Backblaze B2 is GA with interesting partners

Backblaze (www.backblaze.com), the famous consumer backup provider, continues to iterate its Cloud offering and now officially announces B2 as GA. The company already participated to 2 IT Press Tour and they were recently invited by OpenIO to jointly announced their partnership covering Hybrid Cloud. First let me summarize what is B2 to then introduce OpenIO integration.

B2 is a Cloud Storage offering like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage or Microsoft Azure at a fraction of the cost i.e $0.005/GB/month. It is easy to use via 3 methods: WebUI with drag and drop, API integration with dedicated product and CLI.

OpenIO is the only Backblaze partner dedicated to enterprise, service providers or cloud providers and the product supports natively now with the 16.07 release the option to migrate data (it's a move) to a new storage tier, cloud based, represented by B2. It means that OpenIO did the job to integrate the B2 API additionally to the tiering logic implemented in the storage policy. OpenIO is deployed on-premise and users can integrate an external cloud tier completely transparently. The namespace is fully maintained by OpenIO, acting as an in-band logic via a specific gateway service, and the application never interacts directly with Backblaze B2.

Interesting for both companies, OpenIO receives a new argument for US presence and penetration and same from Backblaze not yet present in Europe as the only data center is in Rancho Cordova, near Sacramento, in California. But as of today, I'm not convinced that European OpenIO clients will migrate content to California-based B2 center via the internet... With this announcement, Backblaze also supports 4 other partners - CloudBerry Lab, Cyberduck, Dropshare and Synology - as source of traffic for B2 meaning that this a SMB or departemental play. These 5 partners have made some commitment and integration with the B2 API but I'm still don't understand why B2 didn't pick Amazon S3, the only viable cloud storage interface and API.

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"S3 is the De Facto Cloud Storage Standard serving as the backbone for 90% of today's web companies.
In 2 words, the game is over globally.
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With S3, immediately and by default users will be able to send traffic to B2, generate revenue and penetrate the market. For further info and even wish to integrate B2, please refer to https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html page with step-by-step guide, examples or codes.
Is it a try for a few months, is it a choice to control traffic and avoid any overload to the infrastructure ? Still a mystery. But, choosing a specific API late after S3, just new with no market presence is super risky. I let you imagine the success of the solution if only 5% of each installed base from these 5 partners will extend usage with B2... So in 2 words, I wish and expect that Backblaze will move rapidly to S3 to boost the market adoption.