The world’s leading provider of open source software for secure file exchange once again significantly increased its revenue last year. This means that growth in 2018 reached a mid double-digit rate. The company identifies a significant increase in demand for secure private cloud solutions in the enterprise sector as the main reason for this: around 250 national and international companies and public authorities, including the German Erwin Hymer Group, the Banco Nacional Ultramarino from Macau, the Dutch construction group M.J. de Nijs en Zonen and the University of Tokyo, closed new subscription contracts last year, some of them for a duration of several years.
The past year also proved to be successful with regard to community activities: App Maintainer brought a total of 222 new releases to the ownCloud marketplace, including completely new developments for managing tasks, reading e-books or creating diagrams in ownCloud.
The developer community, that is an important part of the ownCloud ecosystem, processed almost 2,500 pull requests to the ownCloud core in 2018. In addition, over 3,000 new users signed up for “ownCloud Central“, the main forum for the ownCloud community, where developers and users can exchange ideas and support each other. The continuously increasing number of users of “talk.owncloud.com”, the community chat launched last March, also shows the growing integration of the community, which showcases the further development of ownCloud’s technological innovation capability.
The cooperation with the ownCloud Community last year resulted in features such as a new modular user interface, the long-awaited Virtual File System in the ownCloud Desktop Client and the Delta Sync technology. These features are freely available to the ownCloud community, including the associated documentation.
A year marked by IT security
“Last year was a year of dynamic growth and many well-known new customers,” says Tobias Gerlinger, CEO of ownCloud, commenting on the result. “The topic of data security has gained in importance – not least due to GDPR. For larger installations with more than a thousand users, the lower costs compared to SaaS solutions often play a decisive role”.
ownCloud benefits from the trend to keep sensitive and confidential data in self hosted data centers. The software makes it possible to integrate data from the company’s on-premises servers into an existing IT infrastructure by merging all storage resources via a central front end. In this way, maximum security can be achieved without having to forego the advantages of a public cloud.
“Our focus on the combination of security and ease of use has made ownCloud the world’s largest open source provider of file sharing solutions. In the past year it has paid off, that in addition to software development, we have invested significantly in the area of Professional Services and thus created the appropriate infrastructure to successfully meet the complex requirements of large customer projects,” says Holger Dyroff, COO and responsible for product development at ownCloud.
For customers who only have limited internal IT resources, ownCloud presented “ownCloud.online” at the end of the year, a cloud solution that can be set up quickly and easily without IT knowledge and is therefore also suitable for companies and organisations without their own IT department. ownCloud.online is designed to meet the highest data protection requirements (including GDPR) in order to exchange highly sensitive personal data. Hosting takes place exclusively in fully certified German data centers and meets the highest security standards (including ISO 9001, ISO 27001). Depending on requirements and application, the data can also be migrated to an on-premises infrastructure at any time.
The increasing importance of private cloud solutions for sensitive data is also confirmed by independent sources. The market research company Gartner has added ownCloud to its Magic Quadrant for Content Collaboration Platforms in 2018 as the only open source provider and as one of two European software manufacturers. In addition, ownCloud won first place in the renowned German IT Award Storage Insider for the third time in a row.
About ownCloud
ownCloud is the largest Open Source Filesharing solution in the world with 200.000 installations and more than 25 million users. The Open Platform for Secure Enterprise Filesharing combines consumer-grade usability with enterprise-grade security. It enables users to access data no matter where it is stored or which device is used. By giving organizations the visibility and control required to manage sensitive data while offering users the modern collaboration experience they demand, productivity and security are increased at the same time. For more information, visit: https://owncloud.com.
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