Thought Leaders in Big Data: Don DeLoach, CEO of Infobright (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I heard you speak multiple times about the Internet of Things – that you are aligning your company against that trend. What blue-sky opportunities or white spaces would you draw the attention of entrepreneurs to?

Don DeLoach: Not in an effort to be overly consistent but more of just being honest, I do think the Internet of Things is a vast opportunity. It’s also a challenge. It’s one of those things where when you first think and hear about it, the response is cool. I can interact with my house while I’m on vacation or my thermostat can automatically adapt to circumstances. You hear about these things and they tend to have a cool effect, but then when you think about it a couple of levels deeper, what start to come out are a few things. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Don DeLoach, CEO of Infobright (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about your company. Is it a bootstrapped company or venture-funded? Very quickly, what is the history of the company?

Don DeLoach: We are privately-held and are venture-funded. As you would expect with venture-funded companies, there are limitations to what we will disclose but I can give you rough numbers. We have roughly 250 or so direct customers and about 30 OEM relationships that, by extension, have somewhere in the area of 250 to 300 large customers. We don’t count the smaller ones. One of our OEM relationships probably has 8,000 customers but we’re not including that in the number. The other thing is, by virtue of the 250 that we have, that covers among other things almost every telco operator in the world. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Don DeLoach, CEO of Infobright (Part 4)

Don DeLoach: I’ll just give you a quick example. One of our really good customers is JDS Uniphase. They had an application that did network troubleshooting but it was based on a traditional database. What they found was that the increase on the load of the network required their customers to continually index the database, which slowed down load speeds. In order to operate the overall application, it required more human capital and more hardware, and it was getting costly for both JDSU and their customers. >>>

1M/1M Premium Company Freshdesk Raises $31 Million From Tiger Global and Google Ventures

We just did a roundup of the CloudCRM space, covering Zendesk’s successful IPO and predicting that the space is heating up, and more acquisitions will follow. Our premium company Freshdesk is definitely a key target!

Today, Freshdesk announces its new round of funding of $31 million led by Tiger Global, with Google Ventures and their original investors, Accel Partners, following. This brings their net funding to $44 million. The latest round is priced at $250 million. The company currently has 23,000 customers.

As always, big funding news creates big media coverage. Here’s what they’ve got so far: NYT, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, and quite a few others. I cannot emphasize how important this company is to underscore and celebrate India’s quest to build global software companies.

Here’s our prior coverage of the company:

The Million Dollar Club: Freshdesk

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Don DeLoach, CEO of Infobright (Part 3)

Don DeLoach: The way the metadata layer is established is tantamount to indexing everything. So the maneuverability over the data especially for things like ad hoc queries and investigative analytics is very strong. That’s all done without the benefit or requirement of a database administrator. This typically is a low hardware requirement, a very low human capital requirement, and a very easy-to-use platform in terms of the accessibility and the maneuverability across that data. This is useful when you’re an ad tech firm and you’re trying to put together a guaranteed marketing campaign where you’re going to bid on guaranteeing a delivery of a campaign that will have at least 125 million impressions. Sometimes, you’ve to do very complex segmentation of the data to understand if you can step up and bid on a campaign like that. In order to do that, you’ve to maneuver through all kinds of data that you may or may not have been able to plan for.

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Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: As long as you are delivering and executing on what you said you were going to deliver on, there is no shortage of capital. In your case, you have delivered a product. You’ve had customers. Your pricing model is validated. Your business model is validated. You’re ramping up well. These kinds of deals generally do not face any shortage of capital.

Sunny Gupta: From my perspective, you’re absolutely right. Over-delivering based on what I’ve told them I’m going to deliver has opened up more opportunities. At some stage, we did move more into a hyper-aggressive growth. We’ve been very capital-efficient but there was capital at our disposal. Whether it’s ramping our sales capacity, investing in more product capabilities, or marketing capabilities, we’ve been fortunate from that perspective to ramp ahead of the curve.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Don DeLoach, CEO of Infobright (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’re telling me that your go-to-market strategy is OEM?

Don DeLoach: I would say it’s more and more OEM for sure. It had been a combination of direct sales mostly into the ad tech space and OEM sales into the people servicing mobile network operators. Without doubt, that’s over half of our business right now. It is asymptotically approaching 100%. The interesting thing there is that the mobile network operators are really at the forefront of driving the Internet of Things. When you step back and read the various industry analysis or some of the reports coming out of Cisco, they project 50 billion connected devices out there by 2020.

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Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You didn’t go after the Goldman kind of customers from where you picked up the idea. You actually went after the smaller customers to get a feel of the product.

Sunny Gupta: I wanted to get the product and security model validated. I was talking to the Goldmans of the world all along, but I was trying to get the first five customers who were willing to pay me a check. The buying process of large companies tends to be longer, as you know. The validation cycle tends to be longer. They need a richer feature set. >>>