Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you help me with an ecosystem map of the space that you’re in? Who are the other players, whether it’s competitors or complementary players? What does the ecosystem map look like?

Jerry Melnick: You can cut the space in a number of directions. Let’s start at the top in terms of what service level a technology provides, starting with photonics. It’s a small market. You can work all the way down to back up and recovery when you talk about high availability. In the middle of that, the most prevalent is high availability and high availability achieved through clustering. That’s basically less than seven or eight minutes of downtime a year and no data loss. That’s the space that we sit in.

The competitors in that space also use clustering like Around. In the Windows space, we need to be really clear about that. We actually are selling an add-on product to Microsoft clustering, which is highly prevalent for high availability. We’re an add-on product to the environment that gives its flexibility to run a variety of configuration that you normally can’t run. Typically, people run a Windows cluster out-of-the-box using some physical servers and a share storage. It’s an expensive configuration. It can’t run that in the cloud and it can’t run that as a DR configuration.

Our solution allows them to take a very popular clustering technology to achieve high availability and augment it with the value that we bring to it and allow them to flexibly run it in the cloud or between cloud and ground. They’re not a competitor. If you look at the analytics space, the landscape is a little different. We are one of the key vendors in the Linux space. At the very low end if you look at RedHat Linux as having the biggest volume, it’s a really kit type of solution for clustering. In which case, you have an experienced IT guy who assembles the parts and writes the scripts to create a high availability Linux cluster. On the other side of that, you have very high-end share storage only solutions. Those might be the Veritas of the world.

We sit in the middle of that sweet spot on the Linux side. We provide a full cluster solution but that cluster solution has a highly differentiating value in the fact that it too does not require expensive EMC storage. You can use very inexpensive server side low-cost storage or you could put it in the cloud. We have that flexibility platform built into our Linux product. “Cluster your way” is our motto. It is the value that we bring across the Linux domain and the Windows domain. If you look at the types of applications that are different in those two, Linux is where you will find your Oracle-based applications. They’re bigger. You see a lot of SAP in the Linux space. Whereas Windows is typically for smaller applications but have high availability requirements. They might control the gates someplace.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS
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