I like the back screen. Five. Wikibon dubbed 2012 the year of the cloud. You know, two or three or four years ago, people were really skeptical about cloud computing. What is cloud? What does it really mean? Isn't it just IT? And today it's second nature. But the reality is cloud, as simple as it sounds, is still complex. You've got to figure out ways to get data into the cloud. And while that might sound easy, it's not. It needs a lot of technology and a lot of data management to do that. And we're here with Andres Rodriguez, who's the CEO of Nassuni, a local company here in Massachusetts. And that's really part of what Nassuni does. Andres, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Dave. Thank you for having us. Always a pleasure to see you.   And we were talking off camera about Massachusetts really trying to bring its mojo back.  So thank you for that. Yes, thank you. There's one thing we know how to build here is infrastructure. So it's good to keep it on this side. A lot of systems guys here, right? And it's good to see Massachusetts with a big data trend coming back. It's really good to see Massachusetts really focusing on that side of things. Obviously, we've done well in life sciences, but it's good to see the tech market coming back a little bit. So Nassuni, you guys just closed a round. Tell us about that. So we just did our series C. It was a $20 million round done early. There was a lot of interest in the round. There's a lot of interest in this space. And it was led by a new outside investor that do not wish to be revealed by name. But we're very, very excited about it. It's a kind of investor that can make a real difference, not just to Nassuni, but to the entire evolution of the storage as a service market that we've been trying to create from the very beginning of our foundation. So $20 million C round. How much have you raised to date? That puts us at $43 million total. $43 million. So I was talking to David Scott recently, former CEO of 3Part. He was telling me that he knew all along. He said to build a modern day storage company. This is back in the early 2000s. He said, I knew we'd have to raise well north of $100 million. Has that changed? Is it different now? Because you're in a different market space. What's your angle on that? We have some advantages that the 3Part guys didn't have. One of them is we're not a hardware company. There's not a lot of custom hardware that needs to happen with Nassuni. So we're a pure software and services company. And that makes it a little lighter. But you still need north of $50 million, probably $60 million before you're all done if you're trying to build enterprise-class infrastructure at this point. So there's a lot of talk about software-defined networking, the software-defined data center. We at Wikibon have been writing about the whole services-oriented storage for many, many years now. And you're starting to see that come to fruition. Essentially, commodity hardware and then software layered on top delivered as services. And this is really a good trend for you, isn't it? Yes, excellent trend. And you know, the interesting thing is that we're finally separating from just thinking of the cloud as this gigantic umbrella full of promise with very few use cases outside of the SaaS software as a service applications. So for years, those have been dominant in the mind of customers. But now for the first time, we're seeing true infrastructures, things like core storage or core compute services that are being offered into the enterprise. And that changes things. That means that now I can connect cloud. I can bring cloud into my data center in a different layer. I don't make the access to the cloud only the web browser, which is very, very limiting. The cloud services really can do much more than that, much more than just the web browser. It's interesting that trend that you mentioned, because typically infrastructure leads applications. You think about what's happening with a dupe, right? There's just a lack of really good quality applications. But you've got all this infrastructure out there. It's the opposite with cloud. You saw Salesforce come up first. Now, I guess Amazon is a form of that infrastructure. But why do you think it's taken so long for that infrastructure as a service to hit the enterprise? I think it's because that infrastructure was created originally for the people that have gigantic scale and availability issues. That is the large web property. So if you look at who leads in that space, right? Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla in that space. And much of the infrastructure they develop that they're offering now as public cloud, they develop for themselves. Which means that made them their own best customer and their own, you know, the PRD that came out of that, the product definition that came out of that, was very unique to Amazon. And then they realized, you know what? Some of these core infrastructure services we develop for ourselves could be useful to other people. But other people didn't look like Amazon. You know, when you take a classic enterprise account, whether it's a manufacturing facility, a law firm, or any one of these non-web businesses, their users are accessing data in a very different way from the way that you and I access Amazon when we go shopping. And so the potential is all there. The technology is all there. And it was defined by the leading infrastructure in the cloud companies like Amazon. But what has been missing for years is how do I make that available to the lawyers, to the manufacturing firms, to the classic enterprise customers that we've been servicing with traditional components like three-parts or these systems for years? Yeah, how do you make it available to the skeptics? The IT guys are skeptics, right? They're very risk-averse. Absolutely. And you think of Amazon, I mean bookseller. I mean, it's astounding that transformation, but not appropriate for the vast majority of enterprises out there. So that's where you fit in. So talk about Nassuni, you know, what you guys do and really why you're in business. So Nassuni is a very simple value proposition. We make infrastructure as a service. We make storage as a service available inside traditional data centers. And the question is, why do you want to do that? And so what we offer our customers is something that looks very much like a traditional storage controller.  But it's in your data center. It's secure with your encryption. It has local performance, just like a traditional storage unit does. It supports all the standard protocols, access directory. You know, it looks very, very familiar to IT. What it can do that no traditional storage controller can do is it has access to unlimited capacity. It never needs to be backed up or protected because the data is really with us, with the service. It can synchronize data at, you know, enormous levels to any number of offices around the world. So our customers are people that, you know, really have distributed enterprise problems, issues. Most of them are global organizations and they do not have three, four offices. They have 30, 40, 100 offices and they're trying to run infrastructure in all those offices. And in today's world, it's a real pain. That means I have to worry about the storage unit, whether it's running out of capacity, whether the backups are running or not, replicating the data. If I want the data synchronized or accessible from multiple locations, I now have to worry about doing that. That's another piece of pain. We take all of that away. We essentially give you a storage controller that from an IT perspective is just one thin box.  So there's a consolidation use case there, obviously. Absolutely. Okay, talk about that a little bit. So I'm trying to get to the value proposition here for our audience. So clearly there's a simplicity play. Yes. And there's a reduction in CAPEX or not necessarily. There's clearly the storage as a service enablement, the IT as a service, the service catalog. Talk about the value prop a little bit. Why do people buy from you? So people buy, first of all, because they wanna simplify their infrastructure. And secondly, because they want to save OPEX costs. They wanna move, they wanna move the same amount of stuff they're moving and growing amounts of data with fewer people in their staff. And they don't wanna have people traveling around the world, setting up and maintaining infrastructure. And so if I come to you and I say, you know, right now I have a hundred offices and in each one of those offices I'm dropping a fairly expensive storage unit. I'm dropping a backup system behind that. And then I have a whole team that runs around the world and make sure those two systems are always working with each other. I can take that and I can give you one very thin box. We actually make no money on our boxes. The way that Nasuni makes money as a service provider is just storage capacity in our network. That's all we ever care about. That's all we make money, our partners make money on that. And so I can give you storage that you can budget incredibly close to what you actually need. The third thing I should say is the utilization of our system is always around 70, 80% as opposed to the 30, 40 abysmal utilization that you see with traditional storage. And the reason for that is I can crank up, I can dial up storage capacity in the network in 24 hours. I don't have to deploy more disk, I don't have to deploy more boxes, I can just increase the capacity in the network and then I have that capacity available anywhere in the world. And it's share capacity. I can have a terabyte of storage at the service level and I can be accessing that terabyte, reading and writing from it from 10 locations in the world. Think about the way that people do that today is by actually having all that data in the boxes. Replicate it. Replicate it. And you know, one of the things that is really compelling about what's happening when you bring data services native into the storage controller is you're for the first time separating the data from the physical storage controller. That is a revolution in data management because think about your cell phone, right? Your mobile phone is a very powerful device because the hardware is awesome and there's nothing to say, you know, you need that hardware, that fast, very well connected piece of hardware, reliable hardware to be able to access your data but the data really isn't in the cell phone. That's why it's so easy and consumers can maintain the data that's in their phones. The data is really at the level of the data services, whether it's an iCloud music library that you're accessing, whether it's your music, your photo library that you have in one of the iCloud services, whether it's Dropbox, right?  Now imagine the same thing in infrastructure, right? I gave a customer a storage controller with data services integrated behind it. That means the logical volumes, the things that we hold as the holy grail of storage are abstracted out of the physical box and into the service. That means that when the box has too much data, it just caches out. The data just goes into the service and I can evict data from the box because I don't have my gold copy in the box. When I need to replace that box, I just throw it away, I put a new box in there, resynchronize it with the service the same way that you do when you upgrade to a new cell phone and voila, I have my data back to that storage unit, right? Without having to worry about anything. I don't have to worry about backing it up. If I want that device synchronized with a device in New York, synchronized with a device in London, I just connect them at the service level. I don't have to have box-to-box connectivity, physical connectivity to have data interaction. The data has all been abstracted and it's all in this pristine, fabulous environment that never fills up, never fails and it's available from anywhere in the world. So let's talk about the plumbing a little bit. We talked about the business value, which is great. I like to start there, but people want to know, okay, so what's behind all this? Now when I first met you, you used the analogy and you basically put forth the premise to me, Dave, Amazon is like the hard drive suppliers of the world and the cloud is essentially a target for the data and so the data sounds. But talk about that a little bit. So what's behind, who are the cloud providers that you're working with, Sheris? What gives us the ability to bring so much value, so much functionality to the customers is that we're leveraging this fantastic new cloud storage providers. And to carry that analogy forward, think about what Solid State has done for the storage controller. Solid State is essentially a faster hard drive. But a faster hard drive allows you to do, well, faster IOPS, that's one thing that it allows you to do, but it also allows you to do real-time duplication, which allows you to extend the capacity of the storage controller. That's exciting. Cloud as a component, if you think about the core elements of cloud, cloud is unlimited, elastic and unlimited, there's basically an ocean of storage available to anyone that wants to connect to one of those cloud services. Cloud is completely resilient. Any one of these providers, the ones that Natsuni selects and works with, people like Amazon and like Microsoft, are making three, five copies of each data element in at least two geographies. So they're very, very resilient. Data does not get lost in these services. And they're available globally. So I can connect to it from anywhere in the world and I'm connecting to a single image if the system is designed properly. That, those properties, translate it as a component into a storage controller, into something that looks to the cost the users, the applications, like a local file system or like a local block volume device. It's fabulous. It means you now have a storage controller that never fills up, never maxes out. You don't need to worry about the data ever breaking from the capacity boundaries of the box. Now you have a box that is completely resilient. Now you have a box that can synchronize data around the world. See, the componentry allows you to design a brand new class of unit in the front that still integrates with all the stuff that you have today but has these wonderful inherited properties from the cloud storage providers. Do your customers care which cloud do you use? Do they specify the cloud? No, it's funny. When we started the company, and that tells you how long it's been. That was four years ago. And back then we felt that the customers would absolutely care and absolutely want to know. And what we found was every customer would ask us, who do you think is the best provider? And why? And who's the best provider for me given my use case, given my situation? And so we very quickly moved to a model where we said, you know, what our customers are relying on the SUNY for is really giving them the best provider at any point in time for what they're trying to do. That is no different than the way the system vendors, the great companies like EMC, NetApp, HP, they have done this for years. They pick the components that go into their systems and they pick it so that they make great systems. They don't pick Seagate or Hitachi because they have special distribution arrangements with those guys. They pick it because they think they're actually getting the best componentry into the systems. We are doing the same thing. And we've gone to such an extent so far along that direction that now one of the things that we offer our customers is just peace of mind. You know, we have customers that have been in providers that have decided to exit the business. And so one of our promises to our customers is if that happens, it's no problem. We can move all your data to another provider in a non-disruptive way. In no way will it affect your operations when that happens. Say a provider fails to deliver the performance levels that they were used to deliver. Same thing, or the system improves and now it's making higher demands of a provider. You know, we've eliminated providers because of that reason. And so you really want to be the new storage company, the evolution of the traditional storage company is a company that for the first time has the ability to truly in a logical way own the customer data, own control of the customer data. And the cloud is just a medium, a storage medium that you're using for where to store the data. But the control of the data, where that data is located in the backend is still is with this new class of storage company that essentially is asking like a, we're acting like a control plane between a ton of controllers that are out in the field in existing customer data centers and these giant providers that are actually giving us the raw capacity that we then allocate to our customers. And our commitment is to our customers in the front end. Our commitment is never to that backend. Interesting, so you talked about some of these great companies, EMC, NetApp, HP, I would throw IBM obviously in there and some others. Servicing the enterprise, you've got Amazon, Microsoft Azure and others. And they've been kind of on parallel paths. They really haven't been on a collision course per se, although you could sort of look ahead and say at some point, these models you would think come together. But it feels like you're the bridge to bring those two worlds together. I mean, essentially you're competing against the IBMs, the HPs, the EMCs and the NetApps. We are the bridge for a specific type of use case which is enterprise storage. So we're not the bridge, for instance, I would argue that a company like Dropbox is far more strategic to Amazon because they move much more Amazon storage than any other storage company could. They give it away for free and because of that they're moving out petabytes of storage all the time. That's not Nassuni, right? Nassuni is like you mentioned, much closer to the EMC NetApp model where you basically, you bring the componentry, you integrate the component, you add a lot of value, the value the enterprise customers need and then you sell that to the enterprise customers. I do believe that there is a tug of war going on and that you have the system vendors, the people like EMC and HP trying to figure out the cloud vendors because from their perspective, Amazon, specifically Amazon, is the most giant storage system we've ever seen in history and they're not running any of the traditional storage units. They're running on a very different architecture and that has to be threatening to the larger system vendors. The system vendors on the other hand are their strategy, which I don't believe has been a very good one, has been let's try to design storage for those cloud providers. The failure in that analysis is that those cloud providers are like hard drives. There's no margin in that business. It's a volume business. Amazon designed it because they needed to have the cheapest possible storage be their back end and so it doesn't have many of the enterprise features but one thing it is, is it's cheap, is as close to the hard drive cost as you can get and because of that, it's a terrible business for someone like NetApp to try to go in and make a success out of designing storage for those companies. So let's talk about that a little bit more. So basically what you have is a set of emerging cloud service providers that are trying to compete with Amazon. I'd even throw the whole open stack movement in there because this is essentially a Hail Mary against Amazon in my view. And it's a Hail Mary, it's exactly that. It's very unlikely it'll succeed. Yeah so we could, I actually would love to come back and talk about open stack because we've said it's not ready for prime time and it may never be ready for prime time but everybody's hopping on board. It reminds me of the open software foundation years and years ago. So anyway, we'll come back and talk about that but essentially what you have, let me take the example of VMware and EMC with their service provider partnerships. They're basically saying, look, Amazon has the advantage of homogeneity. We basically want to replicate that with a VMware, let's say EMC stack and they're going after Amazon who's getting very aggressive as you know and saying, look, we can give you enterprise class cloud with all those capabilities and all the flexibility, not maybe not as, certainly not as cost effective but resilient and robust and flexible and elastic. Why won't that work in your view? You know, so I think that Amazon has several serious problems when it comes to trying to tackle the enterprise directly. Besides not having the sales and support model to really be at the front, their approach is extremely narrow. They're basically saying the cloud is a destination and we are your destination. You need to move your entire infrastructure, wholesale to us. And that is the only way for the system to really add value to you. It's not realistic. There is just too much infrastructure that you know the one thing you can't move to the cloud, your users. It's really hard to stretch that wire. So for any kind of user application that needs a lot of access to the data, if you cannot collocate the application or the user with the storage layer, you're basically too far away from the storage. And so that's one. Security is another, right? Security of the compute layer is something that hasn't been tackled technically in any successful way.  I don't think so, right? So there is a need to basically stretch the wire to bring pieces, componentry from the Amazons of the world into the enterprise data center. And you can add a lot of value and create a lot of value and make a lot of money by doing that. And I actually believe that that is the roadmap for the classic systems companies. In other words, HP would be much better served by trying to re-architect their existing storage to use Amazon as a component than they would be by trying to deploy open stack, cheap storage, and try to compete with Amazon head to head in the place where Amazon can absolutely destroy them. And we'll continue to destroy them because Amazon has more scale, a better software stack, and more operational experience on how to run these S3 clusters. And you're saying the same premise would apply in your view to say a CSE, buying storage from an EMC or a NetApp. Trying to sell storage, traditional storage into those sort of traditional cloud service providers, managed service companies that are becoming cloud service providers. You're saying long-term they'll lose to Amazon because of the scale? That's a great deal. The MSPs, and Rackspace is one of the ones at the very front, but the MSPs, they start from a good value proposition and a good premise, which is what we sell you is data center space, Rackspace, right? We sell you power, we sell you racks, we sell you facilities, physical facilities, and then you can bring in your own high quality storage. We may provision it for you. We may even lease it for you, but it's like you can run EMC storage or NetApp storage at our facilities. There's nothing wrong with that. That's a great value proposition for everyone because you're running high value, high margin storage in the MSPs. The problem is when you try to complete, that's not the same thing as cloud storage. Cloud storage is made with incredibly inexpensive storage and it's made so that it can scale and it can be resilient, but it's not made so that it can be high performance so that it supports enterprise protocols for CIFs, NFS, Active Directory, iSCSI Fiverr channel. None of that stuff is part of what cloud storage is. And so what happens is the MSPs get confused and they think, well, if we just license this thing called OpenStack, we'll get into the cloud. You get the first step, which is a fairly immature still software stack to play in the game, but you still now need the operational excellence to surround that with people that know how to upgrade the software, replace the hardware nodes, design the new data centers that are gonna be built to provide a level scale and you need the massive scale, massive, massive scale. I mean, we're talking, how are you gonna compete when your starting point is probably gonna be 10,000 servers? The question that I always ask about OpenStack implementations is how many servers have you committed to this? How many storage units? How many nodes do you have in the cluster? Because if you're not talking in the high tens of thousands, you're nowhere near where you need to be to provide the level of service, performance, capacity that you're gonna need to play against an Amazon. Yeah, so your argument is that you bring the best of both worlds, the economics of the Amazon cloud and the resiliency of the traditional storage players. Now, talk to me about your IP, your data management and your storage management stack when it comes to things like snapshots and copy unwrite all those wonderful things that we know and love in the enterprise. Down and dirty. Look, it goes back to the comment that I made. The opportunity with cloud storage is to define a logical volume that is not attached to the physical controller and not limited in any way by the things that have limited the storage controller this far. And so our entire IP is essentially being able to, say at the file system level, which is really where we add the most value for our customers. We're able to snapshot the file system and create, there's a copy unwrite, and we create a logical representation of that file system that lives natively in the cloud storage systems. What that means is that the real IP of Nassuni is this enormous, they're called objects in the back, but it's this enormous collection of objects at the object store layer that represent the ideal file system. What is an ideal file system? It's a file system that has no capacity limits whatsoever, not just terabytes, volume-wise, but no inodes limits, right? No versioning limit. Imagine that. I can snapshot the file system every minute and keep 10, 20 years worth of snapshots with no degradation to performance. That's incredibly valuable. Not Swift, sorry. Sorry to my friends at OpenStack, but not Swift. Yes, no, no. And finally, imagine using the same snapshot model because the cloud is available from anywhere to create a logically consistent single stream of snapshots even though the snapshots are read-write from multiple locations. I mean, that's the reason one optimization exists. The reason companies like Riverbed and all those companies came about was because we were trying to move the data out to distant locations and we were trying to do it over the network protocol. We were trying to do it over NFS and SIFs. You know how inefficient that is? When the real way you want to do it is at the file system layer, that requires an understanding of how the files are put together at the file system level. If you can bring that together with the concept of snapshots, you can get a pretty powerful logical volume that is essentially giving you in every location a pretty close to real-time view of what the file system looks like and all of it is integrated into a single stream of versions for what the file system has been at every point in time from every single location. So those are, you know, our entire IP is essentially the deconstruction of a local limited physical file system into this ideal of what a file system should be or, you know, we do this in the block level as well. What an ideological volume should be, which is a volume with no limits, in any way, in any direction. Yeah, three years ago I wrote in my predictions post, I do these predictions posts at the end of the year, three years ago I wrote that your space was gonna be really hot, and it was. A lot of VC money came in, but a lot of you are competitors have gone by the wayside, closed down, store Simple just got bought by Microsoft. You're one of the few left standing. Are you feeling lonely? Oh, we're feeling awesome. I mean, you know, we took a separate stand so many years ago, right? Our stance was basically that the file system was the starting point for this because you could add the most value because at the block level all you could do was mirroring. And while that's very valuable, it's just, it's not as interesting. First of all, most of the data is in files. My customers all have 80, 90% of their data is all files causing a lot of pain in the backups, a lot of pain on replication, all the stuff. So we took the stands that we were a file system first. We also took the stands that we were a services company. We were gonna integrate the cloud into the offering to the customers. If you look at whether it's store Simple or the AWS gateway, they're essentially today's version of the USB external drive. They're a block device. They are good at making the cloud usable inside the data center. If all you wanna do is mirror to the cloud. It's a very simple, basic level of functionality. You know, we include that now because there's a small use case where we sell that wants to use the cloud for that very thing, mirroring block volumes. But the reality is that allows you to get only so far up the stack, but it's a good thing for Microsoft and it's a great thing for Amazon because if you have low functionality, it means you can sell the device very cheaply. If you can sell it very cheaply, you can move a lot of volume. And you know, I wouldn't be surprised that Microsoft ends up bundling Store Simple and offering it for free to sell more Azure storage. That's their goal. It's a great goal. It's the reason why every, you know, it's the reason why Western Digital makes lots of USB external hard drive, external enclosures for the hard drive because it moves a lot of hard drives. So the Store Simple, you don't see that at all affecting your relationship with Microsoft as you were. Not at all. It's just like, you know, Western Digital, they're going to sell to the low-end NAS vendors and they're going to be very happy doing that because it moves a lot of hard drives and then they're going to sell to the high-end system vendors. So talk about some of your favorite use cases. We've sort of danced around it. So let's get to the heart of what customers are really doing with your solution. Yeah, so we have a lot of customers in, for instance, in manufacturing. And the thing that is unique about manufacturing, especially today, they're all global organizations. They all have to have physical plans in multiple locations around the world and in all those plans, they need infrastructure. They need the infrastructure that has the CAD drawings, that has, you know, the Microsoft Office documents that they use to run their offices and so on. And so you ended with a CIO at the top of all that is managing not just a very large distributed organization. Say they may have 30, 40 offices to start with, but most of those companies are actually growing through M&A. They're acquiring new companies all the time. And so this CIO is left with a very large distributed organization that has not a very uniform level of infrastructure in all the places, but his head, that CIO's head, is on the line if anything happens to the infrastructure and to the data in any one of those locations. We come in and we say, we can give you control.  That is music to the ears of a CIO. We'll give you central security, central performance control. We'll give you central protection and uniform protection, whether you're talking about your headquarters in London or whether you're talking about the smallest, tiniest office in Caracas, Venezuela, which is where I'm from, that's why I chose it. Can you talk about your sales model, your partnership model and who you sell to? Absolutely, so we sell all mid-enterprise to enterprise. We sell only through resellers, so it's 100% channel. And one of the things that we're very different and unique about is all of the resellers are concerned about what the cloud is gonna do to their business, what's gonna happen two years, four years from now. And some of them have even started building their own MSP-like infrastructure, which is terrible when you're a reseller because the one thing you never have is cash flow to support things like that. You don't have a lot of cash lying about to do this kind of stuff. And so our strategy going into that market was we want business partners. We wanna work with the best resellers that add real value in our transactions. And in exchange for that, we will make you part of our business. So we, like I said before, we only make money on one thing, storage capacity in our network, and it's an annuity. It repeats every year, and we cut our partners into the initial transaction with a standard partner margin and then into every other upgrade when the customers decide to bring more storage to our network, we again give them the cut. And then the next year, we do that again. So when a partner today sits there and they're looking at, it's great, I get my 20% margin when I sell that big iron box on day one. But then the next year, I'm looking at maintenance. And on maintenance, that's all I'm gonna get is a 5% cut of that. Goes right to the vendor. Goes right to the vendor, all the maintenance. So you made all the hard work of actually selling the system, but then all the maintenance revenue is gonna go straight to the vendor. We come in and we say, we keep you as our business partners for the long term. We actually will continue to give you the recurrent revenue stream at the same margin that we started the business.  Absolutely. But doesn't that affect your ability to achieve operating leverage in critical mass? Not at all, because remember, we are not building infrastructure because we're not building our own hard drive factories, because we're leveraging things like Amazon and Microsoft. We are have complete elasticity. So the product has good margins built into it. Those margins factor in the partners. Absolutely. And we're extremely lightweight. Like we don't build hardware and we certainly do not build data centers. We leverage the best data centers in the world. So what do you see happening here? So we talked about the traditional storage guys trying to enable their cloud service provider partners is essentially a tactic to sell more storage to those cloud service providers in the hopes that they can compete with Amazon more effectively. You're coming in with this interesting model that's quite disruptive to those guys. Do you see those traditional storage vendors as essentially trying to replicate what you're doing down the road? There aren't a ton of options out there like Nassuni. So maybe one of them tries to take you out. But what do these guys do? Do they develop their own IP? I mean, they have a lot of controller IP. I think some similarities there, but it's cloud, so it's different. Yeah, the object stores are very unique creatures. So I believe that any system vendor that isn't thinking about how to make the storage controller data services enable. In other words, it's not just about, the storage vendors, they're very proud, the traditional vendors are very proud of their hard drives. And so they build the entire technology around hard drives because they haven't been thinking about the cloud as a hard drive, but the best, most progressive of them have been thinking about the cloud as a tier. The cloud is not a tier. The cloud really needs to be a first class citizen right at the front of the storage controller because that's what's gonna allow you to have unlimited storage in the head. That's what's gonna allow you to have synchronization to multiple sites. I think, and you know, migration without having to worry about, the thing that cloud is gonna allow you to do at the end is stop worrying about your data because it's in the box. Because the data really is outside the box. And I think any vendor that isn't thinking about how to integrate data services the same way that companies like Apple have integrated iCloud into every single device they sell to consumers is gonna lose the race in the end. Trying to build cloud is a huge distraction to a lot of the system vendors. They're trying to arm the MSPs with this inferior technology that has no margin, that has no value. They're essentially trying to build their own hard drive factories. Imagine if you were at HP at the strategic council and someone said, I wanna build a hard drive factory so that we can build better storage. They'd laugh you out of the room, but that's the same thing that's happening with OpenStack and all this nonsense about building their own cloud. Rather than saying, let's revise our storage architecture. Let's think about how we can make our storage units so that customers don't have to back up. So that customers don't have to worry about migration. So that companies don't have to worry about data replication. That's exciting. That's something they can sell. That's something they have a whole machine. Some of the best selling armies in the world are in these companies. Well, that's threatening to their margin models, but the- Not at all, we sell at high margins. Oh sure, but they have the big legacy install base that they have to migrate, right? But you don't migrate it. For a long time, it's going to be a model where the customers, so we sell into very, very large enterprise customers. At the end of the day, they say, Andres, we trust you guys, your security model is impenetrable, your reputation, your credibility. You guys come from the big storage company, so you obviously must know what you're doing. We trust everything, but you're telling us to give you our only copy of storage in your network, in your system. It's just too scary for us. We may be there in two years, in three years, but not now. And so what I tell them is, it's okay. Just make a copy of everything that's in our network in your existing storage today. Because this is not a capacity storage. This is not a savings issue. It's an operational savings issue. I can help you run 100 offices, like a dream. And then in one of those offices, you keep a traditional storage box and you copy everything there. That storage box exists today in every major data center. And it's sold by one of those big companies. But your prescription for those big companies is to extract their software layer and essentially do what you've done and make it. And keep the margins the same. By the way, because a terabyte sold in that box is the same thing as a terabyte sold at the service. And guess what? A terabyte sold in the service, you're guaranteed to sell it the next year. Sure, where it's disruptive for them though is they have a box selling mentality, right? And that's what they're trying to do. That is disruptive.  It may take two, three years to make the money. But you know what? If you pick the right use cases, you can keep very, very high margins. Because, again, every new technology has one great advantage. Competition is minimal, which means you don't have a lot of downward pressure on the price. And one thing that soon he never fails, never faces is price competition. It goes for the customers that we're solving the problem they have. If you have a hundred offices and you're really trying to run them in a uniform way, there is no other technology, right? So the early entries into this market will benefit from the same thing. If you're trying to sell yet another EVA, you're competing with a lot of people that are making very cheap storage.  You and your co-founder, he came out of EMC, right? You've been with big companies. You've been with Startup. So you're having a blast. It looks like I love the passion. What do you tell the young people out there? We were talking earlier about the Boston entrepreneurial scene. There's a lot of people bubbling up. A lot of guys coming out of MIT. What do you tell those guys in terms of what's the advice that you would give them? Get a lot of experience before you start your own company.  So make sure when you start something that you know what you're doing, make sure that you're selling something you truly believe in and can stand behind it. Because the real heroes of any technology wave are the early adopters, those customers that love to be on the edge. And every time an early technology burns one of those customers, we've lost far more than the money that was lost in that transaction. The loss of faith in the future is a lot more expensive. And so make sure you surround yourself with excellent people that you know what you're doing, that you can sell it because you believe in it. And that, you know, you can't sell infrastructure without believing that. But you shouldn't try to do anything without believing that.  And you're never gonna be successful. So make sure you're ready to do whatever it is you set out to do. Great advice, and it bodes well for East Coast as we were talking about before. Yes, we're very conservative. Andres, it's a pleasure seeing you again. Thanks very much for sharing your perspectives with the Wikibon community. All right, everybody, thanks for watching and keep right there, we'll see you next time live from the Wikibon headquarters in Marlboro, Massachusetts. This is Dave Vellante. Appreciate you watching. Bye for now.


Hello, everyone. It's great to be here. My name is Rene Krasen. I'm a PhD student at the University of Washington in Seattle. I'm going to be presenting qualitative interview study on governance capture in a self-governing community, looking at a qualitative comparison of the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Croatian Wikipedia case, for about a decade, at least 2011 to 2020, a small group of far-right editors took over the governance mechanisms of the Croatian Wikipedia. They installed themselves and their allies in administrative positions, and they systematically start introducing far-right bias, including historical revisionism about World War II, into the project's article base. Finally, they harassed and stamped out dissenting editorial voices, so it's hard for editors that were not ideologically aligned with this core group to contribute to the project. After years of calls from the foundation to intervene, the situation started getting some media attention. Eventually, the offending editors, many of them, most of them were removed from positions of power, many of them were blocked outright, issued global blocks. The foundation did a commissioned a retrospective assessment of the situation to figure out what happened. They found out that essentially while there was systematic issues with the content on the project, but really this was a problem of governance, they called it project capture, that the mechanisms by which the project was governed were taken over. And as Serbo Croatian is a plural-centric language, and as four separate language editions, three of which correspond to these national, the national variants of the language, so there's, in addition to Serbo Croatian, there's also Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. The report found that the situation on Croatian Wikipedia was unique while there are issues with historical revisionism and vandalism in these other projects, none of them experienced the project takeover that Croatian Wikipedia did. So the question that arose was why? Why did Croatian Wikipedia succumb to capture while other editions in the same language family that shared similar characteristics did not fail in the same way? To answer this question, we did an interview study, we interviewed people essentially in two groups. First group were people who were involved in global governance processes on Wikipedia. So this could be by being a steward, or by being a foundation staff member that was dealing with disinformation issues, or people that were in other informal cross-wiki groups. The second group of people we interviewed were editors and admins specifically on these Croatian and Serbian projects. Through our interviews, we came up, we did a grounded theory analysis of the interview and came up with three themes or propositions that together we propose explain why some projects like Croatian Wikipedia may be more vulnerable than others to this form of governance capture. So the first characteristic of propositions perceived value. Is the project even worth expending the effort to capture? So through our interviews, we found that the four projects were not equally attractive targets for this form of disinformation campaign that promoted nationalist ideology. Croatian and Serbian both had a critical mass of editors and a community in which national narratives resonated. So they were in this way of the four projects, the two most attractive targets of potential targets for capture. The first one that differed in these two other respects. First was bureaucratic openness. How easy was it for contributors outside the core founding team to ascend to local governance positions. On Serbian Wikipedia, there was an early effort by the founders of the project to open up the project's bureaucracy to people outside of the core founding team. So it was a transparent process to ascend to administrator positions, bureaucrat, check user positions, and there was an effort to recruit this initial diverse group of administrators. But that didn't happen. The initial group was quite insular and grew more insular over time such that it was, there was no process for people to ascend to these positions with elevated user rights unless without relying on sort of their existing relationships. The third factor, or the second one on which these two projects differed was institutional formalization. So to what degree did the project preferred these personalistic more informal forms of organization over formal ones. Serbian Wikipedia formalized a lot of its sort of governance processes so they had more rules, and they specifically had rules that constrained administrator behavior there was a process to remove administrators that were not acting in good faith. They also outlined a blocking policy that outlined when you could, what was a good faith use of the blocking policy which was a big problem on Croatian Wikipedia. So instead, rules were invoked kind of ad hoc at the whims of the admins there was no sort of the organization governance was very informal project had no Wikipedia chapter, which Serbian Wikipedia had and which landed some legitimacy or scrutiny from outside of the actual project into the processes in the project. So, we wanted to rep we represented these two propositions on which the two projects differed on this two by two matrix. And one is that each of these quadrants represents the relative a window of a likelihood of capture. So projects that have more personalized institutions and insular bureaucrats like the Croatian Wikipedia are highest risk. Maybe and projects that are more likely to have to have this are these medium size projects that have a critical mass of editors that they're attractive enough to be targeted, but they have not yet developed the sorts of resources that larger projects have lowest risk of capture things are projects like English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia who have open bureaucracies and these more formal processes in place, as well as Serbian Serbian Wikipedia. So, the next step for this study is a quantitative study that empirically tests these relationships. Because obviously this is our kind of theory for what we're have for what was happening based on our interview results. But the next step is testing it across many many Wikipedia additions to see if we can to see if it generalizes beyond our immediate study. And I'm looking forward to feedback and questions.


Hello, everyone. Welcome to the People's Health Dispatch interview this week. Today we are joined by Thiru Balasubramanian, who is a well-known health activist known to follow up on the issues of research and development, intellectual properties, and their influence on access to medicines and medical products. Today, Thiru will be talking to us about the recently concluded Waipo Assembly, the general concerns on issues of intellectual property rights, and the recent session of Human Rights Council that adopted a resolution on access to medicines, vaccines, and other health products. Thank you, Thiru, for joining us. Thank you, Gargay. You know, in the last two years, you know, we have been talking a lot about intellectual property rights, and there have been many campaigns on the issue of intellectual property rights as a barrier to accessing medical products, in particular in the COVID pandemic, in the recent times. Do you see any change in the working and the position of organizations such as Waipo, which have been created to protect and promote intellectual property, towards the agenda of equity and development? So, I think that's a very good question, Gargay, so I think it deserves a considered and perhaps complex response, but I think one thing to note about Waipo is that just for people who might not know about it, it is the, it stands for the World Intellectual Property Organization, and it is a specialized agency of the United Nations, and just for example how the World Health Organization is tasked with, let's say, promoting and safeguarding public health. Waipo is the UN agency that was basically created to promote and protect intellectual property, and as I understand it only actually became a UN agency in 1967. Prior to that, it was more of a private organization. It's quite interesting to see is that over the last decade or so, you've seen Waipo engage in this so-called trilateral cooperation with WTO and WHO. So in that context, yes, you could say that they've probably engaged in some work in the COVID-19 response. However, I can point you to a time very early on in, well, in the COVID pandemic, actually at the end of 2020, in December, let's say. And there was a meeting of the Standing Committee on the Law of Patents, and one of the standing items they discussed is the issue of patents and health. And this was about two months after India and South Africa introduced their proposal for a trips waiver at the WTO. And I remember the delegate from Zimbabwe being very frustrated in one of the discussions saying, you know, why are we watching, there's a feeling that we're watching at the sidelines where our colleagues at WTO are really engaging. So in that sense, you know, there is a perception that perhaps certainly Waipo could do more. In the recently held Waipo Assembly, there has been discussion for an agreement on intellectual properties, genetic resources and traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources. Could you elaborate on what this is and, you know, is there a chance that it will improve access to various products and various, you know, sectors, including the medical and health related issues? Yeah, I think I would want to be quite careful in answering that. So with respect to accessing medical products, I think that's a tough one. I think one to answer, I think generally the sort of concerns that many developing countries have with respect to genetic resources or associated traditional knowledge is, you know, in many instances, what this instrument would seek to do would be to create a mandatory disclosure requirement whereby if I was a patent holder or some sort of prospector or something, if I went to the Amazon or, you know, some region, especially in the developing world, if I was applying for patents and it derived from these genetic resources that in the patent application, it would say this is derived from a genetic resource based in Uganda or Kerala or, you know, and actually in this negotiation, typically it's kind of interesting. So countries like, I would say developed countries such as Australia and New Zealand, maybe I think partly because of their home to, you know, a sizable indigenous population. They've been actually more sensitive to these demands of developing countries because I should say this that in a lot of these negotiations, it's not just developing countries who are the demonstrators. Oftentimes, it's indigenous communities, local communities and indigenous peoples who are pushing for this. And so there's this issue about whether this disclosure requirement should it be mandatory or not. And so I would, even in a country like Switzerland, I think, you know, which is a home to large pharmaceutical companies, I think they're actually supportive of it. It's, I think there's really one major holdout, I would say, and that would be the United States of America. But getting to what happened the last week, it was quite remarkable, I would say, that basically this, as I mentioned to you, this is something that's been, you know, been on the cards for at least two decades. And it was basically a proposal by the African group, what they sought to do was to link the work program, leading to a diplomatic conference for this, an instrument on genetic resources and associated traditional with something completely unrelated on a design law treaty and that's something that is really been called for by many European countries, especially Central and European in the Baltic States. And so what they did was it was kind of a, you can crudely describe as horse trading but they were smart they linked to unrelated items. And they basically so basically in the work program of both you see something like there should be a diplomatic conference no later than 2024 and sort of the political dynamic that sort of they engendered this was the fact that in the General Assembly in this you hardly ever see or at least I have hardly ever seen, there were at least three votes, all related with Ukraine, about an item related to providing technical assistance to Ukraine. And because there was a lot of political capital used on that vote, then on this, these normative items the African group presented it. And even though like typically, because typically you need consensus. But, and even if some countries were reluctant, then the African group actually said, well, you know, they were very open to calling for a vote, and then countries buckled under that pressure, I would say. So that was a very well played. It is true I should mention though that the United States did not join consensus, however, they did not block it. So what that means, I would say to our listeners is that the work is still going to go on and that it'll be. Yeah, you could have quite a lot of implications. So I think it's something that let's say the watchers and the people's health movement should maybe engage in because it's going to be quite a big deal. Going beyond the WIPO, we also see that there was a recent resolution on access to medicines that was access to medicines, vaccines and other health products at the Human Rights Council, which was adopted. Could you please speak about this and why is it important because, you know, in Geneva, we see in the Geneva based UN agencies we see, as I was already telling, it also looks like there is this increased understanding and awareness about the role of this public research and development and intellectual properties and access because we went through a round of huge vaccine inhibitors. Would you talk on this? At the Human Rights Council, there's a group called the core group. And I don't think many people know about it, you know, unless you're following this quite closely. This core group consists of the following countries, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Senegal, South Africa and Thailand. And basically 20 years ago prior to the Human Rights Council, there was this Human Rights Commission.  So right around that time, actually, the United States brought a WTO dispute case against Brazil on a local working requirement. And actually, this was around the time of Doha just before Doha and then Brazil launched another case against the United States. But one thing that was interesting and I've done some research on it and it was reported at the time, this initiative at the Human Rights Commission. It was in a way of sort of a softer way to build sort of support to this issue of equity and access to medicines and bringing attention to the pattern barriers. So fast forward to 2022. So typically I would say from my memory, I think it's about every three years. The core group brings a resolution on access to medicines and at the Human Rights Council and typically at the Human Rights Council, things are adopted by consensus. It's like if there is a vote that's not a good sign that really like it's perceived as like, so if you're citing a document and it's one that had a vote, it doesn't carry the same way. The Human Rights Council is very different actually and so if let's say one has access to the Palais des Nations with the badge. Yes, you can enter the informals as they don't call them drafting groups.  So in 2016, I would just try to give you the context. The reason why it was such a contentious year was that it was the year that in September 14th, the UN United Nations high level panel on access to medicines under Ban Ki-moon. That's when they released their report, but this was a few months earlier. So there was a lot of tension about this report and it was quite amazing because this is the Human Rights Council, right? And yet there were negotiators so and I remember because in that particular time I went to all three informals and there was a part, there's a passage when countries were quoting let's say the core group, they had a reference to the impact of high prices and let's say patents or intellectual property on access. Well, what I remember is Switzerland actually like said, let's strike that up.  And so immediately after that, I think maybe because I mentioned Doha actually the member state Qatar raised their hand and said we support what this NGO said. And I don't know if it was just about me, but like the point is at the end that reference, I believe was retained. But that's just to give you just one example of, you know, how contentious it was and it was, you know, the EU and the UK, in particular, I thought were quite bad in that particular, in that particular year. So this year, you know, of course, you know, this is in the context of COVID. It was in and it was also interesting because, you know, typically you expect I expect at least there to be some contentious parts about intellectual property and which is interesting because the core group, they're not trying to reinvent the wheel or you know, like they use existing language, they're very careful. And yet, even then, certain countries like the US and others were saying, you know, this selective quotations, some new points of contention were this. So there was a part initially in the resolution that referred to international principle of international solidarity. And the European Union objected to that, like quite and what's fun that because, you know, that's kind of surprising because, you know, in the past, in the early days of the pandemic, the president of the, you know, like Ursula von der Leyen talked about solidarity so that that was kind of interesting. Oh, and then there was a very specific reference to an inequality in equity within and among states, and the EU really objected to that they didn't want there to be a reference to discuss the inequality between and among states. So, I will say this, one thing is that eventually, though, this resolution was passed with with consensus. So in that sense, I would say that was a, you know, that was like, at least acknowledging and step in the right direction that there is an issue here in the context of medicine. As we come a bit towards the closing of the end of this interview, you know, can we rightly say that the last two years also brought serious discussions on intellectual properties as a barrier. You know, you have been following these issues from the last 20 odd years, very keenly and definitely a bit earlier also on the issues of medicines and trade and patents and intellectual property. You know, how should we see this phase is there a renewal of activism and renewal of push against, you know, these barriers that, you know, where profits are have been becoming more important than people says then, you know, how do you see, not just technically but more like, as groups fighting on these issues. Yes, I would say that in terms of bringing to the public for certainly in the last two years in the just daily newspapers, not even specialist trade publications or health journals, it's true that this issue of IP and access, you know, it's, you know, something that, you know, now like you would have conversations with once family or friends people who you know normally wouldn't maybe get a bit bored about what, like, I don't know but like suddenly, you know, it became it highlighted like the structural inequities that are brought to bear. So, I think, whereas it is true that I think there was some disappointment about the ministerial decision that was reached at the WTO on June 17. Still in terms of like the impact in the political impact, I think, you know, as still the WTO is still trying to solve this issue about access to COVID countermeasures including therapeutics and diagnostics. I think that it's really, in terms of public consciousness, it's, even though this has been a horrible period and for humanity and for health systems for economies and society. At least it's, you know, I guess one silver lining is that, you know, can help activists sort of galvanize our work in terms of trying to fight for equity and reform the incentives for R&D. Thanks a lot, Piro. We do have a lot of homework to do. And I'm sure organizations like AEI and yourself actually are very helpful and useful in breaking down this very complex structures that sometimes are not so easy to understand. And on this note, we'll be ending this interview. Thank you so much. Thank you.


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