I am writing this on my plane trip back from Minneapolis, having attended the very first Nimble user group. I had a blast!!
We held the user group in a private hall at Chino Latino – it was a bit loud at times but the ambiance was great, and the roast pig was outstanding! What was unbeatable was the energy and support of the people in the room. It was thrilling to see how quickly we had amassed a large set of customers who were so delighted with their Nimble experience that they wanted to launch and actively participate in a local users group.
Two customers presented their perspective regarding their experience with Nimble. They described their challenges, their decision making process in selecting a storage vendor, and their experience since picking us. The previous solution in one case could not keep up with the growing performance needs of the customer, as their environment grew – at least not within their budget constraints. The second customer’s old solution had been simply unable to complete backups within the backup windows. Both presentations highlighted Nimble’s ability to deliver significantly better performance at a lower cost, to substantially improve data protection using our snapshots and replication, and to simplify operations. Incidentally, both customers also commented on their use of our cloning capability – to verify their SQL backups in one instance and to seed their test and development environment from a replica in another instance. There was a lot of active discussion and we took away many suggestions that resulted from those discussions.
We presented a brief overview of the product roadmap for the year, which was received very well. Rod Bagg, our head of support, and the force behind our remote support automation gave an overview of our support automation to date – one of our major strengths. He also talked about a major initiative that we are already piloting, to take an even bigger step forward in our support services automation.
The meeting lasted until 11:00 at night, as people participated with unflagging enthusiasm in active discussions throughout the evening.
Thanks to Steve Lytle and Eric Wicklund, our local sales team, for taking the initiative to launch our very first users group. Many of the people in that room have been helpful in being reference customers on numerous occasions and even referred their peers in other companies to us – thank you!
Happy customers are our best advocates, and we plan to roll out Nimble user groups nationwide. Stay tuned!
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