Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ali Din, SVP & CMO of dinCloud (Part 1)

There’s a significant trend in the cloud services space towards managed services. Read on to learn more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as dinCloud.

Ali Din: I run a company by the name of dinCloud, which is a cloud services provider. I’ve been in the IT channel or IT industry for just shy of 20 years now. I’ve been in implementation roles, product development, marketing, brand management, and am now overseeing dinCloud. The company has been incubated out of an IT value-added reseller that was close to about $1 billion in revenue.

The founder of dinCloud had also founded that reseller, so he had been in the industry for a number of years as well. We initially started out as a desktop-as-a-service provider because there were a lot of opportunities around taking the physical desktop and the evolution of that into a virtual mode. We were already seeing this happen in the server space around 2010 and 2011.

We were foreseeing that this would also happen on the individual worker’s desk over time as well. We did a lot of R&D. We tested different endpoints. We tested different products that are out in the market. We ended up putting together what we called at that time the dinStack. We commemorated that by having a meeting of about a dozen CEOs and C-level executives that included the CEO of LANDESK, Trend Micro, and Supermicro.

The easiest way to describe what we were trying to do was basically take the concept of Netflix where you’re watching your movies and you can pause them and go to the next device and continue to watch that movie. You can do the same thing on desktop. You can start your desktop on one device and, mid-sentence as you’re typing a proposal or a document, you can click out of that and move over to a new device. Maybe it’s in a different city. Then you can continue right where the cursor is still blinking and keep your flow going from there. That’s what we started to build out.

As we were doing that, we realised that when you have a desktop and you’re running applications on it, those applications sometimes require some client-server type of interaction. We ended up basically creating hosted servers as well. In addition to hosted desktops, we added servers. Purely from a physics standpoint, if you have your desktop and servers running in the data centre, it’s going to run a lot faster and more reliably than if you’re connecting from different points in different parts of the country or the world.

We added to the portfolio and over time, we realised that all that application and user workload was creating data. So then obviously, we got into cloud storage as well. Now, we have this virtual space via a private data centre that’s software-defined and built with cloud-first as a mentality. There’s not a lot of legacy hardware that’s holding us back. We’re very fluid and flexible in what we can do in the marketplace. We’ve always had this security philosophy around it. When you look at the logo and everything we approach has always been about security first.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ali Din, SVP & CMO of dinCloud
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