Panzura: 164% Growth in Customers’ Global Data Capacity in 2019

Panzura, Inc. announced its enterprise customers had more than doubled their global cloud data capacity and number of enterprise collaboration sites during 2019.

This significant Y/Y growth demonstrates accelerating demand for real-time collaboration among distributed teams and a fast path to data in multi- and hybrid-cloud environments.

In EMEA, enterprise customers bucked the trend of sequestered IT spending and increased their data capacity by 250%, demonstrating uncertainty over Brexit was not a stalling point .

Patrick Harr, CEO, said: “Last year, we experienced 164% growth in customers’ global data capacity, which is a powerful validation of the market and our unique technologies. As the majority of global enterprises migrate to hybrid- and cloud-native technology, operational speed, agility and their ability to empower a global workforce to collaborat e and compete have become key drivers in their success.“

Analysts at Mordor Intelligence forecast that the global enterprise cloud collaboration market, valued at $26.1 billion in 2019, will have grown at a CAGR of about 13.5% to be worth about $49 billionby 2024. On average, over 80% of North American and European companies are employing a complex deployment model in the cloud, with 51% using a hybrid cloud and 21% implementing a multi-cloud strategy, with an average of five cloud providers.

Expansion in EMEA
“The interesting story behind the growth of our EMEA business is one of consolidation,” said Andy McGlashan, MD, Panzura EMEA. “Organizations have had a very traditional approach to storing data, normally purchasing a lot of disc storage, and then replicating and backing it up. But the cost of that is untenable as the size of files continues to grow, and we’ve seen huge interest in consolidating and reducing what would normally be on-site storage.”

Customers such as British food manufacturer Premier Foods plc and AFRY, a multi-billion dollar global engineering, design, and advisory company based in Sweden, are realizing an average 70-80% cost saving and 90% reduction to on-site storage requirements. This enables employees to work together at the same time across multiple countries without the risk of losing data or wasting time.

“As a multi-billion-dollar global engineering and design firm with over 30,000 employees and partners worldwide, speed and team productivity are critical to delivering world-class designs for our customers,” said Henrik Carlberg, business CIO, AFRY. “With Panzura, we deployed one global cloud file system across all global sites, enabling engineers and designers to collaborate a one global team, dramatically increasing productivity and improving our bottom line.”

“We have a centralized IT environment and the amount of manpower we were putting into managing clusters, SANs and backup just didn’t deliver value to the business,” said Gareth Byrne-Perkins, head of technology and service, Premier Foods. We decided to simplify storage by removing the complex stack of services and on-going support processes that delivered files to our users. Panzura provided an elegant, flexible architecture that completely revitalized the way we worked with file services, cutting out many layers of unnecessary complication and achieving our objective of the users getting access to the files they needed quickly, while more recently enabling us to move our entire datacenter operations to AWS in the public cloud.”

Innovation and Experience
Panzura’s 2019 growth is predicated on the team’s commitment to innovation, experience, and collaboration with a growing partner ecosystem.

• The firm announced the release of its solution Freedom Filer 8. Backed by 33 patents and more than 7 years of development, the latest release delivers real-time global sync capabilities, military grade security, and massive scalability to accommodate enterprises’ ever-expanding data, which is doubling on average every 2 years.
• The company also launched Vizion.ai, a ML-powered global indexing, search and data analytics engine and dashboard that delivers the fastest possible path to data stored anywhere in the data center and multi-cloud environments.
• To accommodate market demand, the company continued scaling its channel strategy, signing a strategic reseller agreement with IBM, and announcing a partnership with Intel to bring Vizion.ai to its customers and channel partners. Another key factor in continued growth is a commitment to a world-class customer experience, which is reflected in the company’s net-promoter score of 82, well above the software and storage industry average, which is only 28.