CTERA accelerates its market footprint

CTERA Networks, established leader in multi-cloud data management for unstructured data, inaugurated the #34 IT Press Tour with a very good online session. In fact, due to Covid-19, we were unable to travel and meet the team face-to-face in Tel Aviv.

Circumstances are unique and Liran Eshel, CEO and co-founder, spent some time to update us on the epidemic situation in Israel and illustrated the remote business constraints that finally is the day-to-day way of life at CTERA and in tons of companies. In other words, CTERA solutions are among the ones perfectly aligned with the healthcare pressure to work remotely and put a "social distance" in the normal collaboration behavior. Not easy indeed but necessary to address the pain quickly and prevent more propagation. This global event impacting the globe demonstrates the need for a global collaboration to accelerate research treatment. Now time means lifes and IS the key metric. And to do so, having an IT solution that deliver a smooth seamless global data sharing approach is key and makes a real difference. Following the epidemic, it won't be the same world at least on human interactions with distance control between people and validation of a new way to work and collaborate. So for CTERA the future is Remote: Remote Work, Remote Data Access, Remote Collaboration and Remote IT.

Forced by events like the Covid-19, by business locations or just by colleagues residence, central HQs coupled with remote and branch offices are a reality for decades now. And the distance must be irrelevant to offer an ubiquitous access wherever users reside and data are generated.

CTERA is about software and files and how you can offer access to them wherever you reside. This is a tough mission and not a lot of companies have successfully addressed this challenge in recent years.

The market validates the vision Liran Eshel and a few others had with CTERA more than 10 years ago about a global file service that spans sites, locations... The industry dreamed about that for a few decades and CTERA demonstrates a viable solution for several years now. Multi-Cloud adds pressure on vendors and we saw now a few years a rapid need for compute and data at the edge.

CTERA develops a pure software solution, what we named for a few years now, a Software-Defined Storage model, that transforms servers (a rack of them) into a (large) storage pool and service. The hardware factor for CTERA is just a go-to-market strategy enabling simple sales for partners and the capability for system vendor to embed CTERA's software on their platforms and finally help them make their numbers and margins.

In term of product line, CTERA has developed a strong presence with

• The CTERA Portal, the key engine running centrally in the global file environment,
• The CTERA Edge systems represented by X Series and Media Edge Filer,
• The CTERA Application and Drive and finally APIs.

all this supporting a multi-cloud model and several key features for enterprise such analytics and security with DLP and Anti-Virus.

CTERA's business model is 100% indirect with a mix of channels/resellers and technology alliances. Among them, we notice IBM, HPE, Cisco, Dell and we heard that Nutanix is coming. The company targets classic industry with manufacturing, engineering and energy actors, media and advertising and publishing players, healthcare of course with hospitals, clinics, pharma and equipments and also government with federal, military and SLG.

2019 was an impressive year for CTERA with 60% YoY growth being installed at 50,000 sites with millions of users WW with the introduction of the first hyper-converged edge filer and a dedicated one for media environments and finally new partnerships and several new patents.

One of the key product is the X Series based on HPE hardware and should run on Nutanix in the coming months. It exists also in virtual appliance flavor running on VMware ESXi, KVM, Hyper-V, Amazon EC2, Azure and Nutanix. The agility of HCI is a perfect fit for edge compute and storage as local human and expertise resources are pretty limited in dispersed locations. Delivered as full flash appliance, X Series seems to be the right approach for VDI, tier-1 and packaged branch applications.

The second strategic product introduced a few months ago and covered recently is the Edge Media Edition. It is designed to support decentralized media content workloads still with the CTERA global file services DNA and aligned with media environments requirements with Adobe, MacOS and 8k rendering supports. 128TB of storage locally with a mix of SSD and NL-SAS is a good size for distributed presence.

The team has also spent some time to cover some new tools. The first one is CTERA Migration Tool to simplify migration from NAS to CTERA Edge Filers. This is not an add-on or a third-party piece, it comes with the edge systems. The second one is CTERA Insight promoted as a data management as a service portal currently supporting only CTERA filers.

We also learnt some new stuff coming a few weeks that will accelerate CTERA market penetration. The demo was quick and straightforward illustrating the value of the solution. We'll be able to speak more about it in a few weeks.

CTERA is hot, super hot, we invite you to follow them carefully in 2020.