Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bradley Kolb, CEO of nScaled (Part 1)

Disaster recovery is moving to the cloud at a fast pace. This interview takes a look at the trend.

Sramana Mitra: Brad, take the lead on introducing nScaled as well as yourself and colleagues on the call.

Bradley Kolb: I’m Bradley Kolb and I’m the CEO of nScaled. Joining me is Ilya Beyer. He’s our CTO. Scott Reynolds is our Director of Marketing. I’m hoping that Mark Jameson, our VP of Sales, will be joining us momentarily. As a brief overview, nScaled is focused on delivering disaster recovery as a service. We deliver that with a fully automated solution. The company was started in 2009 and has built a hub-and-spoke platform that allows customers to perform complex automation workflows with a single click.

Our customer base is primarily focused on the mid-market. We have a client base that’s growing at 75% annual rate. We use two different transport solutions, FalconStor and NetApp. We have almost one petabyte of storage that we currently protect. Our company strategy is to focus on growing through channels and managed service providers. Recently, a Forrester report ranked nScaled as a leader in the Disaster Recovery as a Service space.

Sramana Mitra: Give me the competitive landscape around what you’re doing. You have indirect competitors in the enterprise space and you have direct competitors in the mid-market. The small businesses don’t really do disaster recoveries. This is just my guess but I may be wrong.

Bradley Kolb: There are small businesses that do disaster recovery (DR) and there are companies that service them. But that’s not really our space.

Sramana Mitra: Who are the leaders in the enterprise space? Who do you compete with in the mid-market? Who are the players in the small business space?

Scott Reynolds: There are a lot of people out there claiming that they do DR at some level. We’re going to keep this focused on the top competitors.

Bradley Kolb: If we look at the mid-market recovery as a service, companies like Quorum, Evault, and Axcient would be our main competitors. For customers that have NetApp service, our competitors would be be Terremark, Windstream, Quest, and some regional MSDs.

Scott Reynolds: Those are other vendors. At the same time, we also compete with people who try to build DR themselves. To be frank, we also compete with people doing nothing and are trying to just have a backup of their data somewhere as opposed to fully virtualizing their data infrastructure.

Sramana Mitra: What are the key trends vis-à-vis cloud computing in the disaster recovery space?

Ilya Beyer: The two biggest trends that we’ve seen is that companies like nScaled have opened up a new opportunity in the mid-market by building a multi-tenant platform and opening disaster recovery in a multi-tenant fashion and a fully automated fashion at a fraction of the cost customers had to spend historically. The first trend would be customers prefer to pay operational expenses and this is what nScaled is offering. Number two is those operational expenses are usually a fraction of what they would have to spend on building their own data center.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bradley Kolb, CEO of nScaled
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