Last week, several members of the Xiotech executive team discussed the company’s strategy and unveiled a new identity at TheBDEvent in Palo Alto.  Of course, was anyone in the Valley paying attention to anything other than Steve Jobs in the Moscone Center?  In case you were thawed from a cryogenic chamber this week, the iPad is now the coolest must-have gadget in the world and is on my toy wishlist.

Back to work.

Greg and VaNessa Duplessie put on a great show, with A-list content and a storage who’s-who present over the two days.  Of course, cocktail hours and hotel “lobby time” proved equally valuable.  The days were long but stimulating.  I particularly enjoyed meeting some of the industry Twitterati, including @sfoskett, @sunshinemug and @dvellante.  Always good to put a face to a @name, beyond the 70×70 pixel icon.

The Xiotech strategy we outlined is predicated on the fact that we are squarely in the midst of the performance-limited age of storage.  Application owners want more processing power, analytics, online time, transactions…you name it.  And, in order to serve these apps, IT wants to take advantage of innovations like wide-scale virtualization (e.g. for mission critical applications, not just test/dev) and cloud.  Many excellent blogs have been written recently on the subject, including one from David Black, CTO of Oak Investment Partners, and one from Xiotech’s own Rob Peglar.

Also, during the week, the question of how Xiotech will grow was posed to our CEO Alan Atkinson.  He laid out the four pillars of growth during a private luncheon.

“With over 2,000 customers, largely in the mid-market, the enterprise is definitely an important play,” Atkinson said.  Xiotech’s value proposition – price-performance, scalability and ease of integration – is purpose-built for the enterprise.  He also described how desktop virtualization is an imminent phenomenon that will eclipse server virtualization, and how ISE is well-suited to supercharge these projects.  

Second, Atkinson described a significant focus on the channel to serve both U.S. and international markets.  “We grew our channel business nearly 30% in 2009 and intend to increase that in 2010,” he said.  When asked what type of partners Xiotech was interested in, he said that both SI/reseller partners as well as OEMs would be on the radar.

International expansion was detailed as the third pillar of growth.  Xiotech recently signed several new partners to provide reach and distribution.  As Atkinson noted, early signs of growth have already emerged in Western Europe, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.  “This is particularly important for us as we engage the enterprise,” he said.  “Most banks want to do business with a company who has presence in EMEA.”

The fourth growth pillar was an expansion of the ISE value proposition by cultivating a robust ecosystem.  CTO Steve Sicola detailed the Q1 and Q2 roadmap, including CorteX (coming in Q1) – Xiotech’s RESTful API that will allow developers simple yet powerful access to ISE.  

Oh yeah, in the immortal words of Mr. Jobs, there was one more thing.  In a demonstration of the unparalleled performance of ISE – even in large block parallel streaming workloads like HD video – we announced Mac support for ISE, including boot from SAN and the ability to serve 750 DVD-quality streams from a single ISE without any frame drops.