Quantum Scale-Out Storage Revenue Grows 50% in First Half of Fiscal Year

Quantum Corp. announced that revenue from its scale-out storage products and related services grew 50 percent in the first half of the company’s fiscal year (April 1-Sept. 30, 2014), compared to the same period last year. Based on September quarter sales, the annual run rate for Quantum’s scale-out storage revenue was more than $100 million, up nearly 60 percent from a year earlier. Driving this growth is demand for the company’s StorNext 5 high-performance shared storage and Lattus extended online storage solutions, including from customers such as BBC Sport, MLB Network and UFC that have deployed a suite of scale-out storage systems managed by StorNext 5.

Building on its long-standing leadership in storage for complex workflows, Quantum has greatly expanded its scale-out storage portfolio over the past few years to help a broader range of customers address their most demanding data management challenges. Most notably, last fall the company introduced StorNext 5, a next-generation storage platform specifically designed to enable the newest digital workflows and much greater levels of productivity and efficiency. Providing the industry’s fastest streaming file system and policy-driven tiering software for cost-effective retention of large-scale content, StorNext 5 has been instrumental to the market momentum and success Quantum has seen since April, as reflected on a number of fronts:

• New StorNext 5-based Pro Solutions – These customized storage system configurations include solutions for managing 4K workflows, refreshing Apple Xsan environments (where only StorNext^® offers 100 percent compatibility) and supporting end-to-end content production and long-term archive. As just one example of the technological strength underlying these solutions, in two recent head-to-head competitive evaluations by customers, Quantum provided greater reliability and performance for 4K workflows than clustered, scale-out NAS. In fact, Quantum’s StorNext Pro™ 4K solution delivered fast, reliable playback while the competitive offerings were unable to keep up, resulting in dropped frames.

• StorNext Cloud Workflow – In partnership with Adobe, Reach Engine and Telestream, and leveraging both StorNext and Lattus, Quantum unveiled a new solution for enabling end-to-end media production workflows in the cloud. Creative teams can share content in real time over multiple, geographically dispersed locations and maintain a single, highly durable asset repository, or replicate assets among multiple sites for resiliency and faster access. Working in this advanced cloud-enabled environment also provides the flexibility to optimize the security and integrity of content management, scale capacity up or down to meet short-term needs and incorporate business continuity and long-term preservation of content over its lifecycle.

• Increasing Leadership in Media and Entertainment (M&E) – While Quantum continued to win major StorNext deals among its base of large, traditional M&E enterprises, the company also further expanded its leadership in the M&E market. UFC, one of the world’s most valuable sports brands and an existing StorNext customer, purchased a Lattus extended online storage solution to enable faster, easier access to older video content for monetization. In another example, BBC Sport contracted with Trams, a Quantum reseller, for a four-year deal centered on StorNext 5 that also leverages the close integration of StorNext 5 with Dalet’s Galaxy media asset management platform. Other M&E customers selecting Quantum scale-out storage solutions included one of the largest video game companies and a top online video streaming provider, as well as a major newspaper publisher that adopted StorNext Pro 4K and two state universities that needed to refresh their Apple Xsan environments for managing video.

• Worldwide Customer Growth Beyond M&E – Quantum has continued to extend its market reach to other verticals and use cases where customers can benefit from the company’s workflow-intelligent storage. This includes oil and gas, life sciences, geospatial applications and video surveillance, in which large data sets need to be captured, shared, analyzed and turned into actionable information. As just one example, Calgary Police Service is using StorNext to store video from officer body cameras. Other notable customer wins over the first half of the fiscal year include major deals with a global energy supplier, a China-based oil company, two major genomics research institutes and a European provider of geospatial products and services.

• Expanding Reseller and Ecosystem Partnerships – In conjunction with the momentum Quantum has generated among end users, the company has also expanded its scale-out storage reseller base by nearly 30 percent in the first half of the fiscal year. The enthusiasm of Quantum resellers was clearly evident at a recent U.S. VAR summit the company held. It was the most successful reseller conference in many years, with numerous participants remarking that the opportunity they’re seeing with Quantum has never been greater. Helping to capitalize on this opportunity, Quantum has also continued to establish or enhance ecosystem partnerships with other companies such as Avere in oil and gas, FireEye in cybersecurity and Telestream in sports video.