Bigstep, a bare metal cloud provider, recently announced the appointment of John Martis as President. With experience working in the hosting industry since its inception, John is poised to help navigate the next transformation the market will see.
Martis previously served as President and CEO of Hostway Corporation and then Codero Hosting before making the move to Bigstep Metal Cloud. He has spent most of his career at the forefront of the transformations in the hosting industry and has helped companies stay ahead of the curve by adopting these new technologies at the right time.
Over the course of his career John has witnessed the expansion of bare metal clouds market; so to talk to someone who has seen the evolution of the industry go from a difficult setup to now the mainstream market was really insightful.
M.R. Rangaswami: In your experience, what do you think is driving this latest interest in the solutions provided by bare metal clouds?
John: Public cloud adoption is the primary driver for the bare metal cloud industry. Businesses enjoy the flexibility and rapid deployment capabilities of the cloud but are often turned off by the high costs and unpredictable performance often associated with shared platforms (public clouds). Bare metal clouds combine the flexibility of the public cloud with single-tenant bare metal servers to ensure predictable costs and much-improved performance.
M.R.: In the mid-market, especially with SMBs and SMEs, how do bare metal clouds help achieve business results with machine learning and big data analytics?
John: Machine learning and data analytics can require lots of processing power and storage. Bare metal cloud is an ideal platform for those workloads given its raw computing power coupled with predictable pricing which is something that all SMB’s and SME’s can appreciate.
M.R.: What are some of the biggest challenges you’re looking to solve for customers in the next year?
John: This company was built for running big data workloads for tech enthusiasts. But what they found was there was a demand to use the bare metal cloud for general purpose cloud infrastructure. So, while bare metal clouds are still a relatively new segment in the market, I believe Bigstep is extremely well-positioned to capture market share.
From where I sit, the biggest opportunities revolve around hybrid solutions (combinations of public cloud and bare metal cloud) that match the proper resources to the proper workload. So, we’ll be working to solve one of the biggest challenges for any dedicated server customer…hardware upgrades. With the Bigstep bare metal cloud, server hardware can be upgraded on the fly to add more RAM or more powerful processors. This is a total game-changer and I’m really excited to see how this technology helps our customers in their business functions.