I emailed Dave with the question below - his response follows, minus the personal stuff.
Question:
Is it it true there is a big shift going on 2015 - in as much medium/big business is no longer just talking about the cloud but has now started buying cloud and moving their data into it? And if so - how well positioned is Buddy to ride this wave and in particular position itself for IoT? ie = how much of a point-of-difference can you offer?
Answer:
I think the truth is that the shift to cloud is very well underway – and actually has been for a couple of years now. Whether you’re talking about managed cloud products (Salesforce.com, Rackspace, etc…) or hosted developer environments (Heroku, AWS, Azure) - the maturity of these products has long since been established and the move for some of the more advanced organizations was some time ago.
I think the difference between suppliers of hosted infrastructure such as those examples above, and what Buddy is doing, is the nature of the data flow that we work with. Remember that until very recently, “internet data” was websites, emails, binary files flying back and forth, video streamed content, etc… The advent of connected devices in the form of everyday appliances (thermostats, door locks, light bulbs, vehicles, etc…) has meant that there’s a whole new class of data flying around the tubes that existing systems aren’t set up to accommodate. Now, to be fair, in many cases we’re not talking about new protocols (but in some cases we are) - a lot of the standards upon which the web is built apply beautifully to IoT devices. What we’re talking about is an oncoming avalanche of data that is being generated on a scale we haven’t seen before. If 30% of the 7pm-9pm Internet traffic in the US today is Netflix, what percentage will be IoT data when every light bulb, smoke alarm, thermostat, television, white good or kitchen appliance is connected and pushing telemetry up to the cloud? Of course nobody really knows, other than to acknowledge that we’re talking about a simply massive volume and velocity of data.
So… how is Buddy positioned? Well, we’re obviously very pleased with what we’ve built and believe we have a prominent role to play. Exactly how prominent we’ll leave to investors to decide once we’re able to share more data on the business. But what I would leave you with is that in order to compete in this space, there are two problem axes that solutions need to address – the volume of IoT data, yes, but also the velocity. Building a system that can accommodate not just large volumes of data, but large velocities of data is key to success in this space, and that’s what we’ve built at Buddy.
I encourage you to take a look at the Buddy Investor Presentation that we released to the ASX recently. Details beyond that will be released in due course, but I’m afraid I’m unable to share any more details than this for the time being. I really appreciate your interest in the company, and thank you for your positions in POK. I’m looking forward to being a lot more communicative with the market, of course once the baton is passed. In the meantime I need to respect the process and my (limited public-facing) role in it.
Best wishes, Dave.
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