The San Jose, Calif.-based company now employs about 100 people. It retained about 40 of the 100 employees in Quantum's NAS division -- basically, it was the core engineering team, Kelly says. Snap also brought in around 30 employees from Broadband Storage, and the remainder came from Maxtor. "The good news about what happened is that we were able to hand-pick folks we wanted," Kelly says.
Snap's management team includes Vic Jipson, VP of engineering, who was previously general manager of Maxtor's desktop drive group and IBM Corp.'s (NYSE: IBM) optical subsystems drive business. Also from Maxtor, Kelly brought over Jillian Mansolf, VP of sales and channel marketing, and Randy Gast, VP of operations. Snap CTO Greg Bolstad and Pollard, who is VP of marketing and business development, join the company by way of Broadband Storage.
The company flies under the radar of the two giants in the NAS space -- Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP) and EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) -- which sell higher-scale and more expensive NAS systems.
However, Snap is going to stare down a huge and formidable foe in Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), which sells its Windows Server Appliance Kit (SAK) NAS software to Dell, IBM, and others. But Kelly doesn't rule out using Microsoft's SAK in future versions of Snap products. "There's a set of customers that don't want to use Microsoft, and there's a set of customers who use only Microsoft," he says. "Right now, we're focused on Linux and BSD [Berkeley Software Distribution, a Unix variant that forms the basis of SnapOS], and we're doing extremely well with that... but 24 months from now, we may have to look at offering a new product."
Is there an IPO in Snap's future? Not anytime soon, says Kelly. "I just want to make sure we build a long-sustaining company." That said, 10 years from now, he says, "I think I'll be talking to you as the Goliath in the industry."
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