Nasuni Company Kickoff – 2019 Year in Review

This week we’re holding our company and sales kickoff events here in beautiful (and cold) Boston. Since this is my first Nasuni kickoff, I thought I would share my thoughts on what we accomplished as a team last year and why we’re excited for the year ahead.

First off, it is so great to get everyone in one place to talk about our business and what we’re doing to help our customers. We had an incredible growth year in 2019, too, and that always makes these meetings more upbeat and enjoyable. Our data under management has increased 250% over the past 2 years! We now have 500 enterprise customers in over 8,000 locations and 70 countries! These kinds of metrics always brighten the mood at a meeting.

The meeting started out with a recap of 2019 – and what a year it was. We introduced all of the new faces, and there were a lot. We added 100 new employees (including myself), and built out all of our key departments and teams across the company.

Financial Milestones & Technical Innovations

Next we moved on to our financial results. We are a private company, so I can only say so much, but we beat all of our financial goals for the year, earning an A+ on our scorecard from our CFO. Translation? The bonuses are looking good.

More importantly, we saw more and more massive global brands modernizing their file storage by moving their legacy on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-based approach. What I loved to see was our ‘expansion’ business success. In the cloud/SaaS world, customers can hold you accountable for their success – or lack thereof – because they’re buying on-demand. This isn’t the traditional hardware-based approach where you get ‘locked in’ for years. Our expansion business is growing because our customers are happy. They’re witnessing the power of the Nasuni platform firsthand…and they want more.

We then moved onto non-financial milestones. We have filed 36 patents, with 12 of them granted! Our innovations around cloud-native file systems are best-in-class, especially our multi-location synchronization and collaboration features. We’ll need a separate blog to detail all the technical innovations, but adding support for Google Cloud and introducing an analytics connector for file data were some key highlights. We also added two new board members (look for the announcement next week) from Storage and Cloud leaders in our space.

The Best Kept Secret in Storage

This business we’re in isn’t easy. When you are tackling a market the size of file storage, you need to continue to be laser focused on product quality and simplicity. We are supplying critical infrastructure to our customers. The product ‘just has to work.’ Our engineers are dedicated to quality and performance, and we continue to remove all the complexities of 20 years of legacy hardware models and deliver SIMPLICITY.

During my talk, I also noted that we are the best kept secret in storage. But this is not a good thing. Especially when you are the CMO. There’s a problem here. When you look at our traction, our financial results, and the number of Fortune 1000 brands relying on our cloud service to run their businesses, we should be the buzz of storage and cloud. That’s my job, and the job of our Marketing team. You’ll see us make a big push in this area in 2020! We’re not going to be a secret any longer.

Training Days: Let’s Kick NAS

We then moved into 2 days of sales training. It is great hosting our salespeople and sales engineers from all over the world. The feedback we get on how customers are using our service is invaluable. The sales meeting theme, ‘Lets Kick NAS,’ is based on the idea customers want to stop spending CAPEX on file infrastructure (primary storage and backup) hardware and software on-premises. We rolled out many examples of global brands switching from NetApp and Dell EMC to a Nasuni cloud-based model. We even had one global retailer on stage to talk to the team about why they moved from NetApp on-premises to Nasuni. The three drivers? Cost, complexity, and the agility of the cloud.

Our top partners – Microsoft Azure and AWS – spoke to our teams about the massive growth in file services moving to the cloud. Our Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) capabilities enable our customers to couple our cloud-native file system with the object storage of their choice. The explosion of file data (10x block data growth) is driving massive data to these public clouds.

2020 is going to be a fantastic year for modernizing file infrastructure with a cloud-based approach. I joined Nasuni because I recognized a company with a fantastic, differentiated technology and an absolutely tremendous market opportunity. These last few days of meetings have been invigorating because I’ve been surrounded by co-workers, customers, and partners from all over the world who see the same exciting possibilities. 2019 was a banner year for the company. The financial results were truly exciting. But that’s nothing compared to what’s next. Thanks to all of our partners, customers, and employees for making Nasuni a great place to be!