Phil Soran CEO of Compellent | VMworld 2010
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2012-04-29

Dave Vellante interviews Phil Soran allowing Phil to relay his journey in starting the ever expanding Compellent along with what drove him and fellow storage experts, Larry Osmond and John Guider, to do so. Phil will attribute the trifecta's well deserved success  to a "lot of storage DNA" in the trio's professional backgrounds, following an expression of appreciation for Compellent's founding state of Minneapolis calling it "an eco system for storage talent".

Whenever an effective change is made to an existing system, the lacking of its presence  almost always seems obvious in retrospect. It is the fruitful efforts of entrepreneurs such as Phil Soran, Larry Osmond and John Guider that leave us wondering why we went so long without services such as that provided by Compellent. It is those technology services that offer more efficient data storage software which, in the words of Phil, has "twice the functionality", and is "ten times easier to use and more affordable".

The year 2002 brought many changes in our economy and in our mindset. The need arose for more efficient, affordable storage leading the way to a new vision. Phil tells us that following 9/11, a slew of power outages and strange weather in the northeast, as well as the upset with Enron and data retention getting bigger, "world changes influenced them."

He goes on, "a lot of high end functionality was not available to masses of companies. It was too expensive, hard to implement, and in some ways unaffordable."

It was not long before they began meeting in Phil's basement and their project was underway.
The men designed a storage system that immediately drew the right attention and with good reason. They were able to accomplish this by finding that on average 70% of starge was wasted, while 80 or 90% of data was inactive. In regards to this Phil says "you've got to take advantage of those phenomena" ...."I think we did it".