![]() It's not as if the product starts to slow down in any way or the technology starts to become irrelevant once you get past a certain scale. He was determined to find the answer to the question: What causes a company to go from thousands of customers to tens of thousands of customers? “The conclusion we came to, in particular in storage, was first that scaling support tends to be a major bottleneck to growth. As expected in that situation, many of those same companies would be acquired and or became part of acquisition hungry organizations like HP, IBM, Dell, EMC and NetApp.Īfter that, Vasudevan got to work determining how an upstart in the flash space could overcome such an obstacle. Vasudevan’s approach was to conduct a historical analysis on the characteristics of successful storage vendors and quickly recognized that with the exception of a few, when these companies reached 2,000 customers – give or take- their growth really started to stall. Some 50 other start-ups entered the market during those years. Nimble Storage was not alone in this view. ![]() Vasudevan realized the opportunity for a new entrant to build not just a sizable business, but really take on even the likes of EMC and NetApp sized companies. They concluded that it was unlikely that these large companies could realistically re-architect their entire systems. “Yet, when you look at most of the companies in our industry, whether it's NetApp or EMC or Dell or HP, so much of their installed base was on existing hardware and the software architecture had evolved around the disc drives over two decades,” says Vasudevan. The group also believed that Flash was so different from disc drives, that it required rethinking the storage architecture from the ground up. ![]() The founders and I all came to the conclusion that storage was going to go through a mega change over the next 15 years, and one of the big causes of that disruption was going to be Flash,” says Vasudevan. The founding premise was also something that we were aware of at NetApp. We intersected for a while in the late '90s. “I got to know one of the founders of Nimble during my time at NetApp. CEO Suresh Vasudevan joined founder Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari on Nimble's board in 2009 and took on his current leadership role in 2011.
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