What is Qumulo focusing on in terms of new technology for the rest of 2020?
There‘s really two big areas of development for us. The first one is around simplicity in the cloud. Today, you can run the cloud system as a native application in the cloud. We are deployed on AWS and GCP, but not yet Azure. You might imagine that’s an area where we’re keenly interested in being able to have our data service across all three public clouds. So there will be a lot more around cloud.
And then, the second major area of innovation for us is all around the data. One of the main value pillars of Qumulo is the concept of data awareness. You can run real-time analytics against billions of files to get responses not about storage but about the data in sub-second response times. Customers love that about Qumulo. What we‘re doing is enhancing that experience and taking it more and more inside competitors’ data. We’ve built out a full API so that interacting with the infrastructure is very much a software process, not a hardware process.
Qumulo until now has not made any acquisitions. Is that an area you might want to explore in the future?
It is, as a matter of fact. It‘s not that we haven’t looked at it. A lot of companies have developed some interesting IP [intellectual property] but have just not made it as a business. And we get called all the time to look at these different things. We haven’t found one that’s quite right yet, although I’d expect over the next couple years that you might see us doing an acquisition.
My standard for the team here, having done acquisitions before in my life, is, they‘re harder than you think to get right, so you better absolutely be in love with it when you’re doing the deal. Because on the other side of the deal, it’s tough. You have to be in love, not in like, with the company you’re acquiring. And we haven’t found love yet.
