By Michael Tso, CEO and Co-Founder.
Taking a moment to reflect, 2014 was a year of tremendous growth for us, with customer count up 300%. But this is only part of the story, we made significant in-roads in all areas including engineering, sales, marketing, and support:
Global Team
- We have built global sales and marketing teams with tremendous experience and pedigree
- The teams have executed brilliantly throughout the year:
- raising Cloudian’s market recognition
- defining and prioritizing product improvements
- proving our product can win against competitors
- announcing strategic relationships with companies like AWS and Riverbed
Major Product Enhancements – Enterprise Readiness
- Proven massive linear scalability
- AWS tiering, erasure coding, GUI monitoring, automated operations
- Support for both RAID and No-RAID deployments
- Improved repair speed
- Hardware appliance
- Easy install
Industry recognition as a Global Player
- in 2013, we were ranked as the #1 best known object storage vendor in Japan
- in 2014, we continued our #1 ranking in Japan, but we had 2x customers in US and Rest of World vs Japan
- in IDC’s object storage vendor ranking, we moved from “Major Player” to the edge of “Leader”
$24M war chest
- Our round was substantially over-subscribed
- Backed by long term strategic investors, top names: Intel, Fidelity, Goldman, INCJ
- Sets us up for growth acceleration in 2015
Excellent support operations
- Gained a lot of operational support expertise in high load environments
- Gained customer trust and appreciation
- Gained significant efficiencies through better metrics, tools, and processes
We should all take a moment and be proud of our accomplishments as a team. Team is the key word here: none of these is possible with only one person. Thank you all for your hard work in 2014!
2015 Outlook
Looking ahead, 2015 promises unparalleled opportunities for us. We are seeing more and more enterprise looking into object storage – “Everywhere we dig, we find some new opportunity,” Jon Ash, Vice President of Worldwide Sales.
We more than doubled our sales team in Q4 – most have been on board and can make an immediate impact in Q1.
The market opportunity is enormous: total data volume is doubling every 2 years, driven by IoT, mobile, and big data. In the next 5 years, new data created will be 5x of all the data we have today. The world of storage needs to change fundamentally to accommodate all the new data. Object storage, what we live and breathe here at Cloudian, is the only technology that can keep up with this growth.
Get ready for 2015, it will be a defining year for us.
— Mike