The Interview
Deal Maker of the Year Awards 2012
Suresh
Suresh joined Nimble Storage as CEO in 2011, and has served as a member of its board of directors since 2009. Most recently, Suresh was CEO of Omneon (acquired by Harmonic), and previously served as a member of the executive team at NetApp, overseeing all product operations. During a decade-long career at NetApp, Suresh led the company’s product strategy and product development and was a key architect of the steady expansion of NetApp’s product portfolio into new markets. Before joining NetApp, Suresh worked at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Chicago as a senior engagement manager. Suresh holds an M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Calcutta, India and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani, India.
Q
Can you give an overview of Nimble Storage and its organisational
structure?
We are a privately held, VC-backed firm. We have a very flat organizational structure, enabling us to foster a highly consultative environment that results in new ideas from across the company. An emphasis on corporate culture pervades the organization. With five core values defining our culture – teamwork, initiative, accountability, innovation and integrity – we have fostered in our team an appreciation for risk-taking that leads to positive change.
Q
What are the main areas of Nimble Storage’s expertise?
The founders of Nimble Storage played key early roles at storage leaders NetApp and Data Domain. Our R&D and engineering teams collectively have many decades of experience in building innovative storage architectures. At Nimble’s founding, we pledged that we would design a new storage architecture from the ground up, and we accomplished that. By doing so, we succeeded in surpassing conventional storage architectures that can no longer deliver the affordable performance, capacity and data protection that customers are demanding.
32
www.finance-monthly.com Q
Vasudevan CEO of Nimble Storage
Nimble Storage recently raised $40.7M. Can you discuss the funding?
Our mezzanine round of funding came about as a result of high investor confidence and the opportunity to continue to rapidly expand to capitalize on massive new market opportunities. Our original investors – Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital – have stayed with us through four funding rounds, and Lightspeed Venture Partners and Golden Gate Venture Partners joined them along the way. These A-list investors acknowledge us for our differentiation, significant market traction, and major market opportunities.
Q
What is the focus and strategy for the funding?
The focus is to reinvest in all areas of our operations to propel growth, and to further fund opportunities for the innovation that is the reason for our success. We also continue to reinvest heavily in market development and sales, pinpointing the geographic and industry-specific market segments that are ripe for growth. Our accelerated growth across all segments reflects our “win rate,” which is over 65% of the sales opportunities we pursue, even against the major storage incumbents.
Q
Were there any challenges that needed to be overcome?
The overwhelming challenge for Nimble is to rise above the noise of a crowded marketplace. Storage is a significant growth opportunity in the information technology sector, and that fact has spurred the creation of many new storage start-ups, new storage architectures, and competing claims. We rise above the noise by focusing on the fundamentals that are important to each customer, but more importantly by demonstrating differentiated solutions and ultimate value – whether measured by total cost of operations (TCO) or return on investment (ROI), or other metrics that may vary by customer.
Recruiting and scaling our organization are also major challenges, given our commitment to sustaining a high level of growth that will allow us to serve new markets. That’s a challenge we are meeting, in part through heavy reinvestment in all areas of our operations.
Q
2011 saw global economic turmoil; do you think this has impacted on your
2012/2013 strategy?
The economic turmoil of the last few years has made companies much more aware that their IT spending would have to deliver a high return on investment. That made companies more sensitive to finding alternatives to conventional storage solutions. Data storage is fundamental to an organization’s operations and growth, and therefore is less prone to economic swings. Together, these facts favor Nimble. Even during the downturn, we continued to see very strong quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year growth.
Q
Can you discuss Nimble's patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout
architecture?
CASL is Nimble’s key to delivering high performance and capacity savings to customers. It offers integrated data protection that helps customers maximize uptime. CASL has been shown to deliver 2-5 times the amount of usable capacity per dollar and 4-5 times the performance per dollar of competing storage systems; it enables instant backup and restore operations; and it allows users to scale either the performance or the capacity of their system individually, or to scale both in lockstep. CASL allows organizations to reduce their capital expenditures for storage and backup by at least 60 percent.
Q
Is there anything else you would like to mention?
One factor setting Nimble ahead of all other storage system vendors is what we call Proactive Wellness. Literally, 95% of our customers are connected to our data center, in which we can collect “heartbeats” of their storage every five minutes. That allows us to perform real-time analysis of their environment and create support orders proactively to alert customers of any impending issues.
Contact: Website:
www.nimblestorage.com
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