by Scott Horst, Executive Director of Marketing, Dell Storage — October 07, 2010
7 years for me at Compellent today. Time to sit back for 2 minutes and reflect, as 2 minutes is all I can spare as I try to help drive hyper-growth before I hyper-ventilate. The one thing that strikes me the most is for as much as things have changed, so little has really changed. Clichéd yes, but full of truth. And that is the best thing about working here. As much as we have grown revenue, enabled the channel, scaled the product, solved customer problems, added staff, become a campus, and been recognized as a breakthrough business on so many fronts – we have also kept intact the things that really matter, and the things that really impact a company’s ascent and maturation over time. We have kept intact the culture and our belief in “positive aggressive”, the focus on execution and just getting things done, the autonomy that comes with our work and the chance to just figure things out as you go, the ability to make progress again and again regardless of the nonstop pace or the ever-shifting obstacles, and most importantly, we have kept intact the people that make things go.
| Compellent has always been a “fluid” place to work with both constant change and challenges, but it has also been a rock for 7 years as more and more people have joined to challenge the status quo and change the world of data storage. Just over 7 years ago I sat in a room with our 3 founders and heard the Compellent story for the very first time, and 7 years later the story is better (I may have even played a small part in shaping that story once and a while), but it is still the same at its core. The story of Compellent, Fluid Data and problems we solve is told over and over to customers and partners, but the real story is how great companies are built from within, not without, and how everyone here has invested so much of themselves to make this thing go and keep going, and going. There are some around here who joke that storage never sleeps, and neither have I since I started working here, but I wouldn’t have the story told or unfold any other way. |
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Cover of the program guide for the launch
of Compellent in 2004 |