Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s another question on something that I asked you earlier about. Google has an incredible P&L. They have a business model that just throws out cash. They don’t want to pay that cash as taxes so they’re doing all sorts of things for the consumers and small business to benefit them. They certainly have the profitability and free cash flow to invest in enriching the feature sets and the functionality of their cloud drive offering.

There is a possibility that a lot of the low-end consumer and small business functionality requirements are going to be handled by Google just because of those dynamics. That puts some pressure on the players who actually have to make money to justify being in those businesses like yourself.

Matthew Dornquast: I agree with you. They don’t offer unlimited data for free. Eventually, they’ll get there. They can. We’re both offering the same free product and they’ve got the entire platform stack. I don’t how we would compete there. Our specialty is not offering the best solution for a single platform, but offering the best experience across all platforms, because this is what businesses in the enterprise need. While Google has a vested interest in making the best Android products possible, they’re not investing heavily in the Windows and Macintosh platforms. The same is true for Apple and iCloud. In the end, there’s going to be the four horses – Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Each of them will do their markets very well, but who handles the single experience across everything?

Sramana Mitra: For most consumers, that’s not so much of an issue right?

Matthew Dornquast: As it relates to compatibility with friends and family, it does. We are multi-device households. Our target audience are already over 10 devices in a single household.

Sramana Mitra: But is it 10 operating systems? Ours is an all-Apple household.

Matthew Dornquast: Let’s agree that within a household, they’ll end up being a Google or Apple household, but what happens when you go to work? What do you do when work buys you a brand new iPhone5? You go home to your Android household. Are you going to carry two phones? How do you get your personal data on the work device? How do you get your work data on the personal device? What company is going to offer you a consumer cost point, easy to use control feature set, but with the inter-operability at an enterprise level with the APIs and data governance challenge?

Sramana Mitra: I think the penetration of Apple devices is high, and the penetration of Google’s cloud products like the Google Drive is high in small businesses. That kind of cross-platform usage is more common.

Matthew Dornquast: It is, and it’s increasing. It’s interesting. Gartner predicts that half of the employers will require employees to supply their own devices by 2017. Now within business, we have a multi-OS environment. There needs to be, from a data governance and security point of view, a single dashboard and a single way to manage information. We’ve measured internally and it corresponds to plus-minus 10% that roughly half of personal devices have business data on them. The idea that work and personal are separate in the form of device or mind share is not realistic. The trends are clear. People pick the platforms that they like at home and the businesses take the platforms that they want to standardize around. The two mash together somehow. That creates a cross-platform challenge. This is a trend we’ve seen.

Yes, it’s true. I’m a Mac household, but my sister uses Android. When she shows up, I can’t bump my phone to her phone. I have photos that I want to share with her. Email’s a pain. Maybe, I’ll use Facebook, but that’s not really ideal. How do I do that in a frictionless way for free in real-time?

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42
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