This marks a first for my blog: a guest post. Patrick and I were talking about the momentum that SolidFire seems to have from a hiring perspective, and when I told him he should write a blog post about it…he did! We’ve been discussing a bunch of other cool topics, hopefully more of them make it over here! Thanks Patrick!
Predictions earlier this year proclaimed 2015 would be a transformative year for the storage industry. A tipping point, even.
Projecting those trends was kind of a no-brainer. Years of innovation have created undeniable momentum for dynamic new options to both consume and deliver storage — such as all-flash platforms, converged infrastructures, and even software-only options for commodity SSD hardware. These new models are radically reducing costs, greatly simplifying cloud deployments, and helping companies bring new services to market faster than ever.
Yet with all this excitement, few foresaw another measure of disruption in the industry: a growing brain drain among legacy storage providers, with their experts bolting for new opportunities at innovators like SolidFire.
Case in point. At SolidFire, we welcomed renowned IT industry influencer Amy Lewis to our team from Cisco late last year, one of our more than 150 new hires throughout 2014. She was among the first of what has turned 2015 into an all-star year for us. Since then, among others, we have also introduced virtualization and cloud infrastructure development guru Andy Banta (formerly of VMware), Gabriel Chapman, a prime mover in the storage industry (coming to SolidFire from Cisco), and esteemed IT architect Midori Oge (joining us from NTT).
We’re not alone in attracting notable talent to jump ship. The innovators are running the storage asylum nowadays, with Pure Storage also recently announcing new hires coming from the legacy world. In fact, a recent Speaking in Tech podcast suggested keeping a scorecard to see who gets more talent from the legacy companies: SolidFire or Pure.
May the best innovator win. I think the odds are on SolidFire.
