Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL) is celebrating strong Q2 2017 financial results -- and praising channel partners for the company's all flash array (ARA) storage momentum.
"We saw strong momentum in customer and channel partner adoption of our All Flash arrays," said CEO Suresh Vasudevan in a prepared statement. Overall, Q2 2017 revenues were $97.1 million -- up 21 percent vs. Q2 2016.
During the quarter, Nimble trained "hundreds" of channel partners to sell and deploy the company's Adaptive Flash Arrays and All Flash arrays, the company said in a letter to shareholders.
The results sound promising: Channel partners accounted for 48 percent of Nimble's total bookings during the quarter, up from 45 percent in the previous quarter and 44 percent in Q2FY16. "As the industry continues to consolidate, the depth of our engagement with large channel partners that have traditionally partnered closely with large legacy storage vendors continues to increase," wrote CEO Vasudevan and CFO Anup Singh in the letter.
Enterprise and Cloud Services Provider Adoption
Bookings from enterprise customers grew 37 percent compared to Q2 FY16. The company's bookings grew even more rapidly within CSPs -- jumping 69 percent over Q2FY16, and accounted for 19 percent of total bookings.
"Bookings growth from larger CSPs within our overall CSP base grew even faster," the letter to shareholders stated. "A key driver of our growth is that we have become a de facto storage standard within hundreds of CSPs, benefiting from the growth that SaaS and IaaS companies are experiencing.
Nimble's Q2 2017 results beat Wall Street's expectations for both revenues and earnings.
All Flash Storage: Industry Momentum
Nimble's results come one week after NetApp (NTAP) announced better-than-expected quarterly results -- pointing to channel partners and all flash storage momentum as key contributors to the momentum.
Multiple vendors in the all flash array storage market claim to be taking market share and clientele from EMC, but EMC also enjoys flash momentum on multiple fronts. The next flash benefactor could be Dell, which is expected to finalize its EMC buyout in the next few days or weeks -- creating a combined company called Dell Technologies.
