Today we issued a press release recapping the highlights of 2014 including details of our outstanding sales performance and our recently closed round of funding, the release can be viewed here, but I thought I’d use this forum to share a less formal perspective.
I joined Riak in March of 2014 and was incredibly excited by the enormous opportunity we had in the market but I was also faced with many cleanup efforts internally. One of the greatest challenges we faced was rallying the company around the belief that we could still change the entire industry. This belief was tied to the enormous growth happening in the marketplace for distributed systems software that can handle scale, and the incredible devotion that our customers and community have to the Riak brand and Riak.
In 2014 Riak experienced an enormous amount of staff changes resulting in a large amount of anxiety amongst everyone. With a new CEO, CTO, CFO, VP of Product, and VP of Engineering nearly all Riak staff were faced with working at a very different company and handling a degree of uncertainty on multiple fronts. I could not be prouder of how the Riak team has responded to this challenge. In just a little over 9 months we’ve accomplished so much. We’ve rebuilt every team around preparing for massive growth, while reshaping our solutions to take advantage of a more comprehensive enterprise value proposition in 2015. We have accelerated enterprise adoption of our solutions across the board while at the same time growing revenue with our existing customers, in some instances growing revenue from four figures to strong seven figures. Without the support of long-term contributors including Pete Sheldon, Jon Meredith, Justin Pease and Sam Takagi turning this ship around in the pace we have done it would not have been possible.
All of this could not have been achieved without the strong support of the Riak community and Riak customers. In today’s press release The Weather Company, Tapjoy and OpenX all spoke on behalf of Riak and our services. Riak is strong and confident today due to the support of customers like these and the development community who take such a strong interest in the ongoing development of Riak.
At Riak we are focused on establishing product value and trust, while projecting a vision that our customers and community can invest in long term. In 2014 we built a strong foundation for growth in 2015 and beyond. This year one of our core objectives is to be seen by the market place as the leader in unstructured data! With this team and our product vision, I fully believe we can become the #1 NoSQL provider in the space. Thanks for being interested enough in Riak to read this blog, and please do not hesitate to reach out. Best wishes to you all for a prosperous 2015!
Adam Wray
CEO & President
