It takes plenty to shake up the enterprise storage market and the firmly entrenched legacy vendors. The competitive path is lined with many failed upstarts and smaller players that tried, without much success, to cause any significant disruption. It’s a tough battleground.

However, Nimble Storage (NMBL), a provider of a flash-optimized hybrid storage platform, looks to have the formula to win meaningful market share—offering performance, capacity and differentiated software in a cost-efficient package.

For fiscal 2015 (January), revenue growth is expected to come in close to 77%. The fiscal 2016 consensus revenue estimate of $322.4 million indicates growth of 45%. With these numbers, Nimble clearly is gaining share.

The company, which went public in December 2013 at $21 a share, has a market cap of $1.9 billion. The stock, recently traded around $26.50, has been quite volatile since the offering: it’s well off the post-IPO high of $58 from late February and up from the May low of $19.17.

Nimble operates in a total addressable market (enterprise storage systems and software) that’s estimated to reach nearly $36 billion in 2017 from just under $30 billion this year.

Nimble’s platform, built on proprietary software, leverages the strengths of both flash and disks to provide increased performance and better data protection. In terms of technology, Nimble’s Cache-Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) file system and InfoSight cloud-based storage management service are the key differentiators.

Nimble CEO Suresh Vasudevan says the flash offering involved a fundamental storage-system redesign from the ground up, as opposed to the bolt-on strategy used by legacy vendors, which simply incorporates flash into disk-centric architectures.

CASL enables the platform to deliver high performance and capacity efficiency with integrated data protection, while InfoSight takes advantage of big data analytics and other capabilities embedded across the platform to proactively monitor the health, capacity and performance of customer systems, providing real-time operational insights to IT teams at Nimble and end customers. Cloud connectivity radically simplifies storage management, making on-premise monitoring of storage seem “archaic,” according to the CEO.

CASL optimizes storage system performance and capacity by effectively accelerating the write performance of a low-cost disk. For read performance, CASL caches copies of active data into flash-based, solid-state drives, delivering the I/Os in real time. Using flash as a read cache is much more efficient because it eliminates the need for redundant provisioning of extra flash to protect against data loss. In addition, CASL reduces costs by compressing all stored data (on flash and disk) in real time.

Another benefit: Nimble’s systems have a modular architecture that allows customers to add compute, flash or hard disk drives as needed in small, discrete increments in order to scale to fit both performance and capacity. Multiple systems can be combined into scale-out storage clusters for the most demanding environments.

In terms of data protection, the amount of data at risk on the Nimble platform at any given time is significantly less than with traditional data-protection approaches because of the company’s point-in-time snapshot technology.

In fiscal Q2 (July), revenue rose 89% to $53.8 million, coming in above even the high end of the guidance range, and the company added a record 663 customers, bringing its total customer base to 3,756 accounts (up 115% year over year). Just in the past four quarters, Nimble has attracted 2,000+ new accounts. Management says most of the company’s growth is coming from taking market share from the major legacy vendors (EMC, NetApp, Dell and H-P).

Fiscal Q2 was the first full quarter of availability for Nimble’s scale-out architecture. And the company’s Adaptive Flash platform, enabling customers to dial up resources on the fly to meet fluctuating storage requirements, was available for half the quarter. To better address the needs of large enterprises, Nimble will begin support for Fibre Channel environments before the end of the current fiscal year in January.

With its expanded portfolio of offerings, Nimble is working its way into a greater number of larger accounts. As of fiscal Q2, the company’s installed base of large enterprise customers was up 81% year over year; Nimble now counts 13 of the Global 100 and 53 of the Global 500 as customers. The number of global service provider accounts surged 119% from a year ago. Bigger customers spend more money: 444 deals over the past 12 months were worth more than $100,000 each, up 86% from the previous comparable period.

Two other important positive catalysts for Nimble: expansion outside of the U.S. and overall channel build-out. International bookings in fiscal Q2 jumped 120%; Nimble now has sales teams in 19 countries and distribution arrangements in 26 additional countries. Within the worldwide channel, a sharp increase in the number of trained systems integrators (up 158% year over year) means a lot more people on the ground capable of driving deeper engagements.

The forward multiple on the fiscal 2015 (Jan.) consensus revenue estimate of $222.5 million is down to 8.5 from 16.3 in early March. Nimble trades at 5.9x the FY’16 consensus of $322.5 million (the Street-high estimate is $359.2 million).

I think Nimble’s disruptive nature (62% of bookings from new accounts), healthy revenue growth (expected to average 61% this year and next), increased presence at the high end and reasonable gross margin outlook could make it attractive as an M&A target for any number of legacy vendors (including NetApp, EMC and even Cisco Systems).

Nimble Storage is a ‘Buy’ in the Next Wave Portfolio up to $29.