Amp It Up

14Materialize Your Opportunities—the Data Domain Growth Story

Much of our discussion so far has been about execution, especially developing an intense focus on the mission. But that doesn't mean that strategy doesn't play an exceedingly important role. Over the next three chapters, we'll see how strategic transformation played out at Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake.

Strategic Lessons from Data Domain

Our years at Data Domain yielded formative strategic learnings that had a major influence on our subsequent experiences at ServiceNow and Snowflake.

Data Domain was a data storage company founded in 2001 that offered business customers an array that could filter out redundant data segments on the fly. In use cases such as data backup and recovery, it yielded extreme efficiency and speed compared to the tape libraries and automation systems that had previously dominated those markets. For example, a Data Domain array could hold 50 full backups in a storage space that would previously hold only one.

Tape technology went back all the way to the first days of computing. Tape drives were cheap compared to disk drives, and they had the advantage that a tape could be ejected from a drive, shipped offsite for safekeeping, and eventually recalled for recovery purposes. For decades the data security industry was composed of companies that made tapes, drives, loaders, and library storage and offered customers automation, logistics, shipping, and storing of tapes.

Then little Data ...