The storage market is undergoing a transformation of sorts. Amid the AI buildout’s shift in what’s hot and what’s not, traditional box sellers are trying to reinvent themselves as data management software players.

While the network has largely shaken the moniker of commoditized dumb pipes, core storage players are trying to do the same. But the distinction of success lies in whether data capabilities are genuinely integrated or merely assembled from a hodgepodge of separate products. At least, that’s the view of Vast Data co-founder Jeff Denworth.

Having served as VP of marketing at one such player currently trying to reinvent its core storage image in DDN, Denworth went on to found a market player that successfully marries both worlds – one he broadly claims everyone is now trying to emulate.

“The CRO of NetApp at the last all-hands said if you gave him two bullets to take out competitors, he would put both in Vast Data,” Denworth claimed. “At a minimum, [we have] completely captured a market that came out of thin air, that is the biggest IT infrastructure buying event in history, and we are basically presiding over the non-tier-one cloud part of that from a data perspective.”

Not modest by any means, but the company did reach a $30 billion valuation in the spring – a number that, given the never-ending AI infrastructure scale-out, may have soared even higher. Its meteoric rise, though, has come off the back of tying its storage architecture with a data platform that adds a software-defined data processing layer over storage – something rival vendors are increasingly trying to be seen doing.

Having penned partnerships with the likes of Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, Denworth argues Vast’s rivals are trying to downplay the word “storage” to avoid being seen as traditional storage companies, even though storage remains a real and valuable part of what they sell.

“From our perspective, storage is such an integral part of what we offer, and it's something that a lot of customers use exclusively, right? And so why wouldn't we tell people that want to buy storage that we make a really good storage product. Like that's just good marketing,” Denworth said.

Rival Pure Storage (now Everpure) dropped the latter part of its long-standing name earlier in the year so as not to be pigeonholed as solely being a storage player – though company leaders have sought to stress it was “not abandoning” the space.

Denworth explained to SDxCentral that Vast opted to “defocus” the universal storage part of its story, but its reasoning was to “change the definition of distributed systems in the market.”

But where the Vast story differs from rivals like Pure trying to reinvent themselves, at least in Denworth's view, is that it sought to do this from day one, not add it on when it suddenly became cool.

“If you look at these guys' systems, it's basically another system that you put on top of their systems that has third-party database services, has some sort of like external Kubernetes cluster that you run," Denworth said. "Dell, Pure, whoever – they're nothing more than modern systems integrators that are providing wrappers on top of a bunch of independent technologies that they didn't develop, and they don't, and aren't intended to solve any new problems.”

Capital pressures amid the neocloud wobble?

While Denworth and the Vast team claim to have pushed ahead of rivals, there’s a more revealing tension at the center of its customer base in the form of the fast-growing – and slightly wobbling – neocloud ecosystem.

Vast serves a considerable number of neoclouds ranging from CoreWeave and Firmus to quasi-players like Megaport.

And yet SDxCentral’s sit-down with Denworth came amid fresh concerns about the neocloud buildout. GTC Berlin followed Microsoft terminating an anchor tenant agreement with Nscale in the U.K. because the site would not have power in time. And days later, comments from a similar brazen industry voice in Elon Musk, who said via X that debt markets have shut off access to cash for neoclouds, adding: “Some will make it through, but not many.”

For Denworth, the bigger concern is credit, revealing it was the topic he was hearing about most at GTC Berlin. While he claimed Vast itself has “zero” of the capital problems facing some of these emerging GPU cloud providers, he warned that financing is tightening across the sector.

“You're talking about one of the largest capex events in all of human history, and the capital markets only have so much tolerance for this,” Denworth said. “At some point, the risk and the exposure gets so large that they start thinking, okay, well, how much of this is my business?”

Denworth added that Vast’s supply-chain partners were “completely maxed out from a credit perspective,” citing the volume of business flowing through them. Compounding the credit crunch, in Denworth’s view, is the rise in global interest rates, which is making GPU financing harder, particularly for non-investment-grade borrowers.

Unlike some of the aforementioned neoclouds, Vast has resisted going public. Based on Denworth’s comments to SDxCentral, such a move might not come to fruition any time soon. In order to make such a move, Denworth said the market would need to be “frothy” – a status at odds with the current inhospitable nature to AI infrastructure plays at present.

“There's no pressure to go out,” Denworth said. “A lot of these clouds are going public because their debt covenants insist that they do, and we don't have any of that," Denworth said. "We're just happy to run our business and do whatever we want to do. But investors look at that and they want to be part of the party if it looks like a cool party to be at.”

Denworth described Vast as a “cross-cut” play spanning the AI infrastructure market, calling it an “index tracker for how AI infrastructure is doing, kind of at large.”

He did, however, round out the discussion by saying the IPO calculus could change if major AI labs test the public markets, adding: “My guess is that when Anthropic and OpenAI go out … if the markets are receptive to that, there’s going to be a lot more pressure for us to make a move.”