Market Insight Report: Wasabi leverages channel and technology partners to grow customer base
“While cloud-based object storage is ubiquitous, pricing for object storage among most vendors is a complex maze of multiple service tiers, units of API requests and egress charges. Wasabi aims to evade these with its single-price, single-tier object storage, although this comes with conditions on what constitutes a good fit for the service.”
THE 451 TAKE
Wasabi is making effective use of channel and technology partners to fuel growth, having gained roughly 8,000 customers over the past 10 months. Positioning object storage as an endpoint for other products – Veeam Backup with Wasabi, for example, has over 2,000 customers alone – is fueling growth in the company. The storage-as-a-utility stance appears to be winning hearts and minds, as the singular focus of the firm eliminates the specter of future competition with technology partners.
The value price point is gaining traction. Wasabi claims to be around a quarter of the price of
‘comparable storage from incumbents.’ Typically, attempting to compete on price is something of a race to the bottom – a competitor will inevitably appear to edge others out of the market with a purely price-conscious play. This is a somewhat perpendicular point to Wasabi’s strategy. Lacking a compute option, Wasabi plays in a consciously multicloud world – the firm is not trying to be everything to everyone.
Context
Founded in 2017, Boston-based Wasabi styles itself as a ‘hot cloud storage company’ offering object storage compatible with Amazon S3 APIs. Founded by CEO David Friend and CTO Jeff Flowers, the company envisions a purposefully multicloud future with Wasabi acting as a utility provider of storage, in much the way networking and electricity are utilities. Wasabi’s cofounders are experienced in data storage, the duo started personal computer backup business Carbonite in 2006. That firm was acquired by OpenText for $805m in 2019. Wasabi has over 150 employees, expanding by roughly 50% since our last coverage.
Wasabi’s pricing structure is at the core of its value proposition: pay-as-you-go pricing is set at $6.99 per terabyte per month, with no additional charges for data egress or API requests. The firm offers a discounted, contract-based (Reserved Capacity Storage) option for enterprises with over 50TB of data.
Cloud providers’ reliance on egress charges is an encumbrance to cloud storage adoption, with 44% of organizations that were impacted by egress charges claiming these charges slowed their adoption of cloud storage, according to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Storage, Transformation survey. Further, 31% of organizations indicated egress charges prevented implementation of a multicloud architecture.