Wow, what a year!

by Mark Davis, CEO

Posted Tuesday, March 01, 2011 in Categories, News          1 comment

Tags: customers, startups, Virsto One

Just over twelve months ago, Virsto Software released our first product to the world.

February 2010 was the culmination of several years of work to develop this product, yet it also was the commencement of addressing some key challenges in the virtual and cloud computing market. We’re confident it will lead to even more years of success and further evolution.

The impact of Virsto and our technology reaches beyond simply helping companies consolidate their storage and save a few bucks here and there. It is instead a truly essential shift in how companies virtualize their data centers and consume storage.

We are at the confluence of several fundamental trends, including widespread data center virtualization and the growing adoption of cloud computing. For cloud computing to realize its full potential, it is necessary to virtualize the server and the storage elements. Virsto is playing a huge role in making proper storage virtualization a reality and helping the cloud live up to that vision. Already we have customers that are delivering cloud services enabled by the Virsto platform.

Over the span of the past year, we have hit quite a few important milestones:

• Signed 20 customer deals worldwide.
• Helped these customers achieve efficiencies, performance, and improved operations in ways they previously thought impossible.
• Saved our customers $10 for every dollar invested in Virsto software.
• Achieved 100% quarter over quarter sales growth every quarter since launch.
• Accelerated customer adoption by signing cloud service provider and enterprise customers.
• Delivered four production-grade product releases and added dozens of features based on our customers’ input.
• Expanded our partnership and product integration, moving beyond our Microsoft BizSpark One partnership to also become a Microsoft Virtualization partner, a Microsoft System Center Alliance partner and a Citrix Ready Partner. We’ve also built relationships with other virtualization, storage, server, and cloud vendors, as well as a number of channel partners we’ll be announcing soon.

We are grateful to our excellent customers like Millard Lumber, SSI, West Gastroenterology Medical Group (West GI) and Sienna who recognized the value that Virsto One could deliver. West GI, for example, had been experiencing server consolidation challenges. When Femi Adegoke, IT director of West GI, came across Virsto, he realized his company had been spending far too much on storage. Since Femi began working with Virsto, he has reduced his storage capacity requirements by 75%. With Virsto, he will be able to get more useful capacity and a 3x improvement in performance from his existing hardware.

Beyond Buggy Whips

I have talked to hundreds of virtualization users. In every single conversation, they invariably mention the new problems that virtualization creates for storage administrators and IT teams.

Despite the cries for help, there still hasn’t been much fundamental innovation taking place. It is mostly a case of treating the symptoms rather than the illness itself. The core requirements of virtualization—the workflow, the way the virtual workload interacts with the storage system, etc.—are still incredibly suboptimal. We’re using buggy whips to try to make our automobiles run faster.

The world of virtualization is still growing at breakneck speed, and we run across people every single day who need help figuring out how to make the virtual environment work and deliver the benefits they need—flexibility, agility in their infrastructure regardless of size, cloud support—and storage systems today are holding people back.

That’s why Virsto is proud to put something into the market that’s ready and is ideally suited to address those fundamental issues in an innovative yet real way.

What’s Upcoming?

We’re proud of what’s been achieved since Serge, Alex and I started in Serge’s garage and my dining room, brainstorming a project worthy of many years’ hard work. But there is so much more to come! In the next year, here are a few things you can expect from Virsto:

• Evolution of the use cases for Virsto: We have already experienced traction among hosting companies and enterprises. We haven’t talked about it much publicly, but there are also customers employing Virsto software in a virtual desktop environment. You’ll be hearing more about Virsto in VDI very soon.
• Emergence of new platforms: People tend to think of Virsto as a Microsoft Hyper-V company. But you want to know a secret? Our software ran on another platform in our lab before we ever made it run on Hyper-V. Still does. In fact, it runs on a couple other hypervisors in our lab right now. You’ll see us deliver our solution on at least one other virtualization platform this year. Just as we always promised.
• Expansion of our partnership program: We’ve been quietly investing in relationships with a number of strategic and channel partners. You’ll hear a lot more about these in 2011.

People are yearning for a whole new approach, a different way of thinking about what storage means in a virtual world. That’s why we’re here. We’re proud of the problems we’ve solved so far and are eager to tackle others that are still out there. Buckle up for another exciting year.

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