#smestorage

Fellow Nestori,

after a long hiatus we return to present you another installment in our interview series with online thought leaders. This time we had the chance to visit with Ian Osborne, CEO of Vehera, which trades as SMEStorage. SMEStorage provide a variety of solutions to offer a single, aggregated view across many different cloud services.

As regular readers will know, we love all things aggregation, and so we'd thought we'd learn more about aggregating "the cloud".

1. Why is a cloud aggregation service needed? 

Modern day companies store their data in a variety of information sources. This can be in traditional storage mediums such as SharePoint, DropBox, Box etc but there are many others such as Email systems, Project management systems, SaaS systems, CRM, and even mediums such as Skype or other instant messenger systems are responsible for a lot of corporate information. Having this information in disparate sources make it not only difficult to manage, but increasingly difficult to govern, share disparate data and search. The SME solution provides a solution to these problems.

2. What are the challenges of a start-up trying to interface with the giants of the online/tech world like Amazon, HP, Google, etc?

Actually the larger providers understand the importance of an eco-system so we have nothing but good things to say about the partnerships and help they have given us. 

At a tech level the also understand the importance of an API and how important this is to a 'Cloud' ecosystem in which everything is connected to everything else in some form. The bigger challenge is normally to do with that old bugbear, 'standards'. For example, our Cloud File Server product interfaces with public storage clouds, such as those you mentioned, in a secure fashion but the vendors all support this in different ways. As an example Amazon supports a secure token passing mechanism with secret key generation for  connecting to their Object Storage platform, S3. Google on the other hand supports a security standard called OAuth, whereas some vendors may only support username / password combinations, so having to supports all these different authentication mechanism can be challenging. Similar challenges exist at an API connection level, and we believe the industry would benefit as a whole if there was a standard storage API and authentication API for example.

The biggest challenge of interacting with the giants of tech can be having to compete on keywords and online advertising in general. They obviously have deep pockets which drives keyword and general online advertising up and makes it more difficult for smaller tech companies like ourselves to compete. In that respect social media, relationships with key online blogs etc is the way in which firms such as can extend our reach.

3. In the business world, companies increasingly face a conflict between the desire for security and control while their employees want the convenience of consumer services like Dropbox. Is SMEStorage a possible solution to bridge the gap?

That is a good question and one that is topical. Recently IBM banned the use of consumers services and there has been a lot of discussion as to whether SMB's should follow their lead.  The SME Cloud Appliance is a means to continue to use Cloud Services whilst at the same time enabling IT to retain control. You can read more about this on our blog at: IBM Bans DropBox. Here is why you don’t need to follow suit.

4. How do you see cloud availability changing consumer/employee behaviour?

Consumers have probably never had it so good. They get what they want on demand from a service based infrastructure that is either free or is on demand, so a user can "turn it off" if they perceive they are not either receiving value or good service. In many ways this is the antithesis of the perpetual software model in which payments were made up front and the "power" was in the hands of the software vendor. Today the power is definitely in the hands of the consumer.

Employees are pushing their IT departments to give them the same ease of use and value that they are able to get from consumer services. This is a challenge to IT as their primary motivation is not ease of use but rather security and control. It's interesting that the driver for iPad adoption in quite large enterprises, for example, is not from lower level employees, but being driven by senior executives within the business who are putting ease of use and flexibility above security concerns, something they have probably never done before, and making this a challenge that the IT department has to figure out.

Many thanks Ian. Lots of food for thought about the rapidly changing IT landscape. We well know the challenge of merging and managing many disperate data sources and trying to present the result in a simple, useable way. It's not easy, but when done well it can provide immense value. Best of luck.