Category: storage

Contact: Brenon Daly Tim Stammers

In what would be the first IPO from the storage sector in two years, Violin Memory’s prospectus is out for all the world to see. (We indicated last week that the S1 was on its way.) What people are mostly seeing in the paperwork, however, is red ink – and lots of it.

As we wrote in our full report on the all-flash array (AFA) vendor, its filing and what it has to look forward to as a public company, Violin’s offering won’t appeal to everyone on Wall Street: It’s a relatively immature company, spending money at an unsustainable rate in a market that today represents only a tiny fraction of overall storage spending but is getting more competitive every day.

If we wanted to translate that into some actual numbers, we might offer this summary from the prospectus: Each quarter, Violin has been losing anywhere from $20m to as much as $35m to bring in $20-25m in revenue. (Altogether, Violin has run up an accumulated deficit of more than $250m since incorporating in 2005.)

The main reason for the deep losses at Violin is the fact that its product is expensive to make. (Gross margins run only in the low-40% range.) Once those costs are subtracted, there’s very little left over for operating costs. Yet that hasn’t slowed Violin’s spending on R&D or sales/marketing. For the past year, quarterly operational spending at Violin has run three times higher than its gross income.

While certainly staining the P&L sheet a blood red, Violin’s lavish spending has nonetheless helped establish it as the leader in the nascent AFA market. Storage professionals at major enterprises have tapped Violin as the most exciting privately held storage vendor, according to recent interviews by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research. Further, Violin has succeeded in converting that into sales momentum, with recent growth rates of about 70%. For more on Violin and the offering, see our full report.

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-by Brenon Daly

After a fitful past few quarters, Violin Memory is ready to play on the big stage. The all-flash array provider is set to reveal its IPO paperwork later this week, according to sources. Our understanding is that the offering itself will take place in about a month, with Violin likely to be valued at just under $1bn at debut. Assuming it does go public, Violin would be the first significant enterprise storage IPO in two years.

The initial valuation is a bit lower than the $1.5bn we penciled out for Violin last October when we first reported that the company was set for an IPO. Two factors are weighing on that – one inside the company and one outside. In terms of macro-level influences, there’s been a recent trend toward conservative pricing for IPOs, at least at debut, as uncertainty and volatility has increased on Wall Street.

Still, fast-growing companies have traded substantially higher in the aftermarket, and we would expect Violin to follow suit. The reason? Violin’s torrid growth rate. According to our understanding, Violin is tracking to increase sales about 80% in the current fiscal year, ending next January. We gather that Violin put up roughly $75m in sales in the previous fiscal year, and is projecting about $135m for its current fiscal year.

The heady growth hasn’t come without a stumble or two. Several sources have indicated that the company’s sales in the second half of last year came in much lighter than expected, in part because Hewlett-Packard stopped reselling Violin. But at least some of the lumpiness that Violin had been experiencing has been smoothed by new sales arrangements and new products.

For instance, my colleague Tim Stammers recently wrote an in-depth look at Violin’s partnership with Toshiba, which is also an investor in Violin, to start selling PCIe flash cards . Although the expansion into what’s likely to be a commodity market doesn’t alleviate all of the concerns around the inherent lumpiness of Violin’s big-ticket arrays, it does at least add a new revenue stream.

And in terms of its core product, Violin does have the advantage that it has created a fair amount of buzz with the audience that matters. A recent survey by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research, interviewed more than 260 storage professionals at major enterprises and asked them to name which vendor they found ‘exciting.’ Violin came in as the top-ranked privately held storage company, with twice the mentions of other high-flying startups such as Nimble Storage and Pure Storage.

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.