What market does Sphere target? Frankly, it's hard to tell based on their own investor presentations. Let's look at the Total Addressable Markets that they have told investors they are pursuing. It's interesting to note the massive swings in dollar value and the completely different tech sectors.
Feb 2014, Cantech Investor Conference: TAM = $160BN includes IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and Mobile Cloud Services.
Today, we know that Glassware on Azure is not enterprise ready and is just a demo. Other than repackaged Azure storage, Sphere sells nothing that addresses IaaS, SaaS, PaaS or Mobile Cloud Services.
May 2015, Roth Conference: TAM $50BN includes Backup Appliance, Unified Storage, Cloud Virtualization, Converged Infrastructure
Basically, the old money losing Overland Storage business, plus the VMware based V3 appliance. Sphere does not sell anything for cloud virtualization.
May 2016, Private Investor Call: TAM = $78+BN includes Cloud Management Software,Virtualization Software, Storage Systems, x86 Servers
This is a head shaker. Sphere has no cloud management software solutions, resells VMware virtualization (Per the company, Glassware is not virtualization but more efficient container tech). Overland Storage sells storage but after 35 years in the market has less than .2% market share.
And reselling Supermicro servers hardly qualifies any company to claim they are a player in the $45BN x86 server market.
Consider how the story has changed, all with the same results. The consumer market - Corel, the OEM market - Dell, the network market - Ericsson, the Edu market - Google and Dell, the channel market (20,000 Overland partners and Promark), the cloud market - Microsoft Azure, and now the hyper converged appliance market - VMware.
And of course, lets not forget the excitement about "Glassware on a chip", ending "end of life", "break down the Apple pay wall", the "only way to migrate mainframe apps and data to the cloud", the only way to "migrate ATM Windows XP apps to the cloud", and of course, all that Federal government business.
Oh well, we still have Entisys.
