Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Austin McChord, CEO of Datto (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You have probably seen maybe 30% of Internet traffic to homes in the U.S. is due to Netflix?

Austin McChord: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Could that be a lever that pushes the ISPs and the carriers to do something about the level of connectivity or the quality of the connection?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin, Co-Founders of Huddle (Part 3)

Alastair Mitchell: Being able to access and share work information in a very social and collaborative way is a huge theme. We are owning that middle space around secure collaboration internally and externally. As a result, we get to work with some amazing customers. 80% of the central U.K. government use Huddle and we also work with a large number of government departments here in the U.S. Off the back of that, people trust us to be the most secure place to put their content if they want to work on it and share with other people. We get to work with some fantastic organizations in the private sector – from Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, Disney to BBC in U.K.

Sramana Mitra: You are basically some superset of Box and Dropbox and you’re also providing some of the WebEx functionality. What other toolkit functionality do you have in your system? SharePoint?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Austin McChord, CEO of Datto (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the gating items in providing that connectivity? Is it that the Internet service providers are not moving fast enough? Is there any kind of technology that is unresolved?

Austin McChord: I think there’s just not enough competitive pressure in the market for the quality of Internet service to rise. Lots of these small businesses in the 20 to 200 spot don’t have the availability to bring in direct fiber from a real Internet provider – like Level 3. So instead, when they’re putting together fiber links, they’re limited to what’s being offered by consumer and residential ISPs. There’s not a lot of competition or real pressure to have that quality improved. So that limits businesses’ adoption of the cloud at the lower end.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin, Co-Founders of Huddle (Part 2)

Andy McLoughlin: We took some angel money quite early on from a guy that I worked for. Charles McGregor had a business called Fibernet in U.K., which he eventually sold to Global Crossing. Bucking the trend in the U.K. where angel investments wasn’t a big thing, he bet his cash on us and that allowed us to accelerate the business. A year after that, we closed our first round of venture funding, which was led by Eden Ventures, which is an early-stage VC fund based in the U.K.

Sramana Mitra: How much was the first round?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Austin McChord, CEO of Datto (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I guess the volume of data depends on what industry you’re in and how much data you’re generating?

Austin McChord: Yes, absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about trends. What trends do you track given what you’re doing? What are you tracking? What do you see as threats and opportunities?

>>>

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?

>>>

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.

>>>

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.

>>>