In October, we packed up our former headquarters on the Seattle waterfront and headed to our new digs at 505 First Avenue South, in the city’s Pioneer Square area.
Big Data is growing and so are we! In the next year or so, we plan to hire an additional 200 employees to our existing 430 in the Seattle office. Our expansion was welcome news to the Seattle area, and we loved having our co-founder Sujal Patel, EMC CEO Joe Tucci and Seattle’s Mayor McGinn host the festivities!
When you make a big move like this, it’s hard not to look back and appreciate how far you’ve come. It’s been quite a ride since our first days in our small offices in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood, next to a KFC (finger lickin’ good!) in January 2001.
At that time, the economy was still reeling from the dot.com bust, and Isilon was one of more than 200 storage start-ups. While this scenario might have given some people reason for concern, our founders, Sujal Patel and Paul Mikesell, stuck to their vision. They understood that despite the uncertainties, there would be a growing market for Isilon’s scale-out NAS system (which, at the time, was still a fairly new technology.) And our history over the past 10 years shows they were right.
In October 2003, we introduced the first generation of Isilon iQ. And in 2004, our first full year selling a product, we earned $1 million in revenue. The next year, Isilon expanded overseas with offices in Japan and Korea. Our customer base continued to grow as we added Kodak, Cedars-Sinai and Pratt & Whitney. We went public in December 2006 and in late 2010, just before our 10th anniversary, we joined the EMC family.
So here we are today, in Seattle’s vibrant Pioneer Square area—and it’s amazing! The neighborhood is extremely cool—with lots of restaurants, cafes, galleries, shops, two state-of-the-art sports stadiums and easy transportation, all within walking distance. Other tech firms are moving into the neighborhood, too and we feel right at home in this growing community of innovative companies.
Our new offices are pretty great, too. We’ve got a three-screen telepresence suite for interacting with other EMC offices virtually via life-sized video projection, along with 15 more meeting rooms than we had in our previous space. Our 2,800 sq. ft. employee café has a massive flat-screen TV and barista service (this is Seattle, after all).
We’re all settled in now and working harder than ever. We look forward to seeing you soon and showing you around!
