14 IDC has led the analyst community in defining how the $100 billion storage market is rapidly changing. Instead of continuing to classify the market by now outdated categories (e.g. NAS), they were the first to increase the focus on the content itself, identifying that the fastest growing and most disruptive segment addresses unstructured content. From that perspective, we’re proud to be considered the leader in their latest storage MarketScape. The MarketScape on Object-Based Storage evaluates vendors from a product, go-to-market, and business perspective, including their strategies and existing capabilities. Scality has been in the Leaders segment since the inception of the MarketScape, and has now moved into lead position. According to IDC, “Scality knows and understands the OBS segment better than anyone else.” Here’s why we’re the leader: We firmly believe the conversation isn’t about “object storage,” but rather, the use cases we can address and the problems that we can solve. Customers want to talk about a solution that can help them manage storage at massive scale so they can launch new cloud and mobile services, rethink their enterprise storage and data protection strategy at today’s scale, provide 100% uptime, and cut costs in half. The technology comes second. Though the underlying technology is revolutionary in scalability, reliability, and flexibility, it also needs to be natively compatible with existing enterprise applications. As many as 80% of applications are file-oriented, and are built to work with NAS, so the storage system needs to be compatible. Even de facto standard object APIs, which we also support, are not enough. Add-on gateways are also not enough. Being software-based and software-defined matters. Scality doesn’t sell hardware. We don’t have a business model based on appliance sales. Our product was designed and built to be completely hardware independent, essentially behaving like an application running on Linux and x86. That means customers can use nearly any x86 hardware they choose, which translates into tremendous flexibility in economics, performance, form factor, upgrades, multi-generational support, etc. The other vendors in the leaders segment are not this, period. In the same week (and for many of the same reasons), we were also recognized as a finalist for the 2014 Storage Magazine Product of the Year – as a storage system software product.
