Reports surfaced earlier today that Dave Wright, CEO and founder of SolidFire had left the company.
Having spoken to Wright, CBR can reveal that the CEO has not quit NetApp but is just taking a vacation with his family.
Wright said: “It isn’t true. I’m still an active employee and just taking a vacation with my family this summer.”
The report had emerged after NetApp’s ex-CTO at SolidFire, Val Bercovici, told The Register that Wright had left in order to spend more time with his family.
Wright said: “NetApp isn’t making any official statements since there isn’t any official change, but yes, I am planning to be back in the fall.”
SolidFire has become an important part of the NetApp since it’s acquisition in in 2016, helping the data management and cloud storage company challenge the market leaders.
According to the 2016 all-flash array market share (Q1), NetApp grew its revenue from Q1 2015 to Q1 2016 by 238.2%, which saw it skyrocket into second place behind EMC.
Under the revamped IDC storage tracker, NetApp came in fourth, although it’s pretty much tied with HPE and IBM with Q4 2016 revenue standing $642m and a market share of 10%.
Read more: Flash wars: EMC, NetApp, HPE, Pure Storage & IBM push to make 2016 the year of all flash
Although it’s still well behind clear market leader Dell Technologies, NetApp has been somewhat of a success story in recent years.
NetApp’s E-Series flash arrays, which focused on speed, all-flash FAS focused on performance inside an ONTAP data management service environment, were sold alongside SolidFire’s offering that was more focused on cloud service providers.
Wright recently took to the SolidFire blog to talk about the one year anniversary of the company’s acquisition by NetApp, writing that “time flies when you’re having fun!”
The SolidFire founder had a look at what would be coming next, writing that: “With much of the hard integration work behind us, the SolidFire team at NetApp is now fully focused on the more important task at hand: delivering the next generation of transformative data management solutions across the entire spectrum of infrastructure consumption.”
