from Atlas Venture and Madrona Venture Group—the only Series A funding in the Seattle tech scene that year, Patel says. The company followed that up with a $15 million Series B round the next year, led by Sequoia Capital. By that time, Isilon had grown to almost 50 staff.
Isilon started selling its storage products, and pulled in a couple million dollars in revenue in 2003. Those numbers tripled in each of the next two years, with the company raking in about $7 million in 2004, and about $21 million in 2005—primarily through its initial customer base of media companies and websites. At the end of 2006, Isilon went public, raising $108 million in a high-profile IPO that had expectations sky-high.
Too high, as it turned out. In 2007, Isilon came crashing back to earth, with its revenues still growing, but not fast enough to meet its own projections. “Not only did we not meet the expectations of the Street, we didn’t even meet our own internal expectations,” Patel says. As a result, Isilon’s stock price plummeted from the high $20s per share to single digits. Management shuffling ensued, and Patel, who had been chief technology officer, was named CEO in October 2007. (He had previously been CEO during the company’s first three years.)
Isilon also went through an internal investigation of its earnings statements and ended up having to restate its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2006 and first half of 2007. “It was a very traumatic thing for a company to go through,” Patel says. “But we got through that, and as CEO I realized we had a lot of work to do.”
Patel says he faced three key challenges in 2008. First, meeting the demands of big enterprise customers. “A lot of our growth was transitioning very rapidly out of early adopter markets into a more mature market that had more demanding customers and larger enterprise customers that we as a company weren’t ready for,” he says. So the company reinvested in research and development; it now spends $20 million on software R&D every year, and has invested some $120 million over its lifetime. The second challenge was setting a more cost-effective strategy for product distribution. Patel says Isilon was spending too much on sales and marketing. And third, Patel made sweeping changes to the management team, replacing most of the executive staff with more experienced talent (including senior vice president George Bennett, a veteran of NetApp, Isilon’s chief competitor).
So far, the moves seem to be paying off. Last year, Isilon generated $114 million in revenues. And in the second quarter of this year, Isilon’s revenue was up 40 percent over the same period in 2007, while recording lower expenses and a much broader customer base of about 1,000 organizations. “Now what we’re really focused on, as the recession begins to ease, is returning the company to more significant growth, getting ourselves in position where we can continue to capture market share and grow the business,” Patel says.
Isilon is looking to keep pressing its technology advantage in storage against the likes of EMC, NetApp, and HP. “The key for us is growing and getting to critical mass as a much larger company before those guys really get their act together and start to get closer from a product and technology standpoint,” Patel says.
In the end, the thing that struck me most in talking with Patel was just how pervasive Isilon’s products already are. If you’ve watched NBC’s broadcasts of the Olympic Games, that data is stored using Isilon’s software. If you watch a new animated feature film this holiday season, chances are good that the studio behind it used Isilon’s system. The company’s customer list also includes giants like Sony, XM Radio, LexisNexis, Facebook, MySpace, Kodak, and Adobe. And one more intriguing thing: biomedical research organizations, particularly those doing genomic and protein analysis, now account for about 10 percent of Isilon’s revenue, through partnerships with the likes of Merck.
We’ll hear more of the latest details of the company’s financials today. But Isilon looks to be back on its feet and rising again, fast.
