Exclusive Interview with Thomas Thalmann, CEO, PoINT Software & Systems

Thomas Thalmann, 60, is CEO of PoINT Software & Systems, based in Siegen, Germany, since 2014. He joined the company in 1994, year of the inception of the project. In his free time, he likes to play finger style guitar and is sailing as well.

StorageNewsletter: Could you summarize the history of the company and why at that time the project started as data volumes were not at all the same?
Thomas Thalmann: PoINT has its origin back in 1985 when we developed archiving software for optical storage especially for CD recording at Philips. In 1991 Digital acquired Philips’ IT activities. But as Digital got into difficulties, in 1994 a MBO was agreed with Digital and PoINT was founded. From the very beginning it was our idea and plan to use and develop our assets and knowledge in the field of file systems, archiving and storage management to implement and distribute software products for data & storage management and for archiving requirements. Our software products help companies and organizations of all industries to create success and added value by efficient storage and management of data independent of storage technologies.

Any figures you can share about the size of the company, elements such as your revenue range, your number of employees, customers, etc.?
PoINT was founded as a private company and we do not publish financial numbers. We are an SME and positioned as ISV. Our solutions are distributed WW through our reseller network. In total, we have several thousands of installations.

I’m not sure you raised any VC money, does it mean you’re profitable?
PoINT is a healthy and profitable company. We have been operating successfully in the market for almost 30 years now without any VC or other external investment. PoINT is fully financed by the sales of the self-developed software products and related support services.

As you said the company started almost 30 years ago, you’re a real pioneer in the industry, did you see a change in the market landscape with new technologies, players and needs? And at the same time what did not change?
Since our foundation we have experienced many changes. We started our business with archiving software for optical media like CD, DVD, Blu-ray and MO/WORM for single drives, autoloaders, and libraries. At that time our product PoINT Jukebox Manger was very successful. This product is a management software for optical jukeboxes and we still have customers using optical jukeboxes with our software. But some years later, starting around 2002, the situation changed because “Archiving on Hard Disk” became very popular, especially with the product EMC Centera which was the first CAS system. Meanwhile optical storage has almost disappeared from the professional storage market. At that time, based on our knowledge on file systems and automation, we decided to develop a product which covers not only optical but also all other storage technologies: disk, flash, tape, and later also object and cloud. This was the beginning of one of our current core products: PoINT Storage Manager. For legal and compliance reasons and also to protect vs. ransomware, archiving requirements have always existed and will persist. However, storage media and storage methods are changing and constantly evolving. For example, object-based data storage is becoming increasingly important as a storage method alongside file systems. In addition, there has always been and there will always be more than one storage medium on the market. While HDDs in combination with file systems have so far been the dominant storage medium and method in data centers, we see changes and tendencies towards a combination of flash and tape in an object-based approach.

In terms of mission, what is your role in the industry, what are the pains you address and solve?
Our mission is to help our customers to optimize their IT infrastructure and to save money by using intelligent data and storage management software which at the same time fulfills archiving and compliance requirements and protects data, e.g. against ransomware. The situation is, that most companies are confronted with exponential data growth – mainly related to unstructured file data. Most of this data gets cold after a short period of time. This means that it does not make economic sense to store data that is very rarely or never accessed on expensive primary storage. What does make sense, however, is an approach which automatically moves cold data from expensive primary storage to capacity-oriented secondary and archive storage and which provides transparent access. So that’s exactly what we address with our products. Furthermore, we support customers in cost-effective, reliable, and sustainable storage of large amounts of data by integrating tape technology into the storage infrastructure through standardized interfaces.

Let’s jump into your product line, could you describe it and give us details for each product?
PoINT Storage Manager is positioned as HSM/ILM solution. It provides file-based tiering and archiving, and it integrates a variety of storage technologies independent of the manufacturer. The software relieves cost-intensive primary storage from inactive data, and it archives data in a legally compliant way. At the same time PoINT Storage Manager ensures fast and transparent access to migrated and archived data.
Our second core product PoINT Archival Gateway is a software-defined S3 object storage which supports tape systems as storage devices. This means PoINT Storage Manager and PoINT Archival Gateway complement each other. While PoINT Storage Manager relieves primary storage of inactive data, PoINT Archival Gateway can be used by PoINT Storage Manager as a target for storing this data in a standardized way on tape. Many customers are currently using PoINT Archival Gateway to make backups of their HDD-based object storage directly to tape in a native object format.
PoINT Data Replicator was designed to replicate file and object data to an object or cloud storage as target. This means that PoINT Data Replicator replicates from “File-to-S3” and from “S3-to-S3”. This object storage target can be our product PoINT Archival Gateway, but also any other S3 capable target system. PoINT Data Replicator enables you to make continuous backups from HDD-based object storage and also from cloud storage in native object format.

What is your definition of HSM, tiering and archiving? What are the common elements and differences?
Archiving basically means permanent, unchangeable and long-term storage of data. The objective is to keep data that is used only occasionally or no longer at all, but which needs to be retained, e.g. for legal or compliance reasons, secure and accessible. HSM and tiering are possible concepts and methods to archive data. They automatically move data between different storage tiers based on defined policies. HSM and tiering help organizations to use storage systems more efficiently, reduce storage costs, and meet archiving requirements.

What is your opinion on the role of tapes vs. HDD vs. cloud today?
First of all, it is important to note that cloud is not a storage medium like disk and tape. Cloud providers store customer data in data centers and use mainly hard disk-based storage systems, but also flash and tape. We see the role of HDD primarily in the task of storing active data that requires random access. But we also see that this domain is more and more occupied by flash-based storage systems. Tape media are best suited for long-term storage and archiving of large volumes of data that are rarely required, so that short access times play a minor role. This is due to the fact that tape is by far the most favorable medium in terms of price/TB and performs even better in a total cost consideration due to the very low energy requirement. Further advantages of tape media are high data capacity, high transfer rates, WORM and air-gap protection, durability and sustainability.

Regarding the use cases, where are your solutions deployed? And do you target specific vertical needs or industries?
The use cases for our products are data and storage management, archiving, as well as replication, backup, and data protection. Our products are not bound to specific industries and regions. Our solutions are distributed WW. They support companies and organizations to set up an efficient and sustainable storage and data management – independent of storage technologies and manufacturers.

How do you handle the ransomware threat?
Our software products provide protection vs. ransomware at multiple levels. On the software level, functions like WORM, versioning, object locking and retention management are available. On the hardware level, our solutions support e.g. storage systems that provide WORM capabilities on media level. Especially, by integrating tape storage with our software, air-gap protection can be realized. Additionally, parallel usage of different storage technologies with our products – such as flash and tape – can also achieve a media break, which provides additional protection against ransomware.

Competition is very active as it is a pretty wide domain, what is your view on that?
With respect to our HSM/ILM and archiving solution PoINT Storage Manager, we have many competitors. What we see is, that all solutions have different focus with different features, and different functionality. Compared to our competitive products, I can say that PoINT Storage Manager is a complete and very mature solution. Especially our support for all storage technologies and storage systems is very unique. With PoINT Storage Manager customers achieve independence from specific storage manufactures and prevent a vendor lock-in. With respect to our S3-to-Tape solution PoINT Archival Gateway, Object Storage for tape and unified object storage supporting multiple storage classes is a rather new business. But also in this field we have of course competition. However, we see technical advantages for our product, as we have already started development in 2014, bringing in our many years of experience in the field of automation for removal media.

How do you see S3 on the market? Beyond classic object storage, we see more and more S3-to-tape oriented solutions. It confirms that the API became the preferred interface for secondary storage, do you agree?
I agree and we think that the S3-to-Tape approach will become a game changer in the future with respect to secondary and archive storage. Especially the concept of object storage in combination with tape technology provides a lot of advantages. Object storage is designed for massive amounts of data without decrease of efficiency and ingest of complete data objects which perfectly fits to the sequential character of tape. Object Storage also prevents the alteration of data by versioning and Object Lock which also fits well with tape. The S3/HTTP interface simplifies handling of tape-specific challenges like high access times and timeouts. This means that S3 object storage and tape work in perfect synergy.

Why do partners and users adopt and select PoINT solutions?
In the many years of our business activity, we have proven that we are a reliable and trustworthy partner. Our software products are used by a large number of customers in business-critical processes, which proves the high quality of our solutions. In many customer installations, our software has been running for many years, while the storage hardware used has already been migrated and changed several times. Our partners and customers especially appreciate our responsiveness and flexibility. We respond to requests and demands in a fast and uncomplicated way.

What about your cloud strategy?
All our products support S3 and also other cloud protocols. This means that with our products cloud services can be used as target storage as well as source for backup and replication. Additionally, our product PoINT Storage Manager is certified to run in the AWS cloud. Whether to use cloud services or on-prem solutions or both is something our customers decide depending on their individual requirements. With our products we offer the functions to support all options.

How do you sell your products, it appears to be a good fit for channels and even OEMs? Any specific partners you can share with us?
Our products are primarily sold indirectly via WW distribution and reseller partners. In addition, we have some OEM partners. E.g., one is Fujifilm who is selling a complete solution consisting of PoINT Storage Manager, server, and tape library in Japan.

What is the associated pricing model? Any MSRP price you can mention?
We offer a flexible licensing model. Customers can decide between perpetual or subscription licenses. Essentially the license fee is volume-based, meaning that the price depends on the amount of data which is managed by our software. In addition to licenses, we offer software support contracts and also professional services. Our support services are always provided as second level. First level support to end users is provided by our reseller partners.

What are the next steps for PoINT both in terms of company but also in terms of products? What can we expect for the rest of 2023?
With respect to our products, this year we will release major updates of PoINT Storage Manager and PoINT Archival Gateway. Especially the functionality of our S3-to-Tape solution PoINT Archival Gateway will be extended to support multiple storage classes under one single namespace. Besides tape as on-prem Glacier storage class also disk and flash storage classes can be integrated. Data can be transferred between the different storage classes either by standard S3 lifecycle policies or by user defined policies. With flash, disk, and tape under one unified object storage we see a lot of potential for new use cases. Since software is one component of storage solutions, PoINT relies on co-operations with partners who manufacture storage systems. So co-operations are important for us and we will intensify our partnerships and also establish new ones.