Nasuni wants growth in its cloud file services offering through a much larger enterprise presence. To that end, it has a new chief revenue officer: Pete Agresta, who comes from being VP enterprise sales at Pure Storage.
We’re told that, at Pure, Agresta built an enterprise sales team that more than doubled Pure’s enterprise revenue to more than $1 billion over the course of four years. He will will oversee Nasuni’s worldwide sales organization, strategic alliances and channel programs to expand and scale the company’s global revenue-generating activities.
David Grant, Nasuni’s president, provided a statement about all this: “Nasuni has already achieved phenomenal growth, having surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) during 2022, as enterprises replace legacy, hardware-based file storage and data protection systems with a cloud-native solution. It’s a perfect time to bring on someone like Pete to lead us through our next major financial milestone.”
The company says its $100 million ARR is a major financial milestone. It has increased its ARR by over 140 percent from the start of the COVID pandemic, and its customer retention rates to over 97.5 percent. Nasuni has also recorded a fourth successive year of increasing Net Promoter Scores and increased the number of its employees by over 70 percent without having any employee cutbacks during this time.
Before joining Pure, Agresta was CRO at the cyber security services company LookingGlass Cyber Solutions, and his CV lists senior sales roles at Skyport Systems, Cisco Systems, and AllianceBernstein. However, Nasuni already had a leading sales exec: VP worldwide sales Eric Soffin.
Nasuni told us: “Eric Soffin … has been with the company since the beginning (11 years) and helped grow the company over 10x. Eric is staying with the company, managing a very significant segment of our sales team under Pete.”
The spokesperson said: “We are taking advantage of this momentum and our … product to build a team that can take us to the next major milestone. We all agreed that now was the right time to bring in a revenue leader that would enable us to take a long-term strategic approach to, and accelerate the next phases, of our growth journey.”
“With Pete’s experience at an innovative, disruptive storage company like Pure Storage, combined with his years of experience selling into the enterprise, and his ‘team first’ mentality, Pete is the perfect candidate to help us take Nasuni deeper into the enterprise and continue to build the market-leading cloud services company.”
Agresta provided a statement as well: “Nasuni has an impressive team and a culture of innovation that’s built a disruptive cloud-native file data platform like nothing else on the market, which is proven by their business results.”
Pure Storage has its FlashBlade file and object storage array which provides fast restoring data protection. Delicately not referring directly to this, Agresta said: “I saw firsthand at Pure the need for a new way to approach file data storage and protection, and customers wanted cloud services. The legacy storage players like NetApp and Dell are unable to keep up with market demands. Nasuni has a proven product already being used by the world’s largest enterprises and whose value to the enterprise is crystal clear. I’m excited to join Nasuni and help drive its next phase of growth.”
With Panzura growing fast after its refounding by Jil Stelfox’s team and CTERA developing its technology fast as Hammerspace enters the cloud file services market, the competition in this cloud file services market is intensifying as the suppliers aim to take filer share from the incumbents like NetApp.
