Over the past year SolidFire has been putting the pieces in place to build not only the next great storage company, but the first storage company focused on performance storage for large-scale cloud infrastructure. Our rallying point to achieve this objective is a laser focus on helping our customers 'Advance the way the world uses the cloud.' To have any chance at making this vision a reality requires us to lay down the groundwork today.

Looking back years from now, the foundational underpinnings of our success will not be limited to one part of the organization. They are company-wide, spanning engineering, operations, marketing, alliances, sales, finance and human resources. Across each of these teams we have made some significant moves in the past year to prepare for what lies ahead.

Before we charge ahead into 2013 I would like to take the opportunity to reflect on 2012 and some of the company and industry milestones that have put us in the position we are today.

• Starting off the year, Amazon launched the all-SSD DynamoDB service
• We ramped our initial integration with OpenStack
• EMC aggressively bought into the scale-out all-flash array market
• We added critical engineering talent with expertise in complex distributed systems
• SolidFire was named a Red Herring Top 100 North America Tech Startup
• We expanded our storage platform with a higher density node
• Amazon validated our QoS vision with Provisioned IOPS launch
• A legacy storage vendor demonstrated the challenges of putting SSDs behind a controller designed for HDDs
• SolidFire aligned with the key cloud building blocks used by our customers
• With the birth of Cinder, block storage receives the attention it deserves in OpenStack
• After an extremely successful early access program we announced full GA...with a strong stable of early customers
• We Set the Record Straight on Software Defined Storage
• Then we got recognized as a Colorado Company to Watch
• Finally, we closed the year with some major additions to our executive team

2012 has been an incredible year for SolidFire. Reading through this list makes me tremendously proud of what our team has accomplished over the last 12 months. No question we still have a lot of work to do, but I could not be more excited about the team we have assembled, the product and culture we have built, and the opportunity in front of us as we move into 2013.

Happy holidays and we look forward to connecting again in the New Year.

-Dave Wright, Founder & CEO