Intronis CEO Envisions Shift from Storage Provider to Software Company

As tech giants such as Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) commoditize the storage market for smaller players, some channel-based vendors are looking for ways to move beyond the space.

One example of this is Intronis’ recent decision to make its new Intronis ECHOplatform available for a flat fee per location supported. Its reasoning behind the new offering? — sidestep “natural selection” by moving the conversation around storage away from pricing and toward the value of the service being provided.

Intronis CEO Rick Faulk, who joined the Boston-based cloud-based data protection software provider company as its top executive in April of 2013, told Talkin’ Cloud in an interview that he’s witnessed “a lot of commoditization in the space.”

Speaking on how larger players in the storage space (such as those tech giants noted above) have shaped the market, Faulk said: “Effectively, what they’ve done is brought the perceived value of storage down to zero.”

“What we’re trying to do as a company is, frankly, get out of the storage business, if you will, and be in the software business,” he said. “Our vision going forward is to be a software company, not a storage company.”

To reinforce the new Intronis roadmap, Faulk said the company has a number of new offerings coming out between now and the beginning of the fall, including disaster recovery in the cloud, file sync and share, and bare-metal recovery.

Intronis is looking to “dramatically expand the surface areas that we protect, so we can be that full-service vendor for the managed service provider,” he said.

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