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Maxta Hyperconvergence Closes as the HCI Market Solidifies
Maxta Hyperconvergence closed its doors in January as venture capital funding ran out. With the market clearly maturing, is start-up space in HCI officially closed?
Maxta was not able to obtain further investment and an all-hands meeting was held the week of January 29 to inform a staff of roughly 65 that they would receive their final paychecks and that health benefits would be terminating.
Over the course of its nine-year history, Maxta was not able to support itself on its own revenue generation. Founded in 2009, it landed funding in 2014 followed by a second infusion in 2015.
Maxta differentiated itself as a software defined hardware agnostic approach to HCI. It announced a partnership with Cisco in November 2014, becoming certified in the UCS platform. In March 2016 there was a partnership with Lenovo to provide an HCI system for sale in China. That relationship seemed to have faded before anything could flourish and Lenovo subsequently partnered with Pivot3 and Scale Computing.
Our Take
The HCI space is now an area for established players with little room for start-ups.
- DellEMC and HPE, the larger hardware players in this space, are easily in control of the market followed by the likes of Cisco and Pivot3.
- Nutanix and VMware are leaders in the software-only space followed by the likes of Scale Computing.
- Atlantis Computing, another player that pivoted into HCI a couple years ago, was purchased by Hive.IO in July 2017.
Unless another new player comes along with a radically different approach, it is safe to say that the landscape is now a more defined space.
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