Recap of the 67th IT Press Tour in Sofia, Bulgaria

The 67th edition of The IT Press Tour took place in Sofia, Bulgaria, a few days ago.Designed as a press-focused event, it brings together media representatives and a diverse range of enterprises and organizations for in-depth conversations spanning IT infrastructure, cloud computing, networking, cybersecurity, data management and storage, big data and analytics, and the growing role of AI across all these fields.

Six companies joined that edition, listed here in alphabetical order: Caeves Technology, Leil, NGX Storage, PoINT Software & Systems, StorPool Storage and Storware.

Caeves Technology
Caeves Technology, Inc. is an American startup based in Morristown, NJ, with offices in the US, the Netherlands, and India. Its founding team comes from Talon Storage Solutions, co-founded in 2012, known for its FAST edge caching technology, and acquired by NetApp in March 2020. After five years growing NetApp’s cloud data services, the team launched Caeves in 2024, emerging from stealth with its flagship product, Caeves Intelligent Deep Storage, first in private preview on Microsoft Azure in August 2025, then generally available worldwide in February 2026.

The company addresses two core enterprise challenges. Economically, 30% of storage budgets are spent on cold or redundant data with no business value, while data volumes double every two years. From an AI readiness standpoint, 85% of unstructured data is never touched by analytics or AI, and once archived, it becomes invisible to tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure AI Search, undermining enterprise AI investments.

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Caeves Intelligent Deep Storage is a cloud-native platform built exclusively on Azure, offering intelligent tiering, SMB/NFS multi-protocol access, and native Microsoft 365 integration. It deploys in under 30 minutes within the customer’s own Azure tenant, with no data ever leaving their environment. Automatic tiering from Hot to Cool to Archive can reduce storage costs by up to 70%. Its Copilot Connector indexes archives directly into Microsoft Graph, no custom RAG pipeline needed, at just $0.01–0.03/GB/month, with no proprietary lock-in.

Pricing is capacity-based via Microsoft Marketplace, starting with a free 5TB tier. Organizations managing over 200TB typically recover costs within the first month.
The roadmap includes a minor release in September 2026 and a major version in Q1 2027, adding an Enterprise Management Plane and an MCP Server integrating with Claude, Gemini, Azure OpenAI, and Microsoft Foundry. The long-term vision is to evolve Caeves into a full data intelligence platform within the Azure ecosystem.

Leil
Leil is an Estonian startup founded in 2022 and headquartered in Tallinn, built by engineers with deep expertise in parallel file systems and distributed storage. Its core mission is to bridge the gap between the economic potential of high-capacity hard disk drives and legacy software architectures designed for flash/SSD storage, making HDDs perform the way they were physically built to. We met the company for the second time at the 67th IT Press Tour in Sofia, Bulgaria, having first encountered them in Rome in April 2024. The presentation was led by Alexander Ragel, CEO and co-founder.

Leil addresses what it calls the “SMR Paradox.” While hyperscalers like Google, Meta, and AWS have already adopted Shingled Magnetic Recording drives at 100% using custom software, the remaining 90% of the enterprise market sits at virtually zero SMR adoption, simply because no accessible, enterprise-grade software exists to manage these drives properly. Legacy architectures treat high-capacity HDDs like slow SSDs, wasting 30–60% of potential capacity economics and requiring months of tuning and specialist staff.

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The product stack has two layers: Leil FS, an open-source parallel file system optimized for HDDs, and Leil OS, the commercial enterprise distribution with a management UI and 24/7 SLA support, both powered by the proprietary SMRT Engine. Key claims include a 25% usable capacity gain over generic SDS on identical hardware, tape-level costs from €0.99/TB/month without tape’s retrieval delays, and deployment in just 10 minutes versus 6–12 months for traditional SMR integration.

Use cases span AI/HPC warm-tier storage, active archives, enterprise backup, media post-production, Kubernetes, and CCTV. Leil goes to market through a 100% channel-first model with technology partnerships including WD, Seagate, Nvidia, and Intel. Built on GPL-3.0 open-source foundations, customers always retain full ownership of their data.

NGX Storage
NGX Storage is a European enterprise storage vendor founded in 2015 and headquartered in Ankara, Türkiye, within the Hacettepe Teknokent university-linked technology park. Branding itself as “Made in Europe,” the company runs R&D centers in India and operates across four continents. We met NGX for the second time at the 67th IT Press Tour in Sofia, Bulgaria, having first introduced them to the world in Lisbon in December 2022. The session was led by CEO Beyhan Çalışkan.

NGX was founded on a straightforward premise: storage should be powerful, flexible, and manageable across every protocol from a single platform. Its core argument is that enterprise storage has become fragmented and operationally overwhelming, organizations today juggle separate NAS, SAN, and object storage platforms, spending more time managing storage than using their data. The AI era compounds this, demanding microsecond NVMe latency, massive concurrent data streams, and extreme throughput at scale.

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NGX’s response is a unified portfolio spanning five product lines:

• the NGX-H hybrid system scaling to 38PB
• the NGX-AFA, an all-flash variant targeting latency-sensitive workloads up to 34PB
• the NGX ExaScale, a scale-out NVMe block storage platform for AI and HPC
• the NGX HyperIO, a scale-out object storage platform with geo-dispersed protection and self-healing and
• a Scale-Out NAS capability built for AI, HPC, and data lake architectures at exabyte scale. All products share enterprise features including inline compression, deduplication, full RAID levels, and a unified management GUI. MetroScale Cluster delivers active-active deployments with zero RTO and zero RPO

Serving verticals from finance and healthcare to defence and media, NGX counts 99% enterprise customers across virtualization, AI/ML, backup, HPC, and disaster recovery use cases. Technology partners include Intel, Nvidia, Veeam, VMware, and Western Digital. The company is actively expanding into Poland, Spain, Malaysia, South Korea, and the UAE, while developing its third-generation unified storage platform.

PoINT Software & Systems
PoINT Software & Systems GmbH is a privately held German ISV founded in 1994, with storage and archiving roots stretching back to 1985 through work with Philips and DEC. Certified as “Software Made in Europe,” the company has received the Storage Newsletter Cloud Storage Award 2026 and the EU Commission’s “Go Green & Be Resilient” award for Best Digital Solution. We met PoINT for the second time at the 67th IT Press Tour in Sofia, Bulgaria, having first encountered them in Paris in September 2022. The session was presented by co-founder and CEO Thomas Thalmann.

PoINT’s mission centers on helping organizations manage data growth efficiently, reduce costs, and build cyber-resilient storage infrastructures. Its approach focuses on intelligent data tiering, placing the right data in the right place at the right time, using cost-efficient media like tape, which consumes no energy when idle and provides natural air-gapping against ransomware.

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The company offers three core products:

• The PoINT Storage Manager handles file tiering and archiving, moving inactive files from primary NAS to secondary storage using policy-based rules while maintaining transparent access for end users, with over 200 installations worldwide
• The PoINT Archival Gateway delivers S3-to-tape functionality, exposing an Amazon S3-compatible API while writing directly to tape with no intermediate disk layer, available in Compact and Enterprise editions scaling up to 153.6 GB/s throughput and 392PB of native capacity via the ORION S3 turnkey system
• The PoINT Data Replicator handles backup and replication of object and file data, supporting S3-to-S3 and File-to-S3 modes with key use cases including cloud repatriation, legacy NAS migration, and continuous backup

Notable customers include Daimler, Sixt, Amgen, EMBL-EBI, and the Max-Planck-Institut. EMBL-EBI, managing hundreds of petabytes, achieved read/write throughput exceeding 1PB per week using the Archival Gateway. Technology partners include HPE, NetApp, Dell EMC, Fujitsu, and Cloudian.

StorPool Storage
StorPool Storage, founded in 2011 in Bulgaria, positions itself as the leader in modern software-defined block storage. Entirely self-funded, profitable, and growing, the company has roughly 60 employees across Bulgaria and the US, serving over 1 million end users in 30+ countries. We met StorPool for the fourth time at the 67th IT Press Tour in Sofia, Bulgaria, a fitting location, with CEO Boyan Ivanov, CTO Boyan Krosnov, and Head of Products Alexander Ivanov all presenting at the event.

At its core, StorPool delivers an ultra-fast, highly reliable, and linearly scalable block storage platform. Key technical highlights include sub-0.1ms latency, 100+ million IOPS, five-nines availability, and scalability from 10TB to 50+ petabytes, all while workloads remain live. The platform integrates with OpenStack, CloudStack, Proxmox, Kubernetes, and other major KVM-ecosystem platforms, and includes built-in backup and disaster recovery tools.

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StorPool frames its growth around four major industry trends. The VMware exit driven by Broadcom’s acquisition has pushed customers toward alternatives, with StorPool offering a drop-in vSAN replacement, its all-in-one StorPool One platform at 64% lower five-year TCO, and an Oracle Virtualization combination yielding 71% savings versus VMware Cloud Foundation. EU data sovereignty concerns position StorPool well as a fully European company, participating in the EuroStack initiative. AI workloads are driving new storage demands, with StorPool powering GPU-as-a-Service and AI infrastructure for customers including Redmond.ai. Rising hardware costs round out the picture, with StorPool’s HCI mode consuming just 10–15% CPU/RAM overhead and consolidating 20+ physical components down to 7.

Notable customer outcomes include a 15% margin increase for CloudSigma, 60% higher per-rack VM density for Namecheap, and a reduction from 50 to just 5 storage staff at Dustin. End-user workloads running on StorPool-powered infrastructure include those of NASA, ESA, CERN, Siemens, and Deutsche Börse Group.

Storware
Storware is a Warsaw-based data protection company founded in 2013, built on an early conviction that the market was too VMware-centric and that open-source environments like KVM and XEN were flying without enterprise-grade protection. We met Storware for the first time at the 67th IT Press Tour in Sofia, Bulgaria, where CEO Paweł Mączka framed the presentation as a “ghost story about data security” told across three chapters, the Ghost of Past (2013–2023), the Ghost of Present (2024–2026), and the Ghost of Future (2026 and beyond).

The company’s early bets have proven prescient. Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware triggered licensing increases of up to 1,000%, forcing 300,000 enterprises to rethink their infrastructure, exactly the migration wave Storware anticipated. Key milestones include being first to deliver endpoint backup at global enterprise scale in 2015, pioneering Microsoft 365 data protection in 2018, a Global Resell Agreement with IBM in 2019, co-engineered appliance solutions with Dell Technologies in 2020, and selection by OpenText as its data protection layer in 2022. A fourth major OEM announcement is teased for 2026.

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The Storware platform covers virtual machines across VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix, Proxmox, and more; containers via Kubernetes and OpenShift; private cloud including all major OpenStack distributions; applications, databases, and OS agents. It claims the #1 position for OpenStack backup since 2019, is Red Hat certified, and was the first backup vendor VergeOS called for a native integration. Security features include IsoLayer Air-Gap isolation, immutable write-once backups, end-to-end encryption, MFA, RBAC, and full NIS2/GDPR audit trails. The platform deploys as software-only, a hardware+software NVMe appliance scaling from 10TB to 100TB raw capacity, or fully managed SaaS.

Storware counts over 4,000 customers across 150+ countries and 300+ partners, trusted by Disney, Cisco, Lenovo, and Garmin. The roadmap centers on data gravity, using existing backup infrastructure as a migration engine for VMware-to-OpenStack and Citrix/XCP-ng-to-OpenStack transitions, alongside OpenStack Replication DR with RPO measured in seconds and a next-generation NVMe backup appliance.

The 68th edition of The IT Press Tour will take place in Boston, MA, the week of June 8th, 2026.