BakBone SoftwareT (TSX:BKB, OTCBB: BKBOF) today released information about the company's performance in 2004 and outlook for 2005 in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). As a result of healthy, consistent customer demand and a strong product portfolio, BakBone gained over 1,800 new global customers in the second half of 2004, including Shell Oil, Trinity Mirror Group, Tupperware, Ricoh Germany, Hannover Leasing, and Brighton University in Europe. This has resulted in the Company enjoying an excellent cash position with over 10 million on its balance sheet as of the end of last year.
BakBone's customers have deployed a number of different environments, and this is reflected in an Operating Systems (OS) breakdown of Microsoft 55-60%; Linux 30-35%; and Unix 5-10%, with the balance made up of other OSs. With its announcement of support for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, BakBone continues to embrace a first-to-market approach to OS and platform support. Today, NetVault supports more Linux distributions and architectures (x86, Opteron x86-64 extended systems, IBM Power PC4 and OpenPower) than any of its competition.
Further factors are behind BakBone's success, including a satisfied and loyal customer base that lead to repeat customer purchases rising from 10 % in 2003 to 25 % in 2004 (in the United States in particular, the majority of all transactions consisted of Veritas replacements), and a distribution agreement with Four Leaf Technologies, one of the leading storage distributors in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland.
'Storage software is one of the strongest segments within the storage networking market. Forecast to grow at 28% this year, this is being driven by the need to automate processes and secure data" said Hamish Macarthur, Founder and CEO at analyst house Macarthur Stroud International.
'Recent legislation and events have lead more and more organisations to look into Disaster Recovery as well as Back Up and Restore solutions,' said Sean Jackson, Marketing Director EMEA at BakBone Software. 'Today's datacentres are complex environments where hardware and software from different vendors often run on different operating systems. IT administrators are demanding solutions they can deploy across the entire board to minimise management time and reallocate efforts to other areas.'
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