 Inside theCUBE in a while to the home of Cloudera where we sit in SiliconANGLE.com, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm here with Chris Gladwin, the president and CEO of Cleversafe. Chris, welcome back. It's an easy name to remember, but it's a compound word that people have a surprising amount of trouble with it. We're here at theCUBE, we want to talk about just your business and some of the climate opportunity out there for folks and your customers and challenges. So first start off with, what's going on with you guys in Cleversafe and what's the update on the company? Well, John, thanks for having me here. I appreciate it. It's a pleasure to talk about these topics. So the latest developments with Cleversafe, at a high level, what we're seeing is there's so much interest in cloud computing that it's really pulling through a lot of interest and awareness in cloud storage. Because obviously if you're gonna compute, you need to store. And that's just been really fortunate for us. Whereas two, three, four years ago it was just difficult to get awareness with these kind of issues in a broad sense. Now it's kitchen table conversation in a lot of places. Particularly within the storage industry, it's a topic. So that's helped us quite a bit. We've recently had some pretty key customer announcements, one with the US intelligence community. And then we also just completed a big round of funding and internally we're getting a lot of traction and momentum and excitement. What was the size of that round? 31.4 million dollars is what we need. Nice, congratulations, fresh money. Yeah, that's important. For technology expansion, sales, marketing, any particular focus all of the above? It's all of the above. I mean, the stage of the company now is we're about five and a half years old. And we began delivering product kind of on a limited basis a year or two ago. And really the middle of last year is when we began deploying production larger scale systems. So from a money point of view, it's, you know, we're still kind of expanding the capabilities, but now we're also from sales and marketing and all the other things that you operate a business for. We're Chris Gladwin from the CEO of Cleversafe. You guys are based in Chicago. We are based in Chicago, absolutely. You don't have to be in Silicon Valley to be successful. You guys are doing very well lately around storage, a different kind of storage and the emphasis on security. Can you talk a little bit about that aspect of your business in particular? Well, what we saw early on and there were a lot of surveys that we had access to about what's important to customers. And in a cloud environment, you're essentially giving physically someone else your information. So obviously security is a big concern. And that fortunately for us is something that we do well. So in addition to the capability of cloud, which is flexibility, limitless scale, things like that, you also have to do that in a way that's secure. And there's really three dimensions to that. You know, the classic textbook definition of information security includes confidentiality, means that the bad guys can't see it. That means integrity, which means that the data is perfect to the people that should see it. It's no good if they can see bits and the bits aren't right. And then finally, availability, meaning it's always available to people that should see it. It's kind of an easy acronym to remember because it's CIA. And you have some clients that are government related, right? It's a security aspect. Right, we recently announced a strategic partnership with Incutel. And Incutel is the kind of the business development arm of the US intelligence community. They work a lot with agencies like the CIA. So we have to differentiate it on the slide. But really, when we talk about information security, we mean confidentiality, integrity, and availability. And that's essential. I mean, it goes without saying, but if you have a system, data is the lifeblood of the business. It's the assets of an individual. Those things have to just be there at a very high level. I mean, it can't be compromised. It's got to be right. And it's always got to be there, period. Yeah, I mean, it's been around for five years. There's obviously a lot of questions like the government, the CIA, with the funding from Incutel. But as an entrepreneur, life has some surprises. The world kind of spins your way once in a while. For you guys, it seems to be the case where the world has spun your way with the focus on obviously the adoption of cloud and privacy and security. So that being said, what are you seeing out in the marketplace for the key trends in the outside of security is one we'll dive into. But outside of security, what are you seeing out there as macro trends in the marketplace? One of the macro trends is I would say the cloud thing. And there are reasons why that are driving it. You see this again and again, and this is part of the cloud, folklore practically about electrical power generation, people used to make their own, then it became centralized and more efficient. It used to be that most companies had their own physical data centers, now everyone uses common hosting facilities. When I was starting my career, I was a network person and did some storage work too as I had a large aerospace company where I was responsible for the networking and the storage products. And back then, when TCPIP first came out, we had TCPIP, but it was our network. I mean, it wasn't an internet, it was, we had our own lease lines and so it kind of started out as a private thing, but eventually it became much more efficient to have that aggregated as a public service, which is just kind of aggregating a bunch of private needs into one thing. So the same thing's happening with kind of some of the basics of computing. Computing itself, storage, things like that are going through that transition now. And that really kind of did the whole focus of private cloud where IT has had their own kind of private environment and prizes in the lease lines as you mentioned in the old days to now dealing with public infrastructure for HAA, public cloud. Just like we saw, you know, you saw in the 80s with networking, whereas those technologies came out, they first were used for public, sorry, for private networks within enterprises and then became public. We see the same thing happening, even though there's a lot of visibility to public cloud storage, most of the business today is private cloud. So that's mainly what we've been selling is private clouds that we sell to government agency, you know, large bank, a big social networking site. That's, you know, mainly what we're seeing. You know, they're definitely longer term. Public is gonna be probably the larger segment of the market, but today most of the action is private clouds. From your chair here or in your office, looking at the industry, where are we with the whole public private cloud? I see there's a collision course between obviously the benefits of public, what inning are we in, so to speak, and where are we? It's creation based, second inning. I mean, what are the key challenges for this kind of collision? I see everyone's talking about test ops and test and dev ops are kind of going to the cloud and mission critical, but emphasis of production where the costs are heavier and scale issues are there. You get companies that have scale operations and they have to kind of move there. What are you seeing in the market for that transition? Well, I don't ultimately see it as a collision. You know, like a lot of things, it'll become both. You know, you'll take the requirements of public and private clouds and when those can both be met, then it'll kind of merge to one. I mean, if you look at networking today and people still VPN all the time over the internet to make essentially a virtual private network on top of the public infrastructure, you're definitely going to see the same kind of thing happen with cloud storage. And we already have the capabilities to deliver public, use of public infrastructure, but with the privacy, auto ability, manageability control that defines a private cloud. So, you know, a private internal requirement. So it's already possible today to kind of merge those two things. Obviously, very similar paradigm of the 80s with networking, seeing that now. Very similar. So you have this converged networking landscape, right? You know, storage guides, the networking guides, and the compute guides, the servers, kind of collisioning together. There's not a lot of talk going on around the compute side. It seems to be an abundance of compute. Storage seems to be the key linchpin in all the conversations, whether it's a Hadoop, which we're in Cloud Air as opposite here, to kind of, you know, industrial strength storage. And I wrote a post this morning called, you know, the storage cloud. How is storage changing in that equation, in the conversion networking equation? Now, I'll say it's more relevant. I mean, data's not going away, it's only getting bigger and bigger. Absolutely. But latency is an issue, speed, application support, multiple applications. How would you kind of summarize that whole dynamic? I mean, is it, you know, a tsunami of change? Is it going to be something that's going to be slowly rolled in? Yep. Cloud is a part of the first real, like, change in the dominant architecture paradigm for computing since, you know, the 80s. You know, when the personal computer paradigm really became the dominant paradigm. And, you know, that from a storage point of view, where you basically had a hard drive and that primarily defined your data. As a local device that was associated with you as a person and it was typically in your PC. You know, the internet delivered new kinds of applications, but you still had your data as your own. Clearly, we're going through a big transition where we're moving to a new paradigm. And that's, you know, cloud is a part of that, where you say now I want my data to exist independent of a particular device that I might have. Because in fact, I may have 10 devices. I may have a computer in my, you know, office, one at home, one in my car, different sizes for different functions. So that answer has to become independent of all those devices I have my storage. And that's my information. And that transcends those devices as they come and go during my life, which those devices always will, the data persists. So that's a big driver to cloud storage that we see. And that's a big shift. So a part of that is the cloud, which is kind of the back end bulk store. And then clearly what you're gonna see, local storage effectively just becomes a cash off that. And, you know, for certain devices they'll cash a lot more stuff. You know, other devices they'll cash less because they're smaller, more mobile. But, you know, the net result application specific kind of scenarios, right? Yeah, but the net result is it'll just feel like your data's always there no matter what. And clearly that's something people want. They don't want this idea of well, if I use this device, I can see this. And if I use that device, I can see that. And I've got to try to sit there and figure out what goes where. That's way too complicated. So that's, that's, you know, that's a lot of what's gonna drive that paradigm. And that's a big part of cloud. And then you look at, you know, the technologies of cloud, you know, flash, mobile devices, multi-device kind of lifestyles. I mean, that's all converging to this new architecture. We're here with Chris Gladwell, the presidency of Cleversafe. From MIT, he's a geek. Developers got hundreds of patents here on the solution. Question for you from your definition, big data. Yeah. That's the big buzzword these days. I see data, data, big data, fast data, small data. Data in general. We'll get the Stratoconference next week which we'll be broadcasting live so that they angle the queue. What's your definition of big data? Big data, you know, the, well, let me first say that all the growth of data is big data. It was prior to 1999, most data, and when I say most data, I mean cut open a random internet cable or break open a random hard drive and count the bits. Prior to 1999, most data was structured data like data in a database and the data type itself was numbers or text. 1999 was when it switched over and that was driven by digital music distributed over the internet. Which you have some history with, which I have some history with. I'll get into that in a second. And that's when it, so image and audio data then cross 50%, so these large unstructured objects. Since then, with the emergence of digital video, it's now in the 65, 70% range of all data is this big data, primarily digital content. And then going forward, you know, the longer you go out in time, the more it approaches 100% of all data. So you're still gonna have structured data in a database, but it's just gonna be a sideshow from a bit point of view compared to big data. So that's how we would characterize just large unstructured data objects and it's already dominating storage. I mean the internet is pretty much already turned into a video distribution machine and it's gonna become just more so a big video distribution machine. Digital data is obviously big right now. You see iTunes and you have a little history in them. Talk about your background and the folks out there who don't know the history you have with music, which is the most popular digital asset out there. It is with video, I mean video is really happening. So like you said, I went to MIT, I was an engineer and then I worked for a large aerospace company as a buyer of technology, networking products, storage products, I did that for a while and then I switched to the vendor side where I made computer products and I did different jobs, engineering, product strategy, marketing. And then from there I started starting companies. And the first company I started was cruise technologies which at the time I thought the way to have a great company is to do something that's so hard no one else can do it. But the reality is you can be ahead of your market and that was way ahead of the market. That was the 90s, mid 90s and we were making wireless thin clients like an iPad. And needless to say, we were a little ahead of the market a little bit, a couple of years. Yeah, so we ended up selling that IP and then I started a digital music company called Music Now which was the leading business to business supplier of digital music services. So Best Buy, Clear Channel, Charter, Earthlink, they had digital music services, download stores, internet radio, music subscription services. But it was just their brand and it was all us. We aggregated all the rights, operated all the servers, figured out this penny goes to this guy and that penny goes to that guy. Micropayments dealing with DRM kind of. All the licenses and all that stuff. So that's obvious, complex, it was not simple. Yeah, it was, there was a lot of interesting complexity that certainly won aspectless technology. Back then that was big storage to store all music, not so much anymore, but back then it was kind of a big storage system. Plus that rights distribution was extraordinarily complicated. More so legally and just the reality of getting all those license, that was remarkably complicated. Building a system to administer them, pay them and audit and all that stuff, that was fairly complicated too. Let's talk about CleverSafe and your current project. Obviously you got a lot of funding, you know $34 million, no one's just writing checks, you know, guys in the street holding their hand out for the significant amount of capital. You guys have a five year track record. Where did you get the idea that rate is dead? I mean, not the candy and seeing the data is growing, but I mean you must have had some kernel of, you know, we're gonna do things a little differently. The world's maybe different in vision. Talk about where the inspiration wasn't the idea behind CleverSafe's technology. Well in my prior company music now, we built the system to store all music. And you know, we kind of experienced the state of the art as a customer. And honestly, I thought it was pretty bad. You know, I mean, there were times when, you know, whole arrays would fail and they would never come back. And it just was beyond me, like how can this be? How can this be state of the art? There's gotta be a better way. A lot of my background in addition to storage products is in wireless products. And you know, when you talk to a storage guy, you know, they talk about a bit error rate every 10 to the 14, every 10 to 15 bits on a drive. In the meantime, the failure, you know, of, you know, a couple thousand hours or something like that, they have no idea what failure and bit error rates are. Compared to wireless, like when you're driving 60 miles an hour with a mobile phone and you're talking away, the amount of retransmission drama that's going on, packets are getting lost. You're driving by a building with a steel wall, a connection drive on and on and on. And there are techniques or like, you know, when, you know, when a spacecraft goes to Mars and it's talking back and forth. I mean, these techniques, you know, these advanced coding techniques, Racer Coding, Reed Solomon, Ford Air Correction, whatever you want to call them, they've been around for 30 years to wireless guys. And so as a wireless guy, you look at storage and you say, they're not doing this? Like a radio. Talk to each other, right? Yeah, I mean, you look at, you know, state of the art in storage with RAID is parity. And, you know, maybe you have one or two dimensional parity bits and it's like, okay, that's great. That was like the 60s in wireless. And, you know, there's other ways to do this. Now, the reason why this hasn't happened before has to do with Moore's Law. Back in, let's say 1990, 1991, the CPU was a lot slower than it is now. You know, microprocessors, you know, were maybe a million times slower. So to do some extra math would slow things down. But things have changed. In 1991, you know, the average hard drive, for example, took about 60 seconds to read or write all the data on the drive. Drives have gotten a lot bigger but they haven't gotten much faster. So now it takes somewhere around 16 hours to read or write the data on a two terabyte drive. So now this trade-off, and meanwhile, CPU's got a million times faster. So now you've got tons of abundance of compute power. Yeah, so now you can employ some advanced, you know, math is your friend. You know, in Moore's Law basically is the cost of math. And the cost of math is a million times cheaper. So you can do some pretty interesting stuff without really noticing performance degradation or without really noticing cost. And so that kind of transition, that crossover from, you know, driven by Moore's Law enables these kind of advanced coding techniques for storage, which to a wireless person is like hard to believe the industry isn't already doing this. And so you had the idea. So you start sketching out some ideas and you form a company around it. Is that kind of how it went? And then boom, you've got a product, some battens, and is that, yeah, you know. Well, having started a couple companies, one thing I wanted to do, which we did here, was I wanted the first thing, as soon as possible, to sell it. Even if it's not built, like go try and sell it and see what the reaction is. So the very first thing I did is I kind of wrote just a little very basic long sense replace prototype just to prove, okay, this is gonna work. All right, once that was done, the first thing I did is I worked with one of the other founders who also went to MIT, is an interaction designer. And so she created what looked like a completely functioning system. Yeah. Was it a vase kind of thing behind the curtain? Yeah, so essentially what she did is she went to the Yahoo Small Business site and screen scraped every screen and then pasted on there, like as a graphic artist, not as a developer, what looked like other menu options, okay? And so we had both done a lot of focus groups and so we knew how to pretend to be focus group moderators. So we ran a bunch of focus groups who would like normal pay people 50 bucks and they'd sit there and ask these questions. And we ran focus groups on what looked like a completely done system. And the things that we found were, I've done a lot of focus groups and you look for certain things, you look for unaided and aided awareness of the problems, people willingness to pay, satisfaction with alternatives. And data and information, it's just off the charts. I mean, the value of storage which really is your information as a business, as a person is immensely valuable and it's growing in its value. I mean, how dependent we are on digital information. So that's, I mean, if you wanna sell something to someone they better value it, okay? So that's highly valued. There was a great deal of aided or unaided awareness of problems, like, oh, when my hard drive dies my data's gone. And there was a very high level of dissatisfaction with the currently available alternatives. So, you know, that's the combination you look for. So we sold it and it's like, let's go build it and we did, right? Yeah, we ran focus groups. And you score these different, we did enterprise, small business, consumer and you look at these results and you're like, man, this is it. So then we said, all right, now we gotta go build it. And building a dispersed storage system, it's been, these advanced math techniques have been known since the 50s and they've been used in other industries like wireless. And there has been some use of them in storage, not so much in the commercial world, but in incredibly secure environments like the storage of cryptographic keys or weapon launch codes or things like that, they've used these kinds of techniques before. And there's been a lot of academic work in these areas over 20 years. So it's been known to some degree, but to commercialize it. I mean, just to give you a sense, so we had algorithms working in like 2005, the algorithms were working and that's interesting. But a customer doesn't buy algorithms, a customer buys a system that can be installed and upgraded, tuned and managed and configured in value. And secure and reliable and fast. And so building that whole ecosystem around that, well, that's taken us another five years. And we knew it was a long project, other companies tried and they really couldn't get it to go through deep tech. That's not what the company, your company Cleversafe. So you got some funding, how many employees do you have? I mean, right now we're at around 48. So you guys are growing. So where do you guys stack up in the marketplace? So your business compared to others in terms of who you're competing with and then just overall approach to the business. I'll say there's different approaches these days. You talk to anyone in storage and there's a big opportunity with a lot of the other players been taken out with that acquisition. Everyone knows about three part comparison and others. So there's a huge, big vacuum. Yeah, there's not a lot of mid-sized storage companies left. And there's not even a lot of like bigger, small storage companies left. What's the core strategy for you guys right now? Got the funding, you're gonna go out and gonna sell on the differentiated features of it? Talk about that. Well, there's kind of two phases to how we're building this business. The phase that we're in now is a phase where just having a product that's operational and ships and finishes QA and all that stuff is part of the answer. What a customer buys is a result. They have a business result like they want the system to operate and deliver certain benefits. So, excuse me, little phone ring there. So, what happens is the thing you wanna look for is a customer that buys an initial system and then comes back and buys a second order that's maybe 10 times bigger. Now that's the best validation you have. That means it really works and they want more. So, we're really focused on that and then having that customer be thrilled, that they're referenceable, that they score you high in terms of customer satisfaction. And we really wanna focus on getting that done, not necessarily with 1,000 customers, but currently with the largest, most discriminating kind of customers, lighthouse accounts in our key market. And that's really what we're focused on for this year. So, you're not seeing a lot of broad marketing where we wanna have 1,000. We've got a lot of- Very focused execution. Yes, next year is when we will say, all right, let's scale it up because we've done this enough that we can kinda bottle it and repeat higher sales forces and go crazy. Yeah, but we can't underestimate that step. And even though we know it works, if we stumble, so for example, let's say we have the world's best algorithms and the install program doesn't work. And the customer has a problem. And it could be some trivial thing in an install program. It won't matter that it was a trivial thing in the install program. The reputation of the other stuff doesn't work. So, you just have to get everything exactly right and that's what we're focused on. How are you guys competing against the EMC's in the world out of the big players? I mean, IBM, HP, EMC, the big whales out there and we're in Dallas right now and there's some solutions in place. What's the story there? Well, the closest competitor to us is the EMC of the product called Atmos. And they're using similar techniques. They got a little bit later start than us. So, they're not as far along in terms of the maturity of the product. But it's, you know, they're a smart company and they're on their way. And they'll certainly work through these issues. And that's good for us. I mean, actually, we want them to succeed because it validates. Get a comparable in the market. You got to compare the benchmark against. Yeah, I mean, our issue is not, I mean, we go head to head with them every once in a while but mainly what we compete against in terms of an actual live customer situation is a customer that's thinking about building it themselves. That's the number one thing we compete with in terms of our customers. Sometimes they're looking at like taking some Hadoop and some other stuff and wiring it together. That's normally what we compete against. And, you know, that still shows that our issue is kind of getting the market going, not so much, you know, A versus C versus the C, you know, D competition. When we get to that point, we've succeeded in kind of moving the needle, but we're still in the early stages. We're Chris Gladwin, CEO of Cleversave. Chris, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Question about the tech and the product, the product angle. What's the key differentiation for you guys in the product? I mean, you mentioned security and we'll drill a little bit down into that, but what are the key differentiates for you right now? Well, that's the one we wrap it around is secure cloud storage. So that's what we sell, secure clouds. Secure storage clouds. And as I said before, you know, confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Those are the things that we lead with. Now there's other advantages, cost efficiency, which is kind of the same thing as power efficiency, space efficiency. You just need less servers, less electricity, less capital. And for some customers, it's cost. For some others, it's power and for others, it's space. And so those are some of the key things that we really focus on. And there's some other benefits we could talk about, like scalability, the system can scale to forever if you're using a object interface, for example, which is unique. I mean, you could literally have a namespace with 10 exabytes in it. And there's a lot of simultaneous riders in that same container. No one else can do that, but you gotta kind of pick your thing to focus on. And we really focus on secure cloud storage. What do you think about the efficiency message? I mean, honestly, every vendor has a storage efficiency, because, you know, storage is getting bigger and bigger. I mean, everyone has to have an efficiency story. What's your take on the storage efficiency messaging in general from other folks in the marketplace? And then what's your strategy and message around efficiency? Well, that's where dispersal has real advantages. The traditional approach people have used to create reliability is to create copies, as well as use parity bits, which is RAID. So in an enterprise environment, it's not at all unusual for someone to have three copies. And it's not at all unusual for them to have many more than three. But if you just say, you know, a person's got three copies, maybe two in one location or one remote or something like that, and they're using parity, you know, which means it's in a RAID array, which it pretty much already is, always is. If you add up all the bits you end up with, and there might be some other inefficiencies introduced by, you know, file system or kind of how they lay things out, but at a minimum, for every bit of original information, you end up with five bits to store. And now you've got five bits to air condition and five bits to, you know, buy equipment for and five bits worth of floor space and so on and so on. And there's just no way around it. That's what drives your cost. Dispersal enables you to get, you know, way higher reliability. So typical, talk about dispersal. We didn't get into that. That's your core different approach. You guys have a dispersal approach, which is spreading stuff around, kind of like dispersing the data and then having multiple copies. Just take us through that real quick. Yeah, so as I said, normally to create reliability, you would maybe have three copies. And so the value of that would be, I could tolerate two simultaneous failures because I got three copies. And if I put those in three locations, then I can handle two location failures. If I put those in one location, I can handle two server failures. So, you know, you configure that based on your business requirements. But that's a very expensive way to get reliability. And it has security problems because what you want to do from a availability point of view is make multiple copies and put them in multiple places. That's exactly what you don't want to do from a security point of view because you're basically putting your attack surfaces all over the place. And there's other things that doesn't address like data integrity. There's other ways to create reliability besides making copies. And that's what dispersal does. So a typical example would be, let's say I have a file or an object to store or a block of data. Instead of just writing those copies, meaning I'm writing ones and zeros that are the data, it might be encrypted, it might be compressed, doesn't matter, I'm just writing, it's real data. And then I might put a parity bit at the end if it's not a rate array. There's a different way, there's other ways to represent information. And you know, it involves a little bit more math, but math is cheap because the Moore's Law math is, you know, kind of approaching free. So instead of, let's say, so the way a typical dispersal environment would work is I'll take 10 numbers at a time of that data. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take those 10 numbers, I'm gonna do a little linear algebra. And I'm gonna make 16 new numbers that have the property that if I have any 10 of them, I can turn it back into the kind of original numbers. And technically how that happens, if you remember an algebra, if you have three equations and three unknowns, you can solve. Well, what we're really doing with those 10 numbers is we're making 16 equations with 10 variables. And that's what we're storing is the sums of those equations. So I get any 10 of them, I get 10 unknowns. Now that, and if I put each of those equations sums on 16 different servers and I could put them in one, two, four, six, 12, 16 locations, I could create incredible reliability. So for example, I could tolerate the simultaneous value of six things, because I have 16, I only need 10. So I get the reliability kind of like seven copies, but in terms of how much I'm physically storing, I'm not storing seven times what I started with, I'm storing 1.6 times what I start with. And that doesn't include the parity, the rate that I would use in a copy-based system. So you end up, a pretty typical environment, you end up with a million times the reliability with a third or a fourth times the bits. And that's a good trade-off. You mentioned securities, and you mentioned earlier about the storage guys not knowing the bit errors and things of that nature. So we've seen over the past 15, 20 years as a client server has been enrolled into kind of an internet environment. The converges between network guys and developers, app developers, completely different breeds, network guys and things provisioned. In security and storage, we see the same kind of dynamic. As you just mentioned in your example, you have multiple points of stuff being stored, you have more attack points. So a storage guy is optimized storage on paper, but ultimately is exposed security-wise. Talk about the dynamic you're seeing in the collision between security and storage from a people standpoint. Because there's security staffs out there, and there's network staffs, there's storage staffs, and we kind of have to live through the old today's world of network and app, you know, kind of kind of blending together. What's that status of the security storage guys? Are they kind of coming together, or is this still kind of siloed out? You know, it depends certainly upon the organization. What we found is that we're bringing advanced security capabilities to the market. But at the same time, you don't want to present it as something completely new and different. Any organization that cares about security is gonna have certain standards, like they have a certain encryption level or encryption type that they're gonna use or something like that. It's a very difficult conversation to go in there and explain to them why that's a bad idea and how you should do something better. It's a much easier conversation to say, that's a great idea. We're gonna still do that, and we're gonna add to it. And that's how we approach it. So, you know, even though at some level, what we find is the person that drives the purchase of a private storage cloud or even a public storage cloud is the security guys, I'm sorry, the storage guys are the ones that are really doing it, but they have to check in with the security guys. There's compliance and all kinds of other hurdles in the deal. Yeah, so the way you have to address that is you can deliver a lot of benefits to the storage organization, and they're really ultimately, they typically drive the purchase and operate the system. But you have to do it in such a way that when they take that to their security representatives, they can say, it's what you've already established as a standard and more. And that's how we've designed the system and that's how we communicate those benefits. We're here with Chris Gladwin, the CEO of CleverSafe. Chris, tell us, talk about, let's get into the sharing side and wrap this up. What advice would you give CIOs if they came to you and said, hey, Chris, I'm really looking at cloud. Seriously, we've done some toe in the water kind of things, but I really got to expand my storage footprint. We got to have a strategy. I need to get my arms around it, I need a framework. What should I be thinking about? What approaches should I be looking at? Well, the things that you want to look for are you want to have the good things about the system that you have now and more. You don't want to have a situation where you have to give up. So, you know, going back to security, for example, you don't want to have to suddenly relax your security standards. But there's other issues. So, for example, auditability, control, tuneability, manageability, those kinds of things that they're used to in their internal systems. They need to demand those same things because you shouldn't have to step back. You should get the benefits that they have from their own private resources and get more. Flexibility, cost effectiveness, scalability, whatever the kind of cloud elements that are important to them, they should be able to get what they add and more. So, that's what they should ask for. What kind of things would you say to the CIO if I asked you, if I was a CIO and I said, Chris, what kind of benefits should I be seeing from all this new tech, the clever save technology and or other tech around us that we're converging, consumerization of IT, however you want to call it. But I still need to comply and I still need security. What things should that be enabling? What environment? What things in my environment should be enabling and what are those benefits should I be seeing? Well, for the customers that we have now, we always link it to something that's essential to the business. As we grow in the future, we'll have a lot of customers. But for now, we focus on customers where something that clever save can uniquely provide is essential to their business. And that's a pretty intimate relationship with the customer. So, it depends upon the customer. So, in the government environments, security is incredibly important, but resiliency. If you look at the internet itself, the internet itself was designed initially with government requirements in mind to be extraordinarily resistant in a wartime environment. That, there are still parts of the government that consider those kind of requirements. So, for them, that ability to tolerate six simultaneous losses or a higher number because you can configure it that way, 10 simultaneous losses will still operate, the confidentiality, integrity, that really drives them. In other markets, it can be, it can translate into something about their business. So, for other customers of ours, what it really means is your bottom line is gonna have three more cents of earnings every quarter. And that's a huge, huge deal for them. So, it really depends. But technology capabilities are the same, but it translates into different things for different customers. We're here with Chris Gladwin, the CEO and president of Cleversafe. You're a tech eagle at MIT. You had a lot of experience as an entrepreneur. You're running a big business now growing, big financing you just had. I see you've been to MIT, East Coast. We're here in California. A lot of folks out there developing stuff from MIT. Good tech coming out of these big academic institutions like Stanford, MIT. And cloud is massively growing market. Math is our friend. Math is free, ultimately free with the compute available. What advice would you give those guys that are starting companies? Not like, you know, I wanna build an iPad app. I mean, there are some deep tech going on. And here in CloudAir, we have some startups here in CloudAir Labs and SiliconANGLE Labs developing some tech. What advice would you give them? I mean, on your journey, five years, you took a different approach than some just getting some venture capital. What advice would you share aspiring entrepreneurs or multi-term entrepreneurs? Well, the first thing you gotta look for is a very significant benefit to the customer. It's, customers are not generally going to buy something from someone new and different. It's 20% better. That's not gonna work. And a competitor can respond to 20% better. You gotta find just fundamental, transform their business or transform their life and kind of benefits. So that's the first thing. You gotta have, you can't underestimate the competitors. I mean, they're not gonna let you have their market. I mean, it's gotta be fundamentally better to be the new entrant. So that's the first thing you look for. The second thing, the number one reason most new businesses fail is they don't last long enough. They're usually right, but they're wrong about the timing and they're always wrong on the optimistic side. So you can't believe your own PR just because you're introducing this thing and it's great. It doesn't mean that everyone's ready to buy it and it doesn't mean they're gonna buy it tomorrow. So you also have to look at timing and I like to find businesses where the mega trends are on your side. Like in our case with Cleversafe, if you just look at hard drive storage, which is the bulk of big storage and eventually this will be true of Flash as well. Hard drives on a more logistic basis get slower every year. Eventually it will take a month, two months to read or write a whole hard drive worth of data which makes those systems less and less reliable because if they fail, it'll take a month to rebuild that. That's good for us because we solved that problem. We go to make that go away. So if the pain isn't great enough for you as a customer with a 12 hour rebuild time, well we'll be back because it's soon gonna be 24 hours and it's soon gonna be a week. And so that's just a matter of time. And there's other things that we look for like that where we just know where this is gonna happen. And sometimes the customer is ready to go down so they'll be back in three years. But it's gonna happen. So that's what you look for. How does an entrepreneur handle the timing? Because you're right, I mean I would agree with you. Entrepreneurs are very visionary and they tend to be early. And a lot of the web bubble ideas were dead on. They're just ahead of time. How does an entrepreneur handle that timing issue? Because you said you mentioned in your, you have some scar tissue where you've experienced that in one of your first startups. In this one, maybe take a little different approach. What should an entrepreneur do? How do you keep developing? How do you keep the idea alive? Put it on the shelf, who test marketed? Well, you gotta get at least close. With the wireless tablet thing, I was off by 15 years. You're not gonna last that long. You can be a couple years off, but you gotta be within a couple years. And then you gotta manage it like a business. At the end of the day, what businesses do is they deliver value to customers. And get paid for it. And get paid enough that they can make money. That's what businesses do. And that's never gonna change. So it's okay to have a front-end business model to keep you alive and keep you in the market getting data requirements. Yeah. You okay with that? Yeah, a lot of times what you're doing in the early stages of a startup is you're learning. You're learning how to describe the great thing that you've created. You're learning who should be the person, the type of customer that you should approach. There's a lot of learning that goes on. And you've also gotta be careful to not, there's times when you might think, oh, I gotta really start spending more money on this, this, this, and this. And this whole thing's gotta happen in the next three months. You gotta be careful not to do that too early. When that time comes, you gotta hit it. But you also, if you hit that wrong and you hit that early, it's extremely difficult to recover from. It's easy to recover from a little bit of hesitancy on that. But if you don't wait too long, but if you think the market's gonna go too soon and you start spending, you'll spend yourself out and you'll never come back. The question for you, obviously, you've done some really, really good tech and you've written a number of patents, hundreds of patents. The question I always get from entrepreneurs is when do I file a patent? If do I file a patent? Obviously, some of the internet stuff, time makes critical and maybe patents will work or not. Now, what's your view on patents? I mean, you have a lot of them. It's obviously on one end, it's deep tech to protect it, get patentable. When should an entrepreneur know, like, okay, I gotta start filing patents or provisional patents or whatever? It depends. I mean, it's always good to file. I mean, your patent is not arbitrary. I mean, the patent has very defined standards for what's patentable. It has to really be a genuine invention. It has to be usable. It has to be non-obvious, right? Those are the three criteria. So you have to have patentable stuff. It's just, you don't just get a patent because you want it. Not with a degree. So obviously, that's the first qualification. It's gotta be patentable, which is not necessarily an easy standard, because a lot of things, there's a lot of prior art. So that's, I mean, that's legally a minimum requirement. In terms of the, if you have stuff that is patentable, do you file? You generally want to. It has a lot of benefits. It will give you credibility in the market and it'll help validate you to your customers, to press, to potential acquirers, to potential partners, to investors. So it's useful in that sense. You shouldn't expect, as a kind of a new company, that you're gonna collect royalties. Because the time in which that could happen is way down. You're not gonna get the patent for four years. And the idea that you're gonna sue somebody and get money, that's very rare. You sue some companies and they're gonna sue you back with a thousand of their patents and you're dead end. Yeah, so it's not so much about, I'm gonna monetize this and I'm just gonna sit there and collect royalties. But it does have value in all those other things. The credibility, the long-tracking investors showing some defensibility. Some of those key requirements of investment in our business. More than likely, as you said, you're not gonna use it offensively. More than likely you're not gonna use it other than to kind of give you some credibility. I mean, you're not gonna use it in the short term. But if you do, the most likely way will be defensive, is that you'll get sued by somebody else and you'll need it. We're here with Chris Gladwin, the president's CEO, Cleversafe, talking about his business and Cleversafe, the innovative approach with dispersal, talking about lessons for entrepreneurs, CIOs. Final question for you, Chris, is should the arrow forward five years or so? You talked earlier about how we've seen in the 80s the shift and how things changed. What's gonna happen over the next five years in your mindset? That's not so much from a Cleversafe statement, just from a market. What's gonna change? What's gonna be different in five years? What will continue? What might shift? Just speculate a little bit. Yeah, I mean, it's hard, I get very specialized. So for the past five years, I've thought a lot about cloud storage. So I can talk a lot about that. When you get me outside of that, I get really stale really fast. But in the world of cloud storage, it's gonna take at least five years for the industry to broadly transition. It's, I mean, look, everyone thinks like mobile telephony happened overnight because their experience of adopting mobile telephony happened overnight. One day they got a phone. But that's not how it worked. The time from the first working mobile phone call, wireless phone call, to the first commercial wireless phone call was about 15 years. Took a little while for that to become obvious. It's very obvious now, but it wasn't so obvious in the 70s. The same thing's true. I mean, you get in Silicon Valley and come to the Cleversafe office and it might seem very obvious what's gonna happen in cloud storage. But that doesn't mean every single storage administrator is on the page for next quarter's purchases. So five years is not that much time. And I think five years is really a realistic time of how long it will take for the industry to broadly adopt and deploy cloud storage. Congratulations, thanks for coming on. Chris, really appreciate your very smart and clever and got the credentials and great tech with Cleversafe. Security outside, big focus. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com and SiliconANGLE.tv. We're inside the Cuban Palo Alto at the home of Big Data Cloudera where we sublease some space and we have our SiliconANGLE labs. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for looking forward to next time.