Deduplicating backup target appliance supplier ExaGrid has passed 4,800 customers and says it’s the largest independent backup storage provider behind the big primary storage vendors, meaning Dell, HPE, NetApp, Pure, Hitachi, Huawei, and IBM.
ExaGrid’s appliances are disk drive-based and ingest backup data into a so-called landing zone where it is kept in a raw state with deduplication carried out later. This means restores from the landing zone are fast as the data does not have to be rehydrated from a deduplicated state, as is the case with all inline deduplicating appliances, whether they be disk, hybrid disk and flash, or all flash.
President and CEO Bill Andrews said: “We are pleased that we have achieved 19 consecutive quarters of free cash flow and EBITDA. Revenue and EBITDA continue to grow year over year… ExaGrid continues to have an over 70 percent competitive win rate, replacing primary storage behind the backup application from Dell, HPE and NetApp and others, as well as inline deduplication appliances such as Dell Data Domain, HPE StoreOnce and NetBackup appliances.”
Revenue in the quarter grew, with Andrews telling an IT Press Tour in New York: ”We slowed down a little bit, our growth, because of all the tariff stuff. The whole IT datacenter, not AI, has slowed down… We’re still growing, but not at the same rate two years earlier.”
He said: “We replaced Data Domain more last quarter than any other quarter since I’ve been here.” He also said that, in his customer base, there is a declining presence of backup apps like Dell NetWorker and Avamar, IBM Spectrum Protect and NetBackup.
The quarter’s highlights included:
- Added over 160 new customers
- 19th consecutive quarter of cash, EBITDA, and P&L positive operations
- 50 percent of ExaGrid’s business comes from existing customer reorders
- 49 percent of the business came from outside the US
- Adding more than 14 sales regions worldwide
- Released Version 7.3.0, which included support for Rubrik and MongoDB Ops Manager, and added deduplication for encrypted Microsoft SQL Server direct dumps
Andrews told us: “Over 70 percent of new customer revenue comes from six and seven figure deals; 40 percent by deal count. The 40 percent are much bigger deals so that 40 percent by deal count is 70 percent to 80 percent of new customer bookings each quarter.”
“A $1 million deal is the same value as 20 x $50,000 deals. And that is new business. We also have a large existing customer base buying additional appliances and renewing maintenance and support with over 4,800 active installed customers buying additional appliances and renewing maintenance and support. 99.1 percent of our customers are on maintenance and support.”
In Andrews’ view, the big backup software providers – Cohesity, Commvault, Rubric and Veeam – are less interested in selling backup appliances combining hardware and software. They want to be software-defined and have customers bring their own hardware. ExaGrid is supporting a growing number of backup software suppliers so that, should customers switch backup suppliers, they can keep their ExaGrid appliances.
In our view, the next significant development in ExaGrid’s business will be an all-flash appliance and news of that is still under wraps.
