Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the pricing around this? What kind of dollars are enterprises willing to pay for solving this problem?

Ed Walsh: It’s about a $6 billion software market.

Sramana Mitra: When you’re selling your software, how much are people willing to pay to address this issue?

Ed Walsh: Price of a three-year storage controller is around $5,000 per controller. Average sales price today is $35,000. We expect that to go up to about $200,000. We have 12 paying clients.

Sramana Mitra: What does the competitive landscape look like around this right now? You say this is a relatively new field.

Ed Walsh: What I like to find is a big problem that doesn’t have solutions. This is one of them. You have this copy data management problem, but it’s not on any budget line. However, whenever you talk to enterprises, once you have a couple of conversations about where their data is and about leveraging data, the problem is quickly brought forward. All of the major storage vendors who sell into this market have a need to leverage their snapshots. It’s a very broad opportunity. None of the major storage vendors have the solution although a large majority have tried. It’s actually a fairly hard scalable solution to put together. In fact, it took us two and a half years.

As for the broad landscape, major players are looking to do it but they don’t have the solution. There are a couple of technology startups that are in the space. There’s Delphix and Actifio. We focus on different areas. It’s a broad market so we don’t see our competitors directly, but we have the same vision. People need to use copies for different use cases and leverage those. There are a couple of smaller players. The large players, which make up about a $38 billion storage business, all need it. Clients want to do this. Clients have this issue.

The way I validated that is actually with clients, partners, and storage vendors themselves. They’ve seen it but have been unable to solve it. It’s a latent problem. Once you start having conversations, people really understand it quickly even though they don’t use the same language. It’s a big challenge. It’s a doable solution. We’ve proved it. The competitive landscape is wide open as we stand today. We’re not entering a very crowded market.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software
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