How To Defend Your Dream Against All Odds: Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks (Part 6)

Sramana: How much of the unstructured data market have you been able to get into? Are you in with the big social media companies?

Alex Bouzari: We are in a few of them. We are in some very big ones, but they don’t want us to talk about it. However, some of our customers will allow us to talk about them. We are in Microsoft Xbox. They have 25 million users worldwide who are tapping into content on their storage network. We are in Shutterfly, which has 5 billion photos. We are in YouSendIt as well. It is starting to happen in a really big way.

People are faced with challenges where in order for them to be competitive and successful, they need to find a way to deal with their unstructured data within their IP infrastructure. The old way of doing things does not cut it. Old infrastructures were designed for bits and bytes; it is totally different from having to deal with images and video, which takes a lot more capacity. There is a notion of quality of service because a video stream needs to keep going regardless if you lose a drive in the infrastructure.

That results in complex requirements which we have spent over a decade perfecting. We have 1.5 million lines of code that deal with that challenge. The old way of dealing with IP infrastructure does not translate into unstructured data. It is a market disruption that is creating a significant opportunity.

Sramana: The opportunity you are talking about is now on the radar of a lot more companies. Everybody from IBM to Cisco is going to have looked at this market, and they will all have their versions coming. Can you talk about the competitive landscape a bit?

Alex Bouzari: The stakes are definitely higher. We are undoubtedly on the radar of the big guys now. We are the largest private storage company in the world now. There has been a fair amount of consolidation in this space. There are two types of competitors. First are the pure play storage companies, which at this point are EMC and NetApp. Second are the systems companies such as IBM, HP, Dell, Oracle, and a bunch of others.

The storage guys are struggling to solve the problem. If it is a problem that does not require significant scale, then they can solve it. If it does require a lot of scale, they can’t solve it. Their answer will be to throw a lot of money at the problem. When we compete against them if there are people in the IT department who are making the decision then we win, if it comes from the board or from above then sometimes we win and sometimes we lose.

We have decided not to sell direct; rather, we have taken a leveraged go to market model. We made that decision for two reasons. One, it gives us the ability to run a more profitable company. Two, by teaming up with companies like IBM, HP, and Dell we now have an 800-pound gorrilla in our camp that can compete against our competition. IBM, Dell, Sony, and other partners sell our product. That gives us great leverage with our customers. Most of our deployments are mission critical. It is essential that the products perform. We have developed a long and impressive list of Tier 1 customers worldwide, and that list gives us validation.

This segment is part 6 in the series : How To Defend Your Dream Against All Odds: Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks
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