Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you consider as your competitor? It sounds like there are competitors in each of those buckets as well as perhaps competitors who offer all of those.

Peter Bauer: That’s absolutely right. Most of the solutions were designed when computing was largely a LAN-based activity and companies were running things themselves. Some of the bigger players are companies like Symantec and Barracuda. There’re products from HP Autonomy as well. While these companies are quite big and they may offer solutions in each of these areas, each of those products are different in two different important ways. One is they are disparate products. They’re not integrated. They create different users and administrative experiences, and they’re on different code bases. The second way that they’re different from us is that they are single-tenanted. It’s designed for an enterprise to run themselves and indeed, you could host that for them if you wanted to. It’s not a cloud architect. It’s not a multi-tenanted architecture. We distinguish quite strongly as a company and as a business model by being a multi-product and a multi-cloud architecture.

Sramana Mitra: I guess that’s fairly clear. I don’t think we need to go into use cases necessarily unless there’s something you want to illustrate that is special about this.

Peter Bauer: There are a few specific use cases that have become quite interesting. There’s an increasing trend in terms of companies wanting to go to Office 365, which has become quite a force in the marketplace. What it’s highlighted for companies is the need to have freedom of choice as to where their mailbox services are located. When they try to exercise freedom of choice, they realize how difficult it is when they have a lot of complex technology on their networks that are bound to their messaging infrastructures. Also when they start looking at cloud mailbox services, they realize how much beholden they are to a single vendor. All clouds have outages but more recently, we had an Office 365 outage in North America. They realized the importance of having ancillary cloud services to add value and to connect it to a blended cloud approach where they can have data distributed between multiple vendors. They have recovery options and options to use their data and continue communicating if their primary cloud provider is not available. That’s a use case.

We also see a lot of companies that have LAN-based generation archives. They put a lot of human generated data into their archiving platforms on their own network. Now those platforms are creaking. It seems that it’s not an issue because it’s an archive, and archive data must be boring or old. But if you think about it, we deal with this every single day. The other day, I was going to a law firm that had 70 terabytes of data in an archive. 70 terabytes is an awful lot of data. When you look at what it is, it is the crowned jewels of their corporate knowledge. Particularly the email pieces of it because it has all the records of who spoke to whom, and about what and when. There’s a great opportunity in migrating off of these and decommissioning these old archive systems, and migrating that data into our environment. The use case that we tend to talk about is the concept of unlocking your corporate memory. There’s been a lot of stuff there that’s been forgotten that can be much more helpful in terms of a company’s ability to think and operate and serve customers That’s another common use case.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast
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