Bootstrapping Using Services: FullBottle CEO Reed Berglund (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The company didn’t work out.

Reed Berglund: The company didn’t work out. We were ahead of the market. That’s one of the great lessons in my career. We were also trying to change buying behavior in a highly entrenched industry.

Sramana Mitra: What happened next?

Reed Berglund: We spun out of that company. One of the partners from that company was a global free-to-play gaming company called Miniclip. It was number one at that time. We launched it in the US to handle all of the sales, marketing, and licensing for Miniclip. From 2009 to 2013, I ran all of the monetization for Miniclip in the US. That brings us up to FullBottle, which was launched in June 2013. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Can you give us some examples from your customer base where this kind of content–commerce fusion is happening on their website as we speak?

Gerrit Kolb: One example is Homebase. Homebase is using IBM system in the back-end. Then, we have JD Group who is using SAP in the back-end system. What usually happens is that people consume content form internal and external content editors. Then, they link it to specific offerings. They specifically create topic pages. Homebase is probably the largest retailer of home furniture and garden furniture in the UK. This is a very seasonal business. In the Fall season, you have different offerings and different stories. One thing they do is take pictures of those specific seasons. They have automatic flyover areas where they position their products directly in the story of a family that is going to picnic. >>>

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. >>>

Amazon Finally Coming Out

This was a good quarter for Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and its investors. While it was surprising that Amazon reported a strong operating profit, what was even more surprising was the increased transparency displayed by the company on some of its business segments.

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Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tony Paine, CEO of Kepware (Part 4)

Tony Paine: When you think of the oil and gas market where you have remote sites that are perhaps drilling wells, that information has been historically self-contained on the site and requires someone to be out there to take measurements. The thought is, that is not realistic going forward. The industry doesn’t have the same amount of experts for the same amount of remote sites. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tony Paine, CEO of Kepware (Part 3)

Tony Paine: What we are seeing now is there is a big push to Internet-enable these systems so that people can get visibility into what’s going on at multiple, remote sites and pull it into a central location and to be able to make intelligent decisions based on it. Kepware is starting to get pulled into this new space called the Internet of Things (IoT). I say it’s a new space. A lot of the stuff that we’ve been doing for the 20 years is exactly what’s required to build out an IoT solution. It’s the ability to go and recognize that there are multiple data sources that contain valuable information. However, the way that they expose that information may vary. It may vary in the actual communications medium. It could be wireless, Bluetooth, Ethernet, or a number of other things. >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Egnyte Eyes IPO in 18 Months

The Billion Dollar Unicorn Club has some interesting stories of companies in the same space reaching Unicorn status through different business models. One such story is that of Egnyte, which like Box, operates in the cloud storage space. But unlike Box, Egnyte operates a leaner ship and offers an enterprise grade product that can command much higher pricing.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software (Part 1)

Part of big data is exploding data inside of the enterprises. Ed Walsh draws our attention to a specific problem domain: Copy Data Management.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing yourself as well as Catalogic Software so that our audience has a little bit of context about this conversation.

Ed Walsh: I’m the CEO of Catalogic Software. This is my fourth VC-backed CEO engagement. To provide a little history, I was the CEO of a company called Avamar. It’s now a $800 million business inside EMC. The next one was Virtual Iron Software. It was a late stage venture-backed startup providing server virtualization software. The last one is Storwize, which was acquired by IBM. I started my current business about six months ago. It’s a spin-out and its technology is by a company called Catalogic Software. We focused on the overall challenge of copy data management. That might be a new word. It is basically the challenge of enterprise storage infrastructure with data growing 35% year to year. It’s hard to keep up with. >>>