It’s hard to build a business that gets it all right. In fact, few – if any – really do. The best you can do is have a clear mission statement and stick to it, then hire the best people to bring that vision to life.
If you build great products that provide solutions to your users you should find success. Keeping that success is about how well you take care of those users. That’s the guiding principle for why we built Symply: hard work, a great team, and some of the best customers a company could ask for have made ours a business I’m proud to work for.
The Symply pedigree comes from the people. After an acquisition by Global Distribution in 2018 we’ve built an incredible team under some highly experienced leaders. Those leaders are respected industry experts and have helped to build renowned storage brands around the world, particularly in EMEA. And thanks to the support of the new combined leadership, we’re able to build on our parent company’s industry connections and own pedigree. A pedigree going back 25 years.
You don’t last in this business and flourish for over 25 years unless you treat people right and earn their respect. Symply – and Global – has a strong focus on family, and it shows in the way we conduct our business.
It’s also meant that Symply is now a truly worldwide organization, one that (uniquely for a smaller company) is able to leverage talents and ideas from diverse cultures and disciplines that strengthen us at our core. That alone gives Symply the means to have better internal and external communications – we have to communicate better and more often. Our teams are international as well. We share engineering, support, sales, and marketing across the world. This diversity gives us unique perspective on how to design and deliver better solutions that meet a wider variety of applications. It also makes us better at providing round-the-clock support and sharing a greater number of customer experiences coming from every discipline and functional job area from on-set to DIT, post, delivery, and archive.
As a developer and manufacturer, we’ve never shied away from bringing together best of breed technologies and integrating them into our platforms. It’s helped us broaden our product portfolio and deliver the solutions that end users need – not just want they think is missing from other brand line-ups. And we’re continuing to improve. That’s one thing we all love about Symply: the company learns and so we evolve. We’re always trying to do more, do better, and break from traditional approaches.
Are we perfect? No. But do we try to be? Yes, of course. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, we recognized that the way we did business and the way we interacted with our customers were changing. We also, like so many in the industry, realized the way content was being created was also changing. We wanted to get ahead of the developments and we wanted to do what we do best: design a family of products to answer the challenges of this changing content-creation world.
We didn’t rush a solution to market. We already had a product line in development and we took cues from the challenges being faced by media professionals to roll out this new family with the new world in mind. The products are well designed, well-engineered, and remarkably reliable. We redefined the user experience for the most essential media storage needs: Disk, tape, and cloud. And after a nearly two-year effort we launched the SymplyFIRST product family. And it comprises by far our fastest growing, most successful product lines yet. From personal desktop RAID through to LTO backup and archiving to cloud solutions there’s a toolset to meet every media user’s needs.
For us, SymplyFIRST embodies what makes a company great. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We saw the needs of our users and we told them some of our ideas. We went to the drawing board, back and forth, and when everyone felt good about the direction we went to work.
In the end the sum of the parts looks like this: Great design, robust construction, well thought-out functionality, affordability, and well-defined service and support. And above all the entire family serves the needs of our current and future users.
