Despite a difficult economy so far in 2023, it’s been an exciting time for data storage innovation and unstructured data management. There’s much at stake to leverage data for competitive advantage while still being as efficient as possible with cloud and infrastructure spend. We are seeing our customers’ needs grow and mature every day as they prioritize unstructured data management and mobility like never before.
It’s not enough to move the right data sets to the cloud and leverage new technologies for a fast, efficient storage and backup footprint:
- As data keeps growing at exponential rates, organizations need the best storage cost optimization model possible;
- This requires an independent, data-centric model with full visibility and insights into file and object data assets;
- Doing so solves some intractable problems that enterprises have been dealing with for years.
For instance, our CEO Kumar Goswami explained in Enterprise Storage Forum why organizations should stop trying to get rid of their data silos: “The answer is solutions that look across the data—search, classify, secure, visualize it in place—without forcing you to put all your data into one location or technology.”
IT and business leaders are also seeing the need to prepare for new opportunities with AI, which relies on unstructured data. This requires governance and better collaboration with departmental stakeholders to better understand data priorities, usage trends and analytics needs.
To that end, Komprise is delivering new capabilities to the market for analysis, easier reporting, secure self-service access for line of business IT teams and researchers, cloud tiering and more. Our vision and market execution were validated this year with our third external fundraising round.
Komprise highlights of the year in progress
January: We started the year with major funding news, which was covered by TechCrunch. The $37M of growth capital from Canaan Partners, Celesta Capital, Multiplier Capital and Top Tier Ventures will be used to scale operations and extend market leadership, bringing the total funding to $85M to date.
February: Soon after, we released results from 2022, in which we doubled annual subscription revenues for the third year in a row. Other 2022 results include:
- 50% growth in the Komprise Global File Index, which consists of hundreds of billions of files, providing customers a Google-like search across their entire data estate to find, tag and mobilize unstructured data.
- 120% net dollar retention (NDR) showing world-class customer retention and expansion, even during an economic downturn.
- 30% of revenues came from expansions, indicating strong customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- 200% growth in the number of organizations using Komprise for data migrations to a new NAS or for cloud data migrations.
March: To help customers who want visibility and are not yet ready to move data, we announced Komprise Analysis as a standalone SaaS solution. It includes a new set of pre-built reports along with dynamic interactive analysis. The enhanced analysis and reporting capabilities are also included with Komprise Elastic Data Migration and the full Komprise Intelligent Data Management Platform. Read more about the features of Komprise Analysis in the blog.
April: Komprise is a select vendor in the Azure File Migration Program, which launched in February 2022. The program offers customers access to Komprise Elastic Data Migration at no cost; we have seen the majority of these Azure customers go on to purchase our full Intelligent Data Management platform. We expanded this partnership in April with Komprise Intelligent Tiering for Azure. This exclusive offering is the only Microsoft Azure Marketplace solution that gives customers access to file analysis and tiering to and within Azure. Customers can acquire this without purchasing the full Komprise Intelligent Data Management platform.
May: Komprise Intelligent Data Management Spring 2023 is our latest product announcement, which brings our enterprise customers more powerful self-service access and stronger governance to meet changing enterprise IT needs.
The Komprise Spring 2023 release includes:
- New Directory Explorer allows users to drill down into individual directories with a familiar browser interface.
- Komprise Deep Analytics now includes the ability to filter data using exclusions (e.g., “all data except .log files”) and then use these queries to create data management policies.
- Share-Based Access for Groups: Administrators now can assign group access to shares using Active Directory which automatically provisions data management access only to users in those groups.
- New Reports: Komprise has added more prebuilt reports to easily download and share: Showback, Orphaned Data, Query Summary and Potential Duplicates.
Industry Recognition for Komprise
Komprise has received several awards and recognition across business and technology organizations. We are always humbled to be recognized!
- Komprise Named Gold Winner for Information Technology Cloud/SaaS in the prestigious 3rd Annual 2023 Globee® Awards for Disruptors
- Bronze Stevie Award, Most Innovative Tech Company of the Year, American Business Awards
- Top Fastest Growing Storage Companies by StorageNewslettter
- CRN Storage 100 2023: Data Protection and Data Management Vendors
Komprise File and Object Migration Momentum
As we’ve worked with customers across multiple industries over the years, we’ve learned that no migration is the same; many of them are laborious due to the complexity of enterprise IT infrastructure. To ease this pain for our customers, we developed a non-intrusive tool called ACE (Assessment of Customer Environment).
Our team deploys ACE at customer sites to predict the expected performance of a migration. The ACE tool proactively identifies potential bottlenecks and other issues independent of Komprise running in the customer’s environment; it’s been a great pathway for our enterprise customers that want to get to the cloud and modernize their storage environment faster and with better ROI.
On that note, Komprise released Hypertransfer in late 2022, delivering 25 times faster migrations for problematic SMB workloads. Our resilient, rapid migration platform, Komprise Elastic Data Migration, is foundational to our work with Microsoft in the Azure File Migration Program. We have successfully completed more than 100 migrations for Azure customers so far since the program’s inception in 2022.
AI and Data Management
Halfway through 2023, it seems as if we now live in an entirely different world than a year ago. Make no mistake – practical AI technologies have been years in the making but the mainstreaming of generative AI has thrown many industries and executives into a frenzy. It’s time to get ready for an AI-driven world. When it comes to data, enterprises need to be thinking about unstructured data and how they manage it because it’s the fuel needed to power new AI products and services.
It’s firstly important to get visibility into the unstructured data stored across different storage technologies on-premises and in the cloud. What types of data do you have, who owns it, and what is its business value? But that is just the beginning. As our COO Krishna Subramanian explained in this recent eWeek interview, data management has a strong role to play when it comes to managing data governance and protecting IP and PII in commercial AI tools. She also discusses strategies in her recent blog: 5 unstructured data governance tips for AI.
We’re bullish on the future of innovation in hybrid cloud file and object storage and unstructured data management. We believe that enterprises are gaining the upper hand in addressing infrastructure modernization and cost optimization. Automated, intelligent and unified solutions are evolving to take care of thorny, manual unstructured data management problems, paving the way for IT to deliver a rich array of valuable data services to stakeholders across the business.
