SolidFire CEO Dave Wright Wins EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2015 Award

BOULDER, CO--(Marketwired - June 30, 2015) - SolidFire, the leader in all-flash storage systems built for the Next Generation Data Center, today announced that EY named Dave Wright, founder and CEO of SolidFire, the EY Technology Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2015 in the Technology category in the Mountain Desert region. The program recognizes entrepreneurs who demonstrate excellence and extraordinary success in such areas as innovation, financial performance and personal commitment to their businesses and communities. Wright was selected by an independent judging panel made up of previous winners of the award, leading CEOs, private capital investors and other regional business leaders.

As CEO of SolidFire, Wright has become a visionary behind the transformation of IT and the transition to the cloud and the Next Generation Data Center. He has played an integral role in helping organizations evolve their IT infrastructure to realize benefits that were previously not possible. To achieve this, Wright led his team to develop a unique all-flash scale-out storage platform with guaranteed performance -- offering the ability for enterprises and service providers to reliably handle dense, mixed workloads while ensuring that every application gets the performance it needs, no matter what other demands are being made on the storage array.

"Dave Wright is a true visionary. Very early on, he saw that storage was the boat anchor holding organizations back from driving change and generating business value through data center infrastructure," said Harry Weller, a member of SolidFire's board of directors and general partner at NEA, one of the world's largest and most active venture capital firms that first invested in SolidFire in February 2011. "Dave has led SolidFire to be a disruptive force in the storage industry with solutions that truly advance the way businesses benefit from the cloud."

Under Wright's leadership, SolidFire recently reached multiple milestones:

• Closed out 2014 with an average 50 percent increase in sequential quarterly bookings and grew its Enterprise business 570 percent over the previous year.

• More than doubled the number of businesses leveraging service provider infrastructure, with an estimated 58,000 businesses worldwide now Fueled by SolidFire storage infrastructure.

• Received the highest score for overall use case in Gartner's 2015 Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays¹ (3.6 out of 5) and was again recognized as the Leading Visionary in Gartner's 2015 Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays².

• Established regional headquarters in Singapore and furthered its expansion in Asia-Pacific with new offices in Tokyo, Japan and Sydney, Australia.

• Shipped storage systems to more than 20 countries.

• Raised $150 million in total funding, including its October 2014 $82 million Series D funding round.

Now in its 29th year, the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Award program has expanded to recognize business leaders in more than 145 cities in more than 60 countries throughout the world. Regional award winners are eligible for consideration for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year National program. Award winners in several national categories, as well as the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year National Overall Award winner, will be announced at the annual awards gala in Palm Springs, California, on November 14, 2015.

About EY Entrepreneur Of The Year®
EY Entrepreneur Of The Year is the world's most prestigious business award for entrepreneurs. The unique award makes a difference through the way it encourages entrepreneurial activity among those with potential and recognizes the contribution of people who inspire others with their vision, leadership and achievement. As the first and only truly global award of its kind, Entrepreneur Of The Year celebrates those who are building and leading successful, growing and dynamic businesses, recognizing them through regional, national and global awards programs in more than 145 cities in more than 60 countries.

About SolidFire
SolidFire is the market leader in all-flash storage systems built for the next generation data center. Leveraging SolidFire's all-flash architecture, with volume-level Quality of Service (QoS) controls, customers now can guarantee storage performance to thousands of applications within a shared infrastructure. Coupling this functionality with in-line data reduction techniques and system-wide automation results in substantial capital and operating cost savings relative to traditional disk and basic all-flash storage systems.

Learn more: www.solidfire.com | www.twitter.com/solidfire | https://www.linkedin.com/company/solidfire-inc

¹Gartner Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays, Valdis Filks, Joseph Unsworth, Arun Chandrasekaran, 25 June 2015
²Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays, Valdis Filks, Joseph Unsworth, Arun Chandrasekaran, 23 June 2015

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