Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Brad Cheedle, CEO of Otava (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on the four areas that you talked about. What have you seen by way of entrepreneurial efforts to address those gaps? It may be productive to brainstorm on those.

Brad Cheedle: There are a couple of things that we are thinking about. Let’s start with the cloud at the edge. The type of cloud nodes that we invest in are robust. They are designed around having lots of data, customers, and lots of things within those. Those particular stacks of technology, although amazing, are not necessarily economical.

There are a couple of things that we have seen. In our VMware relationship, we’re working through their edge approach, which is more on the networking side of those pieces. It is a combination of the IT environments and the networks and those becoming harmonious and working together as one.

We also think that there are some situations where you need a technology stack. We made an investment in a company called Scale Computing. They have an appliance to drop ship to customers. It comes with a technology stack to do that. It auto monitors so that you have less IT resources to maintain on-site. They resemble being on that actual technology site. We also have technology that takes advantage of technology stacks that I would consider bare metal-like. There is software that drives all of those rather than having a variety of different stop-ware between the VMware, the Veeam, or the Zerto. They do have a couple of box-type software applications that can run all those business attributes and take advantage of it on a cheaper technology stack, which in some cases can be worthwhile.

This can be an organization that has many locations around the world but also needs to keep it on-site for security reasons or performance reasons. There are some emerging technologies in the entrepreneurial world that I think are getting more disruptive than some of the traditional ways. That is what we are seeing on the edge.

Where entrepreneurship comes in is in trying to make sense of all of those. You have the independent providers or the hyper scalers that are quite facile in their technologies, but there are companies like us that help go into these locations. We help people understand how you put those technologies together and how you create single panes of glass to eliminate multiple different entry points into multiple different systems. We help people create visibility around these multiple different systems and how you can use that type of capability. This can be the edge that we talked about or infrastructure as a service in a more traditional way to handle those traditional applications that still exist and will exist for a long period.

We also help people take advantage of the things that are happening on the public cloud. There are a lot of companies that are trying to solve that. We are one of those companies that are trying to bring those things together with the right technology in a simple way that people can take advantage of. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Brad Cheedle, CEO of Otava
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