SIOS & Cloud Computing

A Japanese IT Firm Moving To Silicon Valley

After engaging Nobu Kita and team last August 09′, I’ve decided to join the company and help the team shape their future in Cloud. When I was asked to assess whether SIOS could participate in Cloud and be successful in building a large enterprise cloud business, I first took a look at the assets of the company both in Japan as well as in the US and then in the rest of the world (ROW).

SIOS USA

The US presence began with the acquisition of a startup in the High Availability and Disaster and Recovery market, SteelEye Technologies Inc. Looking at SteelEye, the core team resides in Lexington North Carolina. The team’s roots can be tracked as far back as AT&T Bell Labs.

Their main products operating in the application protection (HA) and data replication (DR) spaces for both Linux and Windows (LifeKeeper and DataKeeper respectively). Products are broken down by the following matrix:

SIOS Japan

SIOS was founded May 23, 1997 and established its business partnership with Red Hat in 2003. That led to it’s move into the public market with an IPO in 2004 with major shareholders including Otsuka Corporation, Nissho Electronics Corp, Fujitsu, NEC, and Hewlett-Packard Japan.

After becoming the No. 1 reseller of Red Hat and No. 1 in providing enterprise Linux solutions in Japan in 2005, it began to expand globally. It acquired SteelEye in 2006 to expand into data center application and data protection. The company acquired Gluegent in 2008 to expand into data center web application development. In 2009 it opened offices in Beijing, China.

SIOS Globally

In addition to its headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, it has offices in the China, the UK, Lexington South Carolina, and San Mateo (Silicon Valley).

SIOS Cloud Initatives

The following represents the SIOS cloud initiatives by cloud category and company geography:

SIOS Cloud Computing – SaaS

SIOS entered into Cloud with it’s investment in Google Apps in 2007 in Japan. Today the company supports over 450K end-users across 140+ enterprises and 28+ universities.

SIOS Cloud Computing – PaaS & IaaS

As part of a strategic initiative, SIOS has committed to investing into a new US operation in Cloud to address opportunities in enterprise data center automation – private Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service. This will take the form of a new US business unit.

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Jim Kaskade

Jim Kaskade is a serial entrepreneur & enterprise software executive of over 36 years. He is the CEO of Conversica, a leader in Augmented Workforce solutions that help clients attract, acquire, and grow end-customers. He most recently successfully exited a PE-backed SaaS company, Janrain, in the digital identity security space. Prior to identity, he led a digital application business of over 7,000 people ($1B). Prior to that he led a big data & analytics business of over 1,000 ($250M). He was the CEO of a Big Data Cloud company ($50M); was an EIR at PARC (the Bell Labs of Silicon Valley) which resulted in a spinout of an AML AI company; led two separate private cloud software startups; founded of one of the most advanced digital video SaaS companies delivering online and wireless solutions to over 10,000 enterprises; and was involved with three semiconductor startups (two of which he founded, one of which he sold). He started his career engineering massively parallel processing datacenter applications. Jim has an Electrical and Computer Science Engineering degree from University of California, Santa Barbara, with an emphasis in semiconductor design and computer science; and an MBA from the University of San Diego with an emphasis in entrepreneurship and finance.

Jim Kaskade