Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What would some of those examples be?

Matthew Dornquast: If you think in terms of just backing up endpoint devices, that makes sense. But still a large chunk of them would say, “If it’s important, it should be in the cloud or it should be in the server room. Therefore, I should need to back up this entire device.” We say to them, “If you do a backup for the entire device, then you will be able to access all of the information on the device from any of your other devices. But when we have all the data on the device safely and securely protected and if you need to know what information was on those devices at a point in time, you will be able to answer that question.”

Sramana Mitra: How often would a question like that come up?

Matthew Dornquast: It varies. The larger the enterprise, the more frequently would this happen. It becomes a daily or weekly affair for big companies. I’m answering the productivity question from an enterprise point of view and from an employee’s point of view. The same technology of being able to discover and find information on your devices is something that employees use daily. Perhaps you work on a desktop at the office, and you’re currently in the field with a mobile phone. If the question comes up, “Do you have answer to X in document Y?” Now since we have everything on the device, you can answer that question on any other platform wherever you are.

This is in contrast to a traditional, sharing, and collaboration company like Dropbox or Box because in order to access things, you have to change your workflow. You have to put the files into a folder. If you don’t remember that work in your Dropbox folder, or if you’re not working on your Dropbox for various reasons, then you would be unable to access that data.

A really simple way to think about us is what we started as a company in 2007 for storing every version of every file forever. That was our starting point. The first problem we wanted to solve was losing information, whether it was through a device or human failure. Once we had every version of every file forever, then we started unlocking additional value on top of that data.

Sramana Mitra: I have a few questions based on what we’ve discussed so far. There is a trend that companies like Google are catering to the low end of the market for free by offering cloud storage and back-up. What do you see that trend does to companies like yourself, Box, and Carbonite?

Matthew Dornquast: We’ve always been very realistically grounded in market realities as it relates to consumers. For us, we believe that the consumers’ ideal products are those that easily solves whatever problem they have at hand for free. Everything less than that standard is a compromise. As a business, our go-to market for consumers has always been free.

We’re differentiating from Google in that we’re much more capable in a number of ways. For instance, I’ve already hinted at one thing. Google is only going to protect the information for consumers for free that the consumer manually gives them. It won’t be all of the files on your desktop. It won’t be everything. Everything on the Android phone, yes. But what’s on the SIM card on the Android phone, no. They’re protecting some of the data some of the time. We’ve been focused on continuously providing that for free for all of the data.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42
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