Zadara started out selling storage as-a-service, but now focuses on offering a distributed model for cloud computing with over 500 clouds, to go up against hyperscalers whose data centres are much larger but fewer.
New Zadara CEO Yoram Novick
Zadara, which has evolved from being a storage as-a-service provider into a decentralized Edge Cloud model for cloud computing, has brought in former Maxta CEO Yoram Novick as their new CEO. Nelson Nahum, a founder and the company’s original CEO, who has known Novick for years, transitions to the CTO role.
“Zadara has been around since 2011,” Novick told ChannelBuzz. “I joined the company at the beginning of April 2023. I have known the founder of the company for many years, since we worked in the same space, and they approached me about coming here. He has transitioned to the CTO position, where he will focus on technology, and I will focus on the business side.”
Novick said that company is doing well, and expects to be profitable this year.
“We have more than 500 clouds deployed, mostly at MSP sites,” he stated. “A new cloud is being added every week. With more than 500 clouds, we have more than any of the big three hyperscalers. We have a cloud in every major city worldwide.”
Novick said that Zadara’s model is fundamentally different from the big hyperscalers, and while there is a strong use case for the centralized data centre model, there are use cases where it is not a great fit.
“Centralized is the easiest model to start with, but that was also the case in compute, and over time a more distributed model took over in compute and became dominant,” he noted. “We think it won’t be any different in the cloud. Customers start with a centralized model, but some will look to run it in a distributed manner. That’s what we bring to the table – all the benefits of cloud computing but the ability to run it anywhere you want in a distributed manner.”
Novick said that the centralized cloud computing model is based on a fairly small number of centralized data centres.
“It works well in many use cases, and about 60% of customers are fine with this cloud model, but some use cases have issues with it,” he indicated. “Some customers want more predictability and lower latency, and the public cloud does not work as well there. Countries which emphasize data sovereignty aren’t a good fit either.” The big hyperscalers have established data centres in markets that are important to them to deal with that issue, but they still have a limited number of these data centres, and in geographically larger countries, latency becomes an issue.
“You can be a long way from a data centre, even if it is in the same country,” Novick indicated. “Zadara has a different model, where you can deploy your cloud anywhere you want, even in your own data centre. If you are an MSP, you can deploy it in your own data center with all the simplicity of the cloud, such as payment being based on consumption.”
Novick noted that Zadara also offers Federated Edge capabilities.
“A company based in San Francisco might have a prospect with offices in San Francisco and in New York, and because of latency, they can’t do it alone,” he said. “But you can sign up for this network and partner with another edge partner in a geo where you don’t have anything yourself, creating a win-win scenario for you both.”
Novick said their competitive situation is unusual, in that while they compete against the big hyperscalers, the issue in selling is their case against Zadara’s case, because there are no smaller companies with the same kind of business model that Zadara competes against.
“This is for me the first time where there are no other private companies doing the same thing as us,” Novick stated. “Our competitors are the largest technology companies in the world, and most of the time, our competitor is AWS. We are talking with companies who have had some issues with them though, and they ask us if we can do what they do, but address issues that they have with them, which are mainly around latency.”
Service providers are the core of Zadara’s Go-to- Market, and their channel strategy.
“The majority of Zadra sales are where we sell to a service provider or MSP, and they have their own customers who use Zadara infrastructure,” Novick said. “We do sell direct to some enterprises. In the future, it is possible that we will use resellers for this, although that is not the case right now . That can be a partner model in the future.
“Our biggest point is that today we have more than 500 clouds across the globe so can provide global support,” Novick concluded. “We have a cloud near where any customer will want to go. Word is just not out yet about what the company has done and can do.”
