The news: Storage-as-a-service provider Zadara appointed Yoram Novick as president and CEO, while founder and former CEO Nelson Nahum moves into the CTO role to lead the company’s technology strategy. Read the Zadara Press Release here.

Storage Services Vendor Zadara Names New CEO as Competition Increases

Analyst take: Before HPE GreenLake, Dell Apex, NetApp Keystone and Pure Evergreen existed, there was Zadara Cloud Services. Zadara launched in 2012, delivering cloud-based storage on AWS. It has since added compute and networking for a full stack of services and bills itself as an edge cloud company.
Zadara’s fully managed block, file and object storage, compute, and network systems are hosted in point-of-presence (PoP) sites, which it refers to as edge clouds. Zadara has more than 500 PoPs in 24 countries. Zadara services can also run on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, and Oracle public clouds or even in on-premises data centers.

The Zadara approach isn’t so rare these days, as the major storage vendors have all expanded their consumption programs. In an article published on the Zadara site focused on why he agreed to step into the CEO role, Novick stated that Zadara’s advantage is that it offers a consumption-only model with no upfront costs, ingress, or egress fees.

Zadara has expanded its technology through a series of small acquisitions over the past few years. It picked up IP from HCI software startup Stratoscale and compute-as-a-service startup NeoKarm in 2021, and Brazilian service provider ZVS last month to expand into the South American market. These are features Zadara needs to compete with major infrastructure players such as HPE and Dell.

Novick was a founder and CEO of Topio, a data protection company that NetApp acquired in 2006. He was also founder and CEO of hyper-converged infrastructure company Maxtor, which went out of business in 2019 when funding dried up. Novick told Blocks and Files that Zadara hit EBITA profitability last year and he expects it to be operationally profitable in 2023.

The big vendors aren’t pulling back on their consumption models. We saw HPE rework GreenLake this month, and I expect to hear about an expansion of Apex at Dell Technologies World next month. One of Novick’s challenges at Zadara will be to raise the company’s profile to keep it from getting lost in the noise coming from his larger competitors. The Storage-as-a-Service game is now about awareness as much as it is about technology.

Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.