Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Brad Cheedle, CEO of Otava (Part 1)

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Brad talks extensively about open problems within the cloud infrastructure (IaaS) industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Otava.

Brad Cheedle: I am the CEO and founder of Otava. I am a serial entrepreneur. This is my eighth endeavor as an executive and an entrepreneur. Otava itself is focused on the entrepreneurial spirit, keeping it alive and well. We move at the pace of the market around us and help folks with particular things in general.

Overall, we are a compliant and secure cloud provider that is working on making custom-compliant cloud easy. This is not easy for many folks, so we are working on those. We are not 100% there, but we have a lot of things in motion that will help people and we do get good feedback on those.

We focus on enterprise customers. We have partners. We are also focused on state, local government, and higher education. That is in general who I am and who we are. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.

Sramana Mitra: I don’t quite understand. What is the service that you provide to this constituency?

Brad Cheedle: At its basic level, we provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in terms of computing and storage. We offer disaster recovery, business continuity, and backup-type services. We do that over a number of technology platforms including Veeam, Verto, and Actifio. We do some other things that devices do like snapshots and the like.

We are also focused on security services, so we manage firewalls, intrusion detection, and do a plethora of different things in that area to make sure that the environment is secure. We make sure that folks outsourcing their critical infrastructure have access to a complete package.

Overall, we are doing that in areas where there is compliance. You could think about HIPAA, PCI, SOC, and those kinds of requirements for specific industries and verticals. We are great for folks that are ready to outsource and do the cloud migration. They want to do that in a hybrid way, in a private to public type of solution.

Sramana Mitra: Now I understand it. Of the various managed services that you provide on various technology platforms, what is your number one business? You talked about Veeam, Actifio. We know all of these companies very well. We know their CEOs and we have covered them extensively. Which ones are your top businesses?

Brad Cheedle: Our number one in terms of revenue is managed VMware cloud. This is the compute and storage space. The areas behind that are the backup and recovery type services. It depends on the application as to which technology we use for those. That is the next largest segment of growth. We also have location facilities and that would be our third segment in terms of size.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Brad Cheedle, CEO of Otava
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