NinjaOne acquired the Australian Dropsuite

NinjaOne, a leader in SaaS infrastructure management, accelerates on data protection with the acquisition of the Australian public company, Dropsuite, for $252 million. Founded in 2012, Dropsuite has generated a almost $50 million in ARR in 2024. As the company is public, they published interesting metrics such as the ARPU at $2.52, partner revenue churn below 3%, 779 reseller partners and 1.65 million paid users. Since 2020 with $8.5 million in revenue, the company has sustained a 56%CAGR trajectory to reach exactly $49.8 million in 2024, pretty spectacular. More information in their annual financial report available here.

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Zerras Ceased Operations

Zerras Inc. has stopped its activity and its website appears to be parked now (the domain name record has been changed in December 2024). The company was launched in 2021 with the mission to build and develop an optical storage solution to address long-term data preservation needs. The technology was trying to leverage Dacal Technology’s past solutions. The CEO, Lee Yee, left the company in March 2024. One of the reasons behind this failure was the difficulty to raise money to develop such solutions. We’ll see how other similar companies will develop their projects and it confirms that starting an optical storage company is tough.

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New amazing VC round for NinjaOne

NinjaOne, a SaaS management player, just announced a new investment round with its series C with $500 million at $5 billion valuation. This is huge and the company is moving crazy fast, following its recent announcement of the acquisition of Dropsuite, the Australian SaaS backup company. 2025 will be interesting to watch among key players in the domain with Kaseya, N-able, OwnData via Salesforce, HYCU and Eon. I even anticipate some major changes in the Coldago Map for Modern Data Protection.

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Komprise enhances its Smart Data Workflows to prevent data leakage

Komprise, a leader in unstructured data management, enhances Smart Data Workflow with the capabilities to prevent data leakage and "escape" from a corporation environment. In fact, we all know, at least, I hope, that AI represents also a danger with the implicit and indirect effect of the desire to ingest any kind of data to simplify life, boost productivity and improve daily work. The consequences could be enormous especially for confidential corporate data.

As Komprise is connected to all sources of data, it is pretty simple to detect specific sensitive data and apply a dedicated policy. This is exactly what Smart Data Workflow does, with some content indexing extensions, the engine recognizes PII information, regular expressions and keywords, tag and move to the correct space, at least prevent them to be submitted to the AI engine, especially ones with some uncertain destination. This is clearly a process to run all the time before any data submission to AI engine, it could complement others DLP approaches and therefore should be consider as a serious way to control data breaches. The product is under final review and a few customers test it, it should be GA end of Q1/2025.

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Coldago Research announced its 5 Gems for 2025

Coldago Research, the independent research and analyst firm founded in 2009, just unveiled its 2025 list of Gems. Five companies have been selected: ExaGrid, Leil Storage, QStar Technologies, Volumez and Wasabi Technologies. I invite you to check the dedicated page about Gems I published since 2010. Enjoy.

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The IT Press Tour #60 is back to Silicon Valley

The 60th IT Press Tour will take place in Silicon Valley in a few days, starting Monday January 27th. Topics will be about IT infrastructure, cloud, networking, security, data management, big data, analytics and storage and of course AI as it is everywhere.

We'll meet 9 innovative companies or organizations, among them:

• Aquila Clouds, an emerging FinOps player,
• CloudFabrix, a fast growing network observability vendor,
• Crystal DB, a young develop of an AI-powered database management solution,
• Hammerspace, the reference in global file services and parallel NFS,
• Komprise, a leader in unstructured data management,
• MLCommons, the industry body for AI benchmark,
• Panzura, a pioneer in cloud file storage,
• TrueNAS, the standard in open source storage software,
• and Volumez, a recent cloud-oriented block software-defined storage.

I invite you to follow us on Twitter with #ITPT and @ITPressTour, my twitter handle and @CDP_FST and journalists' respective handle.

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Scalytics to accelerate enterprise AI adoption

Scalytics, the new name of DataBloom AI, founded in 2022, just participated to The IT Press Tour in Malta and we had the chance to meet its CEO and founder, Alexander Alten-Lorenz.

The project was initiated by a group of recognized industry experts, see below, all active within the Apache Software Foundation. So far the company has 6 employees associated with 20-25 students. The company is elf bootstrapped and should raise more money in the future to accelerate its development.

The idea came from the proliferation of independent AI and ML engines without any connection between them and finally optimized results and associated infrastructure. And as a side effect, costs explode.

The firm develops an enterprise software named Scalytics Connect that, as its names states, connects diverse AI engines to various data processing platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks or Confluent to name a few. The last version is 1.2 announced a few days ago. The movement of data is very complex and takes time due to large, very large volumes. So an alternative approach is needed and it will continue to be a tough task to do. This is key to benefit from AI globally at the enterprise level. Access is also an second mandatory features that needs to be seriously considered.

In a nutshell, the last release introduces key features:

• Federated Machine Learning to allow models to be trained on various platforms without migrating or copying data, it could be connected to Apache Spark, TensorFlow, and to JDBC compliant solution, with native code integration,
• Traceability and Auditability to deliver fine-grain log access and training processes,
• Enhanced Performance with a new runtime to reduce complexity and time in development and integration,
• Broader Compatibility and more are coming to be considered as an universal approach.
  
  

The performance benchmark to measure the impact of such an approach illustrates the gain with x150 time reduction for a dataset of 3TB.

Scalytics is open source and leverages partners to penetrate accounts such as NTT Data, Google Cloud or even ESA.  The company has launched its partner program a few weeks ago targeting MSPs, CSPs and of course ISVs.

Open source is a philosophy, a culture, some people even say a religion,  and very difficult to displace once adopted. Scalytics is the initiator of the incubated Apache project Wayang started in 2022.

The revenue started to take off promoting a subscription model and appears to be small as of today.

We'll learn more soon I think.

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ProxySQL to radically changes the MySQL user experience

ProxySQL, a performance companion for MySQL databases, joined The IT Press Tour this week in Valletta, Malta. It was a good time to learn more about the solution that accelerates SQL queries and speak with Jesmar Cannao, the COO and co-founder of the company.

Historically the project started in 2013 and the company in 2014 to support developers and users adoption. The company employs around 10 people.  The idea came in the mind of Rene Cannao, CEO and co-founder, a well recognized DBA and MySQL expert in the ecosystem. He thought about improving performance with an element positioned in the network between clients and MySQL server operating like a centralized query traffic manager. The slide below illustrates the key MySQL challenges addressed by ProxySQL.

Of course the solution is open source like the DB it works with and supports various topology such as replication, Aurora or Galera.

The network instance supports up to 1 million concurrent client connections with the capability to consolidate these connections into optimized backend queries. It is not limited to local instance but multi-region and multi-cloud architectures with potentially thousands of backend servers. If the database is sharded, ProxySQL routes requests to the right portion, shard or replica. It also is designed to provide some security, failover detection and routes requests accordingly, integration with various clustering flavors and caching for similar queries. In addition to MySQL, ProxySQL is well integrated with MariaDB, Percona Server among others.

So far 40 clients adopted ProxySQL, some of them are pretty famous names in finance and e-commerce, and of course local Malta companies in the gaming/betting industry. The team sells via key partners but also in direct mode and of course leverages the open source community. Key partners means hyperscalers but also MySQL integrators or monitoring or tools like Grafana, Prometheus... Oem is also an investigated path.

Essentially 2 flavors exist with the open source model and an enterprise licensing with premium features, updates and priority support - 24x7 - enabled by a subscription-based pricing. Beyond that, training and support are of course available. On average the 40 clients spend $45k per year.

Choosing ProxySQL appears to be cost effective reducing the need to extend a MySQL instance by growing the server or cluster the instance.

Based on the success of ProxySQL and its good reputation, the team has started to deliver similar model for PostgreSQL. But we'll see where it will go... but for sure they need to be more visible.

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DigiFilm develops a new approach for long term data preservation

DigiFilm Corporation, a french entity started in 2013 with the mission to develop a long term data preservation media, participated yesterday to the 59th IT Press Tour organized in Valletta, Malta. The team is pretty small but very active and highly skilled with Rip Hampton O'Neil who leads the technical part, Antoine Simkine around innovation and Pierre Ollivier, CEO.

The session was presented by Antoine Simkine who introduced their technology named Archiflix. It is a WORM media in a "Store and Forget" philosophy. First it's about the media and the choice relies on movie film reel who has a very high longevity and robustness. Second, the reader must be a standard with classic commercial scanner. Third, unlike tape and some other media, the goal is to avoid any technology refresh or migration. Fourth, the sustainability constraint is a must over a multiple decade lifecycle.

Some tentatives have been used to store information for multiple decades but the restore or retrieve of information results in a transformation and a new generation. It means that the final data is not equal to the original one and also lost all associated metadata. Such development must deliver the capability to retrieve the exact copy of the data and all metadata.

The team invents the Pixa code format to encode, store and decode the source data and promote it as an open standard. When the access is needed, a simple scan plus a decoding phase are required and thus the perfect copy of the original file. Each reel embeds information about the algorithm to use for decoding, scanner characteristics and blueprint as well. So the reel is self or auto described and allow easy data access. The addition element resides in the Archiflix Vault, a specific location to keep all reels.

The company is in the process to raise a small round to continue the development of Archiflix and is looking for partners to accelerate this phase. The idea is not to build any hardware scanner or machine. We understand that the pricing is based on Pixa. In terms of performance, don't expect to be fast and it is not an issue as we speak about archiving, it shows 5000-10000 documents for 5 minutes, 200GB per 600m/reel. This kind of support will need 10 minutes for one reel.

DigiFilm plays against Piql, another company from Norway who market microfilm for a few years to store data. We also met Cerabyte, BioMemory and other DNA storage actors and even Folio Photonics, not ready yet. And we also know that some hyperscalers have started some initiatives. All this illustrates a real need. We'll see how this project evolves but for sure the storage industry needs sone iteration on these directions.

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The IT Press Tour #59 will land soon in Malta

The 59th IT Press Tour will take place in Valletta, Malta, in a few days.

Topics will be about IT infrastructure, cloud, networking, security, data management, big data, analytics and storage and of course AI as it is everywhere. We'll meet 6 innovative companies, among them:

• DigiFilm Corporation, a emerging player in long term data preservation,
• EasyVirt, a specialist in the efficiency of physical and virtual servers,
• Indexima, a reference in fast BI and Analytics,
• Manticore Search, key actor for information search,
• ProxySQL, the fast enabler for MySQL and PostgreSQL,
• and Scalytics, the fast growing company in AI federation.

I invite you to follow us on Twitter with #ITPT and @ITPressTour, my twitter handle and @CDP_FST and journalists' respective handle.

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