 – Scality and Dell Combine Engineering Efforts and Release the SD7000-S; the Densest Purpose-Built Storage Server for the Scality RING And now: August 2nd, 2016 – Scality Announces Preferred Solution Partner Status with Cisco But why is this latest announcement so important? With this latest partnership, Scality now is immediately accessible on over 50% of the server market via three of the top five major server manufacturers as reported by IDC, based on Revenue, Market Share, and Growth: Top 5 Corporate Family, Worldwide Server Systems Vendor Revenue, Market Share, and Growth, First Quarter of 2016 (Revenues are in Millions) IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, June 2016 * Note: IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide server market when there is less than one percent difference in the revenue share of two or more vendors. Source: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41424716 We’ve continually talked about the importance of software-only, and that “software is eating the world”. But we’ve also stressed the fact that Scality offers hardware freedom. Hardware is still a part of the equation, but the hardware options are now completely unlocked. Our software is built on this founding principle, and runs on any standard x86 servers powered by Linux, meaning that it can run on virtually any server, including any of the manufacturers named in the chart above, as well as others that aren’t. Market demand for improved storage solutions is clear; and we’re prepared to solve them. This new agreement with Scality allows Cisco to provide enterprise-grade software-defined storage via the Scality RING and Cisco’s UCS servers. Cisco has long championed the software-defined data center, and inclusion of the Scality RING in the Cisco Solution Partner Program further expands their software-defined data center portfolio. We’ve already worked collaboratively with Cisco on cloud providers, major email service providers, and financial institutions. Over the last 18 months, Scality has continued to add and announce customers, distribution agreements, global resale agreements and additional investments as we’ve continued to innovate. Now let’s assert very strongly that “hardware freedom” very much implies that “hardware matters”. Hardware freedom as provide by the Scality Ring offers to customers is the ability to take advantage of hardware advancements as they happen without having to wait for certification or compatibility testing. Innovation can come closer and closer to moving at the speed of ideas. Our very first customer Telenet has been taking advantage of 5 generations of servers all along the last 6 years they’ve used their Scality RING. As data is increasing exponentially, with the advent of the Internet of Everything and machine learning, among other new rapid data generators, speed and scale is paramount. In the coming months we’ll be announcing even more partnerships through ISVs and application partners to allow anyone to take advantage of the limitless, petabyte-scale capabilities of the Scality RING object and software-defined storage.