SimpliVity CEO To Nutanix: Congrats On The IPO Filing, We'll Follow Suit 'When Timing Is Right'

Now that hyper-converged infrastructure startup Nutanix has filed for its long awaited initial public offering, will rival startup SimpliVity also decide to test the waters?

SimpliVity CEO Doron Kempel told CRN Thursday he sees Nutanix's IPO filing as a sign that the hyper-converged infrastructure market -- which refers to compute, storage, networking and virtualization running on x86 server hardware -- is coming of age.

"We want to congratulate Nutanix for their achievements," Kempel said in an emailed statement. "The hyper-converged infrastructure industry has seen unprecedented growth over the last couple years, and Nutanix's IPO filing is yet another point of validation for the exploding market."

Kempel indicated that SimpliVity has no immediate plans for an IPO, but said the startup will "consider a public offering when the timing is right."

[Related: Hyper-Converged Startup Nutanix Files For IPO, Had $241 Million In Revenue In 2015]

Nutanix, in its S-1 filing Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, said it's looking to raise up to $200 million in an IPO. The San Jose, Calif.-based startup has raised more than $312 million in funding and has a valuation north of $2 billion.

Simplivity, which has raised more than $276 million in funding and had a $1 billion-plus valuation after its latest round in March, touts its flagship OmniCube appliance as a cheaper, data center-based alternative to the Amazon Web Services public cloud.

SimpliVity said in October that its sales bookings jumped 50 percent during the third calendar quarter compared to the previous quarter, and that more than 50 percent of its revenue came from outside North America.

Mark Galyardt, executive vice president of Xioss, an Atlanta-based firm that partners with SimpliVity and Nutanix, told CRN his customers have been showing more interest in hyper-converged infrastructure as they look to consolidate their IT infrastructure.

Galyardt, who has known Kempel since his days as CEO of Diligent Technologies (now part of IBM), said his track record suggests that SimpliVity is on track for a big year in 2016. "Doron is an excellent CEO and tech industry leader, so [I expect that] Simplivity will continue its torrid growth," he said.

Despite its status as a Silicon Valley "unicorn" with a $1 billion-plus valuation, SimpliVity didn't begin selling its product until 2013, nearly two years after Nutanix entered the marketplace. "It takes time to get it right. When you build a skyscraper, you have to first build a solid foundation," Kempel told CRN in August.

For all the buzz and funding in the hyper-converged infrastructure space, its overall share of the enterprise infrastructure market remains relatively small.

International Data Corporation, in a report issued earlier this week, said hyper-converged infrastructure sales saw year-over-year growth of 155.3 percent in the third quarter of 2015, amounting to revenue of $278.8 million.