CTERA Data Intelligence: From File Systems to AI Readiness

[00:00:03] - [Speaker 0]
Welcome to Across the Tech Pond, The US and European podcast and webcast covering the main technology conferences and events hosted by myself, Anthony Savas, David Marshall, and Neil Hughes. We are all Avid Technology Conference attendees visiting the shows big and small that help set the agenda across the industry. We also cover major news events and trends that feed into the shows we cover. In this show, we have a very special guest, though. We recently covered the IT press tour of New York, where we met a number of different companies in the cloud data management space.

[00:00:38] - [Speaker 0]
One of the leading companies we met was Satera, which is an established cloud storage company active in the worldwide market. Its two main regions currently are North America and Europe, where its global file system for enterprises and big government agencies is well established. But on the IT press tour of New York, we heard from Sotero executives about new technology areas Sotero is now tackling on behalf of both existing companies and future ones. Before we move forward, let's formally introduce ourselves. David Marshall.

[00:01:10] - [Speaker 1]
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Across the Tech Pond. I'm David Marshall, and I'm coming at you from The US side of the pond in Austin, Texas, and I own and operate vmblog.com.

[00:01:24] - [Speaker 2]
Neil?

[00:01:24] - [Speaker 3]
And my name's Neil Hughes. Big warm welcome from me. I'm usually based in The UK. I'm currently in Frankfurt, Germany for a tech conference. I write for CyberNews and also host tech talks daily, which is a daily tech podcast.

[00:01:40] - [Speaker 3]
I also host a network of podcasts as well.

[00:01:44] - [Speaker 0]
I'm from, IT Europa, which is a pan European channel title, IoT Now, Techled, which is a communications, media portal, and obviously the cohost of Across the Techpond. What we're doing here is actually meeting, a company which, has been around not forever. Plenty of people have heard about it, but not everybody, and that's why we're doing this webcast and podcast to educate people about what they can actually offer the market. So we have a very special guest, and his name is Oded Nagel. Oded, introduce yourself.

[00:02:19] - [Speaker 2]
Thank you, and I'm very happy to be here. So I'm based in the Seteora headquarters in Tel Aviv. I've been in the company since the one one when we established it in 2008, and I'm running the company in the last three years. And, again, thank you for the opportunity to be here.

[00:02:36] - [Speaker 0]
Where does Ceterra currently fit into the cloud data management market? What do you actually do?

[00:02:41] - [Speaker 2]
Thank you for the question, Anthony. Basically, Ceterra is leading the transformation of the intelligence data management market. We provide a platform that allows enterprise to unify the all unstructured data that they have across edge locations and different cloud environments. Our data intelligence platforms offer us global file system technology that allows organization to consolidate all their unstructured data into a single high performance data fabric that makes their assets fully secure and ready to be used and utilized using AI analytics or any other business operation workflows that they have. Our platform is recognized today by GigaOM and other analysts as the leaders in this space, and we provide the best security, the best scalability and performance with a very deep integration into their IT platforms as well.

[00:03:40] - [Speaker 1]
Thanks again for being here, Oded. My question for you to kinda kick things off in New York. During the IT press tour, we were told that 95 of generative AI pilots never make it to production. And the reason isn't that the technology, you know, used, but the quality of the data being used. Apparently, organizations are pointing their AI tools at file systems full of duplicate datas, outdated versions, and sensitive information that should never be processed in the first place.

[00:04:14] - [Speaker 1]
And then they wonder why they're looking at garbage when trying to make business decisions. We were told by you guys the solution is is better data management, but we know this isn't easy. While machine learning models need data, that data resides in silos with different formats, permissions, and quality levels, and data science teams can spend months on cleaning up the process instead of building out the models. So Tara says firms must ride three different waves before they can get their data right. I found that extremely interesting during the IT press tour.

[00:04:49] - [Speaker 1]
Can you please explain to our audience listening right now what these waves are?

[00:04:54] - [Speaker 2]
Yes, definitely. And we've been in the market, as you said before, for quite some time, and we saw the market evolving. We believe that we saw like three waves in the last few years. Right? The first wave is what we call the unified data access.

[00:05:12] - [Speaker 2]
It's basically helping organization to gain control globally over all their data data that is distributed across on prem, off prem, edge locations, people that are working from home. This is really a big mess right now for these enterprises when they want to manage their data. The second wave is how to secure the data itself. Right? Once you the data is unified, you need the ability not just to access the data, but also control the data from a permissions perspective.

[00:05:48] - [Speaker 2]
You need to know how to protect the data as well, how to create the versions, how to manage the metadata of the files. And and that's a big big task, especially if you have terabytes of data and millions of files. And that's what we we did in the last probably ten years. Right? We built the most scalable global file system in the industries that allows these enterprises to unify their data and secure the data.

[00:06:14] - [Speaker 2]
But now, in the last two years, is another way, which is the enterprise IT. Once the data is actually unified and secure, Organize can unlock its value. Right? I mean, one of the main assets of the organization is what they have actually in their data. And that's exactly what Ceterra is all about.

[00:06:35] - [Speaker 2]
We are leading the transformation for these enterprises to get into their data and not just access the data, but also understand what is inside the data, how to arrange it in a high quality so AI can really read the data, index the data, and also provide the answers, the correct answer sometimes. Right? Because sometimes people think that AI is working like a magic. Right? You just ask a question and you get the answer.

[00:07:03] - [Speaker 2]
No. It's not working like that. And that's one of the main problems today, which I think enterprises are getting into is how to secure the data, but also how to get the value and the data itself. And that's what it's all about, the data intelligent platform that we provide.

[00:07:20] - [Speaker 3]
One of the things that stood out to me in New York from your presentation was the launch of the data intelligence technologies as part of these waves that we're talking about here and, of course, the AgenTik AI solution. So can you tell me a little bit more, for people watching, of course, a little bit more about what the data intelligence platform is just for people hearing about it for the first time?

[00:07:46] - [Speaker 2]
Yes. Thank you. And I'm happy to explain. So the CTR data intelligence solution, I would say, is a very robust platform which helps the organization to, first of all, collect all their data from different locations. One of the main things today that we see that data can be resides and and when I'm talking about data, of course, I'm talking about unstructured data, right?

[00:08:11] - [Speaker 2]
It can be result resides in multiple sources. And we allow, first of all, using our technology to retrieve all the data from all these edge locations into a secure data assets solution, which we enable some advanced security elements as well. So we know exactly to understand the permissions on each file and which file should be or which data in or which information inside a file can be exposed to a specific user in the organization. And by doing it automatically in real time, we're really giving the ability to these enterprises to analyze the data that they have and be able to expose the data to their end user easier. Either, you know, a user that works from home or analytic platform or any type of consume consumer that needs access to their data.

[00:09:06] - [Speaker 3]
So I'm curious, when you talk to your potential customers, I would imagine you'd set off a few light bulb moments as they hear about the opportunities and the kind of things that they can do with this and your technology. What what kind of questions are they asking you at the moment? And, any any challenges, concerns, opportunities? What are they they coming to you and asking you about?

[00:09:28] - [Speaker 2]
Yes. That's that's a very good question. So we see a few challenges today in this space. First of all, almost every enterprise organization in the industry has a strategy to start working with AI. Right?

[00:09:41] - [Speaker 2]
This is GEMEN. Right? But once they start to understand how it actually works, they they're starting to ask questions about scalability Yeah. Cost, performance, and security. Okay?

[00:09:56] - [Speaker 2]
That's the main things that we see today in the market because AI is amazing. Right? It really can improve the productivity of the the company. It really can help to create content and provide answers. But once you expose your data, you're also exposed to different type of threats, for example.

[00:10:18] - [Speaker 2]
So how you protect the data? That's one of the main questions that we are seeing today in the industry and making sure that the permissions on the file system are applied as well on the answers that you get. For example, how you make sure that the data is stored securely. Right? Fully encrypted and no one can access it.

[00:10:37] - [Speaker 2]
The second thing, how you move the data from different data assets, I would say. Right? Because today, data is a mess. Right? It's sitting on so many locations.

[00:10:48] - [Speaker 2]
It can be on SharePoint. It can be on OneDrive. It can be on a local NAS. And how you unified everything to a single platform, that's another challenges question that we're getting a lot. And the third one is about scale and performance and mainly cost as well.

[00:11:03] - [Speaker 2]
Because once they start analyzing the data, they started to understand it's not it's not cheap. And they need to do it in a very efficient way, and that's exactly the problem that our platform solves.

[00:11:16] - [Speaker 0]
Was it developed by this technology? Or or are you using some sort of third party technology to deliver this?

[00:11:23] - [Speaker 2]
No. So the majority of the technology is fully developed in house. We have a team of what we call the content services in the engineering team that has been working for the last year and a half, two years on this platform. Obviously, of course, you know, we use some you know, we don't develop LLMs. Right?

[00:11:43] - [Speaker 2]
We connect to LLMs and things like that, or we don't develop the vector database. But all the platform itself is is fully developed at Cetera. All the brain of the system is using our code. The ability to fetch the data from edge locations, understanding the permissions, be aware of the of the real time changes is something that, you know, we are doing it for so many years on the global file system. So we apply the same technology also on the intelligence data platform.

[00:12:11] - [Speaker 0]
If people don't know, Zotero has a very established partner channel, including some big names, the likes of Hitachi, HP, that's Hulip Packard Enterprise, IBM, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and it goes on. So Terra Data Intelligence, sorry to go on about it, but it is an interesting product. It's first being offered to existing customers as part of their current deployments. But I imagine, it could well be offered as a standalone product through channel partners in the future. First of all, is that correct?

[00:12:44] - [Speaker 0]
And if so, will other products and services in connection with Vagintiq AI be added by Satera in the future?

[00:12:51] - [Speaker 2]
So first of all, yes, it's correct what you just said. So we want to roll it in phases because, you know, AI in general, and especially AI into the enterprise world is new. Right? I mean, everybody knows CheckGPT and OpenAI. But when you apply it to the enterprise space, as we discussed before, there are many challenges, many things that you need to understand before actually implementing this powerful technology.

[00:13:18] - [Speaker 2]
So we walk in phases, similar by the way to the waves we talked before, right? So we walk in phases. Phase one, we are now offering it as an extension to all Sithera customers that already running our core technology, which is the global file system technology. And as you know, we have hundreds of large enterprise customers, global customers with hundreds of locations and petabytes of data. But as you said, the platform also support other data sources.

[00:13:47] - [Speaker 2]
So it's not necessarily needs to be working only with the CTR core offering. We can also grab data and and and fetch data from other legacy NaaS solutions or any platforms like Confluence and so on. So we definitely know how to manage the old data assets in the organization. And later on, we'll see how the market evolves, and then we will definitely thinking to also offer it as a standalone, not mandatorily connected to our core technology, which later on, obviously, we want everybody using our core technology, which is our global file system. So yes, we definitely see this as a strategic direction of Cetera.

[00:14:27] - [Speaker 2]
And we have some more roadmaps ahead of us to add more technologies and more capability to this platform.

[00:14:33] - [Speaker 0]
I think, David, you had a question you wanted to come in?

[00:14:37] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. Kind of following up on that. So Sotera is you know, we talked about generally branching out from its established global file system offering to develop and sell other products and services, particularly in the data quality and AI areas. Does does that mean that Zatera has to scale up its operations in in the major markets it's operating in regarding key executive hires, staff numbers, and building a bigger partner channel?

[00:15:05] - [Speaker 2]
Absolutely. Right? I mean, our commitment is to continue and grow and grow. And and in the last two, three years, we doubled the amount of people in the company. We hired some very key positions to run our marketing, to run our North America operation and sales.

[00:15:25] - [Speaker 2]
We have a new VP in Europe and some other strategic roles across the globe. So we are definitely expanding, and we see a lot of demand to our product, and we are committed to continue and support our customers and definitely expanding as well our partner ecosystem. We work mainly with partners, either strategic partners, as you said before, or local VARs, local system integrators that allows us to educate our customers, educate the market about our solution, and allows us to expand faster into, different areas. So, absolutely, we are growing. We're growing fast, and we see a lot of, growth in the market we are operating.

[00:16:09] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah. I think it's great to hear about the growth and the expansion. And I think from the outside looking in, it feels like Satir is almost an important, inflection point at the moment when it comes to company growth, especially if you could pull off the product and the service expansion and everything we're talking about today. So can you give me an idea of of what company growth the company is currently seeing and and what you're hoping for maybe in the next year or two years, for example? You you I'm probably conscious you can't share too much, but anything you care?

[00:16:40] - [Speaker 2]
So last year, and actually in the last few years already, we are growing fast and we are growing around 35% year by year in the last three years. We are based on what we call recurring revenue and our growth allows us to grow in different sectors and also in different continent or areas as well. So a few years ago, we decided to also expand our offering to countries like in Asia as well, like Australia, Singapore and others. And last year we grew more than 80% in this area, leveraging some of our strategic partners like Hitachi, for example, which are very strong over there as well. By the way, we just announced yesterday a very strategic partnership as well with Cloudian, which is one of the top object storage vendor in the industry.

[00:17:39] - [Speaker 2]
And so that's another angle that we see a lot of, I would say, possibilities for us to grow using our strategic partners. And Cloudian as well, leading as well some very key accounts as well in Asia Pacific. So this area is well is very important to us. Obviously, of course, North America is growing very nicely too as well. And in North America, we are focusing on some key verticals.

[00:18:03] - [Speaker 2]
One of the key verticals that we see a lot of growth is what we call the government sector, which we grew more than 60% last year. And we have very key accounts in DOD, federal, governments, defense companies, you can name it. And we see also very nice growth rate as well this year. We're still, you know, did not finish 2025, but definitely we see the trend as well. A year and a half ago, we also raised $80,000,000 from one of the biggest private equity comp sorry, the VCs in the company in in in The States called PSG.

[00:18:41] - [Speaker 2]
We raised $80,000,000, which basically allows us to excel accelerate our expansion, especially specific around AI, as we talked about the intelligence data platform. So we invest a lot on the AI development, but also on the cyber storage element as well. We are leading this space as well, and we have very, very good capabilities to protect about cyber attacks like ransomware using AI technology and some other technologies that we have built in the system. Looking ahead, obviously, the enterprise AI adoption is, you know, is one of the key element for us to grow, to grow, which is, by the way, as I said before, it's not just the core offering of the data intelligence platform. It's what we call the data fabric for AI.

[00:19:28] - [Speaker 2]
Right? We are providing the ability to move the data from other locations and move it very fast, super secure to your data lake and then analyze it either using our platform or using third party solutions. And that's exactly where we see the growth in the company. So yes, I think we are in a very good place. The market is moving fast.

[00:19:52] - [Speaker 2]
Our company is growing fast. We have very important partners that are helping us to get to these results. As I said earlier, we just launched another partnership with Cloudian, but we definitely have some other strategic partners like the hyperscalers, Microsoft, Amazon, and, of course, the other object storage like the IBM, Skelety, I HP, and so Very nice and very large customer using this offering. So also this year, if you look in the marketplaces, we launched our offering through Azure Marketplace and Amazon Marketplace as well. Just I think we did it like two weeks ago even in the Amazon Marketplace.

[00:20:34] - [Speaker 2]
And we we closed this year already very, very, very large deals using the Azure Marketplace. So yes, we definitely see this as another way for for us to grow and provide a total solution. And last thing is that we also offer a new service that we call Seterra Insight, which is an analytic service service. It's a SaaS service that allows our customers to connect to, send all the logs, either the audit logs or the file system logs, and we allow them to and and we analyze these logs and and present dashboards and and logs to to the company to understand what's going on in

[00:21:11] - [Speaker 0]
So, Oded, an additional question from me. Linked to all this growth you were you were talking about in investment, an obvious question would be, has it have you and your fellow c suite thought about a road map for a potentially, initial public offering, becoming a public company. Is that something what is possible? Everything is possible, I learned, during

[00:21:33] - [Speaker 2]
these seventeen years. Right? I think that especially when, you know, I became the CEO of the company, my focus is make sure that the company is growing, we innovate, and we provide the best solution to our customers. That's what we do on a daily basis. And if, and I must say we have an amazing management team that's working with me more than ten years now in average.

[00:21:59] - [Speaker 2]
And that's our focus. You know, I don't know what the future will look like, but we don't rule out anything. And we will again focus on our growth and our profitability and provide the best solution to our customers.

[00:22:12] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah. I suppose that's fair enough. I mean, people used to talk about, didn't they, whether it's the right time, but no one can really work out when the right time is these days. But your things change, very quickly, don't they? But I'll accept what you're saying there.

[00:22:25] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah. You've answered a lot of questions there, Ojid. I'm just wondering when my colleagues have have got any other anything else to ask they'd like, you address. David, does anything come to mind?

[00:22:36] - [Speaker 1]
No. The the only thing I would kind of throw out there just in in your previous answer when we were talking about AI and the government, you know, just just from my own knowledge, has there been any kind of pushback, or what what's been the adoption adoption of of AI with government agencies? Have they, you know, asked a lot of questions or is it just they're moving full steam ahead?

[00:23:01] - [Speaker 2]
So actually, this vertical is moving the fastest that we saw Appleton now. So we are in discussion at least with probably five to 10, you know, departments inside the government. And we already started like a few POCs there. So the answer is yes, they are looking for a solution. They understand that the current offering that is available is good, but not for them probably because of the data that they manage and the scale that they need as well, right?

[00:23:35] - [Speaker 2]
And they definitely see Ceterra as a very interesting solution because of the things that I mentioned before, the privacy, security and things like that. And yes, I see big movement over there. And I think that next year, you'll see more and more agencies deploying these type of solutions.

[00:23:55] - [Speaker 0]
Neil, did you wanna come back with anything? Has anything come to mind which you may have left out?

[00:23:59] - [Speaker 3]
I think that figure that you mentioned there, 60% growth in the government sector there. And I'm just kind of curious what's driving that growth. Is it the public sector trying to catch up with the private sector, not get left behind? Or is there something else driving this design?

[00:24:15] - [Speaker 2]
I think it's a it's a combination. Right? I think that first of all, more and more government understand that they need to move to a hybrid cloud environment. Right? And in the past, was all about, no, I need to have a closed garden.

[00:24:32] - [Speaker 2]
No, I can't move the data to object storage. There are a lot of no. Now which they understand that the market and the world in a way is changing on a daily basis, they need to be more, in a way, open and innovative, but not compromise on their security. Right? That's the big thing.

[00:24:50] - [Speaker 2]
Right? And I think actually, Cetera, in a way, allow them to move to a cloud offering in a way. Right? It can be hybrid. It can be on prem, but also not compromise on their security.

[00:25:02] - [Speaker 2]
And that's what we see today. And that's why I think that the government and other public sector are adopting this type of technology because we're actually solving their main problems, but allows them to also innovate and open themselves to new technologies.

[00:25:17] - [Speaker 0]
We asked a lot of questions there, Oded, and and obviously, you know your company better than we do. Is there anything important you want to add to what you've already said which can help people, in the process of, managing their, data storage better and their information assets and linked to AI, for example? Is there anything else you'd like to add?

[00:25:35] - [Speaker 2]
Yes, definitely. First of all, again, I really want to say a big thank you for this opportunity. I think this is very important for us to explain what we do, and thank you for your time as well. So, you know, I think I I mentioned all the important things already, but I really want to emphasize a few things. You know, we've been working with the largest enterprise customers in the world.

[00:25:58] - [Speaker 2]
And, you know, like ten years ago, when we talked to a company, they said, oh, we have a lot of data. We have 100 terabyte. We have 500 terabyte. Guess what? Now 100 or 500 terabyte is is not really big.

[00:26:12] - [Speaker 2]
Right? It's very it's very low. We're dealing with petabytes of data. And I think once the data is growing and unstructured data specifically is growing, right, it creates a lot of challenges to these type of organizations from security, from scale, from performance, from accessibility, from from a collaboration and workforce productivity. And that everybody has these type of challenges.

[00:26:36] - [Speaker 2]
You know, we're talking to thousands of of companies there all the time. And I think that people sometimes afraid to modernize or not I'm not sure afraid is the right word, but, looking, to continue in in the way that they know how to use their technology. Right? And and I think that today, the market is evolving. The amount of data is growing and the technology is really moving super fast, especially now with the AI.

[00:27:03] - [Speaker 2]
And our solution really allows you in the one hand to keep the the way that you used to work with the permissions and the network shares and the same workflows, and nothing changed from from a daily basis perspective. But our solution is really allowing you to start adopting the new technology, starting from moving the data fast and and and moving the data to to the cloud. And then on top of it, of course, to implement all the AI technologies that is coming and will help a lot to these enterprises to grow faster, be more efficient, and reduce their cost. So that's all that's the, in essence, what Seeterra does. And we are committed, as I said before, to continue and support our customers and our partners and to be the most innovative company in this market as as the analyst says in the last five years.

[00:27:53] - [Speaker 0]
Great. Thanks, Oded. Thanks for your time. Hopefully, the audience got a good insight as to, how an executive in a major cloud data storage company sees the evolving market and as we head towards, the take up of AI. We're very receptive to your opinions, Oded, and it's always good to actually drill down in these sorts of things.

[00:28:16] - [Speaker 0]
So all remains now is to say goodbye until next time when we produce our next across the tech bond, but we hope you've enjoyed this one. So it's it's goodbye from me, Anthony Savas, and it's goodbye from David.

[00:28:30] - [Speaker 1]
Again, David Marshall. Odeg, we appreciate your insights today. Truly valuable. And I invite folks to check out our other, articles and podcasts on Cetera, on our individual platforms. And, definitely looking forward to our next edition of Across the Tech Fund.

[00:28:48] - [Speaker 0]
David, thank you very much. Neil?

[00:28:50] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah. I'll I'll just like to echo everything everyone said here, and so many big things that I learned today from that partnership with Cloudin, the 60% increase in government sector, work there. So just wish you the best of luck for next year, and a big thank you to everyone for watching.

[00:29:07] - [Speaker 2]
Thank you again. Thank you, David. Thank you, Neil. Thank you, Anthony. It's always a pleasure to talk and to meet.

[00:29:15] - [Speaker 2]
And again, thank you for the opportunity to explain what Cetera does. Right? And we are really, really happy to give the best service to our customers. So really, we are continuing to commit and to provide the best support, best product in the industry. And again, goodbye and see you next time.