A message from the CEO, Gal Naor
A lot of exciting things have been happening at StorONE since my last update. During 2020 and through the beginning of 2021, we scaled our company exponentially. We built a world-class sales team that has penetrated North America, Europe, and Asia, enlarged our already-strong support team, and increased our digital presence. Our focus for Q2 of 2021 was to deepen and strengthen our company while expanding our offerings.
Partnerships: Azure, Climb, Spinnaker, and DIS
During Q2, StorONE continued on the path of partnering with major technology companies and distributors. In 2020 we announced our strategic partnership with Intel to deliver the “All-Flash Array.Next” (AFAn) to the enterprise storage market. We also recently announced collaborations with Seagate and Microsoft Azure. Current negotiations continue with other major companies, and announcements are forthcoming.
I am incredibly proud that StorONE’s technology, which showcases the capabilities of storage hardware innovation, continues to impress the tech giants.
In June, Bill Cordero joined StorONE’s leadership team as vice president of worldwide channels. He is responsible for executing the launch of our new PartnerONE program and for expanding the global presence of the company’s Enterprise Storage Platform. Cordero is an industry veteran with a proven track record of success, and I am thrilled that he joined the company.
By the end of Q2, we completed the sales kickoff of three value-added distributors.
We partnered with Climb Channel Solutions and Spinnaker. Climb is one of the largest American distributors for technology vendors with solutions for security, data management, connectivity, storage & HCI, virtualization, cloud and software, and ALM. Spinnaker, the European industry leader, delivers innovative supply chain solutions that help clients remain competitive in the global marketplace. Additionally, we completed the certification process with Daiwabo Information Systems (DIS), the largest distributor in Japan. These world-class partnerships have resulted in hundreds of registered opportunities from partners, and we continue to see the numbers increase weekly.
Technology: Backup & NVMe-oF
When presenting StorONE to investors, I explain that one of StorONE’s key differentiators is that 80% of first meetings translate into an identified customer opportunity because we solve all the use cases within the Storage Use Case Spectrum.
StorONE recently identified that backup storage targets are a high pain point for customers. With StorONE’s S1:Backup storage target technology, you can start as small as 50TBs and scale to 20PBs with the same storage controllers. You can also mix and match different drive sizes without reconfiguring backup volumes. Our intelligent integration of flash is ideal for block-level backup and instant recovery features common within today’s modern backup solutions like Veeam and Rubrik. S1:Backup can quickly grow to provide storage for archive storage as well. Later customers can continue to expand, using the same controllers, to file-serving, virtualization, databases, and even HPC workloads thanks to our production-class availability and performance.
During Q2, we also added NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) to our protocol offering. NVMe-oF is a network protocol used to communicate between a host and a storage system over a network.
Some updates could be considered just another feature, but NVMe-oF is far from that. For some companies, NVMe-oF is their entire product. With StorONE’s Enterprise Storage Platform, it is simply another protocol that IT can turn on as quickly as flipping a switch. NVMe-oF is an ideal example of the logic behind StorONE’s eight-year R&D investment in redesigning the old storage system software and the old storage IO stack from the ground up. We went from no NVMe-oF support to complete support within six months, and it is directly integrated into the platform.
Sales/Marketing: Record digital indicators, increased sales, very optimistic projections
Our increased visibility efforts have paid off, and Q2 was marked by record website indicators — traffic, time spent on the site, registrations to webinars, etc.
StorONE’s sales momentum is powerful going into Q3. We have completed Phase 1 of building out the sales team, and the majority of the team has now been with the company for 6+ months. As we begin Q3, our pipeline has grown three-fold.
We maintain several dozen customers with installed systems, and there are more in production. NASA, America’s Test Kitchen, University of Limerick, and many more companies have purchased StorONE’s platform in the past few months. Our success in the market is getting the attention of industry analysts and press. SearchDataBackup interviewed our customer America’s Test Kitchen and BlocksAndFiles recently gave an analysis of the importance of our University of Limerick installation. Thanks to the creativity and dedication of our talented sales and marketing teams, we already have many verbal commitments that we are expecting to generate revenue by the end of August. The first half of 2021 amounted to 10x the revenue of 2020 and we are projecting a very successful second half of 2021.
Thank You!
Most importantly, I thank our customers for their continued support and trust in our innovative approach to storage utilization. StorONE is excited for Q3, and I trust that you will be too!
If you would like to hear more about the company and our plans for this quarter, don’t hesitate to contact me directly to set up a call.
Wishing you an excellent end of summer and continued health,
Gal Naor
Co-Founder & CEO
