Backblaze Profile
Backblaze, Inc., a specialized storage cloud platform, provides businesses and consumers cloud services to store, use, and protect their data in an easy and affordable manner.
The company provides cloud services through a purpose-built, web-scale software infrastructure built on commodity hardware. Through its blog and culture of transparency, the company has built a community of millions of readers and brand advocates. Referrals from the company’s community of brand advocates, combined with its highly efficient and primarily self-serve customer acquisition model and an ecosystem of thousands of partners, have allowed it to attract more than 500,000 customers as of December 31, 2022. These customers use the company’s Storage Cloud platform across more than 175 countries to grow and protect their business data on its over 2.5 exabytes, or 2.5 trillion megabytes, of data storage under management.
The Backblaze Storage Cloud organizes, safeguards, and keeps over 500 billion files available on demand and is designed to handle much more in the future. Through its purpose-built software that manages the company’s global physical infrastructure, it provides a platform that durable, scalable, performant, and secure. The company’s two cloud services that it offers on its Storage Cloud are:
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage: Enables customers to store data, developers to build applications, and partners to expand their use cases. The amount of data stored in this cloud service can scale up and down as needed on a pay-as-you-go basis, or can be paid for on a capacity basis for greater predictability, which the company refers to as its B2 Reserve offering. This Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) enables use cases including backups, multi-cloud, application storage, and ransomware protection.
Backblaze Computer Backup: Automatically backs up data from laptops and desktops for businesses and individuals. This cloud backup service offers easily understood flat-rate pricing to continuously back up a virtually unlimited amount of data. This service is offered as a subscription-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and serves use cases including computer backup, ransomware protection, theft and loss protection, and remote access.
The company’s solutions are designed for individuals and businesses of all sizes and across all industries but have a particularly strong appeal to mid-market organizations (which it defines as organizations with 10 to 999 employees) due to their desire for easy-to-use and cost-effective solutions.
The company has a go-to-market model that was primarily built on a self-serve selling motion. Prospective customers find the company through a variety of channels including its website, partners, and brand advocates. The company has fostered community engagement with content it shares on its blog—in 2022 alone, millions of readers consumed content that it shared there. The company’s free trial and self-serve sign-up processes help convert its blog readers and referrals from its brand advocates into customers, with approximately 80% of its total revenue in 2022 coming from self-serve customers. The company’s technology, channel, affiliate, and managed service provider (MSP) partners help expand use cases and sales channels and attract customers, thereby increasing usage of its Storage Cloud. In addition to its self-serve selling motion, it has a sales-assisted selling motion to identify opportunities to increase business with existing customers and to assist larger customers in adopting its services. The company’s sales-assisted selling motion customers are frequently significantly larger in terms of average revenue per customer than its self-serve customers.
Substantially all of the company’s revenue is recurring in nature. The company employs a land-and-expand model that drives additional revenue from existing customers. As customers generate, store, and back up more data, their use of the company’s platform increases, creating natural opportunities for revenue expansion. The company’s land-and-expand strategy is evidenced by its overall net revenue retention rate of 113% as of December 31, 2022.
The company’s B2 Cloud Storage revenue grew by 46% during the year ended December 31, 2022 and its Computer Backup cloud service revenue grew by 17% during the year ended December 31, 2022.
The company’s ecosystem of partners—including technology and developer partners, channel partners, and MSPs—helps it expand its platform in existing and new markets. The company’s partners leverage its cloud services to provide storage solutions to their customers or its mutual customers and in turn, it is able to expand its use cases and overall reach.
Technology and Developer Partners: The company’s platform, alongside the platforms of its technology and developer partners, enables software developers to efficiently build their applications and provides a cloud storage destination for partners whose products require storage to serve their customers. Partners providing software, hardware, and SaaS services to perform backups, synchronize data, manage media, and address other use cases either select its Storage Cloud for the underlying data storage, or offer it as a choice to their customers.
Channel Partners: The company sells B2 Cloud Storage to resellers at a discounted rate. Resellers then market and sell B2 Cloud Storage individually or as part of broader solutions to businesses and organizations. The channel provides greater access to markets with specialty needs in the purchasing process, like state and local governments and educational institutions.
Managed Service Providers (MSP): The company’s platform enables MSP partners to store data for backups, archives, hybrid cloud setups, ransomware protection, and otherwise manage their clients’ data. MSPs provide critical IT solutions for mid-market organizations who often lack the resources to do so themselves. These providers are drawn to the company’s solutions due to its support of the breadth of their offerings, competitive pricing which helps MSPs with their own margin profile, and ease of use. The markets addressed by the company’s platform include Public Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) storage, as well as Data-Protection-as-a-Service (DPaaS).
Platform and Cloud Services
Platform: Backblaze Storage Cloud
The Backblaze Storage Cloud provides the core platform for the company’s cloud services and is designed to be durable, available, scalable, secure, performant and predictive. This storage cloud organizes, safeguards, and keeps over 500 billion files available on demand and is designed to handle many more in the future. The key enabler of the Backblaze Storage Cloud is the software that runs it, which contains millions of lines of code that the company’s software engineering team has written and continually improved. The ability to manage an ever-larger amount of data across ever-larger hard drives while maintaining data availability and durability continues to be highly complex. This web-scale software layer receives, stores, and delivers data for customers across the globe.
The company’s vault architecture creates redundancy for the storage of customer data using proprietary and other algorithms. The company’s software splits each uploaded customer file into several data parts, adds multiple redundant parts, and stores these parts across discrete hard drives in different servers in a data center. As a result, even if a few of the parts are entirely lost or offline, the company is able to reconstruct the customer data from the remaining parts for durability. Multiple vaults are grouped together to form one cluster, and one or more clusters are organized into a region. The company’s globally distributed storage platform also offers customers multi-region geographic choice for their data—currently between East and West Coast regions in the United States and Europe—providing flexibility for different needs, including geopolitical considerations, regulatory requirements, and performance optimization.
This software manages the company’s global physical infrastructure of more than 250,000 hard drives and one terabit per second (one million megabits per second) of network capacity across multiple data centers. The company’s systems also manage the automation, monitoring, and security of this infrastructure. As its customers’ data grows, and its total revenue with it, the company continuously and smoothly deploy additional infrastructure.
Cloud Service Offerings
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage: B2 Cloud Storage provides customers direct access to the company’s Storage Cloud to store, use and protect data. Users can access the platform through industry standard and native application programming interfaces (APIs), software development kits (SDKs), its web interface, or hundreds of third-party integrations. The wide range of options for accessing B2 Cloud Storage allows anyone to use it, including developers and partners who can integrate storage capabilities into their technology stack or build their own solutions on top of the company’s platform. Customers also strategically tier backups of their core data systems to B2 Cloud Storage, including on-premises and virtual machine servers and other high-capacity storage devices. Customers leverage B2 Cloud Storage for a wide range of use cases, including public, hybrid and multi-cloud data storage; application development and DevOps; content delivery and edge computing; security and ransomware protection; media management; backup, archive and tape replacement; repository for analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning; and Internet of Things (e.g., storing data for surveillance systems, autonomous vehicles, and smart devices).
Backblaze Computer Backup: The company’s Computer Backup cloud service backs up laptops, desktops, and external hard drives in a continuous and automated fashion. Whether for home computers or a business’ full fleet of machines, customers can back up a virtually unlimited number of files without size or speed constraints. This cloud service includes a lightweight agent that runs locally on each end user’s computer, continuously searching for new and changed files in a manner unobtrusive to the user. When a new or changed file is detected, the altered data is backed up and sent to the Backblaze Storage Cloud. Once there, it is accessible to the end user or business administrator responsible for managing the account. In the event of data loss, customers can restore all or portions of their backed-up data. Customers leverage Computer Backup for many different use cases, including Mac and PC backup; ransomware protection; theft and loss recovery; data archiving; organization and MSP-level management; and remote access.
Customers
The company’s customers consist of a wide range of organizations and businesses—particularly mid-market organizations—and consumers. As of December 31, 2022, the company had over 500,000 customers in over 175 countries, including approximately 436,000 customers using its Computer Backup cloud services solution and approximately 87,000 customers using its B2 Cloud Storage solution (approximately 16,000 customers use both its B2 Cloud Storage and Computer Backup solutions). The company’s customers span a range of industries, including a broad range of businesses, MSPs, developers, media innovators, creative agencies, academic institutions, government agencies, research institutes, gaming companies, and individuals. The company’s customer base is highly diversified.
Sales and Marketing
The company’s marketing efforts focus on establishing its brand, generating awareness, creating leads, and cultivating the Backblaze community. The marketing team consists primarily of product marketing, corporate communications and publishing, social media, growth marketing, and website teams. The company leverages both online and offline marketing channels, such as blogs, events and trade shows, seminars and webinars, whitepapers, case studies, search engines, and email marketing. The company complements its self-serve customer acquisition model with a growing inside sales team that focuses on a low-touch sales assisted model that supports its larger customers if the need arises.
Intellectual Property
The company owns two registered trademarks in the United States for the word Backblaze and the Backblaze logo.
Competition
The company’s primary competitors generally fall into the following categories: diversified public cloud vendors, such as Amazon.com, Inc. through Amazon Web Services, Alphabet Inc. through Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Corporation through Azure; certain smaller cloud storage competitors; and legacy on-premises storage vendors such as Dell EMC.
History
Backblaze, Inc. was founded in 2007. The company was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 2007.
