Growing Demand for Cloud Native File Services Drives Nasuni’s Record 2019 Revenue
February 25, 2020
Nasuni achieves 23 quarters of consecutive growth fueled by rising enterprise cloud adoption, frustration with legacy file storage infrastructure
BOSTON – February 25, 2020 – Nasuni®, a leading provider of cloud file services, today announced record results for its fiscal year ended December 31, 2019. Annual recurring revenue increased 44% year-over-year from 2018, marking the 23rd consecutive quarter of growth, driven by rising enterprise cloud adoption and frustration with legacy file storage infrastructure. Nasuni now supports approximately 500 enterprise customers, protecting and providing global access to more than 79 petabytes of data across billions of files in 8,000 locations across 70 countries. This latest milestone is a testament to the growing demand for a new approach, free of legacy hardware, to deliver file services across global locations.
As enterprises look to modernize data centers, the cloud is seen as a way to quickly drive innovation. According to Gartner, Inc.1, 80% of enterprises will migrate entirely away and close their on-premises data centers by 2025 and 99% of all files will be stored in cloud environments. Employees will create, collaborate on and store files from any device, without knowing if the files are stored locally or in the cloud. To support this rapid growth, Nasuni has grown its headcount by 60% since January 2018, and, last year, opened and expanded office space in Marlborough, Massachusetts. This office complements the engineering and customer support teams at the company’s Boston headquarters and a new office in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park.
The company also added new members to its board of directors in 2019, with Joel Reich, former executive vice president of products at NetApp, and Peter McKay, CEO of Snyk and former co-CEO of Veeam. Reich and McKay’s extensive experience and domain expertise in storage and cloud computing will support the company’s strategic vision as the company continues to achieve record growth through increased demand for its cloud-native, file services platform.
Additional highlights of Nasuni’s achievements in 2019 include:
- New capabilities: Nasuni launched significant enhancements to its flagship file services platform for modernizing enterprise storage infrastructure. This new version gives enterprises access to artificial intelligence (AI) and search analytics for unstructured data, as well as powerful cloud migration capabilities. Companies gain a springboard for agile, intelligent migrations and cloud-first approaches, as well as multi-cloud flexibility with new support for Google Cloud.
- New patents: The team was awarded three U.S. patents; the company now has over a dozen patents covering its industry-leading platform and enabling technologies, as well as numerous patents pending.
- Nasuni covers the cloud leaders: Nasuni made tremendous progress in delivering its software via major cloud partners. In FY 2019, approximately 75% of Nasuni’s deployments were in conjunction with customers using AWS and Microsoft Azure for cloud storage. Nasuni continued its focus on channel partners by increasing channel workforce by 35% to support over 80% the company’s revenue fulfilled through the channel.
- New funding: Nasuni raised $25 million in new funding in early 2019. Led by Telstra Ventures, the round also included participation from existing investors Goldman Sachs, Sigma Prime Ventures, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Flybridge Capital Partners.
- Enhanced customer experience: A new consumption pricing model was introduced delivering a flexible subscription-based model. Expansion rates of existing customers exceeded 115% in 2019 for the fifth consecutive year and gross customer annual recurring revenue (ARR) churn was less than 5% both key indicators of customer success.
- Customers with ARR greater than $100,000: Grew by 42% in 2019.
- Executive team expansion: In addition to expanding its engineering team, Nasuni made strategic hires to its executive team, including David Grant, chief marketing officer; Will Hornkohl, vice president, alliances; and Krischel Crawley, vice president, sales – west.
- Awards: The company was ranked among the fastest growing companies in North America in Deloitte’s 2019 Technology Fast 500™, and was the only file services vendor included on the list. Cheryle Cushion, vice president, marketing was named to CRN’s Women of the Channel list.
The global volume of file data continues to explode and is extremely difficult to manage with legacy file infrastructure silos. Nasuni enables enterprises to modernize their file storage infrastructure with a cloud-based approach, seamlessly navigating their entire journey from NAS silo consolidation through protection against ransomware and other cyber threats, enabling global file sharing and increasing workforce productivity. The Nasuni platform is trusted by many of the largest organizations including Meredith Corporation, Western Digital and Electronic Arts to empower users to share and collaborate on files across multiple sites and geographies with maximum performance and reliability.
Meredith Corporation cut CapEx costs significantly, eliminating traditional backup and reducing its on-premises NAS infrastructure by 80% with Nasuni and AWS. The No. 1 magazine operator in the U.S. and owner of brands such as PEOPLE, Better Homes & Gardens, InStyle, REAL SIMPLE and Parents, moved to Nasuni to deliver a file services platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Dave Coffman, Meredith’s director of enterprise infrastructure, said, “We tried all different types of technology approaches, but we could never catch our white whale, a global file system. We used to robocopy from a file server in Iowa to New York, but that was slow and difficult. Now we robocopy to Nasuni and let the magic happen. It’s faster and much more reliable, so there’s a lot less stress before the deadline.”
“Files are the fastest growing segment of enterprise data, and enterprises are simply unable to protect and provide fast global access to them using legacy technologies,” said Paul Flanagan, president and CEO of Nasuni. “We had strong new customer bookings growth at 63%, which will lead to accelerated revenue increases in 2020. At Nasuni, we’ve built a file services platform for the cloud that is not only modernizing primary and secondary storage, but we also cut the total cost of ownership in half compared to traditional file infrastructure. This ability to solve an immense data challenge while saving our customers a substantial amount of money is, not surprisingly, driving demand for our solution.”
1Gartner Research “How to Escape Network and Local File Storage,” January 7, 2020