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While it's been a tough year for IT companies as a whole, Axcient continues to buck the trend.
If the Mountain View, Calif.-based company has any issues, it might be trying to keep up with the growth. Axcient has increased its number of employees by 50 percent this year, added more than 200 new features to its platform for cloud recovery of business data, applications and systems and more than doubled the number of installations through solution providers and managed service providers.
In addition, the company was a finalist for the XCellence in Cloud Implementation at UBM Channel's XChange 2012 conference held in August in Dallas.
[Related: Follow The Money: 10 Recent Tech VC Investments To Watch In September]
CEO Justin Moore spoke recently to CRN's Scott Campbell about Axcient's growth, future plans and how its partners should be focusing on business value and technology to win customers. The following are excerpts from the conversation:
Axcient has been on a significant growth curve this year. What's been the key to the success and what do you need to keep growing?
We're growing at a ridiculous clip at every front. Revenue growth, we're almost 2,500 percent growth in three years. Employees, units installed are growing. We have an 83-percent win rate against competition. We're growing on every single front.
The message is the next generation and next evolution of information management and data protection is here. We don't talk about backup; we talk about our mission to deliver a platform to businesses that eliminates data loss and IT downtime. Fundamentally, what do businesses want? They want to eliminate risk, maximize productivity and eliminate things that impact that, and they want to reduce costs and complexity. That's what we've built.
Will it be harder for Axcient to continue this growth rate in an increasingly competitive market? Where do you go from here?
There's massive market share by a few incumbents: HP, EMC, Symantec, CA [Technologies]. They have a massive entrenchment. All the other players, and there's hundreds more, have all missed the market in the race to cloud storage. They treat [cloud storage] as a glorified NAS. That's not where the cloud is powerful. That's where we try to be disruptive. Why was Salesforce.com disruptive when they took on Siebel [Systems]? Why is ServiceNow disruptive in the service industry? Why are SuccessFactors and Workday disruptive in the HR industry? Why are all these people in different disparate fields successful?
The key common thread is they build platforms. They integrate with other providers and have long term vision. They spend tons of R&D. They start with one and grow a one-to-many model. Our vision of the world is we are building the primary information management platform for business. We eliminate the risk of losing any information on any device, eliminating any IT downtime, not just for data but applications and systems.
Data is going to double between now and 2015 and solutions today don't meet the needs of businesses. We feel we can fill that gap and change the way 20 million SMBs in North America and Europe think about data management, archiving, disaster recovery.
