A year has gone by already and guess what—we’ve grown yet again!
We’ve had the best four quarters of our corporate life and finished off the 2015 calendar year surpassing even our amazing 2014 high water mark. It was fast-paced, exciting, challenging, and full of achievements we all take great pride in.
Let’s recap…
By now, you’ve all seen our new logo that freshens our corporate look. The feedback from our clients and peers in the industry since its debut has been overwhelmingly positive. The Sales Team is capitalizing on the activity by bringing in a record number of new customers all over the globe.
The FreeNAS project is stronger than ever. It’s well received by the community and continues to be one of our most powerful open source contributions. The FreeNAS website attracts hundreds of thousands of unique visits a month, and we surpassed 8 million downloads this past year! FreeNAS is entrenched among DIY SOHO and SMB customers, while TrueNAS has continued to make substantial inroads into the enterprise data center. TrueNAS has received industry recognition as a 1st tier competitor to NetApp, EMC, Dell, and smaller players like Nimble and Tintri at a fraction of the investment, continuing to prove that it’s the best value in storage.
Our Production, Shipping, and Logistics teams are producing a significant number of storage and server products daily, all with the ultra high quality that our customers have come to expect when they purchase a product from iXsystems. Of course, we’re never satisfied with the status quo, so we continue to make investments in systems and processes that improve our commitment to excellence in quality.
Our most important goal for the upcoming year will be the release of the next evolution of FreeNAS. This will be a game-changer for iX™, the open source community, and the storage industry as a whole. It’s generating lots of excitement from the community and the modernized webUI will translate into more sales of our FreeNAS and TrueNAS systems.
As iX™ continues to grow, we estimate we will run out of space in our new facility by the middle of 2016. We are already in talks to open a new building suite. We expect to face several challenges this year, but we will continue to focus on prudent spending and our core product lines.
We will also continue to invest in our most important resource: our employees. This past year, we implemented better services and benefits for employees while keeping health care costs in place, and expanded dental and life insurances.
From our start as a self-funded startup to our evolution into an enterprise that stands toe to toe with the biggest names, I am humbled by the immense changes that have taken place over the past year.
I feel confident we will surpass our goals in new customer acquisition, revenue, and company growth again in 2016. Even though we are growing tremendously, we have never lost sight of the values that brought us here. Thank you, from the depths of my heart, for believing in and working with us throughout all these years.
Here’s to 2016!
Mike Lauth
iXsystems CEO
Michael brings a wealth of experience in sales and management to the iX™ team. Formerly the Vice President of Sales at BSDi, Michael was responsible for sales operations worldwide. In his role as CEO, Michael provides a strong vision for the company’s future. Michael studied Economics at UC Berkeley.
