Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Momchil Michailov, CEO of Sanbolic (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the company now, revenue wise?

Momchil Michailov: We’re at $8 million right now. We’ve been selling the product commercially for just over three years at this point. This quarter we’re moving the product into additional markets. We’re very excited about some product releases that are coming up at the end of the quarter. We have about 15 people here in Boston and about 35 in Sofia, Bulgaria strictly in R&D.

Sramana Mitra: You self-financed the company?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Momchil Michailov, CEO of Sanbolic (Part 6)

Momchil Michailov: To the earlier discussion around big data and analytics, it would be awesome to be able to run the on-premise big data applications and then move that data into the public cloud. Then, rent cheap analytics and cheap compute from the public cloud vendors to do the analytics tasks that are CPU-intensive. They are not as storage-intensive. There are some very compelling arguments around doing that and being able to create a hybrid. Our focus right now is running platform on premise. Our platform does run both on premise and at the public cloud. We can certainly span that. We are very much looking forward to getting the infrastructure in place to be able to deliver these types of architectures to customers.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Momchil Michailov, CEO of Sanbolic (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m also hearing from everywhere that hybrid cloud is a big trend. Are you suggesting that hybrid cloud transition is not well managed and there’s not a lot of infrastructure supporting that right now?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Momchil Michailov, CEO of Sanbolic (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Switching gears, what are some unsolved problems? What are pain points that you’re hearing from your customer base that are interesting problems and that you and your peers are not solving? These are emerging pain points that need a whole new entrepreneur to go after.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Momchil Michailov, CEO of Sanbolic (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Help us with the competitive landscape. Whom do you compete directly or indirectly? What does that landscape look like?

Momchil Michailov: Software-defined storage has been a hot and trendy area. In flash storage and software-defined storage, there was a total of $1.2 billion of venture investment last year. For the pure software stack, we have been positioned against companies like ScaleIO, which was recently acquired by EMC. We are certainly compared a lot to a company called Nexenta and a number of other players out there.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Momchil Michailov, CEO of Sanbolic (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me get a few things straight because I think we’re dealing with a fairly complex ecosystem here. I want to understand the real positioning of your company in that fairly complex ecosystem. We have the data center vendors, enterprise, and customers who run their own large-scale data centers. You are enabling these enterprise customers to layer on software around data center on top of the basic infrastructure provided by the data center vendors?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Momchil Michailov, CEO of Sanbolic (Part 1)

The cloud infrastructure space is going through a huge upheaval, as it moves from a largely hardware architecture to a primarily software-based model. This discussion digs into the issues and unearths some areas where there are clear opportunities for new entrepreneurs.

Sramana Mitra: Momchil, let us introduce you to our audience. Tell us about who you are. What are you doing?

Momchil Michailov: Thanks for having us. This is Momchil Michailov and I’m one of the co-founders of Sanbolic Inc. I happen to be in Boston today, but we’re both a North American and a European company. A lot of our development is done in Bulgaria in former Eastern Europe. The rest of the company is here in Boston.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeetu Patel, GM of EMC Syncplicity (Part 1)

For a while, security and privacy concerns around the adoption of cloud computing were eased, which drove huge adoption of public cloud services. In this interview, we explore how the tide is turning and how even early adopters of public cloud are now concerned about security.

Sramana Mitra: Jeetu, let’s introduce our audience to you as well as to EMC Syncplicity.

Jeetu Patel: Thank you for having me here. I am Jeetu Patel, the General Manager of the Syncplicity business unit. Syncplicity is the file sync, share, and collaboration business unit within EMC. We made the acquisition of Syncplicity in May of 2012. Since then, we have had sky rocketing growth of this technology that I will describe to you in a moment. That’s essentially what I do for EMC and Syncplicity.

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