Tintri, a networking start-up from Silicon Valley, made its initial public offering (IPO) on June 30,2017 and its shares are now trading on NASDAQ under the symbol 'TNTR'. The IPO raised approximately $60 million for the Mountain View, California-based company – a lukewarm Wall Street response considering earlier speculation that the shares might debut in the range of $10.50 to $12.50. Many expected the IPO to occur at the start of last week and at the higher price range. It was not clear why the IPO was delayed by a few days, but the lower price must have caused consternation for early investors and employees. Post IPO, Tintri, which means 'lightning' in the Irish language, currently has a market capitalisation value of about $225 million.
Tintri was founded in 2008 by Kieran Hearty, who had previously led engineering at VMware, and Mark Grittier, who had previously worked on software engineering at Sun Microsystems. The first products were introduced nearly 3 years later in March 2011. In August 2015, Tintri raised a $125 million Series F funding round led by Silver Lake Craftwork and included existing investors Insight Venture Partners, Light speed Ventures, Menlo Ventures and NEA. In December 2016, Charles Giancarlo, the former CTO of Cisco Systems, joined the Tintri board.
Tintri prides itself of having developed an enterprise cloud platform with a 'Lego-like' design that allows for every storage action at the individual virtual machine level. The value proposition is simple: scale the enterprise cloud from terabytes of storage to multiple petabytes as efficiently as possible. The Tintri CONNECT web services architecture use the 'Lego' building-block approach predicated on REST APIs and VM and container level abstraction. The frameworks runs applications on resource pools that span VMware, Citrix,Microsoft and OpenStack. This supports a DevOps model, where resource can be spun up or torn down on-demand, including via automated bots or modern interfaces such as Slack or Amazon's Alexa. To deliver this, Tintri's platform integrates cloud management software, web services and a range of all-flash storage systems.
A key ingredient is a virtualisation-aware file system that allows an organisation to view, manage and analyse application performance and quality of service. In a sense, it enables a private version of a public cloud. Use cases include server virtualisation, virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI, disaster recovery and data protection, and development operations, or DevOps. Tintri says it has an advantage because innovation in storage has lagged and lacked granular level operation at the VM and container level.
