NEW YORK – August 26, 2020 – VAST Data, the storage company breaking decades-old tradeoffs, today announced a series of business and corporate milestones as the adoption of Universal Storage continues to grow rapidly and take market share. In addition, the company announced that former NetApp President and Vice Chairman Tom Mendoza joined VAST as the company’s first independent board member. In his role, Mendoza will advise on the company’s continued global expansion, relying on his proven industry experience in scaling business operations.
Accelerated Business Momentum Despite the COVID-19 pandemic creating market uncertainty for entire industries, VAST has continued its impressive momentum, experiencing Q2 2020 year-over-year revenue growth of 490%. This surge in business was driven by several new large customer orders and the continued expansion of existing customer environments. As businesses come to rely on fast access to vast reserves of data, VAST Data’s Universal Storage is quickly becoming the industry standard. VAST’s platform future-proofs data for everything from AI to rapid enterprise backup and recovery to containers and beyond.
Other key growth milestones:
Customer adoption: In Q2, VAST Data sold to customers in markets including leading financial services companies, life science organizations, government agencies, defense contractors, cloud service providers and leading manufacturers.
Customer expansion: To date, two thirds of customers who have deployed VAST in 2019 have placed follow-on orders, tripling their original investment on average – speaking to both the quality of VAST’s offering and the enabling effect VAST has on customers’ applications.
A global presence: VAST now has petabyte-scale systems deployed in five continents.
Expanding business channels: VAST has also doubled its number of channel partners year over year, with a 5X year-over-year growth in channel salespeople trained to sell Universal Storage.
Coming off an industry record first year of sales in 2019 and more recently our $100M Series C funding at a $1.2B valuation, the adoption of Universal Storage continues to accelerate globally. In fact, we were above our very aggressive revenue target for both Q1 and Q2 of this year,” said Renen Hallak, Founder & CEO of VAST Data. “We are privileged to be led by an industry icon as we grow our business, and are very excited to have Mr. Mendoza join us in our mission to revolutionize the way organizations unlock value from their data.
First Independent Board Member Tom Mendoza, who also serves on the boards of UiPath and Varonis, returns to his storage roots by joining VAST. Mendoza first joined NetApp in 1994 as Vice President of North America sales, later serving as President from 2000 to 2008, when he transitioned to the role of Vice Chairman. During his time at NetApp, Tom built the company’s go-to-market organization from the ground up and played an instrumental role in defining its globally recognized culture.
VAST’s incredible growth and overall customer adoption in such a short period of time, especially during this crisis, is a testament to its vision,” said Mendoza. “New applications are driving a set of requirements in data infrastructure that we have never before seen. The market is recognizing this as it moves beyond legacy storage offerings and VAST is uniquely positioned to lead this transition. I am thrilled to join VAST’s board and look forward to building the next great independent infrastructure company together.
Corporate Growth – VAST is Hiring Announced in April, the company has been working to fill more than 100 positions as it prepares for the next wave of customer adoption, a goal it continues to make progress on. VAST is on pace to nearly double its team in 2020 – more information on openings can be found at vastdata.com/careers.
Expanding Ecosystem and Industry Recognition Outside of its strong business performance growth, VAST achieved several other milestones while continuing to make waves in the industry in Q2, including:
Product innovation: In April, VAST launched Version 3 of Universal Storage, which includes more than 20 new features and introduces new capabilities for enterprise and media customers.
Expanding partnerships: In June, VAST announced its certification as a solution provider for Intel Select Solutions for Genomics Analytics, working with Intel to help organizations eliminate the guesswork around building modern analytics infrastructure. Additionally, NVIDIA recognized VAST as a key partner as part of their unveiling of the DGX A100 AI system.
Industry recognition: VAST was recognized by Gartner in the 2020 Hype Cycle for Storage and Data Protection Technologies report. Additionally, VAST was also recognized by CRN as an Emerging IT Vendor in 2020.
IDC Quote
In architecting its Universal Storage system, VAST Data has leveraged key new storage technologies like NVMe over Fabrics, storage class memory and quad level cell media in truly innovative ways to create a system that can simultaneously deliver low latencies, high throughput, and massive scalability at the cost of disk,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies at IDC. “The compelling value this delivers to customers to cost-effectively consolidate very different workloads on a single platform is undeniable. This is the storage architecture of the future.