Love Story Between AntemetA and HP

AntemetA SAS is one of the most respected French storage integrator with a strong technical team headed by CTO Samuel Berthollier and a president, Stéphane Blanc, running successfully the company since its inception just 20 years ago, growing since 1995 and being profitable since several years.

For fiscal year ended March, the company, with 180 people, recorded revenue of €54 million in 2015 (up 23% from 2014). Average growth is 10% since 5 years. It claims more than 700 customers, from SMBs to big public and private enterprises, including 300 under maintenance contracts.

Revenue of AntemetA in € million
(FY ended in March)

The most growing business is around the cloud with sales of €5,7 million, a growth of 46% compared to 2014.

The company was created in a parking in Coignières by four people in 1995 essentially focusing on FC SAN.

Since 2012, HQs is in a new purposed-based building of 3.500 square meters in Guyancourt, in the suburb of Paris.

The love story with HP began with the distribution of StorageWorks and EVA storage subsystems. But EVA was based on an old monolithic storage architecture, so AntemetA went in USA to find more modern scale-out technology, discovering start-up 3par and becoming its distributor in 2008. That was the first infidelity to HP. But not for a long time as HP acquired 3par in 2010 for $2.350 billion. Now AntemetA claims to manage the third biggest 3par installed base in the world with 300 bays. One hundred EVA arrays continue to be in service.

Note also that Bertrand Bombes de Villiers joined the integrator in 2006 as deputy GM and board’s director, coming from HP were he headed the French storage business unit.

The integrator adopted Pure Storage three years ago to get an all-flash array as HP was late in this field. But HP didn’t acquire Pure Storage … Second infidelity. The French firm estimates to be the European leader in this field having sold between €8 million and €10 million since it entered into this business. “We have migrated 10% of our installed base on all-flash,” said Blanc. According to Berthollier, the product of Pure Storage is good but has some youth bugs.

Other partners of AntemetA include Dell, Symantec, VMWare, Scality for a managed service infrastructure able to backup the data of its customers.

But AntemetA is more than an integrator and has developed utility software resold worldwide by HP. In 2009, it designed a plug-in vor EVA storage bays.

More recently it announced two products for HP storage:

• 3parR Vision: small SRM, audit tool for audit and capacity planning
• Peer Persistence pour AIX: for IBM AIX environment integrated into application layers of 3par

This business represented revenue of around €1 million last year.

The integrator is essentially focused on the French market with six agencies in France and is positioned in Luxembourg, even if it has some customers outside, but never really invests seriously in other countries.