This article was written by Philippe Nicolas, organizer of the event.
The 49th edition of The IT Press Tour happened recently in Israel and it was the opportunity to meet and visit a few innovators that lead some market segments or shake some established positions with their new approach playing in cloud, IT infrastructure, data management, storage: Ctera, Equalum, Finout, Pliops, Rookout, StorONE, Treeverse and UnifabriX.
Ctera
Among the leaders in cloud file storage, it enters into a new era. It took advantage of this session to unveil two major announcements.
The first one is related to promotions for several key executives. Oded Nagel is the new CEO, he joined the team in the early days of the company and was chief strategy officer for 5 years, Liran Eshel moves to executive chairman, Michael Amselem becomes CRO and Saimon Michelson is elevated to VP of alliances. During this session, we measured all the progress made by the team with a significant market footprint increase illustrated by large deals in US and globally. This changes arrive after a successful FY22 with 38% revenue growth reaching 150PB under management.
The session started with Liran Eshel who spoke about data democracy, a new level to reach that goes beyond data ownership considered as necessary but not enough.
The team also shared product news and reiterates some recent new features around ransomware protection, cloud storage routing, an impressive media use case with Publicis and unified file and object or UFO. At the same time, new partners join the ecosystem such as Hitachi Vantara, Netwrix or Aparavi.
The ransomware modules embeds some AI-based development made at Ctera to detect and block attacks under 30s. The idea is to identify some behavior anomalies and then decide which decision to make and enable, this approach doesn’t rely on signature database which is consider not enough for today’s threats.
The cloud storage routing introduced with the recent 7.5 release allows to logically group buckets from various clouds. This subtle feature provides a directory level data placement to optimize data residence based on business, compliance, project or technical needs or quality of service with data placed close to users.
The other new module is the UFO with a direct S3 read-write access directly from the portal. It couples NFS, SMB and S3 under a single namespace to finally expose same content via different access methods. This is required for data integration for data pipeline and analytics projects.
The ransomware and UFO capabilities will be available at the end of June 2023.