August 2014
www.tvbeurope.com
TVBEurope 51 Interview Taking a Quantum leap
Geoff Stedman made the switch to Quantum earlier this year to take up the newly created position of senior VP, StorNext Solutions. Melanie Dayasena-Lowe met with Stedman to fi nd out how his experience in start-ups and the storage business has helped him to steer the company’s goals
THIS MARCH, Geoff Stedman joined Quantum as senior VP, StorNext Solutions to focus on expanding the company’s leadership in scale-out storage solutions across current and new vertical markets. With a solid background in storage, having worked for the likes of Tintri, Harmonic and Omneon, Stedman is well placed to push ahead with the development and growth of Quantum’s StorNext portfolio. “With Quantum being in the storage market, I’m able to draw a lot from my experience at Omneon, which is also storage but a different part of the storage market. Omneon focuses more on playout servers and nearline NAS storage. At Quantum it’s focused much more on production with our SAN technology and archive. I’m defi nitely leveraging some of that past experience,” he explains. So how did this move come about? Stedman had been in discussions with several companies for his next role, many of which were start-ups. He was introduced to Jon Gacek, CEO of Quantum, and they began talking about his past connection with the media and entertainment business. Stedman explains: “I like marketing into vertical markets because you’re able to have much more business level workfl ow discussions rather than pure technology
discussions. Jon was describing where the company wanted to get to with its scale-out storage products and wanting to extend into multiple verticals beginning with media
and entertainment,
government and other adjacent markets. He was looking for someone who could help identify those markets and lead the go-to-market efforts.”
Stedman’s experience in the start-up arena was of particular interest. “[Jon’s] also trying to create a little bit of a start- up mentality within Quantum around the scale-out storage products. It’s the key growth driver for the company. I thought I’d be able to bring a little of my start-up background and it all came together. I felt like the overall company vision was compelling and exciting. It defi nitely drew me in and gave me the platform I
Geoff Stedman: “We’re not a general purpose storage company when it comes to media and entertainment. We’re workfl ow storage”
it to be even more tremendous for the next ten years,” he explains. “We took the opportunity over the last couple of years to rebuild StorNext using newer technologies. That resulted in StorNext 5. We have this technology platform to build on for the future, and we also have a strategy to increasingly incorporate that technology into the systems we provide.”
According to Stedman, a big part of StorNext’s success has been the breadth of the application partner ecosystem that works very well with StorNext. “We’ll continue to grow that ecosystem. Part of our strategy is to build those relationships and help our independent software vendors integrate better with StorNext.”
“Over time, you will see us work with customers and partners to enable cloud-based workfl ows built around StorNext”
He believes the beauty of StorNext is its ability to allow users to establish policies for where data will reside and presenting a single view into that infrastructure regardless of where the fi le actually exists. “An application doesn’t need to know how to talk to a tape library, it just talks to StorNext and it will give them the data they are looking for. It’s smart enough to make sure the data is in the right place at the right time and that the application can always get to it without having to do a lot of custom integration.”
was looking to be a part of.” Brought in to head up the StorNext portfolio, he explains that part of what attracted him to the role at Quantum was that “we were starting from a position of strength. We had a well adopted, very reliable, robust technology that adds value for customers.”
Building for the future His appointment followed the recent introduction of StorNext 5, a re-architected, high-performance scale-out storage and archive platform optimised for customers’ changing workfl ow needs. “In order to keep up with where the industry was going and to handle the tremendous growth we’re seeing in data storage, particularly media storage and volumes of libraries, we’d have to go back and rebuild parts of StorNext as we need
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