Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

Andrew Rubin: It was in 1998 that I graduated from university.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you work in the first job?

Andrew Rubin: I stayed in my first job for under five years.

Sramana Mitra: This brings us to about 2003 then?

Andrew Rubin: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What happens then? >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtualization Services Company: Chris Grandi, CEO of Abacus Group (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was going to be the new company? What did you find that warrants doing another company?

Chris Grandi: This is one thing that I always tell the entrepreneurs I speak to. You always hear about entrepreneurs who start a company when they’re super young and don’t have a lot of experience, and they’re successful. That happens but ultimately, I’ve always believed that if you do something long enough, you get smart in it and get domain experience. Your risk of success is much greater.

I saw a better technical solution to the previous company. I believed that the company who does this 10 years from now is going to be bigger than any of the companies in the space. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Brian Morin, SVP of Marketing, Condusiv (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a venture-funded company? Is it a self-financed company? What is the financial structure of the company?

Brian Morin: Another interesting case about us as a 34-year-old company is that the founder was able to get into the space where there were very low barriers to entry. He’s been able to maintain ownership of the company. There is no private equity backing the company. There is no VC backing. This is a privately-owned company owned by the founder. That’s just not something that you would ever see again in this day and age. The barriers to entry are just way too high for someone to accomplish that. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Brian Morin, SVP of Marketing, Condusiv (Part 4)

Brian Morin: Where we align with that trend is we leverage server-side DRAM so organizations can get more application performance. It’s not just a dedicated PCIE or dedicated SSD. Even within the server, that’s one layer below what we’re doing. We’re actually at the DRAM layer within the server. You can’t get any closer to the processor than using server-side DRAM. We do see that trend eventually evolving.

Sramana Mitra: What are some open problems in your space? If you were to start a company today, what would you be looking at? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Brian Morin, SVP of Marketing, Condusiv (Part 3)

Brian Morin: As you know, virtualization is sweeping the landscape. Gartner has estimated 74% of workloads are virtualized right now. I think IDC is putting their forecast at 71%. Gartner has mentioned that by the end of this year, 80% of workloads will be virtualized. As a lot of companies are virtualizing their most I/O-intensive applications and mission critical workloads, their storage back-end is not able to keep up with the new performance requirement.

They all go into this virtualization process blindly regarding what they need on the back-end storage infrastructure to support it. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Brian Morin, SVP of Marketing, Condusiv (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Are you trying to tell me that there is no competitor in the market? That’s kind of hard to believe.

Brian Morin: Our technology is made up of two core pieces of intellectual property. One of those pieces is proprietary. Nobody else is doing it. There is a second core piece of our technology that involves server-side caching. There are a couple of other players in the field that are doing server-side caching like Infinio or PernixData. Those would be two quasi-competitors. Caching is still a tertiary feature for us. It’s not our primary IP in what we do to sequentialize I/O traffic and increase I/O density. There actually was one. We did have one competitor, Virsto, but they were acquired by VMWare about two and a half years ago.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with one use case where you elaborate further how exactly your customers use the product. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Brian Morin, SVP of Marketing, Condusiv (Part 1)

Read how a 34-year old company has carved a niche in the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to Condusiv. What do you do? How do you map the ecosystem?

Brian Morin: We just turned 34 years old this month. We’re the 12^th oldest software company in the world. What’s interesting though is that for a company that has that kind of legacy, we were rebranded as Condusiv Technologies three years ago, because the company has really transformed itself and IP to really be on the leading edge of what’s going on right now. At least, in I/O performance. >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Expect Acquisitions From ServiceNow

According to Gartner, the IT operations management (ITOM) software market grew 7% to reach nearly $21 billion in 2014. The ITOM landscape is undergoing transformation as legacy multi-segment players give way to a new generation of suppliers that are growing more rapidly than the market average. Billion Dollar Unicorn club member ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) is one such new player in the IT Services Management (ITSM) segment of the ITOM market. >>>