“Success is not measured in dollars and cents, but rather in terms of how determined you are to persevere, how committed you are to maintain an unbending integrity, and how willing you are to stay the course when surrounded by doubters.”

Bobby Moulton has spent his career in the storage industry building global alliances, defining sales strategy and establishing brand name recognition for market leading products. As one of the founders of Seven10 Storage Software, Bobby draws from his significant years of executive leadership at Smart Storage and OTG, where his leadership in sales resulted in successful exits for each company.

Seven10 is a market leading developer of cloud-based information lifecycle management (ILM) software. The company’s award-winning technology provides organizations a simple, unified information management system that includes data migration capabilities from existing storage arrays. With support for on-premise and cloud technologies, Seven10 helps customers protect their most essential corporate data – offering a secure, scalable, and centralized view of tiered storage. With proven success in healthcare, finance and other compliance-driven markets, Seven10′s software delivers demands for immediate access while providing the most economical choices for long-term data retention. Technology built to outpace innovation.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you elaborate on the importance of cloud-computing for SMBs?

Bobby: Cloud computing has obtained mass appeal. For SMBs, the benefits of cloud computing is currently driving adoption. There is often a lack of time and financial resources to purchase, deploy and maintain an infrastructure. In cloud computing, small businesses can access these resources and expand or shrink the services as business needs change. The common pay-as-you-go subscription model is designed to let SMBs easily add or remove services and typically only pay for what you use.

Cloud computing has a definite role in large enterprises. The cloud provides flexibility with shorter contracts and allows enterprises to compare price and service levels. The cloud enables access to new capabilities and innovations while freeing IT resources for higher-value uses and business support.

BusinessInterviews.com: What are some ways that you make data migration as painless and cloud access effortless as possible for your clients?

Bobby: Seven10 has become the most trusted data migration solution in the industry because we make the data migration process painless and seamless.

Our Storfirst Gateway + Migration software eliminates storage obsolescence and delivers a risk-free, simple path from legacy storage platforms to a unified, converged storage enterprise. We work closely with all of our partners to enable customers to update/upgrade their existing storage infrastructure. Seven10 is part of the preferred upgrade path for EMC customers using CUA or DiskXtender. Our Storfirst software helps eliminate “NAS Sprawl” – so our customers can migrate data over to a centrally managed cloud-as-a-tier environment.

BusinessInterviews.com: What are some trends in your industry that you’re excited about or think that our readers should be paying attention to?

Bobby: The knee jerk reaction would be an obvious reference to the Internet of Things, but really this only speaks to one end of the spectrum – data generation.  To date, our industry has not had enough discussion around the other end of the spectrum – which is how, going forward, all this data will be intelligently managed so as to extract the highest value possible.  Storage Resource Management (SRM) is not the solution.  For the most part, SRM is reactionary technology responding to a problem vs defining and delivering a solution that analyzes data residing in a storage landscape before (and during) its life cycle.  This is similar to data deduplication technology of the early 2000’s – when the industry was focused on solving a particular problem (reducing the number of duplicated files) created by mismanagement of data instead of finding the source of the problem.

Advanced data analytics is a technology movement that will truly change the paradigm of how content is organized within a data center, but more importantly it will change the entire economics and management of companies large and small.  Predictive analytics specifically will be responsible for driving down cost of storage ownership while immeasurably improving accessibility to data.  For example, in healthcare the kind of predictive models I am talking about will analyze patient data in order to better understand historical health patterns, while identifying potential risks and prescribing proactive treatments that will avoid future health issues.

BusinessInterviews.com: What advice would you give to an SMB or entrepreneur when it comes to selecting the best storage and migration solution for their needs?

Bobby: Organizations can simplify the task of choosing the best storage solutions technology by making sure their technology solution offers three fundamental and crucial features:

1. Scalability – A storage technology that offers scalability will eliminate concern that your organization’s data or applications will outgrow the storage platform where content resides.

 

2. Security – Security is of utmost importance and must be provided at a level that matches the capability of the most secure OS while exceeding the features of almost all appliance-based object stores.

 

3. Flexibility – Storage technologies, and the associated configuration requirements, are many, varied and evolve over time. The best storage technology must absolutely eliminate storage obsolescence and allow flexible configurations, both at installation and throughout the lifespan of the organization.

 

 

BusinessInterviews.com: How has your definition of success evolved during the course of your career?

Bobby: One of my favorite quotes of all-time is from Teddy Roosevelt who said; “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered with failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat”.  In other words, success cannot be achieved if you are afraid to fail.  As you get more experience, you realize the fear of failure – while still a powerful motivator – can be mitigated by applying what you learned from previous trials and errors.  I learned that success is not measured in dollars and cents, but rather in terms of how determined you are to persevere, how committed you are to maintain an unbending integrity, and how willing you are to stay the course when surrounded by doubters.  To me, success is determined by a man’s character, not his bank account.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you share you’ve managed to exceed your goals for aggressive year over year growth and how you plan to keep the momentum going?

Bobby: Seven10 stays ahead of evolving storage innovation with platform enablement technology that supports the widest range of devices possible (Block, File, CAS, Object, Cloud, Tape and VTL). Additionally, our software’s ability to future-proof environments from rip and replace migrations is made possible with the only migration + management solution available today. We deliver complete solutions with an ability to appreciate and understand how an enterprise is built to grow. We consider the past, present and future when developing our technology and develop in a way that outpaces the constant innovation that takes place in the storage landscape. We build technology not just for the future but to also help our customers transition from the past.