Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see services like Shutterfly going?

Matthew Dornquast: People who focus on everything will ultimately win over the specialization. There is always some new temporal period where a new format will get off, but then the large platforms absorb them.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to ask entrepreneurs to look at opportunities in the space that you really understand deeply, where would you ask them to focus? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s another question on something that I asked you earlier about. Google has an incredible P&L. They have a business model that just throws out cash. They don’t want to pay that cash as taxes so they’re doing all sorts of things for the consumers and small business to benefit them. They certainly have the profitability and free cash flow to invest in enriching the feature sets and the functionality of their cloud drive offering.

There is a possibility that a lot of the low-end consumer and small business functionality requirements are going to be handled by Google just because of those dynamics. That puts some pressure on the players who actually have to make money to justify being in those businesses like yourself.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 4)

Matthew Dornquast: That’s not enough. You have a database of consumers and you want to remind them that you have a business offering. You want to encourage them to participate in that. You need the connective tissue between your marketing systems and your enterprise sales force systems so that you will be able to recognize and measure the success rate of those efforts. There are other things that you can do. Enterprise sales force is armed with free consumer cards. When they talk to professionals they say, “Try us at home. It’s the same technology. If you like what you see, we have an enterprise dashboard for you that meet all your Chief Security Officer’s concerns.” It’s a great way to introduce them to a product in a frictionless way.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I can understand why Google is doing that, but as a private company that has to make money to survive and build business value, what is the justification of being in that business of offering something for free?

Matthew Dornquast: There’re a lot of benefits for the business if you know how to harness it and in particular when you accept the reality that as a business, you need to make your money elsewhere. We make our money on the business side of the equation, but the consumer side of our offering offers us a great deal of benefits. The obvious ones are brand awareness. It’s much easier to market and sell something that’s free, and to gain adoption on something that’s free. As long as you can build trusting, reliable, high-quality relationships with individuals, they facilitate the adoption of your enterprise product in the workplace. There’s a definite marketing advantage. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What would some of those examples be?

Matthew Dornquast: If you think in terms of just backing up endpoint devices, that makes sense. But still a large chunk of them would say, “If it’s important, it should be in the cloud or it should be in the server room. Therefore, I should need to back up this entire device.” We say to them, “If you do a backup for the entire device, then you will be able to access all of the information on the device from any of your other devices. But when we have all the data on the device safely and securely protected and if you need to know what information was on those devices at a point in time, you will be able to answer that question.”

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: San Francisco is very expensive right now but I don’t think it’s as expensive as London or New York.

Peter Bauer: I do have some funny stories. During the interviewing process, there were some guys living in Spain. You realize that these are top class. You get talking about pay and ask for their expectations. Then they say, “Maybe 40,000 pounds a year.” You have to say, “I don’t know how to put this, but we’re going to have to insist that you take at least 55,000 pounds.” They say, “Wow!” Then you would say to him, “Come over here. Look for a flat.” >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 6)

Peter Bauer: The opportunity of multi-tenant architectures in a cloud world that required an awful lot of software to be rewritten to be able to leverage the massively powerful hardware, which was fast becoming commoditized, and the massive networks were allowing SaaS to emerge as a theme. We put all these ideas together and decided to start building our platform. Eventually, we ran out of money. We were fortunate our wives were particularly patient with us. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We do a lot of business development work and customer service work. All of that is going into different mailboxes in my Apple mail, and then Bcc on to our CRM system which is getting stored in context related to the contact to whom that thread is related to. This is my workflow. It’s an immense amount of data. I dread to see what happens to that in a few years. It’s already a very expensive mail client that is full of stuff.

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