I returned from a trip to Sydney, Australia last week and it was great seeing all of our customers there. We held an event for the VFX group and it was well attended and a lot or our customers and friends were there. Laurence Jones put the event together and we got a picture with him and one of the guests in one of our T-shirts. Laurence got a picture of me also. We have a lot of customers in the VFX business niche in Sydney and our business continues to grow in the Australian VFX business, Science, and insurance business as customers in all sectors look for ways to get more value out of their enterprise storage investments.
I also got to see an old customer and friend from Wilmington, Delaware that has moved to Newcastle, Australia. I had not seen Peter since 2003 and it was great catching up again. Peter worked with one of our largest NetApp customers when he was in Wilmington and one of our engineers used to work for him on many of his big network and storage integration projects. The enterprise storage world is a small world but it is a global business for Zerowait.
Laurence also arranged a lunch with the ‘Power players of Sydney VFX” for us and we had a great conversation about storage issues and the similarities between the VFX business and the oil and gas exploration business in the use of storage. Everyone is trying to figure out how to get more value out of their storage expenditures and these are some of the sharpest engineers I know. Every time I go to Sydney I learn something from these folks. And we try to integrate their ideas into our service and hardware offerings.
Based on the suggestions from our customers in Australia our engineering and operations teams are working on upgrading some processes and hardware to help all of our NetApp and SimplStor customers. It was a great trip, and I look forward to going back in a few months.