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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Building a $10M Company Proctoring Exams Online: Don Kassner, CEO of ProctorU (Part 7)

Don Kassner: It remains to be seen if it’s going to break out the way that it used to break out. For us, we’ve been very happy with the success that we’ve had in growing this from nothing to a $10 million a year company. You were talking about getting entrepreneurs to that first million which is a real demarcation for success. We’ve passed that. Now, where do we go from here? Are we going to be a $100 million company or a $1 billion company? I have no way of knowing yet, but right now, the company’s growing. The market seems to be growing.

Sramana Mitra: You’re growing at a decent pace. It’s not like you’re growing anemically.

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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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Building a $10M Company Proctoring Exams Online: Don Kassner, CEO of ProctorU (Part 6)

Don Kassner: If you think about proctoring itself, integrity is critical. It’s a service. We’re providing service to both the student and to the institution. It’s important that it’s simple because they’re remote. They’re on their own device. People need to be able to understand the process. There’s the people side of it and that’s why fun is so critical. We’ve that face-to-face connection with the student in a situation where they’re in high stress. We want to make sure that we bring in an element of relaxation to it. Those four pillars were critical for our business. We have, since day one, made sure that we follow those. The key element in executing is your ability to really find that base of what your company is going to be and be very consistent in building off that base.

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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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Building a $10M Company Proctoring Exams Online: Don Kassner, CEO of ProctorU (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The large state universities are adopting this?

Don Kassner: Yes, it’s typically large state universities. There’re some private universities in there as well. Generally speaking, you’re going to see most of it in the lower level, general administration courses where examinations and assessments are more critical. As you get in deep to any program, the project starts to change. Generally speaking, the focus is going to be on courses that rely heavily on assessments. That’s all over the board. We have Liberal Arts, Math, Science, Healthcare, and many different disciplines.

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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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Building a $10M Company Proctoring Exams Online: Don Kassner, CEO of ProctorU (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So the shareholders of Andrew Jackson came in as separate investors into the new entity, ProctorU?

Don Kassner: That is correct.

Sramana Mitra: So that’s how ProctorU was funded?

Don Kassner: Yes.

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