Has Anyone Reviewed This Report on Alternatives to Amazon S3?
I recently came across this report on Gigaom, shared via a Cloudflare promotional email. From what I gathered, it seems Storj is must targeting the SMB market. Thoughts?
quotes from the article:
āHowever, Storj offers no adjacent services for compute, networking, or development, and compliance certifications are absent, although it has started the SOC2 compliance process and will offer a new tier of enterprise storage where all components and storage are located in SOC2 certified facilities.ā
" Challenges: The distributed, decentralized approach may be off-putting to some compliance-oriented enterprises, even though SOC2 compliance is underway. Storj offers no adjacent services for compute, networking, or development. There is no support for Object Lock or versioning, but both are on the roadmap for 2023."
i think they should understand that STORJ has many complementary partners, a fitting puzzles to add what You need, for example computing, but itās not easy to find for me atm as well, whats actual, and officially recommended.
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You cant aim Big Enterprise, before you get small and medium market. Enterprise is very conservatives.
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Absolutely, Vadim. However, the Storj team is considering a different approach: focusing exclusively on large enterprise customers, bypassing the SMB market.
your 2 posts are with opacite meaning.
Thank you for pointing that out, Vadim. My apologies for the oversight. Iāve corrected it. I meant to say āmustā in my initial message.
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In my opinion to take the SMB market you need to have a profitable service already, because of Pareto principle - Wikipedia : you will spent 80% of resources to get 20% income, and 20% of resources to get 80% income. SMB is huge but also too many small pieces. We doesnāt have so much resources to try both.
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What challenges arise when developing a user interface similar to Dropbox or ŠÆŠ½Š“ŠµŠŗŃ.ŠŠøŃŠŗ with integration into the file explorer? I believe addressing this could benefit many home and SMB users.
We have a lot of tickets from consumers who treats our simple console to operate buckets as a primary interface to the network (which is not).
Developing a feature-rich interface (and sell it) requires a separate team not less than we have now in total, and it also requires much more staff to support consumers regarding this interface.
We are not that size yet. So letās focus on these 20% who brings us 80% revenue. Then we may think about remained 80% to get 20% revenue.
However, we are open to contacts with SMB anyway, just not focusing on that market. Anyone can use Storj DCS, even consumers (but would have a limited functionality) or SMB, which working mostly the same way as consumers, sometimes using integrations with their systems.
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I took a look at the report. It is always risky to judge a strategy, especially when you are an outsider and have limited information. However, taking into account as the strategy is presented in the report and basic knowledge about the environment as well as taking into account my personal experience as a user and as a node operator, I got a feeling that it is a very ambitious and a very challenging approach with a lot of pretty serious obstacles that deserve at least unnatural events taking place (if not almost disruptive events) in order for the strategy to become successful. Based on my experience, sometimes it is more reasonable to divide the route to the final goal into stages. At the beginning trying to conquer a little bit less demanding but well defined market segment than the enterprise one and when having a firm and profitable business, then trying to attract and to attack the most demanding one. Maybe a bit less splendor but at the end the same outcome. Just to be clear, I am not saying that as it is presented in the report, the strategy is wrong.
Just wanted to add that I keep the fingers crossed and I wish you best, especially with the Big Blue, I guess this must be the elephant that @BrightSilence was talking about a few months ago. :- )
Please donāt twist my words. I was pretty clear what I was talking about in that topic and it didnāt have anything to do with what you just said. Iām not even sure what you are currently insinuating. So no, I was talking about (at the time) the unit economics werenāt sustainable and we should probably expect payout drops for node operators at some point. Well, weāre in the middle of those now, so I guess I was right.
Honestly I have no idea what you are actually trying to say. There are a lot of words in your post, but no clarification anywhere as to what you are referring to.
- Which strategy?
- What obstacles?
- What unnatural events?
- Which final goal?
- Why the specific mention of IBM?
So yeah, leave my name out of it. Iāll express my own opinions when I want to.
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Nobody is twisting your words. I was just referring the title of your old and I believe famous post (this is positive, no negatives here) about moving elephants. I was expressing my own opinion and not referring to any of your opinions expressed in that thread. :- )
Look, there are 13 entities in this report, 6 are large cloud providers (Alibaba, DigitalOcean, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle), 2 are well established entities (Cloudflare, Seagate), 2 are quite well established storage providers (Backblaze, Wasabi). So it makes in sum 10 entities. Leaving 2 on the table (11:11 Systems and Zadara).
And now, my friend, to answer your questions:
Strengths: Storjās decentralized approach to object storage creates some unique advantages over the competition, including a CDN-like architecture, low latency, and high performance. Its erasure coding and global distribution remove the need for replication.
And, my friend, how many refrigerators currently, the last time we discussed the subject, I believe in March / April / May there were 4, literally 4, refrigerators, not in a data lake but in an ocean of data and ā¦ a totally ā¦ screwed ā¦ promotion for which in a sense we had to pay (I admit discussable but in a sense correct). Let me ask you another question here. How is it possible that a promotion that is offering 10 times more free space then major market players with as I believe the lowest rates on the market for a paid tier is not successful. Or in the other words, how is it possible that such a great promotion does not work @BrightSilence?
Storj offers no adjacent services for compute, networking, or development, and compliance certifications are absent, although it has started the SOC2 compliance process and will offer a new tier of enterprise storage where all components and storage are located in SOC2 certified facilities.
And another one, my friend. How natural it is in relation to the current network @BrightSilence?
And to be in line, politically correct and to answer all your questions:
Why the specific mention of IBM?
It was not me who was specifically mentioning IBM, I was talking about the ocean of data. :- )
Which final goal?
Profitable or at least rapidly growing business, not a charity on a supply and demand side. :- )
And to sum up, the last question, my friend, is: how coherent is all this @BrightSilence?
Iām honestly unsure what you mean. Iām guessing you used a translation which failed.
Either way, there are many many object storage providers and there have been for years. The fact that Storj is even included in such a report is a very good sign.
And yes, I read the strengths and weaknesses. I donāt see how you draw such a critical conclusion from that (at least, thatās what I think you are doing). There is a place in the market for a specialized focused service and I think the strengths are enough for Storj to find its niche and grow it, while integrating with other platforms to add what Store doesnāt do itself.
Do I expect them to become as big as MS, AWS, Google? No, but they donāt need to to be profitable.
Big Blue has long been a nickname for IBM.
Man, chill out.
I understand that you would like to make the forum to your liking, however, there are also other people like for example me. To be clear, not that I want to take your voice down by any means, actually I even like you. You asked the questions and I provided you answers in a way I like. Do not expect me to write elaborates spanning hundreds of posts without any conclusion. I saw 4 refrigerators including data from this great promotion after which you were writing about the relief. Now maybe there are a few more. I have not checked it.
I believe there is ā¦ :- ) ā¦ a huge potential.
What I was communicating in a way I like was that it seems the strategy is not coherent, designed maybe with a splendor, at the same time it seems being difficult and to some extend unnatural. Dont expect me to criticize the management on the public forum. I just see a lot of inconsistencies like this unused hardware and IP limits for example. In my view, some of those things just do not sum up. However, I am not the insider and I have been here for a short period of time.
Instead of writing about the elephants, should you be in need to prepare a market winning strategy, what would it be? Would you be able to draw a sketch based on for example this famous Business Model Canvas and HBR article by Steve Blank with a special emphasize on Key Activities, Value Proposition, Channels and Customer Segments. It would be also interesting to hear your take on a very short list related to a) Key Success Factors and b) Competitive Advantage. In case you may have some extended time, your take on a short SWOT analysis would be indispensable. Should you decide to follow McKinsey & Co. MECE approach and mentioned above Pareto rule, it would be really great. :- ) But no cheating. :- )
Thanks for the enlightening regarding IBMās nickname. :- )
Why it looks for me like a request to write an around-economic-like article for the student home work?
P.S. I totally did not get analogies with refrigerators, oceans and lakes, and how that all is related to data and this Gigaom report specifically. Could you please skip analogies and post it clear and understandable for non-native English readers?
In my opinion, I did it as clearly as possible and as politicly correct as possible. I would like you to ask not to push me into a direction you are trying. I am also not interested in writing hundreds of posts as in another thread I have been mentioning above. I reiterate, from my point of view, it seems to look that the strategy is unnatural, with numerous challenges particularly related to enterprise sector, all is not fully transparent, actually just the opposite, particularly on the supply side, the basis, as for now, is more like a charity then āfor profitā organization both on a supply and on a demand side.
I totally did not get analogies with refrigerators, oceans and lakes, and how that all is related to data and this Gigaom report specifically.
I am very sorry, I cant do anything about that. :- )
Just wanted to add that I love Storj almost as much as you do (I guess the same level is rather hard to replicate) and I am in full regard to the work of the whole team, particularly the development team but not only, and I would like the project to succeed and grow further and that apart to being a storage space provider I am also an avid daily user. :- )
I donāt doubt it. Anyone who takes the time to regularly post clearly likes Storj enough to care to discuss it.
I wouldnāt say I love Storj. I think it has a great basis to build from and I admire the underlying tech (since V3), but Iām not blind to its challenges. Iāve been pretty critical of certain aspects in the past and Storj has been exceptionally responsive to that and dealt with many of the issues I addressed. Which is one of the reasons I keep coming back here. I do pick my battles and have gotten a pretty decent idea of what kinds of requests are likely to be followed up on. But you can find plenty of topics of me complaining about something as well. 
Iām also a small time user myself, though mostly static backups. Iām not making them any money on the customer side, Iām afraid.
I just wanted to say, I didnāt mean to tell you how to speak in my previous post. I was merely pointing out that I wasnāt following you. It may be that my attempt at humor came across as making fun of you. That was definitely not my intention. But Iām with @Alexey here and unfortunately have no clue what you were trying to say with your analogy. So I didnāt really know how else to respond.
How I can not smile if you present Storj in all colors of the rainbow, ok, I admit, mostly. :- )