Unitrends Grew Hybrid Cloud Business by 250% Y/Y in FY16

Unitrends, Inc. announced strong performance for its fiscal year 2016.

Unitrends achieved significant momentum from its transition to an all-channel sales model; grew its cloud business 250% year-on-year; entered into technology partnerships with cloud leaders Amazon Web Services and Google; and earned recognition from industry watchers and analyst firms.

Explosive growth in the cloud: Unitrends’ broad support for public, private, and hosted clouds equips its channel partners to meet each customer’s requirements today, and paves the way to meet future needs. This flexibility and scalability resulted in a six-fold increase in customer data protected in the Unitrends cloud, with volumes approaching 10PB. To meet this rapid increase in demand, and to serve future requirements, Unitrends added data centers in Australia, Canada, Germany, and the UK, and expanded its US datacenter locations.

Cloud customers delighted: “Our server systems, which are vital to our business, so we were looking for a recovery solution that would guarantee protection in the event of a natural – or man-made – disaster,” said Marc Stevens, SVP of IT and operations, Western Security Surplus Insurance Brokers, Inc. “Unitrends Forever cloud is ideal; it enables us to easily replicate our latest backups to an offsite location. In under 10 minutes, hourly incremental backups complete and replicate to the Unitrends Cloud. We no longer have to worry about data, server and system protection. And, on top of all that, Forever cloud helps us simply and affordably meet data retention regulations.”

Product innovation driving cloud momentum: Underpinning the company’s successes in the cloud were the differentiated products launched or enhanced during the year:

• Unitrends Forever Cloud introduced to complement the Unitrends Recovery Series and Unitrends Enterprise Backup, enabling users to simplify long-term data retention in the cloud, reduce costs, and ensure compliance.
• Unitrends Free virtual appliance for vSphere, ESXi, and Hyper-V. This free product delivers enterprise backup and recovery for an unlimited number of VMs or physical Windows Servers, and inclues instant recovery, and fast incremental backups to Google cloud Platform or the Amazon Web Services cloud.
• Unitrends Boomerang for VMware users looking for VM migration, backup, DRaaS, or cloudbursting in AWS. The company also introduced its Boomerang Test Drive on AWS, enabling VMware users to experiment with cloud-based protection/migration at no cost.
• Recovery Assurance capabilities enhanced. Unitrends has products that provide recovery assurance for VMware, Hyper-V, and physical Windows.

Complementing these cloud solutions is Unitrends Enterprise Backup Release 9.0, a software solution for on premise and cloud continuity that reduces management overhead with sophisticated new functions for both physical and virtual environments, accessible via a totally intuitive new dashboard. Ensuring continuity has never been this streamlined and efficient.

During the year, Unitrends enhanced its on premise hardware offerings, releasing the Unitrends Recovery Series models 944S and 946S with raw capacity up to 182TB along with adaptive inline deduplication.

Key cloud partnerships: Unitrends earned Amazon Web Services Advanced Technology Partner status during the year. Unitrends also became a Google Cloud Platform Premier Partner as the company made progress against its ‘Open Sky’ initiative. The company continues to innovate with both the cloud and in working with hyper-scale public clouds making the company the #1 hybrid cloud solutions provider.

Cloud Industry recognition: Unitrends’ momentum in the cloud-empowered continuity category was acknowledged by industry watchers and analysts. Among the fifteen awards earned:

• The Cloud Awards 2015-2016 – Best Hybrid Cloud Solution
• Best in Biz Awards 2015 – Silver Award: Best New Product of the Year – SMB
• Best in Biz Awards 2015 – Bronze Award: Best Product Line of the Year
• Stevie Award 2015 – Silver Award: New Product of the Year – Software – Cloud Storage & Backup Solution
• TMC – 2015 Cloud Computing Product of the Year
• TMC – 2015 Cloud Computing Backup & DR Product of the Year

Citations by analyst firms include:

• DCIG 2015-2016 Hybrid cloud Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide – Best in Class
• Gartner – Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated Appliances – completeness of vision and ability to execute.
• Info-Tech Research Group – Named overall Champion of Mid-Market and All-in-One Backup.“Categories and Best Overall Value for BaaS, Mid-Market, Enterprise Client and All-in-One.
• Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) – Vendor to Watch
• Deloitte Technology Fast 500 – third consecutive year

Strong channel growth: Key to success in cloud-enabled continuity was the company’s move to a 100% channel model, and its new channel engagement program. Both initiatives contributed to delivering the company’s 28th consecutive quarter of channel-driven growth in Q4.

“Unitrends truly understands the word ‘partnership,” said Lance Wiseman, partner, Viyu Network Solutions. “First, they get what my customers need today, and the company’s cloud focus protects their future BC requirements. With Unitrends, we are confident we are doing the best for our customer. Second, they are 100% committed to our success – they provide what we need before we need it, work with us to serve our customers, and never compete with us.“

Unitrends is both enabling its traditional partner community to offer best-in-class products and services, and adding new, cloud-driven partnerships that offer business management solutions to the portfolio. Recent examples include CloudCheckr and Orbitera Inc.

“The explosive growth of digital information, unprecedented complexity, flat budgets, and the need to ensure BC are compelling IT organizations to find fundamentally new ways of doing things,” said Kevin Weiss, CEO and president, Unitrends. “To meet this challenge, and future customer needs, we’ve focused on delivering the industry’s broadest platform of cloud empowered continuity services. In parallel, our move to satisfy customer demand through our expert channel partners has extended our reach, without compromise to customer service. The market is validating our efforts; we’ve increased our hybrid cloud revenues by 250% year-on year, while continuing our 98% customer satisfaction rating.”