Exclusive Interview With T.M. Ravi, CEO of Mimosa

  T. M. Ravi, 48, co-founder, president, and CEO of Mimosa Systems, Inc., has had a long career in enterprise management and storage. Before Mimosa, he was founder and CEO of Peakstone, a VC-financed start-up that provides performance management solutions for Fortune 500 companies.  Prior to that, he was VP of marketing at CA, responsible for the core line of enterprise management products, including Unicenter, as well as applications, systems and network management; software distribution; and help desk, security, and storage management. He joined CA through the $1.2 billion acquisition of Cheyenne Software, in storage management and antivirus solutions. At Cheyenne, Ravi was VP in charge of managing the company’s Windows NT business with products such as ARCserve backup and InocuLAN antivirus. Before Cheyenne, he founded (and was CEO of) Media Blitz, a provider of Windows NT storage solutions later acquired by Cheyenne. Earlier in his career, Ravi worked in HP’s Information Architecture Group, where he did product planning for client/server and storage solutions. He has a graduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.

StorageNewsletter.com: Your company specializes in archiving. Before we get to specifics about your company, I have three general questions on the subject.
1. Managing archives is a good idea, of course, but you need to keep the data physically on some kind of media. And currently I don’t see any long-term media capable of securing data for 5, 10, or 50 years, depending on the content. What’s your answer to this problem?
Ravi: The approach that archiving has taken is different from backup. In backup, people had the concept that they put the data on tape, and you can keep tape for 20 years and it will be fine, you can rewind it many times. With archiving the approach is different, the main concept, in the last 7-8 years, with the cost of disks going down with SATA storage, and so forth, the concept has been online. Archived data must be online. For a long time. So what people generally think about there is that the lifecycle of the concept, email, etc., you do tiering of storage. So you keep it in secondary storage for 3 years, and now people think less of tape and more about cloud.

But each 3 to 5 years, you’re obliged to change the disks.
Or send it out to the cloud.

We’re talking petabytes in some cases…
Right. So it creates a kind of a discipline for corporations, because it’s very important to keep pruning the data and dispose… because there’s a liability associated with keeping data also.

2. There are too many government and industry regulations. Each country has its own set. How can anyone manage that? Do you offer options for each different set of regulations?
What we do in our solutions is to provide policy management, which is really flexible and granular…

Yes, but you have to configure it…
So this is a kind of complicated thing to figure out in any corporation, what should be the retention policy for this set of people, what it should be for this, what it should be for email, for files, for documents. So we provide professional services, and we also have a number of partners who help customize the policies for a given context.

3. In the long term, companies need to preserve not just data but also software, even the OS, in order to access or manipulate them. How do you manage that?
The general approach there has been to keep it in standard, well-known data formats. So email for example, a .msg format, so there are many tools available in the market that understand that format.

But in 20 years?
It’s a good point. At the end of the day, you have to pick some standard, whether it’s .xml, or .msg.

Because even now, there are PDF files from 15 years ago that we can’t read.
The good news is that there are people like Iron Mountain who make a business out of converting and preserving data…

Yes, and it’s expensive.
It is. It’s an interesting question, about formats in the future…

There is no standard…
Things change all the time. I came from the backup space, and after 40 years in backup there’s no standard format, everyone does there own thing.

Do you consider your company to be essentially in email archiving or more generally in file archiving?
Content archiving. We’re interested in archiving all user-generated data.

But do you anticipate entering document archiving? Which seems to be a different market…
But very close and related to us. If you look at what we have done, we introduced email archiving, then file archiving, and more recently, SharePoint archiving. In SharePoint archiving, there are many different content types, but one of the important content types is documents, so we have to keep track of versions, we have to do single-instancing of all of that.

So today, you can use your software to archive word processing, text, PDF, even images?
Images, we will archive it, but with text data, we do full text indexing. With images, we only capture the metadata. In some cases, with images, you can automatically do tagging, to be able to search.

TECHNICAL QUESTIONS

Do you have your own CDP?
We are mainly in the archiving business. How-ever, once you make a copy of the data, and our approach to archiving is continuous capture, so we also capture all the meta data, which means we make it available to end users for search, compliance, to legal people, but also to IT people, for example in Exchange…

So you are doing some kind of backup?
It’s a feature of the product that’s not our main business, but you can basically, with recovery point objectives being very small. CDP for me, I don’t like to use this term, but it’s basically continuous capture. CDP is a dead market. No company has had much success…

Your own de-dupe?
We have what we call single-instancing, so you can do it at the object level. Our own technology.

Your own e-discovery engine?
Yes, our own.

At one point, I remember you were partnering with Index Engines – is that over?
If you think about the architecture, we have a platform, which is the archiving platform where we keep all the content, and then like Windows or Oracle Database, we deliver our own applications, but we also open our platform. And we have many discovery partners, Kazeon [acquired by EMC. Ed.], etc. You can use any application. Because in legal discovery, they have this model, a discovery reference model, so there are different areas and functionalities that different companies do, and we partner with many of them.

What are you doing with the following integration partners, I’ll go through them one at at time… Microsoft?
Very close partnership, we share a board member, we’re tightly integrated in terms of Exchange, Sharepoint, file systems…

They’re not reselling your products?
They’re not, but in the field, we have very close alignment.

NetApp?
Tight integration with many of their devices, features… Snapmirror, Snaplog. A lot of product integration.

The same is true for EMC with Centera?
Yes.

Hitachi Data Systems?
Very close worldwide partnership with H-AP [Hitachi Content Archive Platform. Ed.], which competes with Centera?

Nexsan?
We have a partnership, but it’s not so close…

I didn’t see HP’s or IBM’s name…
IBM no, but Dell and HP also, with Dell we have a reseller partnership, they resell our product. Nothing with IBM. With HP we integrate with their hardware, but there is nothing special going on.

What about Compellent. Do they resell the product?
They integrate it.

FalconStor?
Good partnership.

ProStor?
They may be an OEM of our software, I’m not too familiar with them. Some people are making appliances for the U.S. market…

Quantum?
They have a D2D solution that we have integrated with. And there are others like Dell and EMC who have OEMed it.

Riverbed?
Yes. So what you see is that our implementations are sometimes centralized and sometimes remote. So we recommend their solution for optimization then.

FINANCIAL QUESTIONS

Since its inception in 2003, how much in all has been invested in the company?
$51.5 million.

In how many funding rounds?
Four rounds.

Annual revenues?
We haven’t disclosed that yet.

In January 2008 Mimosa announced triple digit growth for 2007. And for 2008?
Very dramatic growth. Close to double.

When will it be profitable?
We will be profitable before the end of this year.

Do you anticipate an IPO or sale of the company?
We are essentially putting a process in place for the next 15-18 months, getting ready to go to the next level in terms of IPO. Because of the growth rates we have seen, that’s the ambition of the investors.

It’s not the best environment for a storage company…
Yes, but look at the market, it’s vibrant, with Data Domain, probably in the next 60 days we’ll see two big acquisitions… I don’t know which specifically, but you’ll see Dell and EMC getting active…

What’s the largest deployment in number of users in one organization? How many?
United Healthcare Group, 150,000 users. It’s a multi-location deployment.

How many channel partners do you have?
About 200. I don’t know the exact number.

How many  customers?
870.

Average price for a license?
You’ll see that we have three different segments, I would say about $120K.

Average annual price per customer for services?
Services is in addition. There are typically two models, in some cases, we provide services, but generally we are trying to give that to a partner.

Do you approach storage companies?
We have three kinds of partners. Microsoft partners, people with a lot of Sharepoint and Exchange expertise. The second is storage partners, because we drive a lot of storage, so they have the opportunity to build a solution. The third are partner in the legal and compliance space, because they provide services such as retention policy, discovery policy, this kind of thing.

Do you have any Apple solutions?
We support access to the archive from Mac, from the iPhone. Entourage.

Do you support Firefox?
Yes.

Gmail?
So Google has GoogleDocs for the enterprise, which includes Gmail.

And what’s your roadmap?
If you look at the big things we are doing, this year and early into next year, the first important focus is in hosted email. We have a number of partners today who are delivering hosted email solutions using Mimosa. Like a cloud.
So what they’re doing today is providing email in the cloud, and when they sell email in a cloud, the next question is ‘Sell me anti-spam and anti-virus.’ And the next question is ‘I want to archive.’ So we are targeting those people.

Are you approaching online backup companies?
We have some agreements, do you know a company called LiveOffice? We have some relationships with these companies, but for us the target are more email hosters, telcos, you’ll see a different category of vendors that we also work with. Such as Iron Mountain, those kind of people, who specialize in offsite archiving.

PERSONAL QUESTIONS

Are you an Indian or U.S. citizen?
I’m a U.S. citizen. But of Indian origin. I was born in the United States.

Your parents moved to the United States?
Yes. I grew up in Illinois. In Champaign-Urbana.
 
Are you on the board of other companies?
A company called Divitas Network. It’s in mobile applications.

You are a co-founder of Mimosa. Who with?
Someone who is now at Microsoft. Roy D’Souza. He’s working in cloud technologies. Microsoft is competing against Google. So they are doing whatever they can.

Hobbies?
Traveling. Especially in France. French wine. I like to exercise. Good friends.

Annual salary?
When I become a public company, that will be disclosed.

How many days of vacation did you have last year?
A week to ten days, maybe?

From the list of your board members, I saw two great names… Vic Mahadevan
Yes, from the storage space. Now at LSI…

And Paul Sallaberry… he used to be at Veritas, but where is he now?
He’s on the board of many public companies, such as Quest software. He’s retired now. And you missed another one, David Marquardt, he’s on the board of Adaptec. He started there with Larry Boucher. He’s on the board of Microsoft, one of the few private investors, also on Seagate’s board, previously on Sun’s board. He’s a big dog.

You founded Cheyenne Software…
I didn’t found it, I had a company that Cheyenne acquired.

Then you were CEO and you sold it to Computer Associates…
I wasn’t the CEO, I was the head of the Windows division at Cheyenne, I reported to the CEO. Then I became the head of marketing at CA. But I was involved in the acquisition. 1.2 billion. That was incredible. But they got a great price…

What do you think of CA in storage software?
Practically absent. They were such a big one, and today, not so much.

How do you explain that?
No focus.

But they’re trying to buy some small companies now…
But it’s difficult with small ones. You need some people there with a strong storage background, like Vic Mahadevan, to really drive the business.