Nexenta Achieved 414% Increase in Y/Y Quartely Revenue

Nexenta Systems, Inc. closed its second year of product shipment with sustained triple digit annual revenue growth, a growing customer base and strengthened leadership to propel the company into its third year of commercial sales and beyond.

In the first quarter of 2010, Nexenta released the third generation of its breakthrough NexentaStor storage solution, achieved a 414 percent quarterly increase in revenue from the first quarter of 2009, and secured the creator of the ZFS file system as a critical addition to the Nexenta advisory board. The company is committed to maintaining its pace of innovation and meeting the demanding requirements of its customers and partners by delivering technically superior open alternatives to aging legacy proprietary enterprise storage.

NexentaStor is a hardware independent storage solution built on the breakthrough Open Source ZFS file system. With NexentaStor, customers can for the first time experience the benefits of enterprise storage, including high performance and air tight data integrity with multiple replication methods and in-line data deduplication, without the vendor lock-in and aged technologies of legacy storage vendors. Nexenta’s Open Storage model allows customers to save up to 80 percent of storage costs while reaping the benefits of superior storage functionality, tight integration across virtualization products, and faster development cycles versus proprietary storage products.

Key milestones for the quarter included:

• NexentaStor has now achieved over 1,000 commercial deployments, and is used by over 20,000 people. 241 new customers were added in the first quarter – 31 percent more customers than were added in the last quarter of 2009. Sales to Internet service providers, Hosting companies and Research and Development departments within large organizations fueled a significant part of the growth.
• 10 new partners were added worldwide in the first quarter, reflecting the company’s commitment and traction with the channel. Nexenta now has over 100 partners and channel sales represent 80 percent of Nexenta’s overall revenue.
• Nexenta maintained profitability, and achieved cash flow breakeven, despite increasing the size of its team by 15 percent.

The driving force behind Nexenta’s growth is the company’s commitment to delivering a commercial solution to handle the extreme enterprise storage requirements at a fraction of the cost of legacy proprietary offerings. In the first quarter of 2010, Nexenta reaffirmed its commitment through critical product innovation and strategic additions to the company’s leadership team:

• The introduction of in-line deduplication for primary (production) storage within NexentaStor 3.0. This functionality enables customers to reduce their reliance and over investment in expensive and scarce primary storage.
• The addition of support for Microsoft Hyper-V within Nexenta Virtual Machine Datacenter (VMDC) 3.0. With its new support for Microsoft Hyper-V, NexentaStor is the only product to support VMware vSphere, Citrix Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization platforms from a single point within one unified environment.
• Bill Moore, co-creator of the ZFS file system, joined the Nexenta Advisory Board. Moore joined seasoned investors, experts in growing emerging companies and technology gurus, including Sam Pullara, entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark and former chief technologist at Yahoo!, and Randy Bias, founder of Cloudscaling, a leading cloud systems design consultancy.
• The expansion of Nexenta’s management team to include Rick Hayes as the vice president of technical operations. In his new capacity, Hayes manages the company’s technical infrastructure including support, IT and professional services.

“I’d like to say thank you to all our partners and end users whom, together, are showing that an open community is more powerful than even the largest of proprietary technology companies,” said Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta. “The record pace of adoption of NexentaStor is proof that legacy, aged proprietary technologies and business models cannot compete with superior open solutions; enterprises have recognized that their data is too valuable to be held hostage by the incredibly expensive and out of date solutions of proprietary vendors.”