Tuukka Ahoniemi

In the past couple of years, we’ve taken systematic steps in sharpening our strategy and embracing the momentum to execute on it. The market requirements within many of our key target industries are highlighting the need for Tuxera solutions – the digital world around us is being driven by real-time data and that data cannot be lost.

Now, it seems our work has started to bear fruit: In fiscal year 2020, we continued to show strong growth, with sales climbing over 40% compared to the previous year. Our final numbers tallied up to EUR 17.9 million in revenue and EBITDA margin of 32%.

As global a company as we are, as a Finn I must here use ONE OF THE MOST BESTEST compliments a Finn can: “Not bad”.

A welcomed silver lining in a time of uncertainty

Despite the impact of COVID-19 on our customers’ business, we continued to see strong demand for our products specifically within the automotive and customer segments. These two segments have always been a staple of Tuxera’s business. Today, Tuxera’s products are used by the 10 top automotive manufacturers, and in 17 of the world’s top 20 leading technology companies.

Long-lasting and mutually beneficial customer engagements are important in ensuring the best outcome for both parties. The product life cycles are long and new customer contracts made during the year will not start generating revenue immediately, but instead grow steadily over years. That’s why for us, the focus and success has been in building the long-lasting relationships that will drive significant business growth in the coming years. We also continued to make good headway in newer customer segments, such as aerospace and industrial IoT applications.

Innovation – the beating heart of Tuxera’s growth

In terms of product development, we continued to make major investments in the development of both our embedded and enterprise storage product portfolios.

On the embedded side, we’ve invested heavily during the past few years into high-performance internal file systems, specifically targeted for the automotive domain. In this industry, the requirements for both data performance and specifically data reliability are growing significantly in magnitude due to modern software-driven vehicles. By working closely with our customers and, for example, testing various flash chips against their specific use cases, we are able to focus our R&D efforts into optimizing our solutions towards exact industry requirements.

Breaking new ground in enterprise network storage

Our enterprise network storage business is evolving steadily and the future for this segment is looking very bright for Tuxera. We are already working closely with multiple major customers in this domain. These customer evaluations have initiated rapid and agile development work on our primary enterprise network file sharing solution, Fusion File Share by Tuxera.

Most visibly, last year we launched a new and innovative feature for Fusion, specifically for Linux: SMB Compression. This will satisfy a long-desired need to transfer compressed data over networks without needing to de-compress or re-compress at the end nodes. We are confident that our solution is feature-rich, high performing, and will scale to meet the needs of even the world’s giants in cloud technology solutions.

Caring for Tuxerians leads to even better care for our customers

As obvious as it seems, I want to highlight that specifically at Tuxera, it all starts with the people and the employee-driven culture, for which we were granted the Future Workplaces award. At the core of our being is taking care of our people and continuing to invest in the wellbeing of every one of us. By taking good care of our employees, Tuxerians will continue taking the best care of our customers.

We were very happy to see that the number of Tuxerians continued to grow during the year, with the headcount approaching 100 at the fiscal year’s end – a number we reached at the beginning of this month! Some amazing new talents joined our team, further solidifying Tuxera’s position as a true leader within the field of data storage management, both now and in the future.

Final thoughts

The year was a good restart for the wider growth story of Tuxera and it has been great to see everyone pick up the momentum, commit to the joint strategy, and cultivate a shared can-do-attitude regardless of the challenging times. Having our numbers reflect that reinforces our belief that the world shares our vision for data-driven solutions.

Most importantly, we’ve taken good care of each other. I believe we’ll come out stronger than ever, and continue on the same promising path in the following years.