In all the excitement of closing out our first full year as a company and preparing to dive into our second, I realized I missed reporting a very important milestone. Then I realized, you know, we had a LOT of cool achievements in 2012.
So, stand back a little further as I puff my chest out like a proud daddy.
To start – somewhere around August we passed the MILLION download mark for ownCloud. That’s ONE MILLION SERVER downloads between the community and commercial versions. For a 3 year-old project and 13 month-old company – that’s quite an accomplishment. By the end of the year we had reached more than 1.5 million and the rate of download is accelerating rapidly (40% quarter over quarter).
What else?
Well, we now have dozens of paying enterprise customers from every inhabitable continent on the globe, and the Community Edition is in thousands and thousands more.
We signed nearly 100 partners around the world who are using ownCloud to help their customers to securely take back control of their data.
We had nearly 200,000 downloads of our iOS, Android and Desktop clients – and these too are accelerating.
What about 2013?
This year will see the release of our most stable, secure, open and feature-rich sever edition yet, giving customers the ability to rid themselves of those pesky apps and third-party storage vendors forever and take advantage of the tools they already have – including storage.
This year, we’ll also be announcing exciting and innovative partnerships and amazing customer wins. You’ll see further integration with back-end systems and you’ll see us coming (hopefully) to a town near you as we present ownCloud at more and more shows.
Why is all this possible?
Because we hit a chord. Employees need to synch and share their data and have become addicted to consumer-based apps. But companies cannot afford the exposure to risk that data leakage and privacy concerns introduce through these basic apps. As an analysts friend of ours’ said, it’s a “hair on fire problem for enterprise IT.”
Enterprises can’t just clamp down on the problem – savvy users find a way around. They need to find a solution that leverages all the tools they have AND gives end users the simplicity they have come to rely on. And individuals too want to take advantage of the storage they already have to synch and share their photos, videos and documents. Why store your valuable data on potentially unreliable 3rd-party sites?
And so we have ownCloud. Stay tuned everyone!
