2020 Year in Review and Looking Out to 2021

I think most people were not sad to see 2020 end. Yes, there were some positives such as: less commuting, time with family, more outdoors and more overall appreciation for what we have. That all said, it was challenging, to say the least, but when the going gets tough, great teams excel and that is what our team did in 2020. We recently wrapped up our annual company and sales kickoff, and it was great to run through all that we achieved – and endured – in 2020, and everything we have to look forward to in the coming year. I’d like to use this space to share my thoughts on what we accomplished as an organization, how we’re positioned for the year ahead, and why my team and I are more excited than ever.

From a business perspective the pandemic forced enterprises to rethink how they deliver file storage to end user and accelerated the move to the cloud. It was a good thing for companies like Nasuni who are focused on moving data center infrastructure to the cloud. We have all seen the stats that enabling remote work and driving digital transformation created the perfect storm for a boom in cloud computing. You can see this from the financial results of AWS, MS and Google! We are not a Hyper Scaler, but we also saw continued strong growth in our business as companies needed to enable file access and sharing no matter where employees worked. Not to mention, so many IT professionals didn’t want to be tethered to a physical data center when they could have unlimited storage capacity at their fingertips from anywhere!

Throughout the year, our global team—alongside our partners and customers—reached these impressive milestones:

• A $25m ARR quarter!! Ok, $24.6 but c’mon – we round up.
• Crossed over 500 enterprise customers (525)
• $40 million in new funding, bringing the company’s total funding to $169 million
• 70% increase in data under management
• 10,000+ locations
• 27 billion files under management
• 40b transactions through our cloud service
• New Cloud VDI solutions working with our partners AWS and Microsoft to enable remote work

Ok enough about 2020 – we are onto to 2021, and it is looking to be an even bigger year for infrastructure moving to the cloud. A couple of weeks ago we held our annual company and sales kickoff. It was different this year being virtual and to be honest I thought it might be impossible to recreate the in-person excitement you get from being together. Yes, I missed the chance to have human connections with my colleagues, but we have all gotten so used to Zoom that I have to say the kickoff was as good if not better than others. The engagement level was higher. I think it was a symptom of both excitement from a boom in cloud but also the fact that our team could easily ask questions and collaborate over chat.

The kickoff was a great chance to show off some new content, introduce a very exciting new partner (more on that in the coming weeks), talk about how Nasuni helped companies transition their suddenly remote workforces (and how we plan to augment those capabilities in the coming months), and tease some of the exciting new features that will be included with Nasuni 9.0.

The customer roundtables really were the icing on the cake. We hosted several customer panels, including representatives from two exciting new members of the Nasuni cloud file storage family — a global pharmaceutical giant and a U.K. financial services firm. The presence of these last two companies was no accident. We saw tremendous momentum in both industries last year and expect that to pick up even more in 2021. As our founder Andres pointed out in one of his 2020 blog posts, financial services aren’t looking at the cloud as a risk any longer — they’ve realized that not transitioning away from traditional hardware to cloud infrastructure is the dangerous move.

An Exciting Year Ahead

I should credit Sales and Marketing, too, but we’re already on to 2021 and an entirely new and more ambitious set of goals. As I wrote last year at this time, I joined Nasuni because there’s a truly unique and valuable technology at its core, combined with a tremendous market opportunity. The massive change wrought in 2020 only strengthened those two points. Our customers renewed and expanded their licenses with Nasuni, and new customers turned to us amid an unprecedented economic downturn because our technology really is transformative. These companies are modernizing and consolidating their file storage and data protection infrastructure at dozens and even hundreds of sites through a single cloud file storage solution – and realizing huge cost savings in the process.

We’re proud of how we responded to 2020, but we’re also geared up for the year ahead. We have exciting new partnerships and product features to announce in the coming weeks, and every sign says the cloud boom is going to continue. We’re looking forward to setting even more records in 2021.