Last week I was reviewing our performance over the last two decades with the government folks who came to our office to discuss our winning the Delaware Small Business Exporter of the Year Award. During the discussions we touched on the number of NetApp legacy equipment service contracts we have and the growth of our SimplStor product line over the last few years.
When we started providing customers in the USA with NetApp support contracts a lot of folks said that the business could not be very big. After a couple of years we had over a hundred support contracts and the business was thriving in the USA and Canada. Within a couple of years of opening our European office the business had doubled. And since we opened up in Australia in 2011 our global support business has almost doubled again. Based on a very strong first quarter it looks like we may exceed our average growth in this sector of our business over the rest of the year.
SimplStor, our Archive solution with Enterprise support that we first released a few years ago, is also seeing strong growth and we are finding that the market for SimplStor is as strong overseas as it is in the USA. What is great about the SimplStor growth is the strong response from our NetApp Legacy support customers. This is because they know that we give them outstanding service and support and they trust us to deliver the same quality with our own products.
Zerowait has built lasting relationships with our customers by always putting their needs first, and because we follow through and deliver on our promises our customers continue to recommend us to their peers. As more folks learn about the outstanding service and support we provide them the wheel turns and more folks learn about Zerowait, and some of them need SimplStor and then that wheel also begins to turn.
There is a lot going on around here lately, that is certain.