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by Phil Soran, Chairman, President & CEO — July 30, 2008 |
Six years ago, Larry Aszmann, John Guider and I launched Compellent to bring our vision of the next-generation of enterprise storage to the market. Today, we’re
announcing and celebrating another milestone in our business—we’ve signed our 1,000th customer,
IMG, the global sports, entertainment and media company.
We’re incredibly proud that IMG is the newest customer to join our growing global community. IMG will steer its
worldwide virtual data center based on Compellent, Microsoft and VMware from its London site. Like IMG, other customers throughout the world have recently turned to us instead of larger competitors, including
BLGG,
Van Ameyde Group and
Zeeman textielSupers in The Netherlands; and
Calyon,
Harsch GmbH, and
IAV GmbH in Germany.
In the U.S.,
General Information Services and the
Orlando Magic are using Compellent virtualized storage as the foundation for their mission-critical applications. For example, GIS, our SAN supports the tools that generate background checks and reports for clients like the U.S. Postal Service and McDonald’s. The Orlando Magic will be making a run for the NBA championship in a new all-digital arena, with information stored on the SAN.
A vital part of our community is our employees. Reaching 1,000 customers just four years after we shipped our first product has been possible because our entire organization is executing and firing on all cylinders. Larry, John and I extend our thanks to our team members for their dedication and commitment to excellence—the company’s success is due to their positively aggressive approach to delivering the world’s most powerful, easy to use SAN.
The loyalty demonstrated by our customer base and channel partners is something that we continually strive to keep. In 2004, I remember helping to deliver a Storage Center SAN to what would become our first customer,
The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business. Today the OSU business school continues to increase SAN capacity to keep up with data growth that’s doubling every two years, and plans to add a host of new, innovative projects to its data center including server virtualization and thin replication. Fisher’s Compellent experience exemplifies our founding goal to design a scalable and modular SAN that allows organizations to build upon their existing investments both affordably and painlessly.
From the start, our end-users have trusted our channel partners as their storage technology advisors. We thank all of our partners for their support, commitment to customer service and expertise. Today our 100% channel network includes partners in 32 countries on five continents and the numbers are growing. Our partners tell us they are enjoying excellent margins, repeat revenue opportunities and the best field support in pre- and post-sale opportunities in their business. Some partners, like the Davenport Group, Winslow Technologies, Convergent and Clear North, have standardized their SAN offerings on Compellent, and have been part of the Compellent community since day one.
Together with our community, we look forward to working to surpass our next big milestones—whether it’s our 2,000th or 20,000th customer.