When Bill Andrews steps onto a stage, he does not speak like a CEO chasing buzzwords. He sounds like someone who has spent twenty years listening to customers explain why their backups failed the night before. At ExaGrid, backup is not an add-on or a checkbox. It is the company’s entire purpose.
“We are 100 percent focused on backup storage,” Andrews told journalists at the IT Press Tour in New York. “We do not have backup applications, we do not have primary storage, and we do not have archive storage. We sit behind Commvault, NetBackup, Veeam, Acronis, Rubrik, and Cohesity. That is all we do. It sounds simple, but it is rare.
The State of Backup: Consolidation and Confusion
Backup storage, once a quiet corner of enterprise IT, has become a battleground. Legacy products, such as Dell Networker, IBM Spectrum Protect, and Veritas NetBackup, are each struggling to remain relevant. But there are fast-growing software vendors, such as Rubrik, Cohesity, and Commvault, collectively generating $5.8 billion in annual revenue.
Andrews believes the shift comes down to one thing: software vendors want recurring revenue, but storage does not fit that model. “The backup app companies are moving away from selling backup storage,” he said. “They want subscriptions and software margins. Storage does not do that.
Rubrik no longer promotes its original end-to-end stack. Cohesity, after acquiring Veritas NetBackup, shows little interest in continuing hardware lines. Even Veeam, dominant in the SMB market, avoids recommending specific backup appliances. The result is a clear gap, and ExaGrid is stepping into it.
The Tiered Approach: A Different Kind of Architecture
ExaGrid’s solution to modern backup challenges is called Tiered Backup Storage, which is built around three key elements: a disk-cache Landing Zone, a long-term retention repository, and a scale-out design.
The Landing Zone stores recent backups in full, undeduplicated form. That may sound wasteful, but it is intentional. Deduplication slows performance, so ExaGrid moves it to the second tier, the retention repository, which handles optimization once immediate recovery speed is no longer a priority.
By keeping these layers separate, ExaGrid achieves what inline deduplication systems cannot: fast backups and near-instant restores without a performance penalty. Andrews summed it up: “Everybody else is either using standard primary storage behind the backup app or inline deduplication appliances. That is it.
The system scales horizontally, so adding appliances increases both capacity and speed. There are no forklift upgrades or bottlenecks, only consistent performance growth over time.
Listening to the Market
Andrews takes pride in how much ExaGrid listens to real customers. “We have 38 inside salespeople cold-calling all day, 90 field sales reps, and 58 systems engineers,” he said. “We talk to tens of thousands of companies every year. None of this is from analyst surveys or AI transcripts. It is straight from the people who buy backup.
That feedback reveals surprising trends. Around 65 percent of enterprises, he noted, still rely on standard primary storage for backups rather than dedicated appliances. “It is because the backup teams and primary storage teams are not aligned,” he said. “Talk to the wrong person and they will tell you snapshots are backup. They are not.”
ExaGrid’s tone is refreshingly grounded. The company does not chase valuations or hype. It is quietly profitable, having remained cash-positive for 19 consecutive quarters with no debt and no outside funding since 2013. “We have our own cash in two banks,” Andrews said. “We are not going to raise money again.”
That discipline helps set it apart. In a field dominated by mergers, ExaGrid’s independence signals reliability. Its 4,800 active customers in 80 countries are supported by level-two and level-three engineers only, each assigned to a specific set of clients.
Andrews joked that their support meetings “look like an AARP gathering,” because the team is senior and steady. That experience pays off: 99.1 percent of customers remain on maintenance and support contracts.
Why Backup Economics Are Changing
One of the slides Andrews shared compared CAPEX, leasing, and subscription models for 300 terabytes of storage over six years.
Buying outright costs about $76,800 over six years. Leasing pushes that to $95,520. Subscriptions double it to $149,760. Cloud consumption, at $11 per terabyte per month, hits $237,600 over the same period.
These figures exclude bandwidth fees, which further increase the cost of cloud backup. The takeaway is simple: subscriptions look cheaper at first but become the most expensive option over time.
“Storage is not software,” Andrews said. “Most customers run their storage for six years or longer. If you plan to keep it, the subscription becomes the most expensive option.
The economics only favor OPEX if the hardware is replaced every few years, which few backup teams can realistically afford to do.
The Decline of Legacy Backup
Asked which vendors are fading, Andrews was direct. “Dell Networker is going down fast. Avamar is going down fast. IBM Spectrum Protect is going down fast. We do not even hear about them anymore,” he said. “Dell is focused on AI now, and rightly so.
As hardware makers pour resources into AI and accelerated computing, traditional backup lines have stalled. Andrews sees both risk and opportunity in that trend. With Cohesity now owning NetBackup, long-dormant customers are reassessing their options. “The market was frozen for years,” he said. “Now it is moving again.”
Why Backups Keep Breaking
Andrews believes backups fail because they were designed for an earlier era. “Backup has always been treated like an afterthought,” he said. “Everybody focuses on primary storage first, and backup gets whatever is left. But when you lose data, that is when you realize how fragile it all is.” He points to poor sizing and retention planning as frequent causes.
“Half the time, customers undersize,” he explained. “Nine months later, they are out of storage and frustrated because they have to buy more. It is not incompetence. Most people do not have accurate calculators for growth and retention.”
To address this, ExaGrid provides modeling tools for capacity, deduplication, and retention before deployment. Andrews said these tools prevent many of the problems that plague other vendors.
Customer Loyalty as a Measure of Trust
ExaGrid’s greatest strength may be its customers. Across more than 300 published success stories, a consistent message emerges: reliability. “The product just works,” Andrews said. “They never have to touch it. And the support is outstanding.”
This steady feedback loop between engineers and users shapes every release. ExaGrid does not chase analyst rankings or marketing awards. It measures success through renewals, referrals, and uptime, in an industry where silence often signals satisfaction, that quiet consistency has built absolute trust.
Where Backup Goes Next
The question now is whether ExaGrid’s model can grow in a world defined by AI, hybrid workloads, and cloud-native design. Andrews is confident it can, precisely because it does not depend on hype.
While Rubrik and Cohesity rebrand themselves as data management platforms for AI and compliance, ExaGrid remains dedicated to the unglamorous backbone of IT: keeping yesterday’s data safe for tomorrow.
“If your backup is not reliable, nothing else you do matters,” Andrews said.
In a market driven by valuations, ExaGrid’s refreshing focus on fundamentals will resonate with organizations that prioritize resilience over the next shiny new technology.
Over to You
I’ll be sitting down with ExaGrid for an upcoming podcast to dig deeper into this journey. What questions would you like me to put to them? Share your thoughts, and I’ll take them straight into the conversation.