Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 3)

Paul Zolfaghari: For instance, yesterday I met one of our customers Netflix, which is actually running MicroStrategy against a very substantial instance of data that actually resides in AWS. Netflix is very public about this. It’s a great example for us and one that we’re very proud of. Netflix is a deep analytics company. It’s also a company that has a substantial amount of data and yet they chose to use MicroStrategy while connecting to a data source in the Amazon AWS cloud.

Sramana Mitra: You have three components to this. One is the data layer where the data is being stored. That sounds like that’s AWS. Then, the analytics infrastructure is MicroStrategy. What about the logic? I imagine what you’re talking about is the recommendation engine. Where is that logic? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Cloud is a very large practice for us. One of the big trends driving both cloud and mobile, and to some extend Big Data, are these platforms. There are lots of platforms now available as a service that you can build upon. We’re seeing that as a major phenomenon because you no longer have to build the whole stack. When you were trying to start a company in the ’90s or even in the 2000 decade, for a long time you had to build the whole stack. Now, you can just take advantage of other people’s stacks and add the value-added layer on top without having to deal with the plumbing. That makes it a lot cheaper to bring a product to market for a small company.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 1)

This interview has a very interesting discussion on the future of user interfaces that interact with data. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Paul, let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as to MicroStrategy.

Paul Zolfaghari: I’m Paul Zolfaghari. I’m the president of MicroStrategy. We’re an enterprise software company that’s been in existence for 25 years. We went public in 1998. As an overall background of the company, we are a global company with global operations. We operate directly in 26 countries around the world. We’ve got north of 4,000 customers across a multitude of industries. In 2013, our revenue was just short of $600 million and we consider ourselves the leader in analytics, business >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll switch gears a bit. Given all these things that you’re seeing in the market, can you look ahead to the 5 to 10 year horizon. Tell me your thoughts about what’s going to happen. What do you anticipate as new that is going to happen?

Emil Sayegh: We are all heading toward a world where data is being collected every micro second, where wearable devices are going to be common and where data is collected even in our house. Vital data collected from us can be predictive. We’re heading toward a world where massive amount of data is going to be collected. We think we’re collecting a lot of data now. With avant-garde customers that I’m talking to, that data is going to take shape in the form of numbers, videos, and pictures. To accommodate this huge flood of exponential growth in data, we’re going to have to find ways to store and retrieve data very quickly and very efficiently. That’s going to be the next frontier for a lot of us. That’s going to impact storage – the cost and performance of storage. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything substantially different in any other segment of customers that you cater to besides the two use cases we discussed?

Emil Sayegh: You have SaaS customers that are similar to the e-commerce value proposition.

Sramana Mitra: These are SaaS customers who are themselves public cloud vendors?

Emil Sayegh: They are public SaaS vendors. They’re leveraging our cloud infrastructure to offer SaaS to consumers.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Give me the number again of where you would say the flip happens from a public cloud to a hybrid cloud.

Emil Sayegh: The flip is starting to happen as companies that started in the cloud are looking at their bills now and they’re seeing the exorbitant prices. I think there’re a couple examples. One of them is Target.com. They were with AWS. There’re a lot of public stories as to why they moved. There’s Moz. You may have read some of the publicity here in the last two months where they left AWS for pricing reasons.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 2)

Emil Sayegh: Fast forward to 2014, what we are seeing right now in the market is both of these models hitting a point where frankly they’re becoming less useful as a monolithic type of offering. Companies out there want to be able to benefit from the ability to grow very quickly with the cloud offering for the right applications but also need a solid performance of what used to come with dedicated servers for certain applications like databases and Big Data applications. All those applications need very high I/O still need traditional infrastructures.

Now, you’re in a dilemma. I put my front-end web infrastructure on something like Amazon cloud or Rackspace cloud, but then where do I put my high performance computing needs? Very few companies have been able to bridge those two elements. What we’re seeing is the emergence of hybrid cloud, which allows customers to essentially spin up front-end web resources in a cloud environment in a utility-based model and then have their back-end on robust dedicated gears. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 1)

Cloud hosting, as companies scale, is moving from public cloud to hybrid cloud. More in this discussion.

Sramana Mitra: Emil, tell us about Codero and yourself so that our audience can get to know you a bit.

Emil Sayegh: I’m Emil Sayegh. I’m the CEO and President of Codero. By way of a quick introduction, Codero has been around, as a company, since 1992 in various names. It started as a small corner computer reselling shop in San Diego. Quickly, the Internet came about. They got into shared hosting, domain name registration, and web design. The company grew and evolved into dedicated hosting and managed hosting, and later cloud. In 2006, Catalyst Investors out of New York came and purchased them. >>>