InfluxData closes 2020 with exponential cloud growth, expanding user base, and big new customers

By Company / Company, Press Releases
Jan 14, 2021

Zoom, Rolls-Royce, China Mobile, Virgin Money and GoPay among new deals signed

SAN FRANCISCO – January 14, 2021 – InfluxData, creator of the time series database InfluxDB, today announced significant growth in 2020 across its cloud business, open source user base, and major new customers. Demand for the time series platform continued to climb across industry sectors, especially for IoT and data streaming use cases. As time series continued to be the fastest-growing database category over the last 24 months, InfluxDB broadened its category leadership and climbed five spots in the ranking of the most popular DBMS, according to industry authority DB-Engines.

The amount of data being produced each year is expected to grow nearly 3x from 2020 to 2025 – generated primarily from IoT sensors, applications, networks, streaming data and video – most of which is time-stamped data (IDC, 2020). As the volumes of data grow, so do enterprise demands to get more value out of it, whether for historical or predictive analysis or real-time decisions. The InfluxDB time series platform approach, with InfluxDB open source at the edge and InfluxDB Cloud at the core working together, is designed to deliver high performance, scalability, and agility in a way that uses resources efficiently and is not cost-prohibitive.

Cloud services dominated InfluxData’s business expansion in 2020. The company saw exponential growth in users of InfluxDB Cloud, with a 13x increase in the number of paying cloud customers and a nearly 5x increase in the number of developers using the cloud software’s free tier. New users were relatively evenly distributed across the U.S. and Europe, with 55 percent and 45 percent, respectively. This came on the heel of the company’s launch of InfluxDB Cloud, the first serverless time series platform.

The driving force behind the company’s success remains the popularity of open source InfluxDB. InfluxData dramatically expanded its reach with the open source developer community, ending the year with over 450,000 daily active instances of InfluxDB running globally. The company continues to foster and advance engagement with developers building their own IoT, monitoring and analytics applications. In 2020, it launched a new open source project, InfluxDB IOx, which lifts restrictions on cardinality, data size, and cluster size, and with more permissive OSS licensing, expands the possibilities of projects running on InfluxDB. InfluxDB also surpassed 20,000 stars on GitHub, a sign of its continued popularity among developers.

“We saw organizations, across the economy, moving quickly to digitize operations and build up their critical IT infrastructure, and much of that was driven by powerful open source projects like InfluxDB,” said Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. “This was especially true for IoT and data streaming use cases, which are based on time series data and have accelerated demand for high-quality and low-latency performance – where InfluxDB thrives.”

InfluxData’s new customers ranged from seed-stage startups and Fortune 50 companies to federal government agencies around the world. These included:

• Rolls-Royce Power Systems – using InfluxDB to improve operational efficiency at its industrial engine manufacturing facility. Collecting sensor data from the engines of ships, trains, planes, and other industrial equipment, Rolls-Royce is able to monitor performance in real time, identify trends, and predict when maintenance will be needed, which reduces expensive engine breakdowns.
• SunPower Corp. – using InfluxDB to monitor energy production and sensor health on solar panels powering homes and businesses around the world.
• Zoom Video Communications – will use InfluxDB to improve the reliability of video conferencing by ensuring there are no service disruptions or downtime. Global internal development teams will collect and monitor all video streaming data and perform analytics to identify trends and opportunities to improve the service.
• Disney – using InfluxDB to monitor the infrastructure that is critical for delivering content to the quickly growing number of Disney+ customers across various devices (e.g., phones, tablets, laptops and smart TVs).
• Virgin Money – using InfluxDB to enhance the experience on consumer-facing infrastructure and applications. Monitoring and analyzing usage metrics are a critical part of Virgin Money's IT operations management strategy.

The company also expanded geographically to the Asia Pacific region in 2020 and signed several significant new customers. Among them were Japanese giants SoftBank and NTT Communications, Chinese payments leader GoPay, and Korean telecommunications company SK Broadband. The deals were supported and accelerated by new strategic partnerships with Digital China, Hyundai BS&C and ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation.

Other new customers included Merck & Co., video game developer Bungie, Inc. (creator of Destiny), and Latin American SuperApp Rappi.

About InfluxData InfluxData is the creator of InfluxDB, the leading time series platform. We empower developers and organizations, such as Cisco, IBM, Lego, Siemens, and Tesla, to build transformative IoT, analytics and monitoring applications. Our technology is purpose-built to handle the massive volumes of time-stamped data produced by sensors, applications and computer infrastructure. Easy to start and scale, InfluxDB gives developers time to focus on the features and functionalities that give their apps a competitive edge. InfluxData is headquartered in San Francisco, with a workforce distributed throughout the U.S. and across Europe. For more information, visit www.influxdata.com and follow us @InfluxDB.