Exclusive Interview With Alexander Lefterov, CEO and Co-Founder, Tiger Technology

StorageNewsletter: What’s the genesis of the company its original mission?
Alex Lefterov: We founded the company back in 2004 and, indeed, the technology climate was quite different. After the collapse of the .com boom people have been paying a lot more attention to their on-premises workflows. When it comes to storage, it was all about getting the maximum speed and building collaborative workflows. That is why we tasked ourselves to build a SAN management solution to get the most out of your storage without being limited to the traditional NAS workflows that were not meeting the expected speed requirements. 

Some of us remember products like MetaSAN or MetaLAN … with the idea to mix block and file storage in a heterogeneous world, they’re really associated with the first phase of the company, right?
Yes. We were successful in our effort and 2 years after our founding, we came out with our product for SAN management. It quickly became very popular for people in the most demanding storage verticals. We still have a lot of customers across the globe that base their daily storage workflows on our SAN products even though not as popular today as they were back then..

The cloud changed the IT world and globally how enterprises operate IT. Amazon unveiled S3 in 2006 and it has seriously impacted the storage industry during the last 15 years. I assume it has also changed how tour company addressed IT challenges and leverages the cloud?
It is true that the cloud changed everything in the last 15 years and storage is no exception. The change did not happen very fast, though, and it’s just the last few years that we have witnessed the explosion of cloud workflows and applications. For us, the cloud impact came later as we’ve been serving the more traditional on-premises workflows focused on speed. Speed is something that the cloud lacked in its early days and some would say, it lacks speed even today. Still, we were fascinated by the possibility of blending together the most demanding on-premises workflows with the new possibilities offered by the cloud. We realized the emerging cloud solutions either completely lacked or had very limited on-premises edge components, so we decided to use our 15 years of experience to build an efficient hybrid to be used even in the most demanding deployments. This is how our journey started.

In terms of company figures, any numbers you can share with us? Capacity under management, number of customers, of employees, etc.?
Even though we are an old company by contemporary standards, our restart brought us back to the startup phase with the prime objective of growing business and acquiring customers. We are a small team of about 50 people serving a few thousand customers ranging from very small individual users to very large government operated enterprises. Data under management is in the hundreds of petabytes but it is difficult to tell exactly as not all customers share this information.

Are you profitable?
At this stage of our development profitability is not the primary goal. Every dollar received is reinvested into growing our business and building more products. As Covid also affected the VC market, we have been very careful in our spending over the last 2 years, so we are operating around the break even point.

To sustain your development in a pretty active and competitive market segment, do you need to raise money from VC or other institutions? And if so, what is your calendar?
We closed a seed round for our cloud initiative 3 years ago but the uncertainty in the market introduced by Covid made us revise our original plans. We focused on solidifying our technology and establishing key partnerships. Now that this is complete, we are looking to a more aggressive expansion phase and we are,  working on a new series A funding round to help us capitalize on the significant business traction over the last 2 years.

How do you see the market and especially the unstructured data market segment? New vendors appeared during the last few years, many workloads moved to the cloud thanks to a rich data services functions from AWS, Google or Azure and the distributed enterprise is even more a reality.
The unstructured data segment exploded with the introduction of the cloud. For many years, the limiting factor for data generation was the infrastructure capability to store the data and ultimately the associated price. The cloud changed that completely by offering unlimited storage and an affordable tiered model for storage. Many businesses can now generate, store and process data without being limited by local infrastructure. Of course, this forced them to move entire workflows to the cloud to utilize this data. Still, the shift from hierarchical data to unstructured data can be very disruptive. We are seeing a lot of mission-critical businesses being very conservative regarding cloud transformation strategies in order to protect business continuity.

What’s your cloud strategy? Are cloud first or on-premises first?
As I mentioned, the businesses that rely on mission-critical on-premises workflows have a lot to lose by rushing an ill-planned cloud transformation. As a result today more than 90% of the global IT spending is still not made in the cloud. They very rarely even consider a full-blown cloud migration and turn to a more staged approach with a hybrid deployment as a first step. Even then, they strongly prefer a less disruptive hybrid approach as compared to their existing workflows. They often find that the cloud-first hybrids offered on the market do not meet their criteria and are looking for on-premises first hybrid deployments instead. Since the very beginning, these deployments have been our primary focus – partly because of our vast expertise in on-premises storage and partly because this is still very underserved area with almost all existing hybrid solutions being cloud-first. This puts us in very strange position with regards to the main cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, Google etc.). On one hand we are opposite to their official stance that everything needs to be moved to the cloud as soon as possible. On the other, we are helping customers that do not consider the cloud seriously to actually open up and make their first step towards it. Simply said, We do embrace cloud adoption over cloud migration.

From a product perspective, you develop several products and we understand that your flagship solution is Tiger Bridge, could you give us the pitch about it and how you leverage the cloud?
Tiger Bridge epitomizes everything I said so far. It blends together an on-premises hierarchical storage (file system) and a cloud unstructured storage (bucket or container) in a seamless hybrid. It provides all the advantages of a traditional local storage (speed, low latency, browsability etc.) while utilizing the cloud value propositions (scalability, resilience, cost efficiency, global accessibility, exposure to external services). Our claim is that everything that used to work before Tiger Bridge introduction in the system will continue to work after. This is the foundation of a non-disruptive cloud adoption. Also, we, at Tiger, do not believe in locking someone’s data. We are great proponents of storing data in the native format allowing customers to freely choose the tools to manage their data. Finally, Tiger Bridge is designed to be simple to manage and installs on top of existing infrastructure and that is why it is often used even by small businesses and individuals to manage their cloud needs.

What about use cases and why users pick Tiger? What are they doing with it?
To answer this question I want to describe how we see the 3 stages of cloud adoption. We label them: Solidification, Extension and Augmentation. 

During the first stage, users always look to use the cloud to solidify what they already have – extend their storage, ensure disaster recovery, optimize cost etc. Therefore, the typical use cases with Tiger Bridge are related to these business goals. For example, not having to replace a fully operational storage just because it has become full is very lucrative for any business that is facing this issue. Also many people are finding the continuous data protection combining Tiger Bridge and cloud versioning to be a better way to protect their critical data than traditional backups.   

At the second stage, the users are extending their workflows by introducing some of the core features of the cloud. Global accessibility is just one of those features. A common use case for Tiger Bridge at this stage is multi-site synchronization with a very special mention of remote work as pushed on us by Covid.

And finally, at the Augmentation stage, people are looking for cloud-only services to process their data and bring back to their premises the result of this processing to augment existing workflows there. We are among the pioneers to help integrate sophisticated cloud AI services into mission-critical on-premises workflows in verticals like video surveillance and healthcare.

Finally you’re able to merge primary and secondary storage and avoid external data protection mechanisms. How do you protect data especially against ransomware?
Ransomware protection is a very hot topic that we have taken very seriously when designing our product. On one hand the cloud component itself has various mechanisms to protect valuable data against ransomware in the form of WORM data and versioning. We fully utilize and support these cloud features to recover data that has been attacked by ransomware even if it has hit the cloud component of the hybrid. On the other hand, we have also implemented various measures to not allow the infection to leave your local storage and penetrate the cloud. For example, Tiger Bridge automatically stops the replication of data to the cloud as soon as it detects more local changes that usual – something that is a common symptom of a ransomware attack.

You’re very adopted in the M&E world, what about ecosystem, partnership and vertical solutions? The NAB show is almost here and we know that you have multiple airports as Tiger clients. What is common between those customers?
Tiger has built a strong name in the M&E industry with our SAN management software – one of the few industries that have many customers to rely on such deployments. We continue to service and support our customers across the globe in this vertical. NAB will be very interesting as the media industry was hit very hard by Covid and NAB will be the first post-pandemic large show. For me, I feel, it will take years for this vertical to fully recover, but I hope that we will see the signs for recovery at this year’s NAB.

The hybrid workflows we’ve pioneered fit well into the video surveillance industry as a good example of an industry which is very on-premise focused and, as such, very conservative to cloud transformation. As you mentioned, we are working with a number of airports, municipalities, hospitals, schools etc., to help with their surveillance workflows. In general, I would say that our products can help customers across multiple verticals looking for optimal use of their existing storage.

About your go to market strategy, globally and in different geos, how do you sell your products?
When working with larger and more complex deployments we work together with integration partners. This helps us be active in different geographic areas around the world. Of course, not all areas are equally addressed but this is mainly self-imposed to make sure we do not risk the company health during the latest turbulent times. Currently we have offices in Bulgaria, USA and UK that help us address our customers globally. As Tiger Bridge can be used by smaller customers, we offer also a website where anyone can download and install the products in minutes. This is convenient for small businesses, and we have seen an increase in the use of the product and the total data managed.

Your pricing model?
Our default pricing model is the traditional SaaS model associated with the cloud in general. When is comes to this, I want to make a note: the introduction of the SaaS cloud services model has made anything not based on a subscription model obsolete. Still, when you move to some more traditional verticals that run established on-premises workflows, you find that people still widely use the Capex model and flatly refuse to use subscription services. We are respectful of the business requirements of our customers and offer a flexible license model conversion.

When it comes to pricing, we believe that the cloud enabler should be priced as percentage of the cloud it enables rather than a multiple, which is the case for many solutions on the market. In other words, our prices are attractive and aggressive.

To conclude about the future, we understand that you seriously consider raising money soon, what is the plan behind, both in terms of company, geo expansions and product directions?
Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, we are looking to raise additional funds to continue our expansion and have started the process by talking to some prominent investors. Some of the breakthroughs that we have created with our hybrid offerings, especially in video surveillance and recently in healthcare, require an aggressive business strategy. We believe this traction coupled with our overall value proposition to investors is very high. Geographic expansion is also a big part of our strategy as we plan to address additional areas where we are not currently as active. For example, Latin America and some parts of Asia.