Employee Spotlight: Mike Driscoll, Director of Product Management at Nasuni

Nasuni caught up with Mike Driscoll, Director of Product Management, to explore his remarkable journey from customer to company leader — and uncover the passion, purpose, and innovation that have fueled his decade-long commitment to Nasuni.

Mike joined Nasuni ten years ago after experiencing the power of the Nasuni File Data Platform firsthand as a customer. Since then, he’s held roles across Professional Services and Product Management, working across everything from customer onboarding and product integrations to the company’s ransomware protection product. Today, he oversees four major product areas and is committed to expanding the platform’s capabilities, helping customers maximize the value of their data stored in Nasuni.

Q: Can you introduce your role and tell me what areas of the business you’re responsible for?

I am one of three Directors of Product Management at Nasuni and I’m responsible for four areas of the product. One is working with the Data Path engineering team that creates and maintains our UniFS® file system, the core of the Nasuni File Data Platform. A member of my team also works with the engineers that are building our new set of cloud services, the Nasuni Data Service (NDS). Another team member works with the group that is responsible for building the new High Availability Non-Disruptive Upgrade (HANDU) version of our Edge Appliance that’s coming out later in the year. And, last but not least, I have overall responsibility for managing our Ransomware Protection add-on, with key collaboration from two other members of the Product Management team.

Q: When did you first come into contact with Nasuni and what was it about them that caught your attention?

I was actually a Nasuni customer at an AEC firm in Chicago before I joined as an employee. We’d been using Nasuni for a few years when the vice president in charge of the Customer Success team told me that he needed a professional services engineer in the Midwest. He asked me if I knew anybody who would be interested and I wound up saying, “I’d be interested, actually!”

As for what drew me to Nasuni, I was always impressed by the attention that we received as a customer. Whenever I saw opportunities for how Nasuni could evolve, I would pass on my requests and over time I would see them turn into real products. Nasuni has always really listened to their customers.

Q: Last year you were promoted to Director. How has Nasuni supported your development within the company?

I’ve had opportunities for promotion both in Professional Services and in Product Management. The company has always encouraged and enabled me to learn new things about specific technologies, about different areas of the business, and supported my professional development more broadly.

When I started working for Nick Burling, Senior Vice President of Product, he gave me a chance to go through a really good course for foundational product management skills. I also recently completed a training program for managers, given my recent promotion. I’ve had opportunities to grow in multiple dimensions at Nasuni, for which I’m grateful.

Q: I’m fascinated to know — what motivates a person to stay with one organization for 10 years?

When I was a customer, I was always impressed by the level of support I received from Nasuni. It was unlike anything I’d experienced from any other vendor or software provider. I can confidently say that I’ve seen that continue as an employee. From the support engineers who take the calls all the way up to the executives, everyone goes above and beyond for our customers.

The people and the culture also play a major part in it. There’s a great deal of team spirit. If folks at Nasuni see an opportunity for improvement or something that could be done differently, they are willing to contribute and are given the freedom to do so in meaningful ways.

I also believe in the technology. It’s always had a good foundation and that’s only been enhanced over the years. I think there are still plenty of opportunities for what we have today as well as areas that we can expand into.

Q: Talking about growth, what’s coming up this year in the areas of the product that you look after?

Two products that I’m responsible for will be launching mid-year: NDS and HA/NDU.

NDS was developed in response to two problems we were seeing. Firstly, more and more workloads today require access to the entire data estate at a company — things like global company search, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and compliance. Secondly, there are newer applications, AI being a prime example, that aren’t built to interact with the traditional SMB and NFS storage protocols. NDS will address both of these scenarios. It’s a cloud service that provides fast access to petabytes worth of data, not constrained by a single Edge Appliance. It scales up and down automatically, making it efficient both from a performance and cost perspective. NDS marks a significant change for Nasuni both in architecture and perspective, and I think it’ll have a big impact over the next couple of years.

Our HA/NDU appliance is also due out in the middle of the year. We built it to address a key requirement for customers with workloads that can’t tolerate an outage — even for 15 minutes during an upgrade. NDU stands for ‘non-disruptive upgrade,’ which means that customers will be able to use it to perform an upgrade on a standby virtual machine while the active virtual machine is still working, and then seamlessly redirect users to the now-upgraded VM. And the HA part of the acronym stands for ‘high availability,’ which you get because you have two nodes running simultaneously. If one of them becomes unavailable during an unplanned outage, the other one can pick up and continue to service users.

Q: What do you think the next five years have in store for Nasuni?

I think we have a lot of opportunities to expand into the data management area. We’ve always provided a unified data storage platform with excellent data protection and the ability to propagate data across multiple locations to make sure customers get quick access to the data they need. But with the rise in popularity of AI tools, customers now want to better understand the data they have stored — where it is, what it is, and whether it’s important. There’s an opportunity there to better organize and present the data that we’ve got stored on the platform today.

Q: When you’re not in the office, what do you enjoy doing outside of work?

I have three kids and they keep me busy with their various activities. My oldest son plays hockey, my daughter is a figure skater, and my youngest is just getting started in skating. The hockey comes from my wife’s side of the family as I am not an athlete! I was never interested in sports. My family gets a kick out of the fact that now I spend all my time in ice rinks. They find that quite ironic given how I was growing up.

Would you like to help shape our next chapter? Explore all the recent career opportunities at Nasuni here.