NetApp_BlackLine_ONLINE

If we hadn't made the move to colocation, our business would have been at serious risk. Our existing customers, we would have had to constrain them. It would have been catastrophic. [NetApp] [In 2005, Blackline developed the first software of its kind] [a product that automated every company's most daunting task: the financial close] [Darren Gasser, Director of Engineering, BlackLine] All companies across the board absolutely have to do this business process. So doing it quickly, doing it accurately is something they're desperate for. [Alain Avakian, Chief Technology Officer, BlackLine] We take all those manually intensive spreadsheet activities and provide a clear, easy to implement, very visible application. We've been growing fifty percent year over year for the last seven years. catering to Fortune 50 to Fortune 1000 plus companies around the world like Verizon. [Customers started asking for more hosted services,] [but BlackLine's infrastructure was at critical mass.] Managed hosted started running into cost and scalability issues. Our customers have very strict expectations from us in terms of control of their data. They can't accept anything that puts their financials at risk. [Jeff Nord, Vice President of Service Delivery, Cloud Data Center Division, Verizon] Most people know Verizon as the wireless company, but we're one of the largest Cloud providers in the world. We've learned that you can outsource almost everything except for control of your data. We wanted the flexibility of a Cloud environment but we needed to meet the strict compliance and security standards our customers demand of us. We decided to go with colocation and build our own private Cloud. NetApp and Verizon have spent years developing multiple services together to be able to offer this type of flexibility into the marketplace. Blackline came to us and after reviewing their requirements, a hybrid solution involving colocation and a virtualized disaster recovery service built on top of NetApp architecture was the perfect fit to their needs. NetApp really stood apart. They took the time to understand our business, our growth rate, our security needs. It was almost an extension of our engineering team in the way they collaborated with our engineers in designing the perfect storage infrastructure. We immediately reduced our hosting costs. It bent the cost curve downward significantly. And our engineers just love it. They have complete control over things on a minute by minute basis. Most CIOs are looking at seventy percent of their budget are actually just in maintenance of their existing infrastructure. So being able to come to a company like Verizon allows our customers to get back to concentrating on what they should be concentrating on which is their business. Having infrastructure out of the way is one of my goals as a CTO. Being in a colocation and virtual disaster recovery site where I have the infrastructure I need to support our growth, that's a dream come true.