I dont know much about NMBL as a product, I don’t use them personally and I dont think the company I work for uses them, I believe we use NetApp. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t a good investment or stock.
here is a recent article on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant: http://www.thefibrechannel.com/articles-by-tfc/nimble-storag…
And a recent Fool article (doesn’t look too good in the near future):
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/11/20/nimble-stor…
Your question on ‘why wouldn’t the cloud eat them’ is a good one though, but hard/complicated to answer, but I will give it a shot.
The short answer is they will be eaten. And as great as AWS is, Microsoft’s push into enterprise cloud with O365 among other products, with their sticky OS and Office, will win out over AWS at that level, I think (this is 2000+ employees, 25k+ IP addresses, 3 TB + /day storage requirements). You can easily search for images of gartners 2015 magic quadrant cloud storage and see who is leading the pack.
The long answer is that anything can happen in this industry in the next couple of years. When you talk about data storage, you are really talking about Intellectual Property and other regulated (and non-regulated like email addresses or website visits) information (HIPPA, PCI-DSS, PII, CJIS, SOX, etc.). I could easily see a bill or regulation come out that says a company cannot ‘outsource’ (which is what cloud storage is) regulated data.
For instance, do we really want Amazon, Microsoft, or Google storing/securing (and for conspiracy theorist, using) all the tax information that every state and the federal government currently has? Or is it those government entities responsibilities to store and secure that data themselves? What about electronic/online voting? As citizens, what risks are we willing to take, where is the balance, who is responsible? I guarantee you Amazon, Google, and Microsoft’s user agreements do not hold them liable for any data breaches or loss (I have read them), and they have the money/resources to defend those contractual obligations.
The flip side could be that those ‘big 3’ can secure that data better than any government ever could (think OPM data breach). I struggle with this on the basis that having only/around 3 targets for malicious hackers to exploit (instead of thousands of unknown databases that might not even be connected to the internet (but are connected to a LAN/WAN)) is inherently insecure.
I could go on, but i’ll stop and get back to work
Robert