Dedupe to disk backup target array supplier Exagrid notched up 30 per cent growth in the third quarter of 2018, taking revenue to a record. But a record what?
As a rule, we ignore press releases from privately-held startups touting their revenue growth figures – as they never say what their sales actually are. But for once we will make an exception for Exagrid, even though it has done that very annoying thing – trumpeted sales growth from an invisible number.
FWIW, we think the company’s revenues currently exceed $50m and we can deduce some interesting facts from its press release. In July 2018 Exagrid said it was expanding its worldwide sales capability, and hinted at a 2019 IPO. We infer that this is on track for sometime in 2020.
Although Exagrid doesn’t say what its revenues are, it has revealed some previous quarterly growth rates:
- 22 per cent revenue growth for 2018’s second quarter
- 20 per cent in the first 2018 quarter
- 20 per cent in the final 2017 quarter
And we have 30 per cent in the third quarter.
We’ve asked the company if it can say more about its revenue number. In response CEO and President Bill Andrews told us via email: “We don’t disclose our revenue. We sell against Dell, HP, NTAP, IBM, Commvault, Veritas so any number would look small compared to those players.”
Cash burn? What cash burn!
But he says the company has 2,400 unique customers and more than 10,000 Exagrid systems installed worldwide. And he notes the company is gaining market share at the expense of its competitors and will end calendar year 2018 with 22 per cent growth over last year. Exagrid is gunning for 30 per cent growth in 2019, according to Andrews.
Also, the company appears to be profitable or at least not losing too much money. “Unlike other high tech companies, we are not burning cash and in fact we have not raised money in over 7 years,” Andrews says. “We are not a Tintri, Tegile, Violin, SimpliVity, Data Gravity, etc. that will run out of money and hit the wall.”
A prepared quote from Andrews said: “ExaGrid now offers the largest system in the industry – one that can take in up to a 2PB full backup at up to 432TB/hr., which is 3X faster than its closest competitor,” understood to be Dell EMC’s Data Domain.
Andrews tells us Exagrid’s product is: “3 times faster for ingest over Dell Data Domain, 20 times faster for restores over Dell Data Domain [and] half the price of Dell Data Domain in over 100TB accounts, which is where we focus.”
We await an upcoming Gartner magic quadrant for data centre backup and recovery which contain some useful metrics for measuring Exagrid’s market position. However, analysts on the Gartner team have left the firm to join vendors. So we will maybe have to wait a little longer.
Larger Mass.
Exagrid is moving corporate offices at the end of the year, Andrews says, to “larger and much nicer space in Marlborough Massachusetts. The new space is very high tech looking, it was the previous VCE space which was the joint venture between EMC and Cisco that went belly up. As you can imagine EMC and Cisco really built out the space to look like 2020 high tech space.”
