Excellent FY23 for Lightbits Labs
3x increase in software revenue compared to FY22
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on February 14, 2024 at 2:02 pmLightbits Labs Ltd. (Lightbits) announces its performance results from 2023, marked by a 3x increase in software revenue compared to the previous year.
It attributes its growth to increasingly steady demand from enterprise organizations seeking cost-efficient cloud storage with the flexibility to provision storage resources where and when they are needed without compromising on performance, scalability, or data services. It appeals to business leaders with a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, offering license portability across clouds while delivering the same superior performance and robust data services capabilities across any deployment platform-on-premises or public clouds.
Additional indicators that its modern, software-defined cloud data platform is well-positioned in the marketplace is a Y/Y 2x increase in pipeline, revenue, and average deal size across the board. Customer growth is attributed to the expanded use cases for the firm’s data platform. Lightbits built its business with specialty Cloud Service Providers, which remains a core focus. Last year saw the expansion of use cases with Lightbits becoming an integral component of cloud infrastructure for Online Retailers building eCommerce platforms on-premises and in the public cloud, AI Clouds, and global Fortune 500 financial services organizations launching their own cloud services. The company’s growth aligns with the broader investment trend, as Fortune Business Insights projects the cloud market to expand from $480 billion in 2022 to an estimated $1,700 billion by 2029, registering a compelling CAGR of 19.9%.1
Having launched Lightbits as a Managed Service on Azure last Fall, the company remains poised for sustained innovation and growth with Lightbits for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) offering an effective alternative to enterprise organizations that want to migrate their performance-sensitive workloads to the cloud. The firm is the first NVMe over TCP external storage target for AVS promising scalable high-performance, consistent low latency, and predictable low storage costs. And because AVS is a fully consistent VMware platform, organizations can “lift and shift” their workloads without expensive application refactoring. For organizations using container orchestration or running top-tier databases Lightbits on Azure also provides cost-efficient, resilient storage for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Oracle on Azure.
Since launching its global channel program Luminary Program, the vendor has experienced a surge in interest with the channel base increasing by 22% from the previous year. The differentiated data platform enables partners to capture a greater share of the growing cloud market which grows top-line revenue. For SIs, resellers, and other organizations with a cloud practice interested in joining the program, go to the Lightbits Luminary Global Partner Program website or email partners@lightbitslabs.com.
A summary of key accomplishments follows.
Product innovation
- In September 2023, the product was launched in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace
- In 2023, the firm received 2 more patents, for a total of 18 patents and more pending, reinforcing its commitment to disrupting the market with innovative and relevant cloud solutions:
- Awarded Patent 11,789,632 for a “system and method for data placement in multiple tier storage systems.”
- Awarded Patent 11,740,804 for a “system and method for performing data striping.”
Key announcements
- In September 2023, the company launched the Global Lightbits Luminary Program
- In March 2023, it announced it joined the Microsoft For Startups founders Hub
Industry validation
It received several significant industry awards in 2023:
- It Wins CRN‘s Overall Data Storage Solution Of The Year for the 2nd year in a row
- Was recognized as one of CRN’s Top 100 Storage Solutions For 2023
- TechTarget names the company One of The Best Enterprise Cloud Storage Products
- Named to CRN’s List of Tech Innovators
Patrick McGregor, chief product officer, Crusoe Cloud, said: “Lightbits has been instrumental in helping us build a high-performance, climate-aligned AI cloud platform. They continue to be a great partner, providing continual improvements in product usability and high quality, hands on support for our team.”
Read Crusoe’s blog, How We Built an AI Cloud Powered by Lightbits
Stefan Majer, CTO, x-cellent technologies GmbH and metalstack.cloud, said: “No other storage solution had the same price-performance ratio and tight integ, saidration into Kubernetes. In particular, the achievable latency with Lightbits is outstanding.”
Lightbits will be demonstrating fast, persistent, cost-efficient storage for Kubernetes with metalstack.cloud, a managed Kubernetes service, at KubeCon Europe, March 19-22, 2024, in Paris, France.
Eran Kirzner, co-founder and CEO, Lightbits, said: “I am immensely proud of our accomplishments last year. The solutions we launched deliver efficient, flexible, and resilient cloud storage for performance-intensive workloads at scale. Business leaders who want to remain competitive by innovating faster while controlling cloud storage costs have to architect agile infrastructure with software-defined everything. Our solution delivers simple provisioning, with the flexibility to move storage services where they are needed. We thank our customers for their trust and partners for their contribution to our success and look forward to continuing to shape the future of cloud data, together.”
Scott Sinclair, practice director, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: “Our research illustrates that a majority of organizations turn to the cloud for strategic benefits in terms of superior innovation and accelerated time to value. That same research illustrates that cloud migration is hindered by the ability to control cloud storage costs. The Lightbits solution breaks the barriers to cloud adoption by delivering the performance requirements for today’s workloads at scale while delivering predictable and lower cloud storage costs and reducing overall TCO. We expect this to be an especially compelling solution for organizations who want to migrate their virtualized database workloads to the cloud leveraging the Lightbits for the Azure VMware Solution.”
Ned Engelke, CTO, EVOTEK, a Lightbits Luminary Genius Partner, said: “The exceptional growth and demand for Lightbits’ innovative cloud storage mirror the market’s recognition of its ability to solve enterprise data center cloud modernization problems. Last year’s success was nothing short of remarkable, jointly acquiring a Fortune 100 financial services customer and growing our businesses with new use cases for cloud-architected data centers.”
Additional Resources
- Lightbits on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace
- Storage options for Oracle on Azure VMs
- Lightbits on the AWS Marketplace
1 Fortune Business Insights, Cloud Computing Market Size, Share & Covid-19 Impact Analysis, By Service Type (Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS)), By Deployment Model (Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud), By Industry (BFSI, IT and Telecommunications, Government, Consumer Goods & Retail, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Others), and Regional Forecast, 2022-2029.
Comments
Founded in 2016 in Israel, the company has raised so far around $112 million according to Crunchbase. We see some very famous investors with Dell Capital, Intel Capital, Cisco Investments or Micron among others and Avigdor Willenz, co-founder and chairman, who sold Annapurna Labs to Amazon in 2015 for $370 million.
Active player in the modern storage network era with its block SDS working on NVMe-oF promoting TCP, the team has evolved its strategy to address now cloud oriented workloads. It's worth to mention that the company is the inventor of the NVMe/TCP transport part.
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The early messages and products with a disk array and even a mezzanine card has been reduced to focus exclusively on software and its capability to run everywhere. Of course what is kept is paramount, the capability to decouple storage from the compute and scale it independently. The product is also rich delivering interesting performance and protection levels.
It appears that this block category led by usual gorillas is tough to penetrate, at least on-premises, with a direct competition strategy as end-users require a full solution, ready to use and partners are under vendors pressure as well. This market climate has a serious impact on the business model of such companies, and we count a few ones that all experiment some latencies to take off. In other words, will they ever take off alone? That translates into some path with OEMs and technology integrations that could help growing the business but no guarantees. The other factor is the negative feeling about SDS as it put all category players in the same standard group reducing differentiators over time. The fact that they all use COTS and here TCP, Ethernet... makes all players look the same. And at the end, we know that the standard battle also influences significantly prices. So the business in that domain is tough.
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And the vendor was in that situation and even with some partnerships with key players, that activity didn't really take off. What the team decided with a radical new positioning with the Cloud Data Platform, a bit generic term as it can apply to many various players, shaked their market approach and seems to work today with the results mentioned in this news. The firm immediately explains the value on their solution and execute a very efficient plan for Azure. This choice was a clever one as the block storage offering appears to be a bit limited on Azure. They also added AWS and we should see Google to reach a comprehensive picture.
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On the company level, the management team appears to be stable with just a few tweaks. The very last news is the promotion of Abel Gordon as CTO, being chief system architect since 2016.
Globally, there still is a disconnect with the power of the solution, what you can do with it and what it can deliver and the visibility and success of the company and the product. People who try and adopt the solution love it, no doubt about it, but how do they find it? They need a real boost in the coming months.
If we try to put this kind of business in perspective for the coming quarters, we anticipate an acquisition from a major storage player, one who needs to stay in the race and who has some difficulties to innovate... We'll see.
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