Dear Valued Customers, Partners, Loyal Drobo Fans and Drobots (That’s what we call our team members),
I am excited to share with all of you the progress that Drobo has made over the last year and give you some insight as to what is coming in 2016.
Last year was a transformational year for Drobo. The company was acquired by an investor group that included me and some other members of management as well as financial backers who are longtime Drobo enthusiasts!
Drobo has a rich tradition of technology innovation focused on developing products that are easy to use. However, over the past several years that tradition of innovation has been held back by some operational challenges at the company.
I have spent the last several months traveling the world and meeting our customers, fans, and partners face-to-face to talk about Drobo. It still shocks me to see how emotionally attached everyone is to the Drobo brand and how much they want us to succeed in the marketplace. Only because I am wearing my Drobo t-shirt or baseball hat, people have stopped me in hotels and at airports to talk about their Drobos. When they find out I work for the company, they tell me about the multiple Drobos they own, how much they love using their Drobo, and how Drobo has saved them from failed disk drives. There are so many great stories!
More importantly, I have also heard constructive feedback on how Drobo can do better. I often hear that we need to fix customer support. I take this feedback very seriously. We have already made some changes and I promise that we will be making more improvements in the coming quarters to fix the customer support experience.
Here are some of the highlights from the last several months:
We have distilled our mission down to what we do best, which is to Preserve Simplicity. Technology is complicated, but from our very early days, Drobo was able to design products in a way that kept that complexity in the background so our customers could enjoy using our products. We are focused again on doing more of that!
We have assembled a world class management team by promoting Drobo team members and hiring new executives from leading technology companies.
We have introduced new products including the B810n, an 8-bay state of the art Network Attached Storage device that is the easiest product in that segment to set up and use.
Here are some of the things to look forward to in 2016:
We are currently working on another new product that will be launching very soon and have re-started our product development pipeline.
We are developing a rich set of DroboApps that will dramatically increase the ways you can use your Drobo; as always, the focus will always be simplicity and ease of use.
We are developing a 3rd party app ecosystem that will allow anyone to develop an app for the Drobo. We developed a plan to dramatically enhance the Drobo customer experience, including more changes in our customer support operations.
It’s with great pride that I can say we have made tremendous progress over the last eight months. That said, there is always room for improvement and we will be working hard to make it happen. The team here at Drobo is extremely passionate about our customers and how you use our products.
I look forward to updating everyone on our progress regularly.
Thanks for your support,
Mihir H. Shah
CEO
7 years ago