Amid a relentlessly evolving cyberthreat landscape where ransomware attacks have become an unfortunate norm, the demand for truly secure and unalterable data protection has reached a fever pitch. Tapping directly into this urgent market need, Object First, a company specializing in ransomware-proof backup storage, announced a landmark fiscal year for 2025, with its worldwide bookings skyrocketing by 183 percent. This achievement marks the firm’s second consecutive year of triple-digit growth, serving as a powerful testament to a global shift in IT strategy. Organizations are no longer just backing up their data; they are actively fortifying it against attack by investing in immutable storage solutions designed to be the definitive last line of defense. The company’s record-breaking performance is not merely a financial success but a clear indicator of the validation of its core mission: to provide secure, simple, and powerful backup storage that is purpose-built to thwart ransomware.
A Surge in Global Adoption and Market Trust
The company’s exceptional financial results were a direct reflection of its accelerating penetration into key markets and its growing acceptance within the enterprise sector. The remarkable 183% year-over-year increase in global bookings was significantly bolstered by a record-breaking final quarter, where every sales territory reported its highest quarterly performance to date. This momentum indicates a compounding effect of market awareness and product maturity. A particularly telling metric of this rising confidence was the 250% surge in the number of deals valued at six-figures or more. This specific growth demonstrates a clear trend of larger organizations making substantial, long-term investments in the company’s technology, moving beyond initial trials to company-wide deployments. This shift signifies a deep-seated trust in the solution’s ability to safeguard critical data infrastructure at scale, validating immutable on-premises storage as a cornerstone of modern cyber resilience strategies against increasingly sophisticated threats.
This impressive growth was not isolated to a single region but was a widespread international phenomenon, underscoring the universal nature of the ransomware threat. The Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region served as a primary engine for this expansion, posting an extraordinary 515% year-over-year growth in bookings. Concurrently, the Americas demonstrated robust and sustained momentum with a solid 125% increase over the same period. This global demand was successfully captured and scaled through an aggressive and effective partner-centric sales model. The company’s network of transacting channel partners expanded by a massive 215%, a figure that outpaced even the substantial 193% growth in its global customer base. This strategy of empowering a broad ecosystem of resellers and service providers has proven instrumental in accelerating market penetration and delivering localized expertise, ensuring that customers worldwide can easily access, implement, and manage their ransomware-proof storage solutions.
Driving Growth Through Strategic Innovation
Throughout 2025, Object First made significant investments in strengthening its product portfolio to address a wider spectrum of organizational needs, from large-scale enterprises to distributed edge environments. A key part of this strategy involved expanding its hardware offerings to include new 20, 40, and 432 terabyte appliances. These purpose-built units, designed for seamless integration with Veeam environments, empower organizations to scale their immutable storage capacity up to an impressive 7 petabytes, ensuring they can protect growing data volumes without compromise. Recognizing the security challenges posed by remote and branch offices (ROBO), the company also launched the Ootbi Mini. This compact, immutable storage appliance, available in 8, 16, and 24 TB capacities, delivers enterprise-grade ransomware protection to the network edge. Furthermore, the introduction of a flexible pay-per-use subscription model provided customers with an alternative to traditional upfront capital expenditure, allowing them to adopt the technology as an operational expense while eliminating future hardware refresh costs.
Complementing its hardware advancements, the company delivered critical platform enhancements focused on boosting performance and proactive security. The release of firmware version 1.6 provided a tangible 10-20% improvement in data ingest and restore speeds, which directly translates to shorter backup windows and, more importantly, faster recovery times in the event of an incident. Shortly after, firmware version 1.7 introduced “Honeypot,” an innovative and proactive security feature. This function creates a decoy Veeam Backup & Replication environment on a secure, segmented part of the appliance. It is designed to detect and alert administrators to suspicious reconnaissance activity, providing an invaluable early warning of a potential cyberthreat before it can escalate. To address the management complexities of a growing infrastructure, Object First also launched a beta program for its Fleet Manager, a cloud-based application that allows customers to monitor their entire fleet of appliances from a single, unified dashboard, offering granular reporting on hardware health and utilization.
Market Validation and Industry Endorsement
The company’s strategic focus on product excellence and channel enablement was consistently validated through multiple prestigious industry accolades and third-party endorsements throughout 2025. This industry-wide recognition reinforced its position as a leader in the immutable storage space. For the second consecutive year, Object First was honored at the Storage Awards in London, securing both the “Immutable Storage Company of the Year” and “Editor’s Choice” awards. Its deep commitment to its partner ecosystem was also acknowledged when it earned a coveted spot in the CRN® Partner Program Guide, a testament to its investment in partner success and flexible sales options. Further cementing its reputation as a security innovator, Cyber Defense Magazine recognized the company’s unique approach to data protection by naming it a “Top InfoSec Innovator” and a “Data Security Trailblazer.” These awards reflect a strong consensus from industry experts, analysts, and journalists on the effectiveness and importance of the company’s ransomware-proof storage solutions in today’s high-stakes security climate.
The narrative of success and market need was strongly reinforced by a unified message from company leadership, customers, and channel partners. David Bennett, the CEO of Object First, attributed the company’s explosive growth to the global realization that immutable backup storage represents the most effective and reliable defense against ransomware. He emphasized the indispensable role that dedicated channel partners played in the company’s ability to scale its operations and meet surging demand. This sentiment was echoed in customer testimonials, with users praising the “iron-clad” integrity of their disaster recovery capabilities and the “simple peace of mind” that the solution afforded. Partners, in turn, highlighted significant operational efficiencies, noting that the purpose-built nature of the appliances dramatically reduced customer implementation and onboarding time from a matter of days to mere hours. This alignment across the entire ecosystem underscored the solution’s value proposition of delivering powerful security with unparalleled simplicity.
