Start-Up Profile: Ctera Networks

Company
Ctera Networks, Ltd.

Locations
HQs in Petah Tiqva, Israel, and New York City, NY, offices in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and UK

Date founded
2008

Financial funding

2009 (series A): $9 million – investor: Benchmark
2012 (series B): $11 million – investors: Benchmark, Cisco, Venrock
2014 (series C): $25 million – investors: Benchmark, Bessemer, Cisco, Venrock
2016 (series D): $25 million – investors: Bessemer, Cisco, Venrock, Vintage

Total: $70 million

Revenue
Company only said that enterprise sales increased 200% Y/Y. Probably not profitable since inception

Main executives

Liran Eshel, CEO and co-founder, was CEO of SofaWare Technologies, acquired by Check Point Software Technologies. Previously, he served as an officer in an elite technological unit of the Israel Defense Forces.

Zohar Kaufman, VP of R&D and co-founder, was previously VP of R&D at SofaWare where he led all R&D for SMB and enterprise branch office products. He was an officer in an elite technology unit of the Israel Defense Forces.

Yochai Rozenblat, chief revenue officer, was responsible for overseeing revenue growth at NICE. During his 10-year tenure with NICE, he held various executive positions including president of the enterprise group where he led innovation, design, R&D and marketing, as well as serving as CEO and president of the Americas. Prior to that, he worked at Amdocs.

Aron Brand, CTO, was chief architect at SofaWare.

Jeff Denworth, SVP marketing, served as VP of marketing at DDN after being at Cluster File Systems and Dataram.

Number of employees
150

Products
At the beginning, the start-up began to design and sell a tiny NAS, CloudPlug, for small end users [We got one but it never worked. Ed.], before entering into much higher cloud offerings with an enterprise file services platform and cloud storage gateways.

Enterprise file services platform is a private cloud IT-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform for storing, syncing, sharing, protecting and governing data across endpoints, remote offices and servers with IT security, cloud choice and automation.

The platform is powered by Ctera’s cloud service delivery middleware that IaaS organizations leverage to create, deliver, and manage cloud storage-based services such as enterprise file sync and share (EFSS), in-cloud data protection, endpoint and remote server backup, and office storage modernization.

Click to enlarge

Recent enhancements:
   •   Cloud storage migration: Organizations can now migrate data across cloud storage infrastructure without experiencing system downtime or end user service interruption. By migrating data across storage nodes of any type or location, the platform enables applications and data to securely flow from one data center to any other data center, helping organizations to avoid vendor and/or platform lock-in.
   •   ILM: The platform leverages ILM tools from Amazon S3 and NetApp StorageGRID to intelligently place files in cloud storage tiers according to their application profile. Long-term archive and backup data can be directed to low cost storage tiers, such as AWS S3-Standard Infrequent Access tier, while interactive data (EFSS content) can be stored on storage tiers that offer cost-optimized ingress and egress, helping to reduce customers’ overall cloud infrastructure investments.
   •   SAML 2.0 and support for Single Sign-On (SSO) utilities: the solution supports identity federation over Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 to enable IT organizations to centralize corporate user identity management and provide SSO capabilities for file and backup access. In conjunction with support for this standard, the company has certified compatibility with SSO offerings, including Microsoft ADFS 2.0, Okta, OneLogin, and Ping Identity.

For customers having dozens, hundreds or even thousands of sites, dispersed across geographical areas, cloud storage gateways can support large deployments, including those with unreliable or slow Internet connections. From a single console they monitor usage, perform upgrades, manage backups, and troubleshoot remotely. Template-based management and configurable alerts make this an easy task, even on a large scale.

Released date
2010 for cloud gateway, 2012 for private enterprise file service platform

Price range
Gateways from $2,000 to $13,000, agent licenses starting at $48/user/year

Alliance partners
Amazon, Caringo, Cisco, Cloudian, DDN, Dell EMC, HGST/WD, HPE, IBM, NetApp, Odin, OpenStack, Quantum, Scality

Distributors and OEMs
Arrow, Avnet, IBM, WWT, SHI

Number of customers
All products in the world since inception of the company: 25,000 businesses in 110 countries, 40,000 cloud storage gateways, 200 Ctera clouds

Customers include
Arcelor Mittal, Avery Dennison, Axxa, Bezeq, British Council, Céline, Deutsche Telekom, exp., Henry Schein, hhmi, JWT, Korte, Learfild Sports, Live Nation, LVMH, Orange Business Services, Ricoh, Santander, Swisscom, The Carlyle Group, Post Telecom, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, The US Department of Defense, The State of Texas, TopGolf, UK NHS, Unilever, Weil, World Wide Technology, WPP

Applications
Private enterprise file sync and share, endpoint backup, NAS appliances (cloud storage gateways), backup appliances (cloud storage gateways), cloud server data protection (in-cloud and cross-cloud backup)

Target market
Large, distributed enterprises, security-sensitive enterprises (financial services, government, healthcare, etc.), service providers and telcos

Competitors
Microsoft, Box, Citrix, Druva