October 24, 2014

This is an exclusive interview by BackupReview.info (BR)
BackupReview.info - Your source for online backup news and reviews
http://www.backupreview.info

with Mr. Robert Moulton, CEO at Seven10 Storage Software

Cloud_Backup_Reviews_Interview_with_Robert_Bobby_Moulton

Photo: Robert Moulton

Contact Details

Phone, US: 1-978-725-3332
Phone, EU: +49-8251-896-190
Sales Email: sales@seven10storage.com
Customer Care: support@seven10storage.com
Website: http://www.seven10storage.com
Twitterhttp://www.twitter.com/StorFirst

Company History and Operation

1/BR: Please give us some background information about your company, such as how it was founded, by whom, how long have you been around, where your headquarters are, how many branch offices you have or you will have, etc.

Launched within the shadows of the September 11th three founders of Seven10 – brothers Bobby and Jim Moulton and Gary Lafreniere – started the company as a software development partner to major OEMs in Healthcare and Finance with the
purpose of providing a unified file system into multiple storage types from multiple storage vendors.

In 2009, Seven10 shed its OEM-only strategy and launched the 2nd phase of growth as an enterprise class information management company with proven, differentiated solutions for data migration and cloud-as-a-tier ILM management. Since that time, Seven10 has experienced 60% Y/Y growth and continues to be a leader in providing converged storage solutions for long-term data protection.

Seven10 is headquartered in Lawrence, Massachusetts with sales and marketing offices in Florida and Germany.

2/BR: Tell us about your day to day job, and its challenges and successes
On a daily basis, Seven10 provides over 500 organizations with simple solutions for complex environments, including unified information management, data migration, and multiple levels of security. Seven10 has proven its ability to deliver solutions for both traditional, on premise storage environments such as NAS, CAS, and Object storage as well as the latest innovations in cloud offerings.

We deliver a secure, scalable, and centralized view of tiered storage. With proven success in healthcare, financial and other compliance-driven markets, our software delivers demands for immediate access while providing the most economical choices for long-term data retention. Our technology is built for an evolving enterprise.

3/BR: Is your customer base primarily in the USA and/or Canada, or is there a significant international presence as well?
Seventy percent of our customers are installed in the America’s while the remaining 30 percent are based in EMEA.

4/BR: How many employees do you have and how big is your R&D department?
We have 18 employees, nearly half of which are dedicated to ongoing development of our current and next generation software technologies.

5/BR: Any other news about your company you care to share?
With over 500 active installations, Seven10’s focus is 100% channel friendly leveraging longstanding partnerships with EMC (EMC Select since 2009), Hitachi (Strategic and Technology Alliance Partner since 2011), Agfa Healthcare (12 year partner), AT&T (strategic enablement provider for STaaS) and HP (Worldwide Alliance Partner).

We successfully re-launched our Handshake Partner Program just last quarter with the additions of Bedroc, RoundTower and Comport Consulting as key resellers of the Storfirst suite of solutions. Our Handshake Partner Program was recently featured in TechTarget’s SearchITChannel.

6/BR: How many subscribers do you have?
Over 500 customers.

7/BR: Could you briefly tell us about your revenue history, and what your future revenue growth would be?
Seven10 is a private company — independently funded (i.e. customer funded), growing and profitable with demonstrated healthy growth. We’ve enjoyed tremendous growth over the last two years and a 42 percent EBITDA 2013 margin. In fact our leadership in Cloud integrated storage market has led to a 60 percent customer growth this quarter.

Company Positioning

8/BR: Which companies are your main sales partners globally?
EMC, HDS, HP, AT&T, Telus, Fujitsu, Agfa, Dell, Amplidata, Cleversafe.

9/BR: What makes your company and its service different from others?
Our history and vision! Seven10 focuses on delivering complete solutions with a unique ability to appreciate and understand how an enterprise is built to grow. We consider the past, the present and the future when developing our technology so we can outpace the constant innovation that takes place within the storage landscape. In essence we are building technology not just for the future, but one that helps our customers transition from legacy technology.

10/BR: What have been your greatest challenges so far and what do you see these challenges are / will be at the present time and in the coming years? How do you plan to overcome those challenges?
Our greatest challenge is being a self-funded company that lacks the marketing muscle of well-funded start-ups that pop-up as temporary competitors. Often, we are confronted by challengers that provide a wonderful story, but ultimately end-up as pitchmen for vaporware.

11/BR: And what are your biggest accomplishments so far?
Our greatest accomplishment is delivered through our customer-first vision that has enabled Seven10 to become a vibrant, self-funded market leader that has outlasted hundreds of well-funded competitors and out-performed well-established goliaths.

Products

12/BR: What are your top selling account packages, and why are they enjoying so much success?
Storfirst Gateway is our flagship product. The capabilities, features, and functionality built into Storfirst IP have occurred organically through large enterprise customer feedback, such so that it has become a purpose-built solution for an unstructured data market that is experiencing unprecedented growth.

Our Storfirst Migration is the industry’s only 100% software-based solution for seamless data migrations. With this software-only approach, Seven10 is completely changing the paradigm for technology refreshes from resource intensive, complex and expensive projects to low-touch, customer driven and graceful transitions to newer technology.

13/BR: Are there any new products/services you are developing that will soon be available?
Storfirst Gateway 5 will be released in the second half of 2015. Storfirst Migration 3.0 is slated for Q1 of 2015.

14/BR: Do you charge by account or by PC? Do you offer unlimited backup and restore?
We charge by amount of data (in TB) that we migrate and/or manage.

15/BR: Are your products and/or services industry compliant? If so, please explain.
Yes, our software is built to protect and comply with industry standards. To ensure the highest level of data integrity and security Storfirst delivers (i) native support for Microsoft Active Directory, (ii) hashing, audit and verification, (iii) failover with multi-target archiving, (iii) encryption at-rest and in-transit, (iv) retention, (v) file locking, (vi) lifespan policy, and (vii) customized support for each storage platform’s unique security.

Technology

16/BR: One of the biggest concerns of online backup users is data security and privacy. How have you addressed those issues?
Our software is designed with advanced security with immutability and Active Directory Support. Storfirst has a self-
protecting architecture that includes encryption, file locking, retention, replication, auditing, MD5 hashing, and lifespan policies to ensure data preservation and long-term compliance. We work closely with our hardware partners to develop around the unique features of each platform, so that our software completely eliminates data loss concerns.

17/BR: Does your solution take into consideration compatibility across the major platforms, mobility, flexibility and constant access to data?
Seven10’s IP was purpose-built to scale both horizontally (any storage platform/any storage vendor) and vertically (multi-PB) in a single server HA configuration with multiple-layers of data protection and replication ensuring 24/7 access to data regardless of whether or not a tier of storage is off-line or unavailable.

Industry

18/BR: Whom do you consider your main competitors? And Why?
Our main competitors are storage gateways, cloud gateways, ILM vendors, professional service organizations and storage appliances. Seven10 delivers complete solutions with an ability to appreciate and understand how an enterprise is built to grow.

We consider the past, present and future when developing our technology and develop it in a way that outpaces the constant innovation that takes place in the storage landscape. We build technology not just for the future, but to help customers transition from the past. In contrast, our competitors provide limited capabilities that focus on only one aspect of the customers’ problem domain.

19/BR: Large companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google have started to offer online storage solutions. What is your take on that? How can you compete with such companies?
There are always major gaps to fill when the large vendors take on projects that involve multi-platform/multi-vendor convergence. Independent companies like Seven10 have the ability to see the entire storage landscape without having to focus on one particular type of storage or vendor. It is this “agnostic” view of storage that enables us to deliver the most comprehensive support for heterogeneous or hybrid cloud environments.

20/BR: There has been a great deal of M&A activity in the industry during the last few years. Some companies are now listed on the stock markets. Do you think that major M&A will happen in the industry this year and beyond? What is your strategy?
As a profitable, fast growing self-funded software company Seven10 is focused on delivering solutions to existing and next generation problems in the enterprise data center. Our approach is to focus on the task at hand, and solve hard problems with easy-to-deploy solutions, by doing so we realize that the opportunities for our organization are limitless. Whether that is an IPO, acquisition, or being the acquirer is not as important to us as solving the problems caused by massive data growth. If the opportunity presents itself for any of the above, we will be ready.

21/BR: In the next two years or so, what new developments do you expect to see in the online backup and data storage industry?
Analytics will play an enormous role in how, where and when data is stored/accessed. Seven10 is working on a significant project – Storfirst ESP – that will incorporate analytics, data management, and meta-data that can be best described as predictive ILM.

22/BR: Any advice for IT companies planning to launch an online data backup and storage business?
Yes, make sure you have the piping in place to handle the influx of data.

Feedback and General Comment

23/BR: Now that we know about you, we want to ask you about us. As you know BackupReview.info has been providing useful and timely information about the online backup and data storage industry since 2004. We post daily news, write reviews, rank the top 100 online backup companies on a monthly basis, we keep a directory of companies, conduct interviews, and publish all of our posts in many social networking sites. How can we improve our website and its services?
BackupReview.info website and related products and offerings provide a great resource for enterprises and we are delighted to have this opportunity to share our expertise with your audience and readers.

Ed: We sincerely thank Robert for this interview opportunity.

© October 2014 BackupReview.info

 

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