March 12, 2007
BlueArc Corporation
James Reaney
Director, Research Markets
How has your company adapted and responded to the changing economic climate in the past five years when so many others companies did not?
BlueArc has adapted and responded primarily by staying ahead of the game, by continually improving our products to be faster, to be more scalable, to be even more capable. Essentially we are allowing our customers to do more with less, or serve more and more with the same infrastructure and investment. If there is a word to define this continuous improvement philosophy, it is this: BlueArc is future-proof.
What is your vision for the future of the life sciences market over the next several years?
The avalanche continues. The application of IT solutions to life sciences problems will enable more and more data to be generated at an ever-increasing pace. The life sciences, considered as an entire discipline as a whole, is really still in its infancy compared to, say, some of the physical sciences. The next several years will bring data challenges a few orders of magnitude larger than what we have already experienced in those other disciplines. Staying ahead of that avalanche will continue to be a tremendous challenge.
What products and services does your company provide and what special capabilities do they offer the life sciences market?
BlueArc is a storage company; specifically high-performance network-attached storage. The products and services we offer are not specifically targeted to the life sciences in the way that many products are. Our customers tend to be ones that place great value in the acceleration of their research, and in being able to adroitly handle the huge quantities of data that research often generates. The life sciences have been, and will continue to be, a key market for BlueArc because of the value we bring to these researchers.
Partnerships are an effective way to track life science advances and ensure that your company delivers timely products and services. Which life sciences companies or organizations have you partnered with or invested in and why?
BlueArc partners with our large pharmaceutical and biotech customers, and to a large extent our academic life sciences research customers. Customers have always driven our roadmap; their feedback is critical for future product development. The life sciences have always been a key partner for moving the pace of product development along. They are often demanding customers, but in a good way.
What are your most exciting products and initiatives in development, and how will they improve life science research?
In the short term, it’s 10-Gigabit Ethernet. This technology will be a game-changer in the network-attached storage business. Whereas other NAS companies will continue to offer storage solutions bottlenecked at the I/O bus, BlueArc's solutions will take full advantage of customer's 10-Gigabit Ethernet deployments. We offer not just 10-Gigabit connectivity, but we unleash the full power of this architecture for storage deployments.
Longer term, its clustered storage solutions. Other companies certainly play in this arena already. Some of them must cling to clustered storage solutions because they have no other way to offer performance or scalability. Contrary to some claims, BlueArc is not a monolithic storage company — we offer clustered solutions today and have for some time. The difference is BlueArc's solutions require fewer parts to cluster, because each part is so much more capable. When we offer large-scale clustered storage solutions we fully intend to dwarf the capabilities of anything in the industry.
Where do you see your company in five years?
The unquestioned leader in the storage industry. Today we are known for our high-performance storage solutions. Tomorrow we will be known for our extremely scalable storage solutions as well. When other companies are still speaking of petabytes, we will be offering exabyte-level solutions. BlueArc will offer our customers storage solutions that continue the tradition of being future-proof. Very comforting if you are a life sciences researcher or company contemplating huge growth for the data that comprises your research.