UPDATED 19:33 EDT / MAY 26 2022

INFRA

Wasabi narrows focus to challenge hyperscaler rivals

The technology world is full of companies building out from their core expertise to be a one-stop shop for their customers. But cloud storage company Wasabi has taken a different approach.

“We’re not trying to be everything to everyone; we’re trying to be one thing, executed very well, for a specific set of users and use cases,” said Drew Schlussel (pictured, right), director of product marketing at Wasabi Technologies Inc.

Schlussel and Dustin Albertson (pictured, left), manager of cloud and application alliances — product management, alliances at Veeam Software Corp., spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and David Nicholson at VeeamON, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Wasabi’s growing influence in the cloud storage market. (* Disclosure below.)

Wasabi goes ‘Veeam-ready’

As the only pure-play cloud object storage-as-a-service provider out there, Wasabi has carved out a market niche in an industry dominated by big-name products, including Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3 and Microsoft’s Azure Blob. Predictability, performance and security set Wasabi apart from its competitors, according to Schlussel. But he can’t reveal the technological secret that enables the company to offer storage at a fifth the cost of its hyperscale competitors. What he intimates is that the other companies are maybe not as driven to cut costs as Wasabi and that cloud storage “doesn’t have to be that expensive.”

“We’re highly efficient in how we use the raw storage, and we pass that price on to our customers. We believe that a low-price cloud storage, one tier, always hot, always available gives our customers the ability to spend their money in other places,” Schlussel stated.

Wasabi’s reliably low costs, fast performance and robust protection made the company’s hot cloud storage a great fit for backup, recovery and data management solution provider Veeam’s Modern Data Protection portfolio, according to Albertson.

“Per terabyte, you know what [the cost] is going to be. That’s it, there are no API charges, there are no egress [charges]. So the customers really love that ease of use. It’s become one of the most popular endpoints for object storage for our customers,” he stated.

Imagine if you were watching a game, and every time you went to the fridge you were charged a door-opening fee and a beer or snack extraction fee, Schlussel pointed out, making an analogy to how the hyperscalers charge for storage access.

“Why would you pay a fee to open your fridge and take out a beverage, take out a snack? he asked. “With Wasabi, you can open that door. You can stand there. You can air-condition the whole house,” he said.

A growing ecosystem of go-to-market partners and global locations across the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia show Wasabi’s increasing influence in the cloud storage market. In addition, the company was recognized as a contender challenging IBM, Google, Microsoft and AWS in the most recent “IDC MarketScape: U.S. Public Cloud Cold Storage Services Vendor Assessment,” as well as the IaaS Vendor “that has shaped the year” in IDC’s “Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Market Shares Report.”

“We are seeing more and more analysts identifying Wasabi as the fourth player, which is pretty cool. And I also heard it from some good sources this week that one of the hyperscalers has started to have conversations about us,” Schlussel stated.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VeeamON event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the VeeamON event. Neither Wasabi Technologies Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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