Quantum Grows Scale-Out Storage Revenue by 74% Y/Y

Quantum Corp. highlighted the value its scale-out storage solutions are providing to customers as the key factor behind the growth in revenue from these solutions over the past year.

In the company completed fiscal year 2015 (April 1, 2014 – March 31, 2015), revenue from its scale-out storage products and related services grew 74% over the prior year, with increasing momentum throughout the year.

After growing 41% year-over-year in the first quarter, revenue increased 58% and 77% in each of the next two quarters, respectively, and then 116% in the fourth quarter.

This accelerated growth reflects the benefits that Quantum’s StorNext workflow solutions and Lattus extended online storage systems are delivering across a range of vertical markets and user requirements, as customers such as AOL, Inc. Huffington Post, Calgary Police Service, PBS, TV Cultura and the University of NC increasingly turned to Quantum over the past year to meet their scale-out storage needs.

StorNext 5: Optimized for Demanding Workflows
Video, audio, image and other unstructured data is becoming ever more pervasive, accompanied by increasing demands to derive greater value from this data through analysis and monetization. This creates new challenges for organizations in capturing data real-time, preserving it cost effectively, and accessing the data when needed. These challenges make storage and data management more important than ever as a critical enabler from a business or mission standpoint.

In contrast to many other storage offerings that can’t meet these new challenges, StorNext 5 platform was engineered on the basis that the sheer amount of data and changing profile of data to be managed required a different approach. This approach centers on StorNext 5 providing a combination of fast file streaming performance and integrated intelligence to put the right data in the right place at the right time for efficiency and at low cost. StorNext does so by moving data across disk, object storage, tape and cloud tiers while maintaining control of the data.

Expanded Scale-out Storage Portfolio

During the year, Quantum launched a range of new scale-out storage offerings, including:

StorNext Pro Foundation: gives smaller production workgroups a performance, attractively priced solution for managing content from ingest to delivery to archive.
StorNext QXS-5600: a high-capacity, high-density disk array that delivers cost-effective, work-in-process storage for applications involving high-resolution video, images or other rich content.
Q-Cloud Archive: incorporates the power of the public cloud as an off-site tier within a Quantum StorNext 5 workflow environment, with no changes to existing applications or processes required.
Lattus 6TB Drives: adds new storage nodes with 6TB HDDs, providing 50% greater density while lowering cost per terabyte by 15% compared to prior storage nodes.

Broader Market Reach
Quantum continued to build on its leadership in media and entertainment (M&E) and further extend the benefits of its scale-out storage solutions in other vertical markets and use cases:

M&E: Product revenue in this market grew 155% for all of fiscal year 2015 and nearly 190% in the final quarter. In addition, some of the company’s largest customer wins, including its biggest deal of more than $4 million, were for corporate video use cases involving both StorNext and Lattus.
Other Verticals and Use Cases: Total product revenue in non-M&E markets such as video surveillance, government intelligence, geospatial applications, seismic analysis and life sciences increased more than 70% year-over-year in the fourth quarter. In all these markets, Performance, workflow-intelligent approach was a key differentiator and growth driver.

New Partnerships
The strength of Quantum’s solutions and market momentum also led to the establishment of new channel and technology partnerships. During the year, the number of channel partners reselling the company’s scale-out storage offerings grew 38%. In addition, the company formed partnerships with other technology leaders, including FireEye Network Forensics for cybersecurity, Milestone Systems A/S in video surveillance, Avere Systems, Inc. in oil and gas, and Amazon in cloud services.

Awards
Quantum continued to receive industry accolades throughout the year, including three honors for StorNext Pro Solutions. TVBEurope named them a Best of Show Award winner at IBC2014, and the family won a Visionary Product Award for ‘Enabling Collaborative Storage Technology‘ at the 14th annual Storage Visions Conference. In addition, StorNext Pro Solutions was chosen as a finalist in the post-production category of the StudioDaily Prime Awards, which it recently won.

Luciano Faco, business systems manager, TV REDE Gazeta, said: “Our workflow environment was originally built on Apple Xsan, but we transitioned to StorNext, taking advantage of its 100% compatibility with Xsan. StorNext is now the foundation for our entire workflow, enabling our technicians, reporters and editors to access information easier and faster, which makes the heart of our business more productive.“

Nick Gold, chief revenue officer, Chesapeake Systems LLC, said: “From petabyte-scale, multi-tiered platforms involving super-fast production storage, near-line tape archive and both private and public cloud to collaborative storage systems for small, creative workgroups, Quantum has robust offerings that we are very happy to present to our clientele. StorNext has proven itself again and again for demanding video and media applications, and Quantum is staying on top of key trends in data management.“

Geoff Stedman, SVP, StorNext solutions, Quantum, said: “Our tremendous success over the past year is a testament to the unique value our workflow-optimized solutions deliver in scale-out storage environments. As more and more customers are realizing, no other vendor can provide the combination of high performance, low cost and intelligent, end-to-end data management across sites and the cloud that we offer with StorNext and Lattus.“