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.