Right Technology, Right Time: Opportunistic Ocarina CEO Murli Thirumale (Part 8)

SM: Are your sales initially going to be direct?

MT: Initially yes. I really believe that is the only way to do it initially, and probably the best way overall. I will mention that we have had a lot of partner interest so I am not throwing that option out the door. If you think about it there is a big ecosystem in storage. From our perspective at Ocarina the value proposition and the product are really, really simple and straightforward. It lends itself well to a channel play.

SM: That is true. Sales people are not going to have any problem grasping the value proposition.

MT: Not only that, but we learned a lot about channel plays from our Net6 SSL and VPN experience. Ease of deployment, ease of installation makes a huge difference. Plus, if we have the right channels, we can once again experience customer pull versus channel push. I always prefer to deal with customer pull.

SM: A simple message really helps a lot as well.

MT: Agreed, and there are three reasons why, although we are not there yet.

First, if you look at it we really have a horizontal problem. Anybody with more than 200 terabytes, with storage requirements growing more than 20% a year, are a candidate for Ocarina. If their storage demands are not growing it does not work for us. For potential clients the ROI is literally 3 or 4 months. The beauty of it is there is a very simple event which is likely already planned which will help our clients purchase an Ocarina appliance – their next storage purchase. They can either purchase an Ocarina, or they can buy more storage. We expect people will use the budget they were going to buy storage with and will use it to buy an Ocarina. If they spend just a bit more on their next quarterly purchase then they can spend less forever.

Second, there is a simple value proposition.

Finally, it is a simple installation and not a complex professional services type of play. This means relative through the channel, it will all come later.

SM: Congratualions. This is a good story and a great opportunity.

MT: We have a great team, and we are all very excited about this project.

SM: This should go very well. It sounds like something that can scale very well.

This segment is part 8 in the series : Right Technology, Right Time: Opportunistic Ocarina CEO Murli Thirumale
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