Phil Soran, President, Dell Compellent with Cali Lewis and John McArthur at Dell Storage Forum 2011
Ed Note: Phil Soran, Co-Founder, CEO and Chairman of Compellent, one of the hottest young companies in the IT industry, sat down with Storage Analyst and Wikibon.com CEO David Vellante on Siliconangle TV at the recent VMworld 2010. They talked about how Compellent’s vision has become a reality. Watch it here.
Interview with Compellent CEO Phil Soran, Live from #theCUBE
David Vellante: Phil you have done an amazing job — starting several companies amazingly in the middle of the country. You don’t think of that as a hotbed of IT but there’s a lot of talent out there, isn’t there?
Phil Soran: I actually think it is a competitive advantage. There’s a big competitive advantage to being in Minneapolis. In the old mainframe days you had IBM and the “BUNCH”. One of the BUNCH was headquartered in Minneapolis. There’s a lot of innovation that happened there. One of the big ones was CDC — Control Data Corp. — that would fund entrepreneurial companies inside the company. I’m not sure the venture community got well established in Minneapolis, but the engineering community sure did. We’ve been able to take advantage of that. The quality of talent we have, they’re more loyal, more affordable. All the engineers we started with we still have at Compellent; they don’t pop around they way they might out here in the Valley. And just the quality they come out with, this enterprise-class architecture is a real differentiator for them.
A lot of the storage [vendors] come out there. All of Seagate’s high-end enterprise drive division, all that’s done out there; the old Veritas operations; CNT, the old Channel Network company; Network Systems. There’s a lot of ecosystem for storage talent.
David Vellante: You know I’m from New England and you remember the days of DEC and Wang and Prime and DG, and then we had some tough times back there. But now entrepreneurs like yourself have put together teams of talent, and they’re really sharp people, they’re loyal, and they’ve created a lot of value for customers, for investors. So maybe take us back to the early days of Compellent. I know Larry Aszmann [Compellent co-founder and CTO] a little bit and have great respect for him and his team. Talk about the vision you guys had when you launched the company, because you’ve really seen it through, and I want the viewers to understand where you came from.
Phil Soran: Three of us founded the company: myself, Larry Aszmann as you mentioned and John Guider who’s our COO and also very visionary in the storage space. if you look at our backgrounds there’s a lot of storage DNA there. I go back to IBM and was a storage specialist there. They’ve founded other companies. They’ve done 11 storage subsystems in their careers, and all of them have been successful. They did the first blade servers back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. So there has just been a lot of innovation coming out of John and Larry’s brains, and here I get to take the ride with them.
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
Dell Storage Forum 2011 | Orlando. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Register For Dell Storage Forum 2011 | Orlando
Please fill out the information below. You will recieve an email with a verification link confirming your registration. Click the link to automatically sign into the site.
You’re almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please click the verification button in the email. Once your email address is verified, you will have full access to all event content for Dell Storage Forum 2011 | Orlando.
I want my badge and interests to be visible to all attendees.
Checking this box will display your presense on the attendees list, view your profile and allow other attendees to contact you via 1-1 chat. Read the Privacy Policy. At any time, you can choose to disable this preference.
Select your Interests!
add
Upload your photo
Uploading..
OR
Connect via Twitter
Connect via Linkedin
EDIT PASSWORD
Share
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
Dell Storage Forum 2011 | Orlando. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Sign in to gain access to Dell Storage Forum 2011 | Orlando
Please sign in with LinkedIn to continue to Dell Storage Forum 2011 | Orlando. Signing in with LinkedIn ensures a professional environment.
Are you sure you want to remove access rights for this user?
Details
Manage Access
email address
Community Invitation
Phil Soran, President, Dell Compellent - Dell Storage Forum 2011 - theCUBE
Phil Soran, President, Dell Compellent with Cali Lewis and John McArthur at Dell Storage Forum 2011
Ed Note: Phil Soran, Co-Founder, CEO and Chairman of Compellent, one of the hottest young companies in the IT industry, sat down with Storage Analyst and Wikibon.com CEO David Vellante on Siliconangle TV at the recent VMworld 2010. They talked about how Compellent’s vision has become a reality. Watch it here.
Interview with Compellent CEO Phil Soran, Live from #theCUBE
David Vellante: Phil you have done an amazing job — starting several companies amazingly in the middle of the country. You don’t think of that as a hotbed of IT but there’s a lot of talent out there, isn’t there?
Phil Soran: I actually think it is a competitive advantage. There’s a big competitive advantage to being in Minneapolis. In the old mainframe days you had IBM and the “BUNCH”. One of the BUNCH was headquartered in Minneapolis. There’s a lot of innovation that happened there. One of the big ones was CDC — Control Data Corp. — that would fund entrepreneurial companies inside the company. I’m not sure the venture community got well established in Minneapolis, but the engineering community sure did. We’ve been able to take advantage of that. The quality of talent we have, they’re more loyal, more affordable. All the engineers we started with we still have at Compellent; they don’t pop around they way they might out here in the Valley. And just the quality they come out with, this enterprise-class architecture is a real differentiator for them.
A lot of the storage [vendors] come out there. All of Seagate’s high-end enterprise drive division, all that’s done out there; the old Veritas operations; CNT, the old Channel Network company; Network Systems. There’s a lot of ecosystem for storage talent.
David Vellante: You know I’m from New England and you remember the days of DEC and Wang and Prime and DG, and then we had some tough times back there. But now entrepreneurs like yourself have put together teams of talent, and they’re really sharp people, they’re loyal, and they’ve created a lot of value for customers, for investors. So maybe take us back to the early days of Compellent. I know Larry Aszmann [Compellent co-founder and CTO] a little bit and have great respect for him and his team. Talk about the vision you guys had when you launched the company, because you’ve really seen it through, and I want the viewers to understand where you came from.
Phil Soran: Three of us founded the company: myself, Larry Aszmann as you mentioned and John Guider who’s our COO and also very visionary in the storage space. if you look at our backgrounds there’s a lot of storage DNA there. I go back to IBM and was a storage specialist there. They’ve founded other companies. They’ve done 11 storage subsystems in their careers, and all of them have been successful. They did the first blade servers back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. So there has just been a lot of innovation coming out of John and Larry’s brains, and here I get to take the ride with them.
