Wasabi Technologies' David Friend Talks About The Cloud's Future

The industry said he was out of his league when he launched Carbonite in 2006 – and now the online backup service is a billion-dollar business.

Cloud expert David Friend is on a mission to do that again with his latest startup, Boston-based Wasabi Technologies. Friend co-founded the hot cloud storage company in 2016 with the mission to create a next generation cloud storage architecture.

’When people look at products like Amazon, they have fast and expensive and slow and cheap. Our view is that you don’t need those distinctions because we’re faster than their fastest product and, at the same time, we’re cheaper than their cheapest product,’ said Friend.

The company offers hot storage that delivers fast and low-cost cloud storage with 100% Amazon S3-compatible API. Friend says traditional cloud storage solutions are inadequate because they don’t meet the price-performance requirements demanded by today’s data.

’What we see in the future is the same thing that happened in the hardware business, where they say I’m going to buy servers from Dell, going to buy storage from EMC, I’m going to buy software from Oracle and so forth - and I’m going to put them all together into the systems I want.’

Friend expects the same thing to happen in the cloud industry, and it will be the MSPs that will bring the pieces together for a customer.

For more of Friend’s interview, watch CRNtv’s video in this article.