As many of you that are users know from personal experience, Nexenta has been conducting a customer and user survey over the last several weeks.
We now have a lot of data to share. I’m considering a webinar or other public conversation about it. Feedback welcome. Is this interesting to you or more so just to us 
The data I share here is from 1937 surveys we sent out. We received 668 fully complete surveys. Thank you SurveyMonkey and for our crack marketing analytics team. For those of you dying to know, someone in Latin America won the iPad raffle.
There are many comments from the survey to the effect that overall I’m happy, but…..(and I think some of those that commented read this blog). We are responding to every question or issue raised in the survey. There were 42 such responses.
We have statistically significant responses for the high level information I can share here however not for all the detailed cross tabs that we might really want to know. This is one reason we are extending the survey currently by inviting an additional 5,000 responses. So, if you are a registered user please check your email and spam filter if you are interested in another chance to win an iPad and to give your feedback; the invitation to fill out the survey is in our customer newsletter that is emailing over the next day or two.
Enough with the preliminaries. There are a few ways to measure customer SAT. You can ask them their satisfaction, you can ask them their propensity to recommend, and you can ask them their propensity to buy. Here we did all three:
In a way this is a perfect storm for legacy storage vendors. What we’re seeing is NexentaStor often being purchased under the radar - by divisions or developers or perhaps to spin up a new application. As you can see word of mouth and propensity to purchase are even higher than customer satisfaction. And then, over time, NexentaStor earns its keep and more and more storage and use cases migrate onto the platform. More on that point later.
First, here is another view of customer SAT:
Back of the envelope, those numbers seem about right. We have 42 ‘complaints’ received out of the 667 responses, or 6.3%. The above chart suggests approximately 5% of users have not had a good experience.
So our challenge is to pay attention to both sides of the equation. Yes — follow up with those that have less than good experience but also make sure we understand why some 40% of customer sales are now coming from existing customers. What do you all like so much? Per my prior post, often it is features, not just the price.
Speaking of sales coming from existing customers, here is another graph that gives you some idea of adoption patterns.
Perhaps not surprisingly given the number of new users, NexentaStor tends not to be used for all the data in particular accounts. We do see customers growing - as I mentioned above 40% of all sales now come from existing buyers. But we also see that there is tremendous opportunity for customers to use NexentaStor more.
And here is where the community comes in. While we continue to get better partners and continue to hire many more people and to share in these groups the best practices about business continuity and NexentaStor for example I also believe that events like the upcoming OpenStorage summit in Palo Alto are absolutely invaluable for us all to share notes *live* about what works, and what would be really cool, and how to fix whatever is broken. It is our growing community of users and, yes, survey respondents that are allowing OpenStorage to continue to accelerate while improving overall total product quality.
So, if you want to become a Certified NexentaStor Engineer, or you just want to attend some of the sessions and hear Bill Moore and Garrett D’Amore discuss the future of ZFS and Illumos, please join us at the OpenStorage summit in late October. Note that there is a $100 fee to cover our direct expenses to attend the summit. Learn more here.
And please keep the comments coming!