Carbonite has been growing its backup, disaster recovery (BDR) and data protection business both organically and through acquisition over the past few years. Amid that growth, at least one Wall Street analyst is wondering if the U.S.-based cloud storage provider will build data centers in Europe -- especially to address GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
GDPR, which activated in May 2018, is a demanding compliance regulation from the European Union. So how is Carbonite addressing GDPR for its European customers? During Carbonite's Q2 2018 earnings call, CEO Mohamad Ali said:
"So a big part of our strategy in Europe is around MSPs, right? And the MSPs basically take our stack, the stack that runs in our stack offerings here in the U.S., and they deploy it in their own data centers and then they make the service available to their customers. And that seems to work quite well and we're very pleased with that model.
And so, our MSP partners are deploying a cloud stack that can enable their business customers to be GDPR compliant. So that's probably the path that we'll continue to go down in Europe. Europe tends to trust local companies, and our partners in Europe, our MSP partners, are local companies. And so, it's been a successful model for us."
Ali didn't point to specific MSP names or European locations. But he's been a vocal MSP and channel partner advocate since arriving at the data protection company in December 2014.
Carbonite: Channel Changes, Continued Growth
Admittedly, Carbonite has experienced some channel team churn in recent years -- key names like Chris Doggett and Jon Whitlock have come and gone.
These days, all channel sales initiatives roll up into Senior VP of Global Sales Paul Mellinger. Also, channel marketing reports in to Norman Guadagno, senior VP of marketing.
And the results look promising. The latest example: In the company's Q2 2018, revenues hit $77.7 million -- up a healthy 32 percent from Q2 2017.
Some Wall Street analysts believed the revenues missed targets by about $1.25 million, according to SeekingAlpha. However, Carbonite is quick to add: "When comparing our actual Q2 2018 GAAP revenue of $77.7 million to consensus estimates for Q2 2018 of $79.0 million – one is a GAAP number, the other is a non-GAAP number. The more accurate calculation would be to compare the Wall Street consensus revenue estimates of $79.0 million to our Q2 2018 non-GAAP revenue of $79.85 million."
Either way, Ali's strategy across on-premises appliances, hybrid and pure cloud data protection services has Carbonite growing. And he's tipping his hat to European MSPs, which apparently are helping to address end-customer questions about GDPR compliance.
