71 Reflections on another Milestone Achievement Yesterday, Scality was proud to be in a press release issued by Open-Xchange, announcing that Rackspace has chosen Dovecot Pro on Scality Object Storage for their email platform; and this will benefit more than 3.5 million end-users globally. “By moving to Dovecot Pro and Scality Object Storage, we hope to reduce the number of servers for our email platform to just a fifth of its previous size. This will result in massive cost-savings in up-keep across hardware, electricity and cooling,” commented Dan Shain, technical director, Rackspace. “We are planning to do this without any disruption in service and support while improving the reliability and scalability of our email service.” Rackspace is our 100th RING customer; what a cool milestone for Scality! Our 100th customer has chosen our Petabyte-scale storage software. That’s worth taking time to pause and reflect back on all that we’ve achieved and how we got to where we are today. Scality started on June 9th, 2009, and our RING product was designed from the get-go as a storage solution for web-scale cloud providers. Our very first customer, Telenet (the leading media and telecommunication service provider in Belgium), has been using Scality RING to power a cloud email platform– and it’s rather serendipitous for this post, as Rackspace, our 100th customer, is also for a cloud email platform. Between these two customers, in just 7 years minus a few days, almost everything has changed at Scality, except for our original and radical focus on scale, performance, ease of management and cost efficiency. From 2009-2013, we focused almost exclusively on Service Providers and that explains why Scality RING is so resilient to hardware failures and delivers the utmost protection for our customers data. It is also the reason why, by design, our product is “always on” and allows for online upgrades and includes self-healing mechanisms. At Scality, we pride ourselves on never letting our customers down, because we know their customers depend on us. Initially appealing to telecommunication providers, Scality now serves 7 of the top 20 telecommunications companies in the world, including Orange, KDDI, Telstra, Comcast and Charter/Time Warner Cable. In 2014, we embarked on a journey to sell to large enterprise in multiple verticals. Some of our prestigious customers include TV channels such as RTL and Eurosport, video production and post production houses like Deluxe and AB Group, large research organization like Los Alamos National Labs and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), SaaS services like Daisy Group or Synacor, as well as many public cloud services like Dailymotion and Host Europe. Scality also have several customers in banking, manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies that are within the top 50 in their respective industries. Together these customers serve 500 million end-users, and store 800 billion objects on the Scality RING. We used to mostly sell directly to our customers, but now we now almost always rely on our Strategic Alliances and channels to sell and deliver Scality software. And this is especially true through Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Dell. In January ‘16 we were reinforcing our partnership with HPE, and just last month, Dell announced a hardware line purposely built for Scality. While these giants recognize the maturity and leadership of our product, they help us improve the TCO for our customers as well as their experience as they leverage software-defined storage on industry standard servers – especially at installation and operational levels. For example, we are committed to enable our customers to leverage hardware innovation as soon as it becomes available (10TB HDDs will be shipping very soon), or for customer who choose to, we allow pre-staging of hardware to offer an appliance-like experience. And, of course, our experts remain directly accessible to the users of Scality RING. We’ve have been talking about the future of storage, but the future is now. Software is eating the world, and software is definitely eating the storage world. The legacy players will either need to evolve, or will disappear. The business landscape is changing, with many business challenged to reinvent themselves as a digital business. As John Chambers, Cisco’s charismatic chairman put it: “…more than one-third of businesses today will not survive the next 10 years. The only ones that will survive will turn their companies into digital, techie versions of themselves, and many of will fail trying.” Looking forward, we look forward to continuing to support the element of change and to help disrupt. To make new technologies and ideas real, and doing so by making digital business a reality. Scality is no longer simply a storage or infrastructure play, but an enabler of digital business – enabling any application, through complete hardware freedom, with the flexibility to deploy on any cloud; public, private, or hybrid. As we celebrate this 100th customer, we look forward to the next 200, and to that end, we will be making a series of announcements next month. Stay tuned to the next steps in our new mantra: “Scality, the storage that powers digital business.”
