Storware took part in the European edition of the IT Press Tour at the turn of March and April — a recurring conference connecting technology vendors with industry journalists.
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The IT Press Tour formula brings together journalists from Europe and the United States with representatives of technology companies. The meetings are organized both in the United States and Europe. During the event, companies present their products and strategies in short sessions, while journalists have the opportunity to ask questions directly to the speakers.
The IT Press Tour is particularly valued by small and medium-sized technology companies because it provides access to European industry media in a condensed and efficient format, instead of requiring dozens of separate press meetings.
The latest edition covered a wide range of topics: from virtual machine backup in open-source environments, through software-defined storage and HDD optimization, to tape archiving and extracting value from “dark data” stored in corporate archives. One of the most frequently discussed subjects was Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and its consequences for thousands of companies worldwide. Alongside Storware, the following companies also presented their solutions in Sofia: Caeves (USA), Leila (Estonia), NGX Storage (Turkey), StorPool (Bulgaria), and PoINT (Germany).
A Story of Three Spirits
During our presentation, we referenced Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, using the motif of the three spirits: the past, the present, and the future.
The first — the Spirit of the Past — took us back to 2013, when Storware was just being founded and VMware completely dominated the data center market. Some vendors, such as Veeam, built their business models around backing up virtual machines running specifically in VMware environments. Most backup software vendors followed the same direction, integrating their products with VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V (together controlling more than 80% of the hypervisor market at the time).
We chose a different path, focusing on the remaining 15–20% of the market, which included virtualization environments based on KVM, Xen, OpenStack, and other open-source hypervisors. At the time, none of the major players offered backup solutions for these platforms. Our first version of vProtect was released in 2015 and initially received a rather cold reception. Many potential customers claimed that nobody used hypervisors such as KVM or Xen. Nevertheless, patience and confidence in our strategy ultimately paid off.
The breakthrough came in 2019, when IBM, Dell Technologies, and OpenText realized that their portfolios lacked a strong data protection solution for open-source environments. Instead of building such a solution from scratch, these vendors chose a simpler path — partnering with Storware.
Today, our technology is available under several names, including Dell vProtect, Data Protector for Cloud Workloads, and IBM’s vProtect offering. In every case, the backup engine behind the solution is powered by Storware.
This creates a somewhat paradoxical situation. On one hand, the Storware brand remains relatively unknown in the retail sales channel. On the other hand, our technology has successfully passed rigorous due diligence processes conducted by four leading vendors from Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for backup solutions. That level of validation from market leaders is an important argument in conversations with customers because it opens many doors that would otherwise remain closed.
A particularly interesting example is Garmin. The company selected Storware while simultaneously rejecting Dell’s solution, unaware that both offerings were based on the same backup platform. For many years, most of our revenue came through OEM channels, but today the proportions have reversed — around 60% is now generated through our own brand distribution.
The Spirit of the Present and Broadcom
In 2023, Broadcom announced the acquisition of VMware. The new owner changed partner cooperation terms and introduced dramatic software price increases. Broadcom focused primarily on the top 20% of VMware’s largest customers. As a result, the remaining 80% — including thousands of managed service providers and cloud operators — began searching for alternatives.
From our perspective, this was the best thing that could have happened to the virtualization market. Previously unfamiliar names such as Proxmox, XCP-ng, OpenStack, and Citrix Hypervisor suddenly started appearing in customer conversations. We have been operating in this space for more than a decade, protecting these environments long before they became mainstream.
Today, our products support more than 13 different virtualization platforms: VMware and Hyper-V as market necessities, but also XCP-ng, Citrix, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Virtualization, Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager, Azure Stack, Nutanix AHV, Scale Computing HCI, Verge.io, and multiple OpenStack distributions.
Importantly, we were the first enterprise backup vendor to introduce agentless protection for Proxmox, Scale Computing, and Nutanix AHV. Today, that long-term technological investment is paying dividends.
OpenStack: A Major Opportunity and Challenge
Among all the platforms we focus on, OpenStack holds a special place. It is one of the most difficult virtualization platforms to manage and protect with backup solutions, yet at the same time it is the only enterprise-scale open platform realistically capable of replacing VMware for service providers.
In the OpenStack backup market, there are essentially three major options: the Australian company Trilio, Storware, and OEM solutions based on Polish technology offered by IBM, Dell, and OpenText.
However, Storware is currently the only vendor offering native plugins for Horizon and Skyline — OpenStack management interfaces. This allows service providers to build backup-as-a-service solutions directly integrated into customer environments, similar to what Veeam once achieved in the VMware ecosystem.
According to Gartner forecasts, 70% of VMware customers will migrate at least half of their workloads to alternative platforms, while the virtualization market is expected to reach a value of $300 billion by 2030. This would mean that the non-VMware segment alone could be worth approximately $50 billion.
If the standard backup-to-virtualization market ratio of 10–15% is maintained, this creates a potential $5 billion opportunity for vendors such as Storware.
One example of the scale of this migration is Rackspace Technology, which announced plans to move 90% of its approximately 300,000 virtual machines to OpenStack. Storware is adapting its V-to-V migration functionality — based on backup technology — specifically for this project.
Data Sovereignty and the European Advantage
In an increasingly tense geopolitical climate, the argument for European data sovereignty and European vendors is becoming more important. This topic generated many discussions during the Sofia event as well.
To capitalize on this growing opportunity, Storware is building its own cloud offering — Storware Cloud — in cooperation with three partners:
- N-able from Canada, providing deduplication and replication mechanisms,
- Vault from Portugal, enabling data storage across two or three cloud locations with the option to restrict data residency to Europe,
- and Seagate Technology, responsible for object storage.
For customers sensitive to jurisdiction and compliance issues — including public sector organizations, banks, and healthcare institutions — we provide an environment where data never leaves Europe. This directly addresses growing demand from Nordic countries and the Netherlands for fully European backup service providers.
Recently, we won a government cloud tender in Romania, implemented jointly with Red Hat and funded by the European Union. One outcome of this project was the creation of a Romanian-language version of the product interface. It is a clear sign that we are capable of delivering highly demanding public-sector deployments.
Licensing Against the Current
While nearly every software vendor is racing toward subscription and SaaS models, we are deliberately moving in the opposite direction. Storware offers both perpetual licenses and subscription models, allowing customers to choose what best fits their needs.
This decision is based on a practical understanding of market realities. In many Central and Eastern European countries, IT investments financed through EU funds must be accounted for as CAPEX expenditures, making subscriptions difficult to justify financially.
Meanwhile, in Asian and Latin American markets, operational continuity concerns dominate. Customers want software that continues functioning independently of internet connectivity or license server availability.
The defense sector illustrates this particularly well. Military customers openly state that they cannot risk systems that require monthly online license verification.
Our pricing policy is equally flexible: per host, per CPU, per VM, or per terabyte. We do not impose a single billing model, which clearly differentiates us from increasingly restrictive licensing practices adopted by the industry’s largest vendors.
The Partner Channel: A New Chapter
For many years, we sold products directly to end customers. That is now changing. Storware is transitioning to a channel-first model, prioritizing distributors, resellers, and integrators capable of supporting customers in their local languages.
The reason is simple: customers in Spain or Italy prefer speaking Spanish or Italian. Artificial intelligence can translate conversations, but a local partner who can visit onsite and communicate directly with administrators in their native language delivers value that even the most advanced chatbot cannot replace.
At the same time, Storware is launching its own line of physical appliances — systems built on Supermicro servers with NVMe drives and a Linux distribution. Instead of installing the software independently, customers receive a ready-to-use, fully configured device with end-to-end responsibility handled by a single vendor.
The strength of this model is best illustrated by a recent case in Germany. A medical industry company that had never previously heard of Storware saw a presentation at a trade show, downloaded the software, tested it, and within four weeks placed an order for hardware worth $250,000.
The Spirit of the Future: Storware in 2030
Our goal for the 2026–2030 period is to become the leading provider of backup solutions for KVM and OpenStack environments. We aim to dominate a specific market segment that is currently experiencing rapid growth.
In the near future, version 7.5 will introduce an updated Nutanix AHV API integration, while version 8.0 — scheduled for the third quarter — will deliver replication support for OpenStack.
We are also in discussions with a Polish deduplication technology vendor regarding an integration designed to support environments with capacities of half a petabyte and beyond.
At the same time, we approach AI with realism and caution. We do not want to participate in the industry’s “AI marketing arms race.” While the growth of AI and machine learning will undoubtedly require additional layers of data protection, Storware has no intention of adding the “AI” label to every presentation slide.
Instead, we remain focused on delivering solid, foundational solutions for open-source infrastructure environments.
