Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 1)

This interview puts the spotlight on a very interesting topic: how companies that primarily monetize through their enterprise/B2B business and use B2C offerings to test software as well as to generate leads. In the cloud storage business, we’re seeing very interesting trends, and Matthew explains the rationale and the analysis very well. Great conversation!

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about yourself as well introduce our audience to Code42.

Matthew Dornquast: I’m one of the founders and CEO of Code42 software. We are in the data governance or protection space. Our product is CrashPlan, which allows you to both protect and access your data from any device anywhere in real-time. Think of us as a private, public, and hybrid cloud data storage company with emphasis on data governance, security, and management.

Sramana Mitra: Based on what you said, what would be helpful for us is to understand the ecosystem map for your space, because we have done a lot of stories of players who are working somewhere in the cloud storage, security, and cloud-based governance area. Who are the players that you see in deals perhaps? Who’s adjacent? Who’s complementary and who does what? How do you differentiate in that spectrum?

Matthew Dornquast: What’s interesting to think about is the target market. You can divide them into consumer and business. We’re somewhat unusual, in that we’re very focused in both markets. Within business, we cover all segments from microbusiness all the way up to 100,000 plus employee enterprises. Within the consumer space, we have a number of competitors. An obvious big name is Dropbox. Box too, to a limited degree, although they’re more enterprise. Within the enterprise space, we compete with Box and a legacy product called Connected. There’s not a whole lot of competition within the enterprise segment. It’s an emerging trend. Data governance and information protection on endpoint devices is a relatively new thing. Enterprises, historically, have focused most of their spending and their attention on the server room or in the cloud, and less on the endpoint devices themselves.

Sramana Mitra: Your focus is more on the endpoint devices whereas you’re saying that a whole bunch of competitors are focusing on the server side?

Matthew Dornquast: Right.

Sramana Mitra: Where does Egnyte fit for example?

Matthew Dornquast: We don’t run into Egnyte much. I’m not familiar with their offering, but I would think that they’re more in the sharing enterprise space. It’s their target space.

Sramana Mitra: Box and Dropbox do data storage and secure backup. Is that a correct summary then?

Matthew Dornquast: Data storage and data protection, yes. Also, there’s some philosophy here as we get into the 30,000-feet view. We believe that in order to drive adoption, you also have to offer general productivity into the products as well, which will put under the monitor access to your information.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42
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