The man who found Atlantis: 14PB of storage, flashy models and Moore's Law

Tell us, what makes your techies better than the rest?

WTH: How did you pick all the right people to support the comprehensive product you now have?

CT: We have a lot of employees that come from all-flash start-ups that weren’t going anywhere. Then we recruited many skilled employees from traditional storage companies that were bored and were looking for a challenge. We have an engineering team that is composed of some of the smartest guys in storage, with an average of 14 years of experience. At least a third of our employees are in engineering.

WTH: Compared to companies like PernixData or Infinio, that for now focus purely focus on acceleration, you guys have an enormous set of features. What competitors do you have? The only one I can think of is Maxta.

CT: Yes. Well, Maxta I do not as of yet consider to be a competitor because they are so early, but in terms of features there are similarities. Technologically speaking this is a competitor, but we are not competing with them yet in terms of customers.

WTH: I already asked Bernard (Harduindeguy) about his thoughts on the Atlantis culture. What typifies an Atlantis employee?

CT: This is my third company and along the way you learn from your mistakes. I want Atlantis to be one of the places people will always remember as one of the highlights of their careers. Rather then them thinking about the amounts of money they made, rather I would be proud if Atlantis brought them a great sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

We really started to focus on a culture that is very much can-do and pragmatic. We look for people that can keep their egos at the door and rally be effective in a team. Second thing is finding people that are really good at solving problems in a collaborative manner.

The third challenge we had is that this is a fast-forward company. We have been doubling the company in terms of revenue and customers over the last 4 years.

Especially in Europe pace is fast, our revenue is more than 50 per cent from there. Europe is actually ahead of the US in terms of the technology adaption. If you take a country like Holland for example, they were doing desktop virtualisation 5 or 6 years before anyone else.

So we need people who have an appreciation for how to work in a fast-forward environment and how to be able to look out 6 months ahead. Unless you are thinking 6-12 months, you’re not going to be able to execute ahead of time.

To keep up the success we look for passionate people that can articulate the vision, take the technology and map it to the challenges a customers have.

WTH: Thanks for sharing your story, Chetan. ®