Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin, Co-Founders of Huddle (Part 1)

If you are wondering what is happening to enterprise collaboration as cloud, mobile, and social trends converge, this interview is an in-depth study of one of the most exciting startups in the field.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to Huddle. Tell us about you guys. Where do you come from? How did you come together? How did Huddle come about?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Austin McChord, CEO of Datto (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the SME market. Help me understand the sweet spots. What are the other characteristics of the sweet spots among your audience?

Austin McChord: We’re selling into the SMB market space. Our sweet spot is the 20 to 200 seat business. They typically have anywhere from half a terabyte to 10 terabytes of critical data. There’s a broad swath of businesses that fit that. It cuts across many verticals – medical, legal, financial, manufacturing, and a lot of creative services companies. In our case, backup is a universal need for businesses.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeetu Patel, GM of EMC Syncplicity (Part 7)

Jeetu Patel: It’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of how fast and how big. Because everything is getting re-factored to the cloud, the amount of innovation that’s going to happen in analytics and models around security will fundamentally change. Security models are no longer going to just prevent something from happening. Security model is going to be real-time inventing, “When something happens, I will immediately know that this is happening. If there’s a behavior happening outside of the normal pattern, I will make you aware of it.” I think there’s going to be a huge amount of innovation that will go on in that area.

Sramana Mitra: For many generations of technology, security has been interesting as a startup field. Yet again, security is becoming critical because of a whole new scale and a whole new set of architectures developing.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Austin McChord, CEO of Datto (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You took the financing from Boston VCs?

Austin McChord: Yes, from General Catalyst up in Boston.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about your business. Tell us what you do. What is the competitive landscape that you play in and how do you differentiate?
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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeetu Patel, GM of EMC Syncplicity (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It’s not viable for startups to come into a market with major incumbents purely on the strength of usability. I just don’t think it’s going to be viable.

Jeetu Patel: Let’s take Syncplicity. We took the DNA that they had around user experience and SaaS. They would have not been able to make a dent by themselves as a standalone company, but because we took this small company of creative people and fueled the growth and innovation, it made us, within one year, the fastest growing file sync and share vendor in the market.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Austin McChord, CEO of Datto (Part 1)

This interview focuses on some of the bottlenecks facing the cloud services industry in penetrating the SME customer base.

Sramana Mitra: Austin, give us a bit of context about you as well as Datto.

Austin McChord: I started Datto right out of college about seven years ago. Our goal was to provide backup and SaaS recovery in a better way and at a lower cost. With that, we pivoted towards the SMB market space. Now, we provide innovative solutions for businesses on the backup and SaaS recovery front. We go beyond simply recovering data and even go as far as avoiding downtime all together. Our company has grown really fast around that premise. We have  270 employees now and appliances on every continent except Antarctica. We have been experiencing doubling growth every year and I’m excited to continue that.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeetu Patel, GM of EMC Syncplicity (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the business? What scale are we talking about?

Jeetu Patel: It’s in hundreds of millions of dollars. IDC has predicted growth rates that are actually conservative compared to the ones we had in 2013. We are the fastest growing file sync and share vendor in the industry. The other players in the market are Box, Dropbox, and Microsoft. These are the four players that I think will constitute a lion’s share of the market. Then, you have the tier-2 vendors that might go out and take some of the bread crumbs.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeetu Patel, GM of EMC Syncplicity (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Fair enough. We have talked about security, privacy, and hybrid cloud. Where do you see things going from here in terms of the open problems? Given those other trends and that there are multiple devices in the enterprise floating around, what are the open problems currently on your radar?

Jeetu Patel: The first open problem on the radar is the fact that software is going to get more predictive with a fair number of insights. Software will know what you want to do before you actually want to do it. I’ll give you a couple of examples. There’s a fair amount of productivity enhancements that happen by solving some of the small frustrating problems that we actually spend a lot of time on a daily basis. I sit down in a meeting with 15 people. We white board some concepts. At the end of the meeting, I take a picture through my phone. Then people ask, “Can you send me that picture as well?” Now, I have to remember all the people and their email addresses to send them that picture. It is something very basic but happens on a regular basis.

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