Prior to starting Daruma, I led Strategy and Product at Stratus Technologies. I learned more professionally in my time at Stratus than any other position I held. I am also happy to say that I was part of Stratus being sold to SGH and I feel that had a lot to do with the effort of Stratus going through a fairly major transformation.
First the background. Stratus was an old technology company that specialized in building some of the world's most reliable computers. It's easy to say that much of the world has some contact with a Stratus computer on a daily basis.
When I joined Stratus they were once again trying to update their technology into a new computing form factor. They had done an acquisition but it was not going well. After toiling away at fault tolerant cloud for a couple years, there were some promising moments but the technology and market was just not there.
So, we needed to do a massive pivot. At that point we did something a lot of tech firms find scary which was we narrowed our focus vs. tried to broaden it. We did a data science project with Espalier.ai to better understand where our value proposition was strongest and we got very smart on those micro verticals. We also listened very intently to our partners who served those markets and it turns out they had some needs we did not expect.
At first, we just listened and repositioned our existing lines to see if it would in fact have an impact and it did within about a year. We saw our revenue mix change and our pipeline grew. At that point we really began to invest in innovation and our go to market. This was especially true when we saw the hype grow around edge computing. We started to refine our value proposition and began to tailor our offerings more specifically towards this subset of our base.
It took a while since we did not have a lot to invest and always had to balance this new Edge venture against a legacy data center business. But, our top line revenue reversed it’s course from declines to increasing. Our margins were able to maintain the high level they had for the previous 10 years. Additionally, we gained thought leadership share and our new tech won some awards. This lead to further investment from our ownership and we went even deeper into data and analytics to specifically target, market and sell to end customers we could not have accessed before.
This effort led to Stratus being sold to SGH in 2022 to help them bolster their existing cloud and data center business and extend into the edge.
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