Y/Y 500% Bookings Growth for Scality

Scality, Inc. announced that 2013 was a year of business and product expansion, highlighted by the company’s year over year bookings growth of 500%, the addition of twelve major customers, product enhancements broadening the range of applications for Scality’s RING, major industry recognition and a $22 million Series C investment.

Customers and Markets
Over the course of 2013, Scality consolidated its position in existing markets and entered new markets. It extended its market in providing mission-critical storage infrastructure for the largest email service providers.

Scality now supplies petabyte-scale storage to twenty service providers, each of whom manages more than one million mailboxes. In the aggregate, it now manages critical information assets for more than 110 million users.

Scality’s first customer, Telenet, deployed Scality in 2010. Since then, it has experienced 100% storage availability, and has had zero data loss or corruption. The system has remained fully operational, even after a complete replacement of hardware, a 10x increase in storage and many application and architecture upgrades and replacements.

Scality’s success in the service provider market demonstrates the ability of its software defined storage, based on object storage technology, to provide 24×7 availability and data protection, year after year, at a low cost of operations, even for mission-critical Internet services.

Beyond its established position with email and cloud service providers, in 2013 the company made inroads in new markets, including financial services as well as media and entertainment. And the company closed its first deals in Japan, expanding its presence beyond the USA and Western Europe.

Product Innovation
In 2013 Scality made engineering investments in its RING software solution. While dozens of capabilities were added or enhanced, three are noteworthy for their broad implications for Scality’s markets and technology vision.

• Native support for a range of industry standard file sharing protocols. With the October Release 4.2 of Scality’s RING, Scality added native support for standard enterprise file systems including NFS and CIFS. It has extended its data protection and storage management benefits, including replication, erasure coding and DR to data stored in traditional enterprise formats. Release 4.2 provides interoperability among NFS, CIFS and REST APIs, so that data stored in NFS or CIFS can be accessed using a REST API and data stored using a REST API can be accessed via NFS or CIFS.
• Unified Storage. In March, the company shipped a key component of its unified storage vision, a plug-in for OpenStack Cinder, providing support for persistent block storage. Scality now provides block, file and object storage, all from within the same storage management architecture.
• Building a converged storage and compute platform for Hadoop. In March, Scality also released the production-grade version CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface) plug-in for Hadoop, extending performance, scalability and durability benefits to big data. By harnessing the compute power of storage servers, the software defined storage can run Hadoop jobs directly where the data is stored. The data may be processed ‘in place’, whether it was stored through a traditional file interface (NFS or CIFS), or through CDMI, without the need to transcode or move data between storage and compute servers. Users can mine more data for a fraction of the cost of a classic Hadoop compute cluster.

The impact of these innovations taken together is that in 2013 Scality broadened the conventional views of what could be expected from the object storage industry.

In addition to powering some large cloud infrastructure applications, RING interoperates with traditional applications, delivering massive capacity for a fraction of the cost of conventional storage systems, without compromising performance for Internet services or other massively parallel workloads.

Industry Recognition
Scality achieved frequent recognition over the course of 2013.

• In April, Scality was one of five storage companies named by Gartner to its Cool Vendor list. Gartner recognizing it “can potentially deliver massive scalability, HA and data protection at lower costs.”
• In September, GigaOM released an assessment comparing the leading object storage vendors and identified Scality as the best object storage solution for performance, scalability and cost. Comparing to the three other market-leading object storage solutions, the report concluded, “Scality currently does an overall better job and does so at the lowest TCO.”
• In October, IDC issued its 2013 Object Storage MarketScape and named Scality to its object storage Leader category after evaluating thirteen vendors against more than ten different criteria. The report noted its unique multi-geo capabilities, which enable the RING “to deliver a high level of service availability and data durability.”  The report also noted: “Scality knows and understands the OBS (object storage) market segment better than anyone else.”
• In October, The Enterprise Strategy Group released the results of a detailed, hands-on validation of the performance of RING 4.2, examining performance, throughput, HA, data protection and data recovery. ESG concluded that across all benchmarks, its results demonstrated a highly efficient solution, “that met the performance and latency requirements of enterprise organizations.”

Organizational Development
In 2013, Scality invested in new engineering initiatives, saw increased interest in petabyte-scale solutions from a variety of vertical markets and technology partners, increased its sales activity and supported more than twelve new major deployments. Given continued investment in these areas, over the course of 2013, Scality doubled the size of its team and expanded its executive staff, including the hiring of Erwan Menard as COO (joined in January 2014), Philippe Mechanick as CFO, and Antoine Fauvel as senior director of European sales.

To support the company’s continued business growth, in July Scality closed a $22 million Series C financing round, led by Menlo Ventures and Iris Capital, with participation BPI France and all of Scality’s existing investors, including Idinvest Partners, OMNES Capital and Galileo Partners. The funds are intended to further investments in new technology, customer support and market development initiatives.

Given Scality’s strong 2013 results, the company has been able to invest in these areas without using the proceeds from this new financing round.

“Four years ago, Scality’s founders placed a ‘make-or-break’ bet that the approach taken by Google, Amazon and Facebook would spread and become the dominant architecture for IT,” said Jérôme Lecat, CEO, Scality. “We expect SMBs to leverage public cloud services, while large enterprise will have enough economies of scale to control and operate their own private cloud. Our vision is that time-sensitive storage will be in silicon and very close to compute resources, while all other storage, for things such as documents, video, big data, archive and sensor data will be deployed on standard servers managed by intelligent software, an approach now known as software defined storage. In many ways, 2013 allowed us to validate our bet, and the company is now gearing up for expansion.”