What the cloud started and the pandemic accelerated is now charging full speed ahead: the data-centric economy is here to stay. Looking back on 2021, it was an invigorating year for data startups, new cloud services and major storage companies alike: tech companies are rushing to bring a data-enabled nirvana to enterprise IT buyers. But wait: is this merely a capital endeavor? No. There are human, societal benefits from excelling at the responsible curation, management and analysis of the ineffable volumes of data being stored in IT systems around the globe. Think more life-saving medicines. Think cleaner lakes, rivers and oceans. Think more efficient, healthier food production. Think smarter, less wasteful supply chains. Think safer, friendlier city streets. It’s only with good data, innovative technology and empowered leaders that we can make progress in solving these critical issues. Below, we review some of the top stories in the data management industry from 2021, followed by the most notable Komprise headlines of the year.
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Data Management Industry Highlights of 2021
Hybrid Cloud Moves
The Next Platform reports on IDC data that shows spending on public cloud infrastructure deployed on premises such as AWS Outposts and Microsoft Azure Stack is climbing. “Between 2019 and 2025, IDC reckons that spending on cloud outposts will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 151.8 over those years to $14 billion.”
Smaller Clouds Get Attention
Wasabi announced that it raised $112 million in Series C financing, bringing its total equity financing raised to $219 million as well as expanding its storage services to Asia. Cloudflare introduced R2 (a play-off of AWS S3). Cloudflare’s attack on the object storage market will be to target the thermal exhaust port of AWS S3 by not charging egress fees on R2 storage.
Google Tackles Data Silos
Google launched three new services for “an integrated data cloud.” The new services include Dataplex for intelligent data management, Analytics Hub, to enable data access and sharing and Datastream to enhance data replication across multicloud environments.
NAS Cloud Backups Gain Popularity
It’s not a big surprise that enterprises are preferring the cloud to other offsite backup options given the favorable economics and faster restore times. “More cloud providers have pivoted in the direction of NAS compatibility in recent years. Some options include Backblaze B2, Google Drive, Dropbox, MEGA, OpenStack Swift and Amazon Glacier.” There are hidden costs for cloud backups, however. Our blog post on cloud tiering breaks it down.
No-Code ML
The world’s biggest cloud unveiled Amazon SageMaker Canvas at AWS re:Invent. “The promise is that it will allow anybody to build machine learning prediction models, using a point-and-click interface.” Fitting nicely into the citizen science trend, we expect more no-code and low-code AI and ML tools to enter the market in 2022.
Databricks’ Billion-Dollar Splash in Cloud Data Warehouses
Data lakehouse provider Databricks raises $1.6 billion in Series H, putting the company at a $38 billion valuation. As one of the largest VC deals in 2021, Databricks is leading the charge to unleash enterprise data to the cloud for the next generation of data analytics innovation.
Flash-Based Object Storage Grows
Blocks & Files cites an ESG report that the performance needs of new workloads in application development, AI, and analytics are driving adoption of flash-based object storage. The lower cost of object storage is also a driver. While 95 percent of organizations are using flash storage systems, only 23 per cent of those use all-flash object storage. Most (87 percent) of those not currently using it intend to evaluate the technology over the next year. Object storage is also becoming a sound strategy for ransomware defense. “Data stored securely on an immutable backup system makes it fixed and unchangeable, meaning that it cannot be deleted or modified. This is especially important when it comes to ransomware as data on an immutable backup is impervious to infections,” as reported in ITProPortal.
Silos Impeding Data Analytics
Hybrid cloud infrastructure has become pervasive in enterprise IT, bringing those inevitable data silos as organizations store data in many different places across on premises, cloud and edge systems. Tech Republic cites a survey by NewVantage that revealed over half of companies (54.9%) felt that they were behind in areas of data and analytics with up to 43% of data being unutilized—due largely to those silos. One answer to the barriers of data silos in analytics is a data fabric, which Gartner defines as: “a design concept that serves as an integrated layer (fabric) of data and connecting processes…which leverages both human and machine capabilities to access data in place or support its consolidation where appropriate.”
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Komprise Intelligent Data Management: Year in Review
Komprise Began the Year with Excellent Numbers from Previous 12 Months
The company achieved record growth in 2020, despite the challenges of the pandemic. Key growth drivers included: unstructured data under management grew by over 300% and a record number of major enterprises signed up as new customers.
Komprise and Pure Extended Their Partnership
With the announcement that Komprise will provide Komprise Asynchronous Replication to deliver reliable data replication for Pure FlashArray™ file customers.
Komprise Intelligent Data Management 4.0
Announced in June, delivered new multi-site management capabilities. Global enterprise IT organizations and service providers can now deliver storage-as-a-service with a consolidated view across all data centers and cloud locations while giving storage managers the ability to manage each site per local requirements and policies.
Krishna Subramanian, Co-Founder, President and COO, Named a “2021 Top 100 Women of Influence” by Silicon Valley Business Journal
She has built three successful venture-backed IT businesses and held senior leadership positions at major tech companies, including Sun Microsystems and Citrix. In her words: “Simplifying complex problems through technology motivates me. I co-founded Komprise to tackle the two biggest problems companies have with data – managing the explosive growth of unstructured data and unlocking the business value of data.”
Komprise Doubles Revenues in First Half of 2021
Key growth drivers compared with first half of 2020 included: 97% revenue growth, 190% growth of new customers and 200% growth in average deal size. Komprise was recognized by CRN as one of the 20 Coolest Data Management companies of the Top 100 Storage list.
Komprise Released the “Komprise 2021 State of Unstructured Data Management Report”
Based on responses from 300 storage IT decision makers in the U.S. and U.K. Key findings as reported by VentureBeat: “Sixty-three percent of companies are already managing over 1PB of data with 30%+ IT budgets spent on data storage and backups — and most organizations expect these costs to go up in 2021.
Komprise Achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Migration Competency Status
This designation recognizes that Komprise, an existing AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Tier Partner, provides proven technology for rapid, large-scale cloud data migrations to help customers move successfully to AWS through all phases of complex migration projects, discovery, planning, migration and operations. We also announced expanded support for new Amazon Web Services (AWS) file services to accelerate petabyte-scale file data migrations to the cloud and enable the use of cloud-based analytics.
Komprise Deep Analytics
Komprise Deep Analytics Actions, announced in October, delivers granular, flexible search and indexes data in-place across file, object and cloud data storage to build a comprehensive Global File Index spanning petabytes of unstructured data. Said Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting: “Komprise solves the very real, concrete time problem that comes from moving petabytes of file data into a cloud data warehouse. With their “Deep Analytics Actions,” you can simply find and move a small fraction of what’s required to get the real-time analytics needed, which speeds up that time-to-value.”
Komprise Wins Two Industry Awards
In November, Komprise was recognized by New World Report in the sixth-annual Software and Technology Awards as winner of the Enterprise Data Management category and Komprise also won Product of the Year by National Association of Broadcasters in the cloud computing and virtualization category.
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We’d like to thank all of our readers, customers, partners and employees for their support in 2021 and a joyous holiday season. We’re already gearing up for a data-heavy 2022. You can check out some of our early predictions in TechHQ and InformationAge.
Happy Holidays!
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