From rethinking data protection in the cloud to preserving digital information for centuries, four tech innovators unveiled bold new approaches to some of today’s most urgent enterprise challenges at Technology Live! in Munich. Spanning hybrid data management, SaaS resilience, AI workload orchestration and ultra-durable archiving, the event offered a glimpse into the future of data: tackling fragmentation, performance bottlenecks and long-term sustainability head-on.
European startups Cerabyte and Piql introduced brand new storage media designed to address the challenges of long-term data preservation. The newcomers joined established players Hammerspace and Keepit to share live demos, roadmaps and candid discussions about the real-world impact their technologies can have on business outcomes, and the challenges that remain.
Cerabyte: Revolutionising long-term data storage
A radically new approach to data storage, promising to reshape long-term data archiving, was on show at Technology Live! Using nanolayers of ceramic on glass carriers, German startup Cerabyte’s ultra-durable technology potentially stores terabytes of data per square centimetre and offers environmental resilience and longevity of up to 5,000 years, with no need for energy to maintain this medium over time.
Speaking at the event, Cerabyte CMO and co-founder Martin Kunze explained: “Cerabyte is a breakthrough in sustainable, permanent optical data storage built on advanced ceramic materials. By harnessing massive parallelisation in both writing and reading processes, Cerabyte delivers unprecedented performance and accessibility while eliminating the need for media replacement, data migration and maintenance, the key drivers for high costs of long-term data retention.
This pioneering technology ensures that vast volumes of data -critical for powering next-generation AI and machine learning - remain instantly available while preserving digital heritage for centuries to come.
Although still in early stages, Cerabyte is gaining industry traction. Pure Storage has taken a board seat, signalling confidence from a major player in enterprise storage. With its promise of energy-efficient, ultra-long-term data preservation, Cerabyte is one to watch for organisations seeking sustainable solutions for cold data or compliance archives, or safeguarding digital data.
Keepit: The first step in an ambitious data protection roadmap
Organisations relying on Atlassian Jira and Confluence Cloud now have a stronger safety net against data loss and downtime, as SaaS data protection expert Keepit announced the expansion of its enhanced backup and recovery platform which now covers the Atlassian collaboration tools.
Keepit’s CTO Jakob Østergaard said: “Many CIOs imagine their SaaS provider protects their data - but they’re wrong. The provider is not responsible and data is at risk if there isn’t alternative protection in place. Just imagine a product team losing its entire Jira roadmap, or a customer success team being cut off from the service history logged in Confluence. The ripple effects touch every part of the business.”
Keepit’s new support ensures fast, backup and recovery - independent from global hyperscalers - filling a crucial gap in many organisations’ data resilience strategies. The news announced at Technology Live! marks the first milestone in the company’s ambitious product roadmap, which is designed to future-proof cyber resilience for organisations navigating an increasingly complex threat landscape. Keepit plans to expand coverage from eight to hundreds of cloud apps over the next three years.
Hammerspace: Rethinking fragmentation in the AI age
How do enterprises manage data for AI and high-performance computing? Hammerspace made a compelling case for rethinking the status quo as organisations face increasing pressure to harness AI at scale.
With data scattered across data centres, cloud and edge environments, accessing the right information for reliable AI results remains a major challenge. At Technology Live!, Hammerspace senior technical marketing engineer Dan Duperron explained how enterprises can avoid costly replatforming by unpicking the complexity of siloed storage, automating data placement and enabling unified file and object access across otherwise incompatible systems.
Crucially, this allows enterprises to introduce AI workloads into existing infrastructures - without vendor lock-in - while achieving linear scalability in IOPS and throughput.
“For CIOs wrestling with fragmented data estates and rising performance demands,” Duperron said, “Hammerspace’s approach offers simplified AI integration and accelerated innovation.”
Piql: data storage with a 1,000-year shelf life
Piql positions itself as a pioneer in ultra-durable data preservation. Founded in 2002 (originally as Cinevation) in Norway, the company first disrupted the motion picture industry with its award-winning Cinevator film recorders. Now, it is applying that film technology to digital archiving, aiming not just to store data, but to make it immortal.
At Technology Live!, Piql demonstrated its piqlFilm solution - a nano silver-halide film on a PET base that encodes binary data and can store up to 120 GB per reel with a projected lifespan of more than 1,000 years. The offline, immutable medium is resistant to electromagnetic interference, cyberattacks and environmental decay, and requires no power or active migration.
Speaking at Technology Live!, Piql Managing Director Rune Bjerkestrand explained Piql’s mission and how the company’s groundbreaking tech could benefit users. “We protect the data that matters most, archive it with integrity, and preserve it so the world can remember,” he said. “For CIOs facing long-term compliance, sustainability targets, and digital continuity challenges, Piql offers a unique, future-proof path: analog technology reimagined for the digital age.”
Piql also recently launched the Arctic World Archive, securely housing national archives - including GitHub code and country heritage - in a permafrost vault in Svalbard.
Technology Live! setting the data storage agenda
Established in 2015, Technology Live! is a one-day deep-dive event where up to four vendors showcase their technologies to the region’s leading journalists, bloggers, analysts and other independent influencers. Hosted by A3 Communications - the data storage industry PR agency - the event heads to Paris, France, on 1 October and London, UK, on 20 November 2025.
