Skytap's Strong 2020 Continues Through H1 2021, with Double Digit Customer Growth, New Partnerships, Expanded Azure Presence

Today Skytap, the industry-leading service to run traditional IBM Power workloads natively in the cloud, recapped a successful eighteen months of growth that saw the company increase its customer base by 30% in 2020, fueled by a growing relationship with Microsoft Azure, a strong relationship with IBM Cloud, and the addition of key partners. Skytap expanded its global footprint this year, adding availability in Azure data centers in Singapore, Amsterdam and South Central USA. The company also offers availability on IBM Cloud in seven regions around the world. Skytap's momentum has carried into 2021 with 40% quarter over quarter customer growth in Q1 and expanded Azure data center availability in Hong Kong, Northern Europe, and the UK to support customers in those regions with multiple additional Azure regions planned for 2022.

The Skytap service enables traditional IBM Power, IBM i and AIX applications and tightly coupled x86 components to leverage the power of the cloud for disaster recovery, production, backup, and application development and testing. Over the past year, Skytap has developed partnerships across the Azure ecosystem, with Accenture Avanade, Meridian IT and Commvault, to help customers easily migrate complex traditional applications to Azure without rewriting. In addition, Skytap continued to build on its established relationship with IBM Cloud through partnerships with companies like Kyndryl, in response to strong interest among IBM Power customers seeking to migrate traditional applications to the cloud. Skytap also saw increased demand for the company's virtual training and demo solution, which enables organizations to quickly provision and manage virtual training labs, product demos and proofs of concept, providing a critical alternative to in person training and demos during a time of enforced social distancing.

"Commvault's industry-leading Intelligent Data Services platform, including our Backup & Recovery solution, along with Skytap's ability to natively run and manage IBM i workloads in Microsoft Azure or the IBM Cloud is a powerful combination," said Randy DeMeno, VP and CTO, Microsoft Practice & Solutions, Commvault. "Together, we offer customers choice with a modern, reliable and affordable solution to manage, back up, recover and migrate their mission-critical IBM i workloads to Azure or IBM Cloud."

"Many organizations that have set goals to move fully into the cloud are blocked by the risk and cost of replacing or replatforming critical IBM Power-based workloads. Skytap eliminates those blockers by migrating and running those workloads natively in Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud," said Brad Schick, CEO for Skytap. "The IBM Power Systems space is a multi-billion-dollar addressable market with tens of thousands of customers, so we are well-positioned to continue strong growth, as our Q1 results have already shown."

Skytap's overall customer growth included a doubling of the user base for Course Manager by Skytap, which enables organizations to easily and affordably build and deliver virtual on-demand and instructor-led technical training labs and product demos.

Skytap has released a host of product updates over the past nine months to optimize Skytap for customers migrating traditional applications to the cloud, including:

• PCI and ISO 27001 Compliance: Skytap is compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and with ISO/IEC 27001:2013, allowing Skytap customers to run IBM Power, x86 and hybrid application workloads in both Azure and IBM Cloud while ensuring their data is secured to internationally recognized standards.
• Azure Blob Storage: Skytap integrates with Azure Blob Storage to give users a more streamlined option for importing virtual machines (VMs) and logical partitions (LPARs) into Skytap.
• API Token Expiration/Rotation: Skytap now offers an API token expiration policy that lets administrators enforce limited lifespans for tokens, as well as adding support for two tokens per user (to allow for smooth rollover when tokens expire).
• Integration with Azure ExpressRoute: Skytap users can connect their on-premise network to their Skytap environment in Azure via ExpressRoute.
• Template Copy and Sharing: Skytap recently added the ability to copy templates, which allow users to create a read-only instance of an environment containing VMs, LPARs, networks and settings, between different Skytap customer accounts.
• Environment Locking: Skytap has added the ability to lock environments to prevent accidental deletion, power-state changes, or network and hardware changes.
• Microsoft License Mobility: Skytap has enabled the License Mobility through Software Assurance licensing model that allows users to run and manage fully licensed software products from Microsoft on Skytap VMs.
• Stronger Default Password Settings

In addition to its customer, partner and product growth, Skytap also appointed Chris Min as Chief Financial Officer. Min, who was most recently CFO of CAKE Corporation, has more than 20 years of experience in financial leadership roles.

About Skytap

Skytap is a cloud service purpose-built to natively run traditional systems in Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud. As the best cloud service to support AIX, IBM i and Linux on IBM Power together with x86, Skytap makes it easy to evolve traditional workloads by rapidly migrating them to the cloud. Enterprises around the world like IBM, Honeywell, CA Technologies and Okta use Skytap for production workloads, disaster recovery, virtual training labs and application development. Skytap's cloud environment simplifies management, reduces IT costs, speeds up application development and allows organizations of all sizes to modernize at the pace of their business. www.skytap.com.