[ Photo Courtesy of The IT Press Tour ]
Cloud storage has become an essential part of IT infrastructure for businesses of all sizes, but complexity and unpredictable costs have remained major pain points. Boston-based Wasabi Technologies is aiming to change that with its “hot cloud storage” offering that promises simplicity, performance and predictable pricing. To learn more, we met with executives from the company last week, while at the 58th edition of the IT Press Tour in Boston.
Founded in 2016 by tech industry veterans David Friend and Jeff Flowers, Wasabi has seen rapid growth and now manages multiple exabytes of data across 14 global storage regions. The company has raised over $500 million in funding to date and is positioning itself as a specialist alternative to the major hyperscale cloud providers.
“Our objective is to make a really good return for our investors and to build a sustainable company that will be a major force in the IT industry,” said David Friend, President, CEO and co-founder of Wasabi. “The last time we raised money was a year and a half ago, and at that time, we achieved a market cap of 1.1 billion. And hopefully, well, we’ve more than doubled in size since then as a company.”
Wasabi’s Approach: Keeping it Simple
A key part of Wasabi’s strategy has been to focus solely on object storage and keep its offering as simple as possible. The company offers a single tier of storage with predictable pricing – $6.99 per TB per month with no egress or API charges. This contrasts with the complex, multi-tiered pricing models of hyperscale providers that can lead to surprise bills.
“Our pricing is up to 80% less than AWS S3 storage. We have no egress charges and no API request charges, which are the unpredictable part of cloud storage,” explained Friend. “We don’t offer any of those types of charges to customers.”
This simplified approach extends to Wasabi’s product lineup as well. Rather than offering a wide range of cloud services, the company remains laser-focused on object storage.
“Focus was key to [EMC’s] success, and focus is key to our success,” said Friend. “You don’t see us doing blockchain or gaming or, you know, the hundreds of other things that Amazon and Microsoft are involved in.”
Performance and Protection
While keeping things simple, Wasabi has not sacrificed on performance or data protection. The company claims its storage is faster than competitors for both uploads and downloads. On the security front, Wasabi offers 11 9’s of data durability, along with features like immutable storage to protect against ransomware.
“We have system availability. And if customers store in two of our data centers, they get four nines of system availability. They store in one data center, they get three nines of system availability,” said Marty Falaro, EVP and COO of Wasabi. “We measure 11 nines of data durability. Our technique for storing an object is such that we make multiple copies on random drives in a storage region that the customer chooses.”
The company has also introduced innovative security features like multi-user authorization, which requires multiple people to approve certain actions like deleting data. This provides an extra layer of protection against insider threats or compromised credentials. Think of the nuclear key, where you need two people (two keys) to enter the launch code.
“We came up with this multi-user authentication, which says that no one individual has the power to delete or modify the storage,” explained Friend. “So if you turn that feature on and you have an employee who is disgruntled and wants to go out the door and blow up somebody’s data or something. They can’t do it.”
Channel-First Strategy Fuels Growth
A major part of Wasabi’s growth strategy has been to aggressively build out its channel partner network. The company now has over 15,000 channel partners globally and sees this as a key differentiator.
“Our strategy from the beginning, really was to raise a lot of money and grow very quickly, because we’re in a market that, for all practical purposes, it’s an infinite market, and I wanted to get big quick,” said Friend.
Wasabi has focused on making its offering channel-friendly, with features like reserved capacity storage plans that allow partners to sell storage more like traditional hardware. The company has also invested heavily in enablement and training for partners.
“It’s easy to say you want to work with channel partners. The hard part is putting the money into it, because the channel partners need to be educated. They need marketing tools, they need training,” explained Falaro. “We invested and launched in 2019 and as a small company, the amount of money we put in and the amount of effort we put in has really been amazing for us.”
This channel-first approach appears to be paying off, with Wasabi reporting approximately 70% year-over-year growth in annual recurring revenue in EMEA. The company is rapidly expanding its global footprint, recently launching in Milan, Italy and planning a second UK data center.
Targeting Key Verticals
While Wasabi’s storage can be used for a wide range of applications, the company is seeing particular traction in verticals like education, surveillance, and media & entertainment.
In education, Wasabi has over 500 university clients in the US alone. Many are using Wasabi to augment on-premises storage and give department heads a more cost-effective storage option. Cornell University, for example, is using Wasabi’s Account Control Manager to provide centralized management of departmental data while reducing costs.
According to David Beardsley, Senior Storage Architect at Cornell University, Wasabi Account Control Manager gives them more vision into what their customers are doing. Not only has it helped them with security, it’s also helped them in planning budget and potential onsite and cloud resources.
In the surveillance space, Wasabi has partnered with leading providers like Axis and Milestone. The company recently launched Wasabi Surveillance Cloud, an integrated offering that makes it easy for organizations to store video surveillance data in the cloud. Utah State University adopted the solution to alleviate capacity constraints and meet retention requirements.
For media and entertainment companies, Wasabi is positioning itself as a cost-effective option for storing large video libraries and other media assets. Legendary Entertainment uses Wasabi for a range of studio assets, including as part of its workflow for remote collaboration during the pandemic.
“Wasabi has proven to be an easy-to-use centralized storage environment for a range of studio assets,” said Jason Davison, SVP of Information Technology at Legendary Entertainment. “And with no egress charges, we don’t worry about how often we access our Wasabi storage or download assets for review and repurposing.”
Enhancing Storage with AI
To further differentiate its offering, Wasabi recently acquired and integrated AI-powered media tagging technology, now offered as Wasabi AiR. This allows customers to automatically generate metadata and make large media libraries more searchable.
“Everybody’s got these huge archives of games going back to, many cases, the 1960s and we’d like all that stuff in our cloud,” explained Friend. “And what the customers were telling us is, we’ve got this stuff all on tape. We certainly don’t want to throw it away. We’d like to move it to the cloud. But if we do, we still can’t use it, because it takes too long to find what we’re looking for.”
Wasabi AiR aims to solve this problem by using machine learning to identify faces, logos, speech and other elements in video content. This allows organizations to more easily search and make use of their media archives. The technology is already being used by major sports teams to enhance fan experiences and streamline content production.
Sustainability Focus
As enterprises increasingly factor sustainability into their IT decisions, Wasabi is also emphasizing its environmental credentials. The company has partnered with Zero Circle to provide customers with carbon footprint calculations for their Wasabi storage usage.
“We’ve purposefully architected Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage for optimal power consumption and efficiency,” said Andrew Smith, Director of Strategy and Market Intelligence at Wasabi. “Wasabi remains committed to helping users quickly and accurately measure their Scope 3 emissions.”
Looking Ahead
With strong momentum and a laser focus on cloud storage, Wasabi appears well-positioned to continue its rapid growth. The company is betting that its simplified approach and channel-friendly model will allow it to capture a significant share of the massive and growing cloud storage market.
“We think we’re in a unique place in the industry. We think the barriers to entry for new people trying to come into our market are so high now that if you wanted to replicate what we have, it would take probably at least $200 or $300 million and probably three or four years,” said Friend.
While not disclosing specific plans, Friend hinted at major partnership announcements on the horizon that could further accelerate growth. As data volumes continue to explode across industries, Wasabi is aiming to position itself as the go-to specialist for simple, high-performance cloud storage.
“We’ve sort of run away from any potential small competitors — we basically have Amazon, Google and Microsoft as kind of the other alternative players out there that we have to deal with,” said Friend. “Can we get to 1 billion in the next few years? I would think so. You know, there’s no reason why not.”
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