BlueArc Finally Profitable

BlueArc Corporation announced that it set new records for both quarterly and annual revenue for the fiscal periods ended January 31, 2011. BlueArc’s fourth quarter revenue rose 40 percent over the same quarter a year ago. Capping four consecutive quarters of revenue growth, customer adoption and continued product innovation, BlueArc has attained profitability for the first time in its history.
 
"Businesses are seeking every opportunity to increase revenue without increasing costs. This puts extreme pressure on IT departments who have to support new applications and expand existing workloads within strict budget limitations," said Terri McClure, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "In short, when businesses try to scale, IT infrastructures must operate at scale. The critical component to running ‘IT at Scale’ is Scale-Out Storage.  As a leader in Scale-Out File Storage, BlueArc is well-positioned to accelerate infrastructure transformations which are needed to support high performance, fast growing environments, and the results they are seeing in the market certainly reflect that positioning."
 
Capitalising on the increasing demand for storage at scale, BlueArc experienced growth in all customer segments and across all routes to market. Existing customers took advantage of BlueArc’s scalability to add capacity to their existing storage systems without impacting performance. Inhance Digital, a Los Angeles-based VFX company, initially purchased a BlueArc solution with 48 TB of storage, and within six months had increased its storage pool by 400 percent, without adding additional nodes, due to their growing storage demands.
 
While existing customers showed growth, BlueArc more than doubled the number of new customers over the prior year. Channel business through value added resellers also accelerated. BlueArc also saw an increase in OEM revenues through its partner, Hitachi Data Systems with BlueArc-powered NAS systems in the enterprise.
 
"BlueArc has long been known for industry-leading performance and scalability, and early products earned great success in high-growth and high-end vertical markets," said Mike Gustafson, BlueArc CEO. "More recently, and in particular over the past two years, we have seen a radical shift  in mainstream demand for greater levels of performance and scalability, driven by ever-expanding datasets and the need to conserve datacenter resources such as rack space, power and cooling. As companies across all markets have grappled with scaling their businesses, they have realised the limitations of their incumbent storage solutions. While this shift was occurring, we brought new mid-range products and enhanced software capabilities to market, making our solutions even more attractive to customers. The result has been an increased appetite for our at-scale solutions across the board. The attainment of profitability is a testament to that demand."