From Uber to Exaba: AJ Tills takes on Big Tech storage

WEBVTT - From Uber to Exaba: AJ Tills takes on Big Tech storage I'm Peter Griffin for Business Desk and today on the Business of Tech. We're getting to grips with one of the biggest shifts happening in enterprise. It the move away from putting absolutely everything into big public cloud platforms. My guest is AJ Tills, a seasoned growth marketer who cut his teeth helping Uber expand in its hypergrowth Travis Kalinak era before senior roles at Crimson Education and the world's largest wedding marketplace.

AJ is now leading the customer drive at Exebra, a Hamilton based startup that wants to bring data back home by giving enterprises a cheaper, more sovereign alternative to the hyperscalers for storing and backing up their data. Exebra has just closed an almost twelve million dollar seed round, one of the largest in New Zealand, to deepen its presence here and in Australia and take on the massive US market. In our chat, AJ explains how Exiber's software turns manage service providers into what he calls local scalers, letting them stand up their own storage infrastructure on commodity hardware instead of shipping everything off to aws, Azure or Google Cloud.

He talks about why they believe they can be up to ten times cheaper than the hyperscalers on storage, and why predictable pricing and avoiding nasty egress fees I suddenly front of mind for chief information officers and managed service partners alike. We also get into the growing importance of data sovereignty and residency, with organizations wanting sensitive health and financial data kept on locally hosted infrastructure and out from under the reach of the US Cloud Act. Ajoutlines how Exebra is building for that world, from doble backups and the three to one rule of data protection through to native post quantum encryption designed to withstand a future where attackers can harvest now decrypt later using powerful quantum computers.

And because this is the business of tech, we spend time on the growth story how AJ is applying lessons learned from launching Uber in new markets, building a virtual high school at Crimson, and scaling a multi country marketplace to win over managed service providers in the US. If you're thinking about cloud strategy, AI workloads, cybersecurity risk, or the future business models off MSPs, this is a conversation that will give you a lot to think about. Here's my conversation with Aj Tills.

Aj. Welcome to the Business of Tech. How are you doing very well? Thank you, appreciate you having me on, Peter and looking forward to the discussion.

Yeah, lots to talk about Exeber, your company you're with. Explain first of all, the name where does that come from? Exiber comes from the exhibite. So as data progresses, different terms become all different definitions become more relevant.

There is terabytes, which is when you're talking about. Data storage, is what you might be aware of now the terabyte, a thousand terabytes is a petabyte, which is a sizable amount of data, but a thousand petabytes is an exobyite. So we've named Exebra to be really where the world of data is sailing. Wow.

And yeah, that's really an indication often era of artificial intelligence, for instance, where you're generating a lot of data but also searching through and analyzing a lot of data. That's the scale that we're working with now and hence some of the major investments in data center capacity, and we're going to talk about all of that. You've got a really interesting history I want to get into. You sort of liked the growth marketing guru I guess for tech companies and started out as the first employee of a New Zealand employee of Uber.

That must have been a fascinating time because they were definitely in serious growth mode. This was the Travis Kalanic era where it was gopher broke. Let's get this as far and wide into every city in the world. I mean, you know, if I reverse engineering my career, it's really been about normalizing disruptive technologies to make them more understood and to drive that mass adoption.

And ubert was really certainly the first protocol for that journey. I joined in twenty fourteen and there was you know, we'd boots on the ground in Australia and they were setting up in New Zealand. It really was a disruptive technology at that period of time. I don't know if people fully remember, but uber x, which is the pet of peer service, was largely unregulated.

Many parts of the world termed illegal and so. When we first launched that here, we really had a bit of a fight on our hands, not just with government or taxi but really to make the promise of Uber really understood to riders, drivers and the city. So when we talk about driving that growth. It was really that sort of three sided conversation that needed to happen.

For Uber to succeed. You reference Travis. You know, I was very fortunate enough to see really some of the positive things he was able to achieve with an Uber, And whenever anyone asks, I would say that there would be no Uber today as it is without Travis and how he was. You know, when many cities, governments, regulators are saying this is a legal stop, to have such steadfast belief that this was going to be good for riders, good for drivers, good for cities, and to still push on with that belief, you know, with something that permeated through the entire company, and I think really it's a testament to Whereber is today around his leadership, specifically on that fact.

Well, it's proven to have been a successful model. There was a lot of doubters along the way, the amount of money that Uber was spending even after it listed. You know, it took a while to be profitable, but now it's just the default name for hailing a ride and getting around town, and there's been a lot of innovation there. You know, Jump was one of those I think you were involved in at one point.

You know, this was eastcoters and bikes and that sort of stuff was bundled into Uber. That didn't last that long though, did it. So what was the reason for that? It seemed like such an obvious thing to do to bundle all of this in alongside hailing a car.

Yeah, that's a really exciting journey. I haven't really talked about this really part of my career too much. You know. I went from New Zealand through marketing in Australia, helping to drive regulations and really make Uber regulated in Australia as well as New Zealand eventually, and then I was really looking for the next step with and Uber.

Just acquired a company called Jump. Jump was originally just bikes, but it was the first of the micromobility vertical that Uber wanted to bring in as part of its platform approach, so to give people more options to travel around around that city. It was a really interesting transition because you know that really that company when we acquired them, had really only a thousand bikes on the road and it was only in a couple of cities, and it was really set up to be the Uber killer, right it's how do we get less people in cars and more people out on bikes and eventually scooters.

And so we really had to when it was brought into Uber, transition that business to being a really high growth global company. And so we set out to launch one hundred cities and one hundred days. That meant producing thousands and thousands of bikes, importing thousands, thousands of bikes, and you know, it was a very successful and exciting part of the company. I should have mentioned I came in as one of the first hires to come across Ober and lead that growth strategy.

And when you go from you know, having a thousand bikes on the road to then importing a thousand bikes a week and launching one hundred cities, you know, you really begin to see how challenging managing and operating your own hardware can be. And I think you know that wasn't necessarily Uber's sweet spot. The unit economics were incredibly challenging, thinking about how do you make sure that bikes are in the right place at the right time across cities, how do you manage battery swaps and storage and all those sort of things.

And so eventually the decision was made. To to to really work with a line to acquire that part of the business and just to double down on the call business, which was the right's part of the business. And at that point in time I moved back and effectively took up a chief of staff type role within the rides business. Yeah, and still I see them all out over the streets, you know, sometime in the small hours of the morning and van you know, picking up scooters and replacing batteries.

So it sort of a labor intensive business, but it sort of has settled down into two or three players in most of those cities. But you sort of you followed that up very different proposition. Crimson Education, great New Zealand company, a unicorn, another very dynamic leader there in Jamie Beaton. What was that transition like, going from very much consumer oriented business, high volume to selling high quality educational services to a subset of people, people looking for Ivy League universities the best places in the world to get tertiary education.

It was a bit of a shift, I mean to put it in context. I was based in New York at the end of my time at Uber and COVID had really hit and I was managing a bit of a team over there. We had some large projects, but really the decision was made by the team in New York to disbanding back to your home home cities, and for me, that's New Zealand, so on the other side of the world. I found myself and then really started to do some soul searching.

You know, I'd been at Uber for close to seven years. It's in the company go from you know, I was one of the first thousand people hired into Uber globally, and it was then roughly forty thousand people, and so the company just undergoes massive change, and I found myself sitting there saying, you know, the next twelve months is going to look very different, you know, very different to the last twelve and I don't necessarily think my learning journey was going to be where I wanted.

And fratuitously I started a conversation with Jamie Beaton, still within the early days of COVID, and you know, he had this idea to really start a virtual high school. So the typical Crimson model is you work closely with ambitious young students. From a very early age. You surround them really talented and bright people and you support them on their journey to getting admission to the world's top universities.

Now, the coming into cod the gap that was the high school. So how were we going to how is Crimson really going to support some of their brightest young students during this period where high schooling and education was going to be a critical gap. And so we actually met during lockdown and the Pianel Rose Gardens and went for a walk and really spent the closest sort of four or five hours working. Through what this could look like.

And the output of it was that I joined Crimson as CMO and one of the first hires within their Crimson Global Academy. And really it was a instill is to this day a small virtual high school where you connect students from all around the world with teachers in a really curated, small class. And you know, one of some of the world's best teachers. And you know, we started that for the Crimson students, but very quickly found that there were these subsets of students that it really benefited.

One of those was obviously your really ambitious students that want to go fast and deep with their education. Two was rural students who may not have access to amazing teachers close by or may not have access to some of the subjects that they want to study, and so they started to come on. And then what was really. Empowering was there was a subset that were potentially socially anxious, might have been bullied at school, and for them, joining a virtual high school, either full time or part time after school was a way for them to be able to study and to give their all and to quote one student, to give all without having to walk down the hallway after class.

And so you know, we found that building that virtual high school that really unlocked a lot of purpose and a lot of impact amongst students. So again another disruptive technology that we were trying to normalize, and I think to some extent it's been largely normalized and adopted today. What would be some of the key things too, very different businesses, but very high growth businesses in terms of marketing, and this is especially when you take venture capital funding. You've got that sort of runway, you're burning money, you're trying to get to revenue growth as soon as possible.

What are some of the key things you've learned about what makes for really effective growth marketing? And these sorts of businesses. So you know, humbly appreciating that you don't know anything about this business, and what about what is going to drive growth within that business? And what I mean by.

That is there's a very different series of obviously channels, of messages. Of proof points that are required. When you look at any technology and how that's going to be adopted and trusted. And so when you go into a particularly an early stage company that doesn't have a strong brand, it isn't salient or isn't known for being in that category, you need to literally just test everything that's not just channels, that's messages, that's conversion points, and really build confidence and conveection in what is really the perfect fun And so it is really an execution focused role at the very start, just testing, iterating and optimizing.

And it wasn't like with Uber. I mean, it wasn't one particular campaign or thing that suddenly I think had breakthrough the concept of it was brilliant, not having to mess around with payments, getting out of a cab, all that sort of thing, but the work that had to go in to live up to that promise and then for people to catch on. And I think if anything. It was probably people talking to each other.

I just got an Uber. What's that? It's a thing that you know, It's so much cheaper and user friendly than getting a taxi. It would have been interesting back in twenty fourteen twenty fifteen seeing that network effect grow as people got into an Uber and cities around the world told their friends about.

It so exactly right, so side of marketplace right. So you couldn't just grow the writer base, ye had to also grow the driver base. So the first year I talk about quite finally, I'd spend two or three hours in the morning before actually getting to the office catching taxis, trying to convince the taxi drivers to join Uber and talk about them to some of the benefits. And then really a lot of the evenings were just spent going the bars and restaurants and giving up promo codes and testing different referral mechanisms in order to get people trying it, in order to get people talking about it.

And one of the things that we learned quite quickly. Was there was a bit of a use cased waterfall whereby people would be out for a night out. It might be Thursday, might be Friday, it might be Saturday, and one of their friends would say, hey, I took an Uber to get here, and you can get a free year be home with a free twenty dollars ride. That means that I also get one, and.

So that would be that first the genesis of their first trip would be that referral code and they would get a free right home. They'd probably forget about the app. They wouldn't use it again. Maybe Wednesday, Tuesday.

The next week, they'd be going to catch the train. It might be raining, and they thought, well, actually, yeah, you know, it's cheaper than a taxi. My training journey is not going to be that exciting. It's it's raining.

Why don't I try that Uber up again? And typically the two of three of those different use cases stacked up that would eventually create a bit of you know, loyalty, stickiness with the product, but again a really really exciting journey to be a part of it. Yeah, and then you've done another couple of businesses. Not what wedding services.

It's actually the world's largest wedding marketplace. So I finished up my time at Crimson, was really excited and happy with where we got to. Our stayed on the advisory board still really close with Jammy at this day. But you know, at that period of time, I'd done you know, really three and a half years back in New Zealand during COVID, and I've always been a global soul, to be dramatic.

And the ex head of marketing at Uber when I was there had recently joined this company called the not as CMO. It was owned by a private equity company, and that private equity company had since acquired thirteen different businesses in the UK, across Europe, Latin America and India, and they'd all been operating independently. And the business itself was a wedding marketplace. So if you're a couple and you get engaged and you say I want to get married in a vineyard in Tuscany, then you go on the platform.

You're able to search a vinyard in Tuscany for two hundred people at this price point to the whole bunch of reviews and photos, and then once you book that, then you can go through and go all right, I need a caterer, I need a videographer, I need a makeup artist. All of those sort of things stacked onto that original purchase decision just to make the journey of planning a lot more enjoyable and stress free. And so my role there was leading international marketing, international growth for that business.

We had again, thirteen different brands, we're in thirteen different countries, five different languages, a very large, large team, large footprint. So just a very different area from where I've been in the startup world. Tremendous learning journey, and after four years and living in Barcelona, it was time to come home to us. Yeah, it's incredible the diversity of organizations you've been involved with.

You clearly you know up for trying different types of industries. I guess for you, really the attraction is that how do you market something and grow something really quickly, get traction with the loyal customer base of raving fans. Growth is all about connecting product to people, whatever that product is and whoever the right people are, and then it's about solving for that. And so in every situation it's almost more enjoyable to come in and say, again, I do not know what is the right thing to do in order to make this connect with the people, but we're going to experiment, We're going to test, and you know that is where I.

Get really really excited. You know, I'll use my career at UB as an example. You know, we spent really three years at in the early days figure out exactly what worked. Every step was building going from zero to one.

Let's test this, let's review it in a throw it out of scale it up. When you get to the point where you. Have a pretty defined calendar of activity each year, where you have a really defined set of channels, then you're no longer building, You're just optimizing. And for me, that's where it gets slightly less interesting.

And so going into these new technologies and understanding, all right, what are the things that I need to build in order to start that growth curve is where I get it really excited. Which brings us to exhib give us the origin story of the company, which we should point out is just raised what twelve million dollars in seed funding, one of the biggest seed raises in New Zealand so far. That's exactly right. So earlier this year we completed our ced funding round.

It was eleven point eight million and the original target was eight million, So we were very very happy with the result there. That's going to fund our go to market, our deepening of the relationships that we have in New Zealand, but also the expansion to the US, which is just a really really exciting market for Exebra. And so yeah, the journey is just beginning. But I don't think I've come across a company really since that has had the growth potential that this company does.

So give us the pitch. We've heard so much about data centers and it's all about artificial intelligence and in funtil building the biggest CDC data center in Australia, all this sort of stuff. Slightly different approach that you guys are taking a different area you're playing in. That's right.

So Exebra is a data storage layer specifically designed for enterprises to be able to protect more data, to be able to store it locally, which is really important in something to discuss, and then also really as part of that, to harness the full potential of their data as we look at technologies like AI and everything that's to come there. And we do that specifically by working with managed service providers, which are the IT companies of the world that are responsible for managing and owning many of those companies data.

So roughly sixty to ninety percent of enterprises companies today depending on their size, will work with an IT company or a managed service provider really. To look after their data. So where exhibits. Sets is empowering and incentivizing those MSPs to bring back control over their customers data by setting up their own infrastructure and their own hardware on site.

So we've got the so called hyperscalers, the Google clouds, the Azure from Microsoft Aws. Are we talking about the underneath them? The likes of the Data Comms and Spark in New Zealand that have their own data centers and have a lot of infrastructure in there are working with the hps and the vm WREA is to store a lot of data for New Zealand organizations. Is that the layer that you're working at.

Yeah, So it's really an alternative to the hyperscale. So for the last twenty years, the motus operandi has been to just really pass that data across to the clouds, store it there, and really you know, that was done because it was easy, it was scalable, and at the very start it was likely quite cost effective. But over time more and more enterprises have found that that's not really been fit for purpose. It's an incredibly high cost depending on what you're trying to do with the data.

It is all over the world, and so it's. Not local, it's not sovereign, and so really depending on the layer of storage that you're looking at, it has not been for purpose. And so you know, we're seeing this move back to on prem. Many of the world's largest companies in reference the hyperscalers, but other large technology companies as well, are investing huge amounts in setting up their own data centers.

But that's not specifically achievable for most companies out there. They do not have the capital to be able to stand up their own data center. And that's what we're aiming to do with our local scale up products. So hyperscale Up Local Scaler is to turn MSPs into their own local scaler to be able to democratize access back to on prem for the world's world's enterprises.

So I guess you know, the big pitch from the likes of Microsoft is come onto our platform, get instant access to all these fancy AI tools like an Amazon's case Bedrock, all in a managed location. You can access clawed and open AI all of these tools in one place. You don't have to plug in directly. You can have that access in the same place for all your data as hell, so when you're talking about a local scale or using all of that infrastructure that might be sitting in the same city as you, in the same country, can you still access all those high quality AI sort of inference tools.

Yeah, So we of bifurcate that the two components of that. One is obviously the compute, as you recognize, but the second one is really the foundation, which is data storage. And so that's where we sit. And data storage is about being obviously secure but also increasingly local.

And then you know, we do that at a price point. So Exebert is really up to ten times cheaper than the hyperscalers, and that means that companies are able to store and back up more of their data, they're able to keep it close. And then when you are looking to take advantage and leverage technologies. Like AI, proximity is really important.

So being able to run that compute right next to that storage layer. And so that's really the layer that we are playing at the moment. There's no. You know, I won't say that we won't move up towards that layer.

Our co founders have been in the high performance compute space before and so X was designed. To be high performance. But where we play really is about empowering enterprises to back up more of their data and then to to store it locally. And you talked about that sort of data sovereignty, and it certainly seems like there is a movement, particularly in the European Union, but also I'm hearing from New Zealand organizations.

Anyone who has any sensitive data, health data, financial stuff, they're less comfortable these days about that going to Sydney or setting off shore. So you're seeing that being part of the driver of interest in what you're offering when it comes to storage. They want their data sitting on locally hosted and owned infrastructure. That's exactly right.

I mean, I'd be remiss to say that our first hypothesis and going to market was that cost and the price point that we come at was going to be the most exciting piece. To be able to remove that premium so that companies were able to store more of the data was going to be exciting. But then increasingly this sovereignty and where your data is stored, where it's kept, has just become such a large trend and increasing trend, particularly as you think about the geopolitical situations around the world, and so when we talk about data sovereignty, it's a bit of a misnomerus Sometimes I think there is data residency, which is the location of your data, and you see many of the hyperscalars setting up data centers around the world.

That's not specifically sovereignty. That is data residency. When you talk about sovereignty, that is really the jurisdiction where your data is under and if it is with a hyperscal us companies, they are still under the jurisdiction the overreach of the US government, specifically that the US Cloud Act. So if anything we're required there, then it is exposed.

And then also the final thing that I would say is when we talk to enterprises, the way that they also think about sovereignty is not just their clients wanting to know where their data is, but it's about being able to protect their proprietary data. So we are now in a world where companies data is going to be their product, meaning the relationships they've had, the processes they've built, all of the insights that built sits in that data. Companies need to store that, protect that and make sure that that is going to be part of their competitive mode going forward.

If it is sitting in a hyperscalar, I would be surprised if it hasn't happened already. But that data is exposed to being trained on those global models, and so that you are risk of really losing your competitive advantage in that space. So again, when we talk about sovereignty, it's having a local but it's also ring fencing a. Company's propriety data.

So it is going to be available to them to be able to build a continued mot on in the future. So that's really important. The other thing around cost is the trap with the hyperscalers. You know, it's free to import all your data into the cloud.

It's that exfiltration. If you want to shift that somewhere else to you might you might have a manufacturing plant and you want to have some edge AI capability robotics there right on the factory floor. If you want to download terabytes of data that you pay I watering amount for that. Is that something that you avoid with with your solution.

Yeah, I mean, great question. That's certainly on the tip of people's tongues at the moment. So we recently ran a survey in the US, which was two hundred and twenty leaders c suit executives at managed service providers in the US and the largest pain points. So sixty three percent of respondent said that hidden fees and unpredictable building was the single biggest frustration in the industry.

And we see that when it comes to the egress of fees. So you know, it might be cost effective or seem affordable to put your data in the ingress, but oftentimes if you need to restore, you know, you're really your backs up against the wall if you need to restore, there's no other option. That is where it can get very very expensive to get your data out exit. A charge is purely based on a pay as you use profile, and so what that means is you're only paying for the amount of data that you're storing.

It's not full capacity. And so we see that just being a very friendly and more importantly predictable model for our customers. To build on. So what exactly are you are you building yourselves?

Are you sort of like an orchestration layer over these managed service providers and their infrastructure, and are they the path to market? Are these MSPs that own the actual ten are they are they selling exeber as a layer over that. So with the software storage layer and what that means. I'll take a moment here really to recognize that the team, because it's been a huge engineering feet So Peter Boyle our CEO, and doctor Stuart Ingles our CTO have been in storage for well over a decade and really they saw in talking with managed service providers and enterprises, this need to be able to fill a more affordable storage space in the market, and so we've built exeber to be that really affordable price point in the market to empower MSPs to stand up their own hardware and then install Exeber on it so that they can support their clients with that solution.

We are one hundred percent hardware agnostic, so whether it's a Dell, Hpe, Lenovo SNC, you can run extopra on that and really from day one you can be supporting your clients and building a strong storage storage business. So you're based in Hamilton, it's New Zealand. Did the seed capital mainly come from New Zealand? Yeah, So we were incredibly appreciative and fortunate that many of our investors within the seed round have been invested with us for a period of time.

I'm sure what Mindy saying, but you know, Guy. Hamilton has been one of our biggest supporters since day one. It's just a phenomenal advantage to have someone like Guy associated with a business. He's not just an investor, he is really a true operational and strategic partner.

And you know he was a big supporter during this round and is continually on. And you know, we are based in Waikato. We have a really close relationship with the University of Waikato. It's where Peter Boyle and doctor student Gills actually our alumni, and many of our engineering team our alumni from from there as well.

But really it is Whykatta to the world, and so this funding. Round is to take us deeper in New Zealand, to Australia and then also to the US, where we just see huge opportunities. Yeah, obviously that's the biggest market and I think a lot of interest there in alternatives to just putting everything in public cloud platforms. So what's the strategy is the growth marketing guru and a lot of experience in this place a different type of industry, But what's the way to get this on the radar of as many managed service providers as possible across the US.

Well, we've had a really fast paced start to the year. We are sort of soft launched in the US. A couple of months ago we did the keynote at the MSP Summit and then more recently we attended at an event in Australia. I think, you know, one of the things that I really appreciate is just how deep the community is within this industry, you know, especially in places like New Zealand, where you know there is that two degrees of separation, and so for us, it's about really being a partner to manage service providers.

I will not hear that. You know, code development has been really critical to our whole development journey. For the past two years. We've really had five New Zealand based MSPs that we've worked alongside with really really closely to build a product that's fit for purpose, and.

So that's going to continue as we as we go to market. Part of being in the US recently was to start to build some of those local relationships and it was incredibly validating to hear many of the same concerns that we've seen and felt in New Zealand to be echoed in the US sometimes even further. You know, I talked to the sovereignty piece, but the cost piece in particular, and so you know, we will be building relationships with those MSPs. I also think that there is a real need to when you talk about partnership, I think that word often gets misused, but it's really about deeply understanding the economics of a business like an MSP and seeing exactly how you can be built to support them building a business into the future.

There are huge risks within that industry. Everyone's talking about AI, and you know, when we surveyed these MSPs, forty percent said that the implementation of AI was going to be their highest revenue growth driver, but thirty seven percent said that it was the biggest threat to their margins. So these MSPs have this sort of short term trend of being able to implement AI and agentica AI at their clients, but it is a huge risk in terms of margins. There's not that service layer on top of it.

And then you know, in addition to that, the age old model of growing seats with within these companies is just not going to be sustained, particularly with the implementation of AI. Those two things really cancel themselves out, and. So one of the things that we hope to do is to really work with the MSPs to be able to future proof their business model, and part of that is to take back margin over their storage line. On where do you see all of this going the cloud market sort of in the next five years.

You've got obviously a huge buildout in data seen it is mainly around compute capacity. AI factories are calling them now. I think Metas building one in Louisiana somewhere, which is the size of Manhattan, So you've got that going on. Obviously, you need storage close to those sorts of facilities, so this huge demand there, cost is an issue getting buying GPUs and even memory and storage, the cost of that is escalating.

Then you've got things coming along quantum as well, where so those services will be access via the cloud. You'll have quantum computers that are highly engineered, cryogenically controlled devices, but it's all about getting the data to those computers and from them. So what's your sort of take on where this industry is going to go, and particularly that's the storage industry that you're particularly interested in. Yeah, there's a lot there, and I'll try to connect the dots.

So I think. In simple terms, there is a massive move back to on prem. That is because you can control your cost, you can store more data, it's more local, it's sovereign. And then also when you're running AI models, it.

Needs to be approximate, and so that location is really really important. We're seeing in the US that you know, almost forty percent of data center projects are being canceled. You know, that is an issue that's going to constrain the industry going forward, and so part of what we are trying to achieve is really that incentivization of managed service providers to be able to bring their clients back on prem by hosting their own infrastructure. To the point around hardware and just how difficult it is to acquire some of these GPUs and CPUs, we again run on standard commodity hardware, and so we can really accelerate those timelines to be able to start companies deepening their their their their data storage.

I'm glad you mentioned quantum well, the security risks of quantum computing, you know, that's something that you know, I think we've been really fortunate enough to get well ahead of most other storage providers are trying to bolt on post quantum security security, but you know, Excerpert has really built native immutability and you know native post quantum encryption, and what that means is, you know, quantum computing is really living on the harvest now, decrypt later philosophy or you know process, whereas what we're really set up to do is to have that native immutability so that once data is written, it can't be deleted or changed.

And so that's really where we're set up to unlock that security for our customers in the future. So it's a big market opportunity. As you say, there is that movement back to on premises as they call it. I think most businesses will be sort of a hybrid sort of situation for the foreseeable future.

I mean, if you're running Microsoft three sixty five, the best way, the only way really to do that is from the cloud. So you'll pay for Salesforce and Service now and SAP that'll be one cloud, but actually for a lot of your data storage and if you're feeding AI systems, why not have that in a co located facility in New Zealand or even on your own premise. Is if you want to do that as well. The cost equation of that, as you demonstrated, is going to be so much better.

I think that's exactly right. It's about finding the solution that's really fit for purpose and. So for your day to day, your operational data. Yeah, the hyperscalars that may be the best option for you in the in the their term.

When you think about backup, there's a couple of things here that the golden rule for backup is three different copies in two different locations, one of which is immutable. And really, if CTOs are asking their MSPs or CEOs are asking their CTOs, that's the first question to ask is what is our backup strategy? Are we following the golden rule? Are we really secure here?

And you know where where Excerperts is really set up to players is to really unlock that capability in that really to make that a lot more achievable in the short term form. So I think where the future is going is, you know, companies may still be using the cloud for their day to day, but it's about finding a backup solution that allows them to store more data at a more cost effective price point so that they're able to actually store more of their data. To use that in the future.

For AI, in sort of recent estimates, you know, we found that companies may only be storing up to ten percent of their actual actual data, so they're not storing that proprietary data that may be so valuable for them in the future. Well yeah, and I think a number of companies have been caught out, particularly when they've had cybersecurity breaches and they might have a ransomware attack and the hackers are saying, you know, we've got all your data, We're going to leak it onto the web, and that's fine.

You have a dilemma do you pay a ransom or not? But your primary consideration is can I get my business back operating, and do I need that data to do it. So if you take that out of the equation, because you've got a mutable data, you know and can trust that is somewhere else, maybe in three different locations, because it's been cost effective to do that, it's going to be a massive disincentive to actually pay a ransomware hacker, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars exactly right.

I think you know, recent data showed forty one percent of companies had experienced a ransomware attack and ninety one percent of those attacks targeted back up and so your backup is really at risk, you know, alongside the immutability, a whole platform has been built from the ground up in Rust which eliminates all of the memory related vulnerabilities and just really so from day one you have that protection, you have that peace of mind. Well that's exciting stuff. Another journey for you in a different sort of industry.

So good luck with that and we'll keep an eye on where things go. And thanks so much for coming on the Business of Tech. Peter, It's been fantastic. Thank you so much for your time.

That's it for this episode if the Business of Tech. Many thanks to Ajtills from Exebra for a fascinating look at how data storage, sovereignty and costs are reshaping cloud strategy and for sharing the lessons he's bringing from Uber, Crimson Not and other companies. I think Exebra are really onto something. I interview a lot of chief information officers at New Zealand companies and a lot of them are concerned about the costs associated with moving to public cloud platforms.

Often they will get there hoping to consolidate everything on one platform, and then they find out, wow, this is more expensive than I had budgeted for moving from capital expenditure to operating expenditure. So there is definitely pushback against that, and a lot of New Zealand companies are now pursuing what's called a hybrid cloud strategy, where they put some of their workloads into public cloud platforms, but keep a lot of their data and applications either on their own infrastructure, on prem infrastructure they call it, or in private cloud facilities co locating with New Zealand located and owned managed service providers.

So that's definitely a trend that Exeba I think are under money and tapping into. If you enjoyed this discussion, follow or subscribe to the Business of Tech in your favorite podcast app and share this episode with a colleague who's wrestling with cloud bills or data sovereignty headaches. I'm Peter Griffin, Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next week where we're talking quantum computing and one hundred and sixty AI powered ideas that could really transform New Zealand's public sector.