Tintri 'consolidates' Australian office to Singapore

Storage vendor Tintri has “decided to consolidate APAC operations out of regional headquarters in Singapore”, effectively shuttering the Sydney office from which it served Australia and New Zealand.

As archive.org records, Tintri had an office in Sydney as recently as May 7th, 2016. The company's Contact Us page now contains no mention of the ANZ office.

Tintri's not saying why it closed the local office or how many staff remain.

We've only been offered the statement that the decision was made because “We manage our operations responsibly” and that “We are selling to, servicing and supporting customers in Australia through our local channel partners. We’ve centralised our APAC team in our headquarters in Singapore.”

Tintri's not revealed to The Register how many, if any, staff remain in Australia. The company's serviced office is still answering calls and routed our inquiries to local staff, but we're yet to hear back from those worthies. Former staff contacted by El Reg tell us that only Tintri's PR firm has anything to say, and that firm has nothing more to say than the canned quotes above. Nor has the company's handler at distributor Avnet returned our call, although the press contact there was surprised to learn of changes at Tintri and said they'd heard nothing of the change.

The template for cracking the Australian market is simple: find a pre-sales chap or two, plus someone who has helmed a multi-national vendor's local sales team, and get them to mine their banking, telco and public sector contacts. If that advance party can land a deal, add sales and marketing then start sending cheques back to HQ.

Tintri landed former Brocade and VMware man Graham Schultz to lead the local operation, scored Deakin University as a client but seems to have sent insufficient or insufficiently-large cheques home, if the “consolidation” to Singapore and pledge to “manage our operations responsibly” is any guide.

The statement Tintri has offered sounds ominous, if only because the vendor has in the past pointed out that even VMware regards Australia and New Zealand as two of the most heavily-virtualised nations on earth. Which begs two questions: if the company's VM-aware storage can't make it down under, just where can it make it, and; if Tintri needs to shave a few bucks off its operational costs by reducing its operations in Australia, how's the rest of the company going? ®