Nextcloud doubles order intake and customer base, remains profitable and independent

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Originally published at: Nextcloud doubles order intake and customer base, remains profitable and independent - Nextcloud

Release of Hub set to accelerate pace for market leader in on-premises content collaboration market

Nextcloud closed 2019 with record numbers, increased its growth rate further, doubling order intake last year and doubling its customer base for the 3rd year in a row. The business maintained profitability and financial independence using an organic growth strategy. The higher expansion rate was fueled by increased security awareness and a growing movement to bring back critical business applications on premises. The release of Nextcloud Hub in January 2020 to glowing reviews in the press immediately doubled incoming lead flow, emphasizing the interest in the new capabilities it delivered and setting the stage for continued growth in the new year.

Accelerating growth thanks to supporting industry trends

The explosion of SaaS services employed in organisations overloads IT departments and increases business, security and compliance risks. Awareness of this problem has caused a push towards consolidation. As part of that, security has become the central factor impacting cloud strategies in enterprises, and amidst disappointing benefits of the move to the cloud and hybrid cloud considered the 'ideal' IT operating mode by over 80% of businesses, studies show that almost three-quarter of mid-size and large enterprises are migrating one or more applications away from the public cloud and back on-premises. The Nextcloud app platform, with well over 200 apps providing extensive collaboration and communication capabilities, is perfectly positioned to benefit from these trends. Nextcloud offers enterprises a way to cut down on the amount of different SaaS services while hosting the platform under their control.

The industry trends supports accelerating Nextcloud growth, with businesses in need of more modern collaboration technology but security risks and compliance regulations resulting in migrations back to on-premises or local, managed cloud providers

said Jos Poortvliet, head of marketing at Nextcloud GmbH.

Based on the first months of 2020, we expect to double our sales again and we plan to expand our team significantly to meet customer demand while remaining profitable and independent from external investments.

added Andreas Rode, head of Sales at Nextcloud GmbH.

Among strong demand in the public sector in Germany, Nextcloud also opened a second office in Berlin during 2019.

Expanding range of customers

Nextcloud accelerated its sales growth, signing twice as many new customers in 2019 as during 2018. 179 new enterprises and government organisations from Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas joined the existing customer base, more than doubling its size. Besides over 100 organisations in a wide variety of industries from finance and insurance to transportation and engineering, about 30 universities and research institutes, more than 15 local and federal government agencies and a dozen health and hospital institutions joined as new customers.

Financially, Nextcloud shows healthy and sustainable growth. 2019 was closed with a significant profit, and the increase in growth rate and strong sales results of the first 2 months position Nextcloud well for an equally successful 2020.

Despite significant investments in product development, Nextcloud GmbH is closing the year with a profit. A strong product roadmap focused on meeting the needs of customers, combined with excellence in engineering and support pays off with strong but sustainable, organic growth.

noted Nextcloud GmbH managing director Frank Karlitschek.

Fast growth of user base

Nextcloud is increasing its lead on the competition in the on-premises file sync and collaboration market. Statistics show the Nextcloud server installed base again grew by 50% over 2019, with monthly server downloads growing from 100.000 in 2019 to 250.000 early 2020. The pace is accelerating: the Nextcloud Hub release alone grew the download rate by 250%. Hub had 150.000 downloads in under 6 weeks, with downloads of previous releases increasing as well.

The official Nextcloud Docker image crossed the 100M pulls threshold early 2019 and the Nextcloud Desktop client release recently exceeded 100.000 downloads in a single day. A similar trend is visible with downloads and ratings on app stores, with an iOS app rating of 4.7 from 3.4K reviewers and the Android app exceeding the 500K user mark, unique in the on-prem collaboration market. At the very popular Ubuntu Snap Store, Nextcloud maintains its ranking as the number one server application with over 36K active installations, a 50% growth compared to a year ago. Popularity on NAS devices is also growing, with the QNAP store showing over 50.000 active installations.

Google trends shows search interest in Nextcloud averaging 3x over its closest competition. With over 2500 code contributors over its lifetime and 700 in the last year, Nextcloud is the largest self-hosted productivity suite in terms of contributor base.

About Nextcloud

Nextcloud Hub is the industry-leading, fully open source, on-premises team productivity platform, combining the easy user interface of consumer-grade cloud solutions with the security and compliance measures enterprises need. Nextcloud Hub brings together universal access to data through mobile, desktop and web interfaces with next-generation, on-premise secure communication and collaboration features like real-time document editing, chat and video calls, putting them under direct control of IT and integrated with existing infrastructure.

Nextcloud’s easy and quick deployment, open, modular architecture and emphasis on security and advanced federation capabilities enable modern enterprises to leverage their existing file storage assets within and across the borders of their organization. For more information, visit nextcloud.com or follow @Nextclouders on Twitter.

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Or the update failed and people had to download the new version 2.5 times on average :astonished: No jokes aside, on the forum there was also a growth over the year with 50% more pageviews.

The real competition are the big leaders, Google and Microsoft. If they share 99% of the market, you must get better than their solution not trying to outperform the other 1%.

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See wikipedia pageviews:

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Nextcloud is growing.

@tflidd Is it deceptive, or are you a little more critical at the moment?

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I’m perhaps a bit allergic to marketing at the moment. I have to say the numbers are really interesting and the increase of interest at January 2020 is impressive.

Well, the curves for Nextcloud don’t end up at top, but already half the pageviews of onedrive! There is still much room for growth!

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I absolutely loved that last link, @tflidd - half the page views compared to OneDrive! We are really making an impact here with Nextcloud and you two and everyone else who’s helping out on these forums are of course a big part of that. Kudos!

(and stay safe with :mask:)

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And you are right about that, of course. They are our real ‘enemy’ here, and esp Microsoft Office 365 is our real competition, the other companies rarely if ever really show up on the radar of our sales team. And we almost never lose deals to anyone but Microsoft.

In other words, the choice potential customers make is about on-premises and staying in control (going with Nextcloud) or losing control to a company they trust is too big to fail*

  • It seems our governments will never actually follow through on legislation that makes the use of MS cloud services illegal, because they could not run themselves without it. Everybody knows that and Microsoft pushes this knowledge, so everyone will just keep buying MS and leaking our data to the USA instead of investing in an alternative. Even if that alternative were better and cheaper. And yes of course, given the open source community Nextcloud is a part of built a competitive solution for 0.0000001% of what Europe pays to the US for cloud services, investing 1% would allow us to build a far better solution than all those foreign cloud services together could ever be… But nah, it is easier to keep sending Euro’s to the USA instead of building our own digital economy up. yeap. https://digitalsovereignty.org btw :wink:
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some nice little story here… off topic, of course.
i made friends with someone selling ms-arzure-stuff to companies… they sell like crazy… and i told him some years ago that i am with team nc. so everytime we meet (like twice a year or so) we update each other about whats new and how things are going (and growing).
he always kept laughing at me about nextcloud. it was last february when he told me that most of his colleagues prefer having nextcloud at home… even his direct boss (ceo) of the company. :smiley:

so well… nc is at least winner of the hearts for this company. :wink:

for logical reasons i can’t give away the name of the guys nor the name of the company :smiley:

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A little addition to the main story from an IT / user perspective.

MS, Google, etc. may be big and may have a lot of features, luring a lot of people into their fictional arms but they all lack that tiny little thing called data security! They all advertise the security of their infrastructure but how often do we read about breaches of that same infrastructure.

We used to start with ownCloud and were pretty happy with it, since it gave us the oportunity to manage our own cloud on our own infrastructure without having to worry where all of our data is being stored in the world. We moved on to Nextcloud, since it had been maintained more on a regular basis, compared to ownCloud.

We always wanted to have an inhouse cloud solution, which we can manage at our will without being tied to rules and policies. We always wanted to make our own rules and policies, which are vital to our company and our data. This is exactly what Nextcloud is allowing us to do.

There are many additional apps and features which can be implemented to improve every companies work force. Our main goal was to have some sort of data encryption, LDAP connection of our local LDAP server and a few more to have a secure and stable cloud for our employees around the globe.