Getting ready to launch

by Mark Davis, CEO

Posted Tuesday, December 15, 2009 in News          0 comments

Tags: people, startups

In the summer of 2007, I talked Serge Pashenkov and Alex Miroshnichenko into to quitting their paying jobs and joining me the ranks of the unemployed. It was hugely risky, but there were so many opportunities to help companies with better data storage solutions, and frankly the big vendors weren't (and sadly still aren't) doing much in the way of real innovation. The only way to do anything truly exciting in this industry is to start your own company.

By that fall, we knew exactly what problem to solve: making storage work properly in a virtualized environment. We talked to lots of big and small VMware shops, who all said they loved virtualizing, yet hated how storage worked when they did.

Two years of hard work later, we're about to move Virsto Software into a new phase.

We're transitioning from a development-mode company to a going-to-market company. Early in 2010, we'll launch our first product and take our first customers from beta testing to production deployment.

Igniting the rockets

Virsto has an outstanding technical team. These folks are, in fact, rocket scientists. The power of the technology we've built goes far beyond what will be exposed in our first product, but even this first offering has our beta sites excited to jump, with both feet, into the Virsto solution.

Going to market requires more than great engineers. It takes a subtle and rare set of skills to work with customers and partners. So we've recently added a couple key people to the team. In case you didn't already know, Rafael Santini joined us last summer, and has done a fantastic job developing relationships with customers and partners, connecting our technology's value to unmet market needs. In November, Mindy Anderson filled the position I'd previously written about to direct our product roadmap in the direction that will help the most customers.

One of the things I like about Rafael and Mindy is that they know how to thrive in the amorphous ambiance of a startup. Very few people can operate effectively in the lack of certainty inherent in getting a new company airborne.

All of us at Virsto Software look forward to firing the rockets on our first product very soon.