Has ExaGrid achieved a $100 million revenue run rate? The deduping backup target shipper with fast restore capabilities has announced its third record-breaking quarter in a row with accelerating revenue growth and is pondering a $500 million run rate target for 2027.
Its year-on-year revenue growth was 24 per cent in the first quarter, 50 per cent in the second quarter, and 57 per cent in this third quarter. The full year revenues are looking to be excellent.
In its third quarter, ending September 30, President and CEO Bill Andrews told us: “We are cash and P&L positive for each quarter and will be for the year. We brought on over 150 new logo customers in the quarter and 42 of those were six and seven figure deals. We are replacing low-cost primary storage disk behind backup apps as well as Dell EMC Data Domain, HPE StoreOnce, Veritas storage appliances, etc.”
He said: “We are expanding the sales team and currently have over 60 open positions worldwide in inside sales and field sales. We have over 3,100 installed customers worldwide in the upper mid-market to the enterprise.”
ExaGrid has not revealed its revenue run rate, but our impression (no more than that) is that it has achieved the $100 million mark and that is prompting its exploration of a $500 million run rate target.
Comment
The deduping backup target market is technologically mature. The only real innovations introduced in the last five years or so have been backup to all-flash systems, such as Pure’s FlashBlade for very fast restore, backup software help in speeding dedupe, such as Data Domain Boost, and public cloud-based long-term retention tiers.
All-flash target systems relied on 3bits/cell (TLC) flash which was more affordable than the then-mainstream 2bits/cell (MLC) NAND, and has now moved on to even more affordable QLC (4bits/cell) flash in systems such as Pure’s FlashArray//C.
But the bulk of backed-up data does not need all-flash speed and deduped disk provides the best mix of performance and cost. Against that background the supplier group is stable — Dell EMC with Data Domain, HPE with StoreOnce, Quantum with its DXi product plus systems from Veritas. By and large the only development is the addition of faster CPUs, more memory and larger-capacity disk drives.
As the amount of data to be backed up grows, system ingest and restore speeds become more important, and this is why ExaGrid sales are growing. It ingests data without deduping it, thus providing a fast data landing zone from which initial fast restores can be made, and then dedupes the data for longer-term and more efficient storage in a so-called retention zone.
ExaGrid’s systems also scale out and provide global deduplication, which, for example, prime competitor Data Domain does not.
So long as its competitors fail to match ExaGrid’s technology, it should keep on picking up their customers as they become dissatisfied with their installed system’s ingest and restore speeds and deduplication efficacy.
We think that there are two potential pressures ExaGrid could face. One is from Quantum, which is showing recent energetic technology development, and the other is from an expansion of all-flash backup target systems into the mainstream backup storage market. The speed of all-flash ingest and restore could then reduce ExaGrid’s advantages. There is however no indication that this is happening, or likely to happen.
