Start-Up Esoptra, Co-Founded by CAS Innovator Paul Carpentier

Esoptra, NV will be officially introduced at the Big Data Expo in Utrecht on September 20-21.

There is about nothing on company’s web site with the main title being: “Welcome to the Magic MiddleClouds!” Only information on the company were published on the web site of the Dutch event. Below are some abstracts of this release.

The start-up Esoptra (mirror in Greek) is based in Herentals, near Antwerp, Belgium, and was founded ithi year by two big names in the history of the object storage industry: Paul Carpentier and Jan Van Riel who originally defined and developed the principles of object storage – at this time CAS (Content Addressed Storage) – at FilePool, a Belgium company to scale, performance and cost limitations of storing files in traditional systems.

Paul Carpentier, CEO, began at FilePool, sold to EMC in 2001 in a cash transaction valued at around $50 million, this later turning Centera CAS into a multi-billion dollar business. We were in Belgium as a journalist at this time covering this announcement where participates a discreet Joe Tucci just named president and CEO of EMC. After less than two years around 2004 at HyperTrust NV also in CAS and acquired in 2006 by Telenet Group Holding NV, he co-founded Caringo in 2005 together with Mark Goros and Jonathan Ring where he was CTO until 2014 and remaining in the company one more year as board member. Since April 2017, he is COB of Bagaar also in Antwerp.  

Jan Van Riel, CTO, worked with Carpentier at CTO of FilePool, then joined acquirer EMC as director of technology from 2001 to 2007, before being VP advanced technology for Caringo from 2008 to 2015. He continues to be since ten years GM of Creative Services.

Jos Keulers is Esoptra’s VP business development, coming from NVMestorage.com, Mangstor, Infostrada Information Technology and Dell, after more than six years at Caringo after being at Data General, Polyserve and Veritas.

Esoptra is a software platform that delivers information access and integration solutions as a service, both on any cloud and on premise. End users are serviced through solution providers to be up and running at a fraction of the usual cost, in hours or days rather than weeks or months.

“Think of Esoptra as a programmable file server in the cloud where files happen to contain exactly the information you need, are custom formatted and structured into folders that everybody understands. Those files and folders are virtual: they only source their information at the moment of opening, from any combination of backends, whether greenfield or legacy. In that sense, Esoptra does for any information what thin provisioning will do for storage: instantiating the resource when and only when it’s needed. Writing information works just as well: dropping a file in a folder to trigger enterprise workflows can be a refreshing alternative to submitting tedious forms with endless input fields,” says Carpentier.

Van Riel details: “Picture a file server platform with plug-ins, which we call pluglets. For use either on premise or in the cloud, as simple as running a VM. Pluglets are custom, lightweight connectors that generate content for a virtual file from in- and outside data sources. Pluglets can also trigger custom functions. Pluglets are easy to build in any programming language and leverage the capabilities of our platform: it takes care of all the hard stuff: security, runtime isolation, authentication and authorization along current standards.”

Esoptra server platform’s generic file server like capabilities are extended and customized using container-based software modules pluglets.

Benefits:
• Developers can deliver functionality to the user and create a recurring revenue stream for their development efforts by publishing in Esoptra’s Pluglet Store
• Solution providers can deliver the platform as an agile service to their end user customers at low cost with a recurring revenue model  
• End users can get functional services at low cost, on short notice with no upfront investments.

Read also:
New Adventures for Chris Gladwin And Paul Carpentier
Esoptra and Ocient
by Philippe Nicolas | 2017.07.24 | News