SolidFire has announced EY named Dave Wright, founder and CEO of SolidFire, a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2015 Award in the Mountain Desert region. The program recognizes entrepreneurs who demonstrate excellence and extraordinary success in such areas as innovation, financial performance and personal commitment to their businesses and communities. Award winners will be announced at a special event on June 25, 2015, at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Wright has become a visionary behind the transformation of IT and the transition to the cloud and the Next Generation Data Center. In today's fast-paced environment, IT infrastructures are struggling to keep pace with organizations' needs for scalability, performance, efficiency, availability and automation, while being able to support thousands of applications. As CEO of SolidFire, Wright has played an integral role in helping organizations evolve their IT infrastructure to meet these needs and realize benefits that were previously not possible.

To achieve this, Wright led his team to develop a unique all-flash scale-out storage platform with guaranteed performance that enables organizations to capitalize on newfound agility and simplicity. SolidFire is the only company that offers innovative solutions for four major storage consumption models with its single platform: As a Service, Converged Infrastructure, SF Series Appliance and Element X, a software-only option leveraging SolidFire's Element OS software on industry-standard hardware. As a result of Wright's vision, organizations can accelerate their businesses by guaranteeing performance to each and every workload, and achieve scalability and automation to respond to business demands faster than ever.

"This honor is a reflection of the innovative spirit and passion SolidFire's people, our customers and our partners have for transforming the data center to achieve things that have never been possible before," said Dave Wright, founder and CEO of SolidFire. "SolidFire is successfully enabling customers' transition from an environment that supports a few dozen applications to a Next Generation Data Center that supports thousands. I share this nomination with every SolidFire employee, our customers and our partners, as our success wouldn't be possible without them."

Under Wright's leadership, SolidFire recently reached multiple milestones:

  • Closed out 2014 with an average 50% increase in sequential quarterly bookings and grew its Enterprise business 570% over the previous year.
  • More than doubled the number of businesses leveraging service provider infrastructure, with an estimated 58,000 businesses worldwide now Fueled by SolidFire storage infrastructure.
  • Received the highest product score for overall use case in Gartner's 2014 Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays¹ (3.43 out of 5) and was recognized as a Visionary in Gartner's 2014 Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays².
  • Established regional headquarters in Singapore and furthered its expansion in Asia-Pacific with new offices in Tokyo, Japan and Sydney, Australia.
  • Shipped storage systems to more than 20 countries.
  • Raised $150 million in total funding, including its October 2014 $82 million Series D funding round.

Now in its 29th year, the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Award program has expanded to recognize business leaders in more than 145 cities in more than 60 countries throughout the world. Regional award winners are eligible for consideration for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year National program. Award winners in several national categories, as well as the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year National Overall Award winner, will be announced at the annual awards gala in Palm Springs, California, on November 14, 2015.