A briefing from Nasuni revealed that the cloud file services supplier’s growth is continuing unabated and that its deals are getting larger.
B&F met Jim Liddle, Nasuni’s chief innovation officer and the ex-CEO and founder of Storage Made Easy – the UK startup acquired by Nasuni in mid-2022. Nasuni is one of four enterprise cloud file services suppliers – the other three being CTERA, Egnyte and Panzura. The common factors are a cloud (or on-prem) object storage base, with file services made available to edge sites and users on a file sync ‘n’ share foundation, plus lots of services on top – such as ransomware attack detection and recovery.
Nasuni passed the $100 million ARR mark in January his year and Liddle told us: “We’re still growing at the same rate.”
There were about 750 Nasuni customers at the start of the year and the number has risen to more than 800. Liddle told us: “Nasuni has more than 4,300 AEC locations worldwide” – AEC being the Architecture, Engineering and Construction market. Egnyte reported it had more than 3,000 AEC customers in September, when it claimed more than 17,000 enterprise customers.
Liddle explained that Nasuni was: “continuing to see seven-figure deals and has signed an eight-figure deal in the last 30 days.” That’s a deal worth between $10 million and just under $100 million, and it’s one of the largest deals in Nasuni’s history. This comes after Nasuni hired a CRO, Pete Agresta, in January, with a brief to grow its enterprise business. Agresta was Pure Storage’s VP For enterprise sales.
The sales effort has been strengthened with the appointment of Matthew Grantham as head of worldwide partners, and Curt Douglas as VP of sales for its western region.
Recent Nasuni news
- Nasuni hires new chief marketeer in go-for-more-growth push – October 4, 2023,
- Nasuni working with Presidio to manage AWS costs – September 6, 2023,
- Data management biz Nasuni eyes data intelligence – April 6, 2023,
- Nasuni makes new board hire after bumper 2022 – January 31, 2023,
- Nasuni to grow bigger by getting deeper into enterprises with new CRO –January 21, 2023
- Nasuni buys Storage Made Easy – June 28, 2022,
- Nasuni buys DBM Cloud Systems – May 3, 2022,
- Nasuni scores $60 million to fight file services war – March 24, 2022
Competition and AI
Liddle noted that Nasuni is replacing NetApp in some deals and Panzura in others. It does not meet CTERA nor Egnyte in competitive bids, suggesting that these two companies operate in different market sectors.
The surge in the AI market, led by generative AI, is encouraging organizations to have a more encompassing view of their data assets so that they can be organized and curated for presentation to AI analysis and processing. They have data visibility challenges, with one contact telling him: “I can’t even see past the shadow cast by the data mountain.”
He reckons that some of the biggest obstacles are data silos: “Large organizations have hundreds of NAS devices and file servers and other legacy systems implemented during the pandemic. They need to consolidate in order to get to a single source of truth and to turn data into an opportunity vs just a cost. AI is proving to be a catalyst for this change.”
“We have focused on a strategy for companies to combat these challenges and be able to leverage their unstructured file data for AI – to be announced in in Q1 2024 with complimentary tools and services.”
This involves making it so that customers “can easily integrate Nasuni stored data into their AI pipelines/workflow. The destination and resources that underpin that can be decided upon by the company.” For example, “Nasuni’s global file system can be accessible through a single cloud (or on-premises) located edge device that can accessed to facilitate the data required for an AI pipeline process.”
Comment
Our supposition is that, given continued growth in 2024, Nasuni could be considering an IPO for the 2025 period.
