IPO on the horizon for ExaGrid?

Bill Andrews, CEO, ExaGrid, told The IT Press Tour a few weeks ago, that an IPO could be on the radar in the coming quarters even if the priority is to grow the business and gain market footprint. But there is no pressure on that and no special interest from investors. The 16 last quarters demonstrate strategy and operational excellence with impressive figures. The company revenue should pass the $200 million barrier for the next ARR window.

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Swissbit promotes a real security product line

Swissbit, the European leader in SSD and Flash media, started to extend its product line and address some security needs with dedicated products that leverage their expertise in flash. The idea is to provide some cybersecurity and trusted solutions to their partners and thus users in our world becoming more and more digitalized. This initiative has been launched in 2013.

This security solution line targets authentication, access control and identify management leveraging flash and ubiquitous devices. It means also to secure data and process such as secure boot or encryption to guarantee safe IT operations against cyberattacks.

And it makes really sense when you consider some synergies with embedded storage in automative vehicles for instance. all info is stored on plenty dispersed small devices and requires some security techniques both on the storage aspect but also on the access one.

The German company developed a MFA - multi-factor authentication - aligned with FIDO2. It is instantiated with iShield Key FIDO2 and Pro flavors and the new coming one, the iShield Key MIFARE. Force to comply with US, European and global regulations, the firm has released a security upgrade kit with encryption and access control for MicroSD/SD cards. The encryption uses a real time AES 256 bits and also the memory is based on industrial grade pSLC to improve endurance.

For government segments, RSA and Swissbit join forces to provide the RSA iShield Key 2 series and we expect new models in 2025.

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Some directions for ExaGrid

ExaGrid, a reference in secondary storage, will add soon 2 key product iterations. Bill Andrews, CEO, shared with The IT Press Tour group 2 additional flavors related, first, to some deep integrations with Rubrik in addition to Veeam, Veritas and Commvault and classic support via S3, NFS or SMB. The team picked Rubrik instead of Cohesity as Veritas will join officially them very soon now. It means that ExaGrid will cover deeply the 4 top data protection products and thus increase its market footprint significantly. The second news is about the release of a Flash-based appliance at least for the landing zone to boost backup and recovery times. IT was not clear of the company will develop a full flash systems. Great news.

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Wasabi AiR to leverage content

Wasabi, the leader in alternative cloud storage, accelerates on what they called Intelligent Media Storage. The idea is to leverage the technology they acquired early this year with Curio AI to provide rich metadata management. Based on AI and some sort of advanced self content indexing, the product team wishes to offer a way to find and access data in a different way. The problem they address can be illustrated by this famous sentence "find a needle in a haystack" realizing that finding rapidly the right file in a very large opaque remote repository is a real mission. Now with Wasabi AiR, a searchable index is auto-generated with auto-tagging, recognition of face, people, object, image, logo, brand, sound, optical character, speech to text and multilingual transcription. The new service provides unlimited search and browse queries, unlimited playback, unlimited metadata review, zero egress or API request fees and no hidden costs.

The video below illustrates the immediate gain users receives with AiR.

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HYCU is ready for DORA and NIS2

HYCU, a reference in next generation data protection integrating SaaS and cloud capabilities, confirms that the last regulation - DORA and NIS2 - from Europe regarding data protection is almost in place. The article 12 of that new rule forces users to keep a local copy and for SaaS applications it could become a nightmare. This is probably why some moves happened recently such as Clumio swallowed by Commvault but above all Own by Salesforce for $1.9 billion.

HYCU will add Nutanix Objects, Dell, Cloudian, OVHcloud in addition to what they have today.

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Some directions for Wasabi

Wasabi, the alternative champion for cloud storage, shared recently during The IT Press Tour in Boston some directions for its future.

David Friend, CEO, insisted on the next corporate step and it could be a IPO.

On the product side, the team works on an on-premises instance to finally provide a global answer with local and remote storage capability, we could say an hybrid model, to increase data availability, durability and boost RTO. This is also alined with the last European regulation DORA that forces users to keep a local copy especially for online services. This new official rule will be in application in January 2025.

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HYCU restores data everywhere

HYCU, the SaaS applications data protection fas growing player, confirms its ability to restore data on any other cloud supporting several combinations such as VMware to AWS to GCP to Nutanix or Azure. It offers the cross-cloud data mobility and allows flexible migration that can be key to sustain SLAs.

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ExaGrid, a leader a bit confidential

Reference in secondary storage dedicated to backup, ExaGrid participated to The IT Press Tour I organized this week in Boston, MA. We met Bill Andrews, CEO, yesterday and it was the right opportunity for a company and product update.

The company continues its independent journey with a pretty unique product approach and business model. The team has reached a new level with its 15th consecutive quarters, almost 4 years, of free cash flow, Ebitda and P&L positive operations. These results demonstrate the right business strategy with a few key numbers:

• +150 new customers for a total of 4,400+ and 48 of these new ones passing the 6 and 7-figure deals,
• New major product release with ExaGrid 7.0.0,
• Support of Commvault Metallic in addition to the top 3 Veeam, Veritas NetBackup and Commvault classic product,
• 95% net customer retention,
• NPS score of +81.

We also anticipate that the product will support additional dedicated API and access methods for Rubrik and potentially Cohesity and for sure it will invite the company in a new dimension like Veeam did.

With such confirmed progress and impressive trajectory, I even think that the company has a good chance to join the bi-annual Coldago Research Storage Unicorn Club soon.

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Wasabi, the cloud storage gem

Wasabi Technologies, the active player in cloud storage who shakes the top 3 public cloud providers for secondary storage needs, joined The IT Press Tour this week in Boston. It was the perfect time to get an update about the company and its offering and the directions they'll take soon.

We had the privilege to be with David Friend, CEO and co-founder, to present and discuss with us. The company, founded in 2015, has raised more then $500 million and is of course included in the Storage Unicorn Club published bi-annually by Coldago Research for several years.

With more 100,000 customers attached to 14 storage regions and 15,000+ partners of all kind, several exabyte are stored with for example more of 1EB of Veeam pushed data. Wasabi is used by various industries with a real partnership effort pushing a channel first approach. All storage sites are co-located with local internet, data centers and cloud service providers.

The Wasabi offering is pretty simple in its concept with of course a real complexity in its deployment but it is completely masked to users and consumers. The idea was to leverage S3 API as the de-facto standard for universal data access to cost effective cloud storage. In other words, build a 100% compatible solution with AWS S3 storage that invites users to select or switch in favor of Wasabi at an attractive cost, 805 less than Amazon. Of course users continue to own their data in a very secure way and can predict cost. With AWS S3 and other similar services, traffic costs increase the final bill and it is very difficult to anticipate the real final cost. With Wasabi this traffic is reduced to zero so users pay only for capacity per month.

Performance is also pretty good and data is immutable, protected by erasure coding in each site and replicated across regions projected 11 9's of durability. Encryption is done in-flight and at-rest with strong identity and access management (IAM), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and multi-user authorization (MUA).

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R-Cloud covers the highest number of applications

HYCU, a reference in SaaS applications backup, joined The IT Press Tour this week in Boston for the 10th times. It was a good time to get a company and product update from Simon Taylor, CEO, and his team as they're growing fast. The installed base passed 4,200 for 78 countries illustrating the rapid pace with 440+ partners. But also a good moment because we saw recently several mergers and acquisitions moves and probably $5 billion have been exchanged.

Launched with the tour last year, R-Cloud has radically changed how users approach SaaS applications data protection. It was clear yesterday that the product team has significantly increased the number of applications supported with 80+ applications. As the IT companies landscape has been highly modified if you compare with the last 10-20 years, the vast majority of applications used by enterprises are SaaS-based.

It is good for HYCU to be listed in some analysts reports even if Gartner has lost its credibility for several years confirmed by recent crazy MQs. I invite the readers to check my various comments and analysis of these Gartner strange documents.

The recent SaaS survey was an interesting source of informations that illustrate that SaaS service feed a scandal without a real serious protection while users don't really know what they use.

R-Cloud has made real progress while competition still focus on classic SaaS applications with an average of 9 supported. And the idea for HYCU is to cover the entire stack to be really considered as a universal or horizontal solution. The last news shared yesterday is related to new applications. In the domain, HYCU now adds:

• Protected infrastructure services with AWS S3 Express Zone, Cloud Formation, Lambda and Google Cloud Run,
• ITSM: ClickUp, Docusign and iManage,
• DevOps: GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, Terraform, CircleCI, Jira Product Discovery and Google Artifact Registry,
• IAM: Microsoft Entra ID, Okta Customer Identity Cloud, AWS IAM, VPC, WAF, KMS, Parameter Store and Route 53,
• Data Management & Analytics: Google Big Table, Cloud Functions, Artifact Registry, Firestore, Redis and Pinecone,
• Collaborative Work Management: Box, Monday, Podio and Wrike.

All this is a good example of the fact that "The industry creates its own complexity, a sign of maturity probably...".

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