CTera, the reference for EFSS

CTera Networks (www.ctera.com), the obvious leader in EFSS (Enterprise File Sync & Share), has made a good refresh to the IT Press Tour crew a few days ago. It was a dense session for a company with a rich solution sometimes a bit confidential.
First a bit of history, CTera was founded in 2008, 9 years ago so for sure no longer a startup, and has raised so far $70M in 4 rounds. The company understood very quickly that Cloud will change all IT industry and will shake established position even giants' ones. And this threat for IT was and is finally a superb opportunity to launch new businesses to offer new solutions to better used cloud. But the company didn't start with EFSS exactly, it was more about a gateway - local access of remote data - and a new flavor of remote data protection, these 2 were around 2010.
EFSS, now synonym of CTera, pioneer and leader in various analyst reports, established a new norm for scalable secured enterprise-class file sync and share from any cloud. CTera and Cleversafe - now IBM - have signed a gigantic contract with DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) for 4 years and two one-year extension for a huge amount. These 2 products fit perfectly in this kind of high secured environment.
And results continue to fuel the success of the company, the list of customers is pretty impressive with more than 25,000 business clients globally, the number of gateways sold with more than 40,000 entities - wow - and the growth, just amazing at 200%+ Y/Y revenue run rate, all indicators are green. To reach this level, a strong Go-To-Market strategy is a must and CTera has made some great choice with AWS, HPE and IBM even if HPE projects some doubts on the market with the "demolition" of the HP empire. For IBM, is different, they have made a super decision to acquire the best object storage solution on the planet with Cleversafe and will soon power all 55 IBM data centers with IBM COS aka Cloud Object Storage. CTera and IBM have signed very recently a global reseller agreement and for sure this will help CTera moves to a new dimension. They continue to make right choices and decisions as 50% of the cloud is controlled by 4 players: AWS, Google, Microsoft and IBM and they partner already with 2 of them.

Cloud was and is probably the biggest agent of change for IT during last 50 years. With an IT sending of $15B a year for file services, collaboration and data protection, this IT transformation is one of the new eldorado for IT companies. CTera EFSS was built to offer strong key features that make the solution unique and large adoption. Two interesting capabilities are the multi-cloud support and the back-end storage flexibility with object storage leaders like AWS, DDN, Caringo, Cloudian, EMC, HDS and IBM COS of course. Products could be acquired in two ways: physical devices or virtual appliance. Among the various success stories shown during this meeting, one was particularly interesting - TopGolf - with huge IT replacement and consolidation having chosen 1,000 EFSS and endpoint backup users, sync gateways, all connected to AWS that replace OneDrive, Dropbox, Backblaze and NAS islands. The second example was Orange that offer CTera for Orange Flexible Storage, great example of external service, Orange has replaced exotic, no scalable..., products to offer that.

Jeff Denworth, SVP Marketing, CTera Networks

CTera Networks has made a great job, the solution is the most comprehensive of the market, no doubt. We also realize the impact of new marketing initiatives built and pushed by Jeff Denworth, SVP Marketing at CTera, that have changed the company, the message, the outcome and the outside perception. 2017 will be interesting for sure.