Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Rick Tinsley, Former CEO of Silver Peak (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Given that that is what you do, what trends do you see in the market right now? What are trends you are anticipating?

Rick Tinsley: The number one trend is affecting our business and all networking businesses right now. It is the move towards virtualizations. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Rick Tinsley, Former CEO of Silver Peak (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So what you do is load balancing on intranet traffic?

Rick Tinsley: It is not load balancing. It is called WAN optimization or WAN acceleration – networks that extend over great distances. Our products are network elements, although recently they have been purely software-based products. But we employ a variety of techniques that allow data to move more efficiently, quickly and cost-effectively across those enterprise locations, whether it is data being protected between a data center and a disaster recovery facility – to mitigate against catastrophes – or data from users in remote offices that have to access data, computing, and storage infrastructures in data centers that are thousands of miles away. Or data that is moving between one company to another. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Rick Tinsley, Former CEO of Silver Peak (Part 1)

Rick Tinsley is the former chief executive officer of Silver Peak, a company that focuses on wide area network (WAN) optimization through the virtualization of networks. In this interview Rick talks about Silver Peak’s focus on accelerating data flow of enterprises over large distances. He also gives us insights into the future of the industry and his opinion on what startups should focus on when entering this space, and he discusses opportunities for investors in this space. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Jason Blessing, CEO of Plex Systems (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The U.S. has lost millions of manufacturing jobs. How many of those do you think are coming back?

Jason Blessing: That is hard to say, since there is no great data on it. But what you can point to are some of the most well-known manufacturing companies in the world like General Electric or Apple. Their CEOs are out in the press talking about bringing major portions of their manufacturing back to America. The movement starts with some of the thought leaders in the industry. They are doing it for the reasons I just described. Between that and the support in Washington to set up manufacturing hubs across the country, I think we are going to bring more life back into the segment. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Jason Blessing, CEO of Plex Systems (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about smaller companies interested in providing value-added solutions on top of your systems? Is that something you are doing?

Jason Blessing: It is. We have a concept called community-enabled development, which is a platform that allows partners as well as customers that are big enough to have IT shops to build extensions on top of our products using our own tool sets. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Jason Blessing, CEO of Plex Systems (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: About 10 or 12 years ago I worked with a mechanical design company, and we sold to all your customer base – the machinery, the discrete manufacturing, etc. What is today’s state of the union in the interface between CAD and manufacturing execution? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Jason Blessing, CEO of Plex Systems (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That sounds a bit high. I think you need to differentiate among the very large manufacturers – like the auto or aerospace industry, where it is an SAP sweet spot. It would be very hard for you to move any of those off SAP. If I were you, I’d figure out what the mid-market TAM is, and which companies are interested in the cloud and a more affordable solution and perhaps more interested in coming at it from the shop floor point of view. I think that is a more accurate assessment of where your opportunity is. I don’t think you’d be able to move to the larger ones. The number you are quoting includes those larger players. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Jason Blessing, CEO of Plex Systems (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You seem to be hinting that the SAPs and Oracles are not as much on the cloud. The first statement you made is that they are on-premise solutions. The second thing you said is that they are coming at it from the financial point of view, whereas your software comes at it from the manufacturing execution system point of view. Did I get that correct?

Jason Blessing: Yes. Let me provide a bit more color on those two points, because they are very important ones. Plex was initially architected for the cloud. There are a lot of companies in the space right now that are saying they are in the cloud, but ultimately what most of these companies are doing is running hosted software across a variety of products they had acquired – people are on different releases. That eventually is going to crumble under its own weight. In our case, is it pure cloud and everybody is on the same release. >>>