Dear Valued Customers, Partners, Loyal Drobo Fans and Drobots (That’s what we call our team members),
As promised, I am excited to share the progress Drobo has made since the last letter I wrote back in February of 2016. The team at Drobo has been working extremely hard to deliver on the commitments we have made to our customers, partners and ourselves. I am extremely thankful and grateful to our team here at Drobo. The commitment and sacrifice our team has made in improving the quality of our products and experience over the last year has been amazing. I also want to express my gratitude toward our partners (resellers and distributors) who have re-engaged with Drobo and have shown us a tremendous amount of support. And finally, Drobo would not be where we are today without our loyal customers. I continue to be amazed by our talented customers, who I continue to engage with on a regular basis and thank them for their commitment to Drobo.
Company Performance
As the CEO of Drobo, I am very focused on company performance, because ultimately this is the metrics our investors measure us by. In the spirit of transparency, I would like to share some highlights on our financial performance. The first half of the year had its fair share of ups and downs. After a strong Q4 of 2015, we ran into some market headwinds in Q1 of 2016. Our segment of the storage market as a whole, was down about 10% over Q4 of 2015. Fortunately, being the nimble company we are, we took corrective action and had a nice bounce back in Q2 of 2016. In Q2 of 2016, our revenues were up a whopping 107% (that’s more than double from the same quarter in the previous year). We continued our momentum through the end of the year and revenues were up significantly over the prior year.
Commitment to Innovation
As promised, we have continued to innovate and I am proud to say we have introduced several hardware and software products over the last several months. On the hardware side, Drobo launched the B810i, the 5Dt and the 5C. All three products are built with our award-winning BeyondRAID software that preserves simplicity for our customers.
For the creative power users, we created our complete solution, Drobo 5Dt, which includes Thunderbolt 2, a mSATA SSD for a performance boost, and three years of DroboCare. We also introduced the Drobo 5C, the world’s first self-managing USB-C storage solution as a high-performance, affordable option for our customers.
All of this adds up to extending peace of mind for our customers. We also introduced several software apps, including DroboAccess and DroboPix. DroboAccess allows users to access their Drobo NAS remotely via a mobile device or PC. DroboAccess is essentially your own private cloud, where you can securely access, upload and share your data. DroboPix is my personal favorite new app. It allows users to seamlessly upload pictures from their mobile devices onto their Drobo NAS through the specified geolocation and Wi-Fi network.
Ongoing Investments
We have increased our sales and marketing investments in Europe and Asia Pacific to accelerate growth in these international markets and are already seeing tremendous progress. Australia and New Zealand are up 10x and China is up 3x over the prior year! Europe was a focus area for the Q4 and was up 300% Q-o-Q. We continue to believe that North America is a strong market for us and are looking to make additional sales investments in 2017.
Customer Experience
We have continued to make enhancements on our customer experience, especially when it comes to support. I am proud to say, based on recent surveys and calls I have personally made to our users we are exceeding the expectations of our customers. This will continue to be a focus area for us in 2017. We are striving to be the storage company that delights and WOWs our loyal fans.
I will be sending out random surprises to our customers this year, so watch out for some cool gifts! Follow me on the Twitter handle @DroboCEO for the announcements.
Although we have had terrific momentum in our progress to date, there is still work to do. We have listened to our fans and we will be introducing new hardware and software products with the requested updates and features. I can assure you the team at Drobo is working hard to innovate, serve our customers, and change the way the world uses data storage.
Until the next update….Mihir…..Out!
Thanks for your support,
Mihir H. Shah
CEO
Drobo 5N w/ 12TB
Twitter: @DroboCEO
Facebook: Mihir H. Shah
6 years ago