Coldago Map 2025 for Object Storage

Coldago Research, an independent market research and analysis firm, recently released the 7th edition of its Object Storage Map.

The 2025 edition evaluated 13 vendors and identified 10 market leaders: Cloudian, DataCore, Dell, Huawei, IBM, MinIO, Pure Storage, Quantum, Scality, and VAST Data.

For each Map, Coldago gathers extensive data over a 12-month period through engagements with vendors, end users, and partners, as well as in-depth reviews of product announcements, customer success stories, and strategic partnerships. The Map does not attempt to predict future directions; instead, it reflects current market positions based on historical performance, with particular emphasis on the past 12 months. When applicable and needed, vendors are asked to complete a dedicated evaluation matrix covering product portfolios and features relevant to the Map’s focus, along with business operations, user profiles, and installed base. The Coldago team then processes this information – segmenting, grouping, and normalizing the data – to enable consistent comparison and ranking.

Coldago evaluates and ranks companies rather than individual products, taking into account all offerings relevant to the specific Map for each vendor. Rather than limiting a vendor’s representation to a single product, the analysis reflects the full scope of its presence in the targeted storage domain. As a result, a vendor may be represented by a single product if it is the only relevant offering, or by a broader product portfolio if multiple solutions apply. The objective is to accurately capture each company’s market footprint. Products are included in the matrix only if they have been generally available for at least six months and are actively promoted as official GA releases. While there is no minimum company age requirement, vendors must demonstrate production deployments for each product, ensuring a baseline level of market adoption. Coldago also applies its own selection criteria, excluding SMB-focused and entry-level offerings from the analysis.

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The evaluation matrix enables the analyst team to assess multiple dimensions, including company profile, business and strategy, and products and technologies.

• At the company level, the analysis considers factors such as executive leadership, founding team and background, historical performance, key successes and setbacks, years in operation, geographic footprint, workforce size, and funding status. This includes venture capital involvement – total capital raised, number of funding rounds, and investor profiles – as well as IPO status, market visibility, and potential exit scenarios.
• From a business and strategy perspective, the evaluation covers business models, go-to-market approaches, alliances, partnerships and OEM relationships, pricing strategies, revenue metrics, financial ratios, transaction activity, and operational efficiency. It also examines supported use cases, vertical market focus, solution strategies, customer references, installed base size, customer retention and repeat business, competitive displacement, product uninstalls, and overall business conduct.
• The product and technology assessment focuses on product–market fit, current releases, product evolution and roadmap, release cadence, intellectual property and patent portfolio, development agility, and internal product design and architecture. Additional criteria include the integration of new technologies, adoption of industry standards, participation and contribution to standards bodies, feature depth, access methods, data protection capabilities, services, cloud integration options, and performance. Public participation in official benchmarks and the availability of published results are also taken into account. The analysis further considers the use of open-source components and third-party integrations, with particular attention paid to true technology ownership. In this context, Coldago places higher value on solutions designed and developed in-house rather than those primarily assembled through external integration. Beyond data protection, incidents such as data corruption, loss of data integrity, or regression issues experienced by customers may negatively impact a vendor’s ranking.

Once collected, normalized, and weighted, this information is processed through a series of proprietary formulas to generate comparative indexes. These algorithms – forming the core intellectual framework of the study – translate raw data into the Coldago Index and ultimately the Coldago Map.

As a reminder, Coldago ranks companies based on their demonstrated market presence and performance over the past 12 months, rather than on future expectations, potential, or hypothetical scenarios.