151 Each year we take time to reflect on our company’s progress, achievements and challenges — 2020 was the year we discovered our collective resilience. Because 2020 was such an extraordinary year for the world with the COVID-19 pandemic and major geo-political fluctuations, this reflection takes on an entirely new dimension. Assessing corporate results is an annual ritual for most of us in the tech industry, but this year, we must balance our results against a greater worldview and take into consideration our own personal impact. Right when the chaos of the pandemic hit, my family and I decided to focus on three fundamentals: stay healthy, get active, and increase family activity time. Our goal was to help us all adapt and remain resilient as online schooling took shape and time with external family and friends lessened. Adaptability and resilience would see us through. A similar approach took hold within the Scality family as the executive staff led our global workforce through 2020. We focused on three key things above all else: staying healthy, staying connected, and keeping the momentum high. Adaptability and resilience not only saw us through an exceptionally challenging year — Scality had its most successful year to date. Staying healthy: Scality pays mind to 360-degree employee well-being With “home” suddenly becoming synonymous with “office,” finding healthy activities outside work became ever more important at Scality. The company arranged socially-distanced outdoor meetups, encouraged regular breaks during work hours, and financed exercise and hobby equipment. Jerome, our CEO, shares his philosophy in a great article in Chief Executive magazine: Employee wellness is the way through. Scality also shared its goodwill with the world through increases in charitable contributions for AI research with Inria Institute and reforestation efforts in the wake of unprecedentedly destructive California fires. Staying connected: Scality pivots to service customers with online collaboration Looking back on my journey with Scality over the better part of the last decade, I can definitively say that 2020 demonstrated our team’s capability when it comes to conquering the challenges imposed on our industry — and, specifically, on our customers and partners. Thanks to the resilience of the tech industry and our employees’ ability to quickly adapt to our new world, we were able to embrace a full work-from-home set-up in short order. This swift pivot was aided by the use of fantastic collaboration tools (thank you Slack, GoToMeeting, Zoom and Google!), which were leveraged to their full potential to make sales, marketing and engineering more effective. During this time, we also developed new ways to stay in touch with and support our customers. Scality launched its online customer center, complete with documentation, technical tutorials, product updates, an interactive community forum and more. Scality University, a live virtual customer training event, connected the Scality team and customers across the globe for a fun three days of shared learnings and much-needed laughs. Keeping momentum high: Scality and its customers accelerate innovation Our customers also proved to be impressively resilient this year, pivoting to accelerate digital initiatives that facilitated remote work and increased access to critical data for faster, smarter business decisions. More enterprises turn to Scality for enterprise-scale data management than ever before We focused on selling solutions to industries that continued to invest in technology infrastructure during 2020. Many even chose to accelerate their strategic multi-year digital plans. Enterprise-level banking, insurance and trading corporations continued their investments in data storage — and, specifically, Scality RING, notably to fuel their cloud data services, big data analytics and data protection strategies. Due to the dramatic rise in demand for content on media streaming platforms during the pandemic, it’s no surprise that we witnessed strength in the media & entertainment sector. In healthcare, hospitals continued to invest in medical imaging storage solutions, and a boost in requirements for genomics research created a need in biotech-related institutions for data storage and hybrid-cloud data solutions. Adding government agencies to the mix of key industries we served in 2020, Scality had a strong year with record revenues. We extended our global reach to customers in 43 countries with exceptionally strong performance in North America and the Asia Pacific region. Record numbers of new and old customers placed large-capacity orders ranging to over 80 petabytes! Partner solutions were also key to our success. We’re seeing rapid growth in deployments with Weka, Ctera, Veeam, Splunk and, of course, HPE’s leading solutions. Multiple new product innovations released to serve Scality customer needs Kudos must be extended to our engineering team for continuing to deliver amazing product innovations without missing a beat. That includes strengthening Scality RING in the areas of file systems, object storage, XDM hybrid-cloud and enabling RING on all-flash servers. A new NAS Archiver solution was introduced as was the proven performance of our scale-out file system (SOFS) in the Azure cloud, continuing our exceptional partnership with the Microsoft Azure team. Gratitude for our Scality family The resilience of our family — both inside Scality and within the entire tech industry — gave us the tailwind we needed to come away from 2020 as an even stronger partner to Scality customers. Our investors continue to stand by us to fuel new expansions and innovations that will solve key problems for the next decade and beyond. We look back on the past year with gratitude and look forward to the exciting journey ahead. Read more about our 2020 financial results here: press release
