The acquisition follows Zadara’s technology partnership with NeoKarm, which expanded the company’s cloud platform and was announced in October. In the three months that followed, Zadara deployed 20 new private compute clouds.
“We believe MSPs (managed service providers) of any size should be able to offer their own competitive on-demand private cloud without the large upfront capital expense investment traditionally required,” said Zadara Chief Executive Nelson Nahum.
“The NeoKarm technology seamlessly integrates with our storage solution and offers a vastly improved performance for our customers and partners,” Nahum said in announcing the acquisition on Feb. 16.
When the NeoKarm partnership was made public last fall, Nahum said “our MSP partners can now offer advanced cloud services to their enterprise customers backed by Zadara.”
It’s another step in Nahum’s long journey from Uruguay, where he grew up, to Israel and now Orange County, where he’s been since 2002 and says it’s “really a good place to be.”
He was a co-founder of Zadara in 2011 and says “we’re quite a global company” with offices in the U.K., Israel, India and Japan in addition to the Irvine headquarters.
Cloud Storage
Zadara operates worldwide, including clouds in hundreds of data centers at public and private-cloud partners, with a team that provides follow-the-sun services and support. The company says it will have more than 1,000 cloud locations by the end of this year.
While it traditionally has been known for storage-as-a-service for companies, “a better name is cloud storage,” Nahum told the Business Journal on Feb. 8.
“Our storage is more secure than somebody doing it themselves,” Nahum said. “It is more secure than the traditional cloud.”
Zadara was No. 11 on the Business Journal’s 2020 list of fastest-growing, midsize private companies.
The company had revenue of $25.2 million for the 12 months ended June 30, up nearly 95% from mid-2018 levels.
“We will plan to be profitable maybe in the next two to three years,” according to Nahum.
Fully Managed
Zadara has about 50 local employees and 150 companywide; it was advertising for 14 open positions on its website as of Feb. 23.
Nahum says customers will see tangible benefits from Zadara’s latest developments.
“Instead of having few very large cloud data centers, like Amazon or Azure, we have a lot of smaller clouds very close to the customer or actually at the customer’s data center,” the CEO said.
“We offer our clouds as a fully-managed service so we ship the equipment, with the software included, and we manage all that remotely by our DevOps team.”
He adds: “Late last year one of the things we did was add cloud computing, in response to customer requests.” Zadara has now acquired the NeoKarm technology, according to the Feb. 16 announcement.
Cloud computing is the use of various services, such as software development platforms, servers, storage and software, over the internet, often referred to as the cloud, according to Techopedia.
The price for the NeoKarm purchase was not disclosed.
Racing Deal
Separately, Zadara was named the official cloud supplier of the Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN Formula 1 Team.
“The partnership is significant for Zadara and truly a partnership engineered in the cloud. Like Zadara, the Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN team is first an engineering company focused on performance and innovation,” Nahum told the Business Journal.
Zadara says that in a sport where every millisecond matters, the ability to access real-time data for instantaneous analysis is critically important.
