WekaIO leveraged its capabilities in overcoming
the challenges of performance and scale in today's data centers to
expand business opportunities in target use cases that include
artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning (DL), machine learning (ML),
high performance data analytics (HPDA), financial services (FinServ),
high-performance computing (HPC), and life sciences research.
Among
the successes Weka achieved throughout 2020 include a 350 percent
year-over-year increase in its cloud business, while on-premises
revenues more than doubled year-over-year for the company. Additionally,
customer confidence was strong with a 95 percent re-purchase rate, with
re-purchases generally 500 percent higher than the original purchase.
Today, 8 of the Fortune 50 use Weka to accelerate innovation and
research, extracting more value from their data and improving
time-to-market. These growth signals realized in an otherwise
challenging business environment that was affected by a global pandemic
indicate that Weka is well-positioned for further success as large
corporations and enterprises need solutions that enable data center
agility with the cloud, cost-efficiency, data mobility with faster data
access at scale and data portability.
Last
year, Weka announced significant product innovations further
solidifying its leadership position for technical computing in the
enterprise. These included: Weka AI to accelerate edge to core to cloud
data pipelines that are accelerated by GPUs; Kubernetes CSI plugin for
cloud-native storage on-premises and in the public cloud allowing
application and deployment agility enabling superior DevOps abilities; a
SAS Analytics reference design that reduces wall clock time by 5X for
long running jobs; AWS Outposts Ready designation to extend hybrid cloud
storage deployment capabilities for the enterprise wishing to leverage
AWS services on-premises; and reference architectures with leading
object storage providers that deliver a unified global namespace from
flash to object storage to the cloud for enterprise customers that need
simplicity and performance at any scale. In addition to these enterprise
storage capability announcements, Weka filled key positions in sales,
management, and product development: Ken Grohe as President & Chief
Revenue Officer; Intekhab Nazeer as Chief Finance Officer; and George
Pamboris as Vice President of Product Management.
"While
we greatly relate to the events of 2020 that have impacted everyone's
business around the world, we were fortunate to end our fiscal year
having posted strong growth and a great sales pipeline for the coming
year. And, we were pleasantly surprised by the amount of repeat customer
business, that we attribute to the great product and customer support
we provide," said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO of WekaIO. "I
attribute our success to enterprise customers who were forced to rethink
their IT infrastructure strategy this year, seeking cloud-ready
solutions that enable data mobility and ‘zero-touch' operational
efficiency. Weka delivers that and more, targeting the intersection of
technical computing and enterprise IT by delivering a modern storage
platform that solves big problems and customers have confidence to
implement. To maintain a competitive advantage, we predict that even
post-COVID, enterprise IT will invest in solutions that accelerate
access to the cloud and simplify their infrastructure, while embracing
the cloud either on-premises, the public cloud, or a hybrid of the two.
In 2021, we will accelerate our customer adoption trajectory, by
investing in R&D, hiring for key positions, and identify strategic
partnerships."
The
backbone of Weka's success is derived from the innovative modern data
storage platform, WekaFS. WekaFS was architected to accelerate I/O to
CPU and GPU-enabled compute clusters whether the data resides
on-premises or in the public cloud, or a hybrid of both. WekaFS provides
a full enterprise grade solution with all the features found in legacy
appliances, while future-proofing their IT investments with advanced
security and full cloud integration.