Bob DeSantis, SVP Global Sales & B’ss Devt., Symform

Symform, Inc. is experiencing record growth fueled by users of NAS devices. NAS customers from more than 80 countries now account for 20% of all devices on the Symform Global Storage Network, storing more than 1.1 billion data fragments.

Symform recently announced integrated solutions with Synology and NETGEAR NAS devices, adding to a partnership with QNAP.

 To accelerate its partnership strategy and network growth, Symform has brought on a seasoned executive, Bob DeSantis, as SVP of global sales and business development.

With more than 25 years of technology leadership, DeSantis is the candidate to drive Symform’s sales and partnership initiatives. Prior to Symform, he served as VP of sales at DocuSign, building the sales organization from an early-stage startup to the global brand leader. As the managing director of DocuSign EMEA, he established and built the company’s European presence. He also previously served as the regional VP of sales for Procuri, and held numerous roles at ImageX, the on-demand commercial document solutions division of FedEx Kinko’s.

"Symform has created the most disruptive and innovative cloud storage business model I’ve ever seen," said DeSantis. "Accelerating the Symform Cloud Storage Network will be critical for long-term success, and I’m looking forward to playing a key role in a business that is changing the industry as we know it."

As of Q3 2012, the Symform Cloud Storage Network stored over 5.5 billion data fragments and 150 million files, with users backing up data and contributing local drive space to the network from 156 countries. This represents a growth rate of over 300% in the third quarter compared to the same period last year. In addition to its NAS strategy, the network growth is due to the company’s recently announced ‘Bytes or Bucks’ pricing model, where customers can pay for unlimited cloud backup by contributing local drive space to the crowdsourced network.

NAS users have especially embraced the Bytes model, extending local storage devices to the Symform Cloud for secure online data backup and disaster recovery.

According to Gartner, the worldwide vendor revenue for network-attached storage grew 21.5% to $4.5 billion last year,* and the market is expected to continue growing by 22% through 2016.**

"A NAS device coupled with Symform’s cloud storage offering is an all-in-one solution for data backup," said Denton Meier, founder, partner and CTO at Firefly Technologies. "The NAS gets to serve its purpose for local backup and can be seamlessly integrated with Symform to obtain the power and protection of cloud storage."

Firefly uses QNAP devices for local backup and pays for Symform cloud backup with ‘Bytes’ by contributing unused drive space in its NAS devices.

*Gartner, Inc., Market Share: Network-Attached Storage/Unified Storage, Worldwide, 2011, Pushan Rinnen, March 14, 2012.
**Gartner, Inc., Forecast Analysis: Network-Attached Storage, Worldwide, 2012-2016, Pushan Rinnen, April 9, 2012.