Future of Edge Data with StorMagic’s Bruce Kornfeld

Episode Overview

​Bruce Kornfeld is a highly accomplished technology executive with more than three decades of experience in the storage, server, networking, and security industries. As the Chief Marketing and Product Officer at StorMagic, he has played a pivotal role in driving the company’s global marketing strategies, product management, and strategic partnerships. StorMagic specializes in edge computing and storage solutions, catering to industries like retail, finance, and healthcare that require secure, cost-effective, and scalable infrastructure outside of traditional data centers. Under Bruce’s leadership, StorMagic has become a trusted provider of hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions, simplifying storage and security for organizations managing distributed IT environments. His expertise in edge computing, virtualization, and IT strategy has made him a sought-after thought leader in the technology space.

Before joining StorMagic in 2017, Bruce held high-profile leadership positions at industry giants like Compellent, Dell, and NCR, where he significantly influenced product development and business growth. During his tenure at Compellent, he was instrumental in scaling the company’s revenue from $9 million to over $150 million, leading to its successful IPO and acquisition by Dell for $960 million. At Dell, he played a crucial role in establishing the company’s first-ever storage division, growing its revenue beyond $1 billion and shaping Dell’s approach to enterprise storage solutions. Bruce also spent time at NCR, where he contributed to innovations in enterprise IT solutions for various sectors. His ability to identify market needs, develop impactful products, and create effective go-to-market strategies has consistently propelled companies to new heights.

Bruce holds both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Engineering, along with an MBA from Cornell University, reflecting his deep technical knowledge and business acumen. Beyond his corporate career, he is an active member of the Forbes Technology Council, where he regularly shares insights on emerging trends in edge computing, storage, and cybersecurity. His expertise has been featured in numerous industry conferences, podcasts, and publications, solidifying his reputation as a key influencer in the enterprise IT space. Outside of his professional endeavors, Bruce is passionate about music, sports, and mentoring future leaders in tech, balancing a distinguished career with personal interests that keep him engaged and inspired.

Episode Transcript

 Bruce Kornfeld: Edge computing is going to do nothing but grow over the next 5 to 10 years. And that’s because you can’t fight the speed of light and that rhymes. And that wasn’t on purpose, but you don’t even know it. Yeah, I didn’t even know it, but yes.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Hey there. Welcome to Pay Pod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is. Thanks for listening. Data is at the core of modern financial systems. But as businesses expand to more locations and embrace digital transformation, managing and securing data at the edge has become increasingly critical. My guest today is, chief marketing and product officer at Stormagic, a company making edge data storage and management simple, secure and cost effective. In this episode, Bruce breaks down what exactly edge data is, why it’s essential for industries like banking and retail, and the ongoing debate of cloud versus on site solutions. So whether you’re an IT expert or just curious about the future of data, I think you’ll enjoy this conversation and I’m excited for you to hear it. So please welcome. So edge data isn’t a term everyone is familiar with, but it’s becoming increasingly important. Can you explain what edge data is and why it’s critical in today’s tech landscape?

 Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, so edge data is really anything that happens outside of a big data center. So when you talk about edge, typically what we think about is where is the action happening. So it’s either where a customer is interacting with a computer or a payment system. Let’s say it could be a manufacturing plant where robots or machines are creating data. But anywhere that data is being created where the action is happening is is a fun way to say it. But that’s, you know, generally the way we think of either machines are creating data, or people are creating data outside of a data center or outside of the cloud. And we often.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Hear about obviously, everyone knows about the cloud, but edge data is kind of a different approach.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, I mean, think about it like a cloud, like think about how you can put clouds and big corporate data centers in the same bucket. Clouds are even bigger, right? But for data centers and clouds they think about massive scale thousands of servers, thousands of switches, people and monkeys and whatever running around replacing failed components. It’s a massive operation. The IT industry has been built over the years. Now roll to the edge. It’s very different out there. There’s usually not an IT person within 100 miles. Edge computing is the broader term. It just needs to be a system that’s simple to install, simple to run. You can’t have it. People coding out at the edge. It just has to work. It just has to run reliably.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Why are businesses, especially maybe in industries like, like our audience might be in banking or even retail payments? Why are they shifting their focus to edge data solutions?

 Bruce Kornfeld: Good point. I mean, good question. I’d say there’s always going to be a debate in the industry. And I’ve got friends that work for cloud based retail system companies without naming them here. But there’s all sorts of ways for an IT person to figure out how to run an application at a store, at a bank, at a small site, at the edge, if you will. There’s there’s different ways of doing it. And as we all know that in the last, I don’t know, ten years, 20 years, cloud has gotten all the momentum. Cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud. There’s a lot of benefits to cloud, but there’s also drawbacks to cloud. And what a lot of companies and organizations are realizing is that they can’t use the cloud for everything. And they’ve made it an architectural decision that at my small site, at my location, at my branch, at my store, at my manufacturing site where I’m doing something small, I can’t I can’t depend on the cloud for a few reasons. One of them is latency, right? Performance. Performance with cloud is usually pretty good, but it’s not great.

 Kevin Rosenquist: It’s not as good as local. Yeah, it’s.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Not as good as local. And if you’re I mean think about it. If you’re making decisions, particularly if you’re making decisions in real time, you can’t wait for data to go from your store to the cloud to run some AI thing and then return the answer. A lot of times that’s not fast enough. So there’s latency or performance issues. Cost is a big one. Cloud can be great if you have one store and you don’t want to mess around with on site, but and it’s not super expensive there. But once you have a few sites or lots of applications in the cloud, it can get very expensive. And also is reliability, particularly in the financial world. Whether you’re a bank or you have a payment system, you cannot afford to have an internet outage like I just had here in my building.

 Kevin Rosenquist: I can’t afford a callback.

 Bruce Kornfeld: I can’t afford to have an internet outage, and you can’t afford to have the cloud down for ten minutes or half a day. So yeah. So there’s there’s reasons why companies are looking more and more to you know what. Let me just figure out how to run my critical applications on site as long as I can keep the cost down and that it’s easy to manage when.

 Kevin Rosenquist: You think about, you know, the different kinds of businesses that might be deciding between cloud based or on site. Do you find is there is there is one better for small business versus medium versus large? Like what other factors do you think these businesses look at from a larger standpoint to try to decide what’s best for them?

 Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, I mean, I would I mean, I always say this, I would hate to be like a CIO or a director of it because they have hard jobs. There’s there’s 100 different ways to, to design a system. Right. But I’d say the things that they the things that they look at is, I mean, if they have a strategy that says we are cloud only or we are cloud first, that’s fine. There’s reasons for that because they they can keep the number of people to a minimum, right. You don’t have to have all of the people building systems, updating software, all that. So there’s a lot of benefit to cloud, but I think what they look at is for for big, for big data or big applications that are running the business, cloud and data center solutions. Private cloud, however you want to call it, are very popular and they make sense. But what we see from talking to our customers is, is that what the movement is at the smaller sites? They don’t really want to spend the money on cloud operations because it can get very, very expensive. So I say cost comes into play. And they also look at what am I doing today versus what do I need to do in the future. So, for instance, AI isn’t commonplace at small sites and edge sites and branch offices yet. But it’s definitely coming. It’s definitely coming. The innovators are out there doing it now, but there’s a wave coming that says, can my operations handle the fact that in the future I might need to do some analytics that I’m not doing today? I need to go analyze customer data fast. Cloud isn’t designed for that. So they’re thinking about the future. What’s the right architecture so that we can be prepared for solving business problems on our small sites?

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, even for someone like me, a lowly podcaster, you know, like, I can’t I can’t store everything on the cloud. I mean, because, first of all, I had to pay for cloud storage because my files are huge, because it’s video, but also, like you have to edit locally or else it gets really bogged down and stuff. So even for someone like me, I can’t rely on the cloud. I have to have this two terabyte hard drive, you know what I mean? So I can run everything, but yet I have to pay for cloud to, you know, just so that I can, I can upload stuff and send to people and all that. So I can definitely see I’m so small, I can’t even imagine a scale bigger than that. When people are trying to trying to work productively and quickly from a cloud based system.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah. The other thing, um, another another answer to your question is cloud. Like it’s not edge or cloud. It’s it’s usually both right now. Some like I said, some organizations have said cloud only, which is okay. Now of course, at the store there’s going to be something there. There’s going to be iPads, there’s going to be a little desktop. But applications are generally run in the cloud for some, and they keep the tech on site minimal. Or you go run your applications locally. That’s the difference there is. Where do you know where do you actually run the application? But even if you’re running your applications on site, you still need a cloud connection, or you need a data center connection because the data can’t. Just like you just said, you’ve got some of your data here locally because you need to work on it, but you have some of it in the cloud and that and that’s typical for enterprises as well. It’s it’s a mixture of both. But the key question is where do you run your application for the best performance saving costs, etc.. Another example I’ll give is just a real one for me is I hate to slam a very big company, but I’m going to. I’m not like we use Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft 365, it’s great, but did you ever try to use PowerPoint on 365 in the cloud? It’s it’s terrible. It’s slow. The feet. It’s just it’s slow. The features aren’t there. So every time we do things, we move it from cloud to our desktop because it’s just faster. It’s just that’s just the.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Way the world afterwards.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, exactly. I do the same thing.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Exactly. Someone sends me a file. I have to download it, work on it, do all this stuff, you know, and then pop it back up and. Yeah, it’s.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Everybody wins, Kevin. Everybody’s happy, everybody happy.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Everybody’s happy. So let’s talk a little bit about one of your products specifically at Store Magic. Do you say it Svensson? Svensson.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah. Svensson I usually say it. Yeah.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. It’s about making storage easier. More affordable. Can you kind of talk about, like, explain what this tech is and how it works and why it’s well suited for edge locations?

 Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah. Simply put, um, over the years, the technology that’s become very commonplace is called a hypervisor. I don’t know if that’s a term that you use or you’re familiar with, but basically what a hypervisor is, it’s a virtual server technology and VMware dominates that market. So it’s infrastructure software that runs on servers that allows end users to run multiple applications on the same physical hardware. So you’re virtualizing servers to run lots of applications instead of having one server for every application. So it’s a very common way that IT teams have deployed applications over the last, whatever it is, decade or so. So virtualizing servers. What we do is we say, all right, you’ve chosen a hypervisor. You’re going with VMware. They’re the big gorilla in the market. It’s great. It’s a great way to virtualize your server. Let us enable the storage layer below it so we can save you money on that. Typically a lot of enterprises will say, okay, I’m going to put a couple of servers. And then I also need a physical piece of storage as well. And that creates more cost and more complexity. So SV San we come in, we come in and say, hey, just just use the disk drives that are in the servers that you have. Anyway, our software will virtualize the disks and the storage and will create a highly available cluster between two of them. So if a server fails, all of your applications will fail over to the existing to the other server and just keep running. So that’s the basic value prop that vSAN has, is that we say use your hypervisor. Usually it’s VMware, and we’ll provide that super highly available storage solution without requiring another physical box at every site. That’s what we do.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Okay, that’s really cool.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Simply put.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, yeah.

 Bruce Kornfeld: We put we save customers a lot of money by doing that. And we simplify their lives for sure. Yeah.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Which is always nice to see. Yeah. Simplifying lives as well. It’s nice. Yeah.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah.

 Kevin Rosenquist: So with so many financial applications running across multiple platforms, how can businesses ensure that data security and encryption remain airtight? How can Stormagic help simplify this? Yeah.

 Bruce Kornfeld: So particularly in the world of finance and financial Applications. So one thing is that over the years there’s been a lot of. Innovation and focus from the software community, let’s say the vendor community. Due to requirements that they get from end users, is we have to make cloud and data. Center really secure. We’ve got to make sure that data is secure. Data in flight. Applications are secure. Et cetera. Et cetera. So a lot has gone on for security and encryption in data center and cloud environments. But what you find is at the edge at smaller sites, no matter what they’re doing, if they’re running a small little couple of servers to run their local applications, there hasn’t been as much focus there. And the issue is there’s less physical security when you’re at the edge, whether you’re a branch office of a bank or you’re a retail store or even a hospital, whatever it is, a smaller site. There isn’t usually a locked data center with a key, you know, key, badge, access and racks and power cooling and all that stuff. It’s usually stick a few servers under the desk at Home Depot kind of thing, right? Or it’s sitting in the corner, which means physical security. Access to that hardware is much more open. So what happens and what we do to help our customers in that case, it’s we make sure that all of the data is encrypted. So encryption technology is very important because a disk drive could walk away a whole server. I mean, servers aren’t that big these days. They’re, you know, like this big.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. They’re not what they used to be. Yeah, yeah.

 Bruce Kornfeld: The server could disappear. Like all sorts of bad things can happen. In addition to what you deal with in the data center, hackers and bad actors and all that. But there’s physical security to worry about. So a best practice is whether you’re using store magic or not is to enable encryption wherever you can to make sure that as data enters that system as it’s written to disk, it’s always encrypted, so you’re safe. If something bad happens and a system wanders away, at least your data cannot be recovered and cannot be used.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. So you know edge computing you kind of talked about we’ve been talking about it’s growing. It’s growing rapidly. Where do you see technology like this heading. Do you think industries like finance and retail are going to embrace it more as time goes on?

 Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, I really do. And that’s um, you know, I’m sure there’s other opinions in the market and, you know, different points of view. But I would say the way I look at it is and, you know, this is from me speaking with our customer community, our partner community, because we have channel partners and integrators, Vars that help us bring our technologies to market. Talking to the analyst community, it’s just kind of generally my worldview, I would say is, is that the edge computing is going to do nothing but grow over the next 5 to 10 years. And that’s because you can’t fight the speed of light and that rhymes. And that wasn’t on purpose, but.

 Kevin Rosenquist: You don’t even.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Know it. Yeah, I didn’t even know it. But yeah. So like no matter how close you are or location is to, let’s say an AWS cloud data center, there’s still going to be the speed of light. Getting that data from point A to point B, that you can have the most expensive Cisco switches and routers and all that, but you still have to wait the milliseconds or a few milliseconds that it takes to go back and forth, and the economy keeps speeding up, and the time that we have to make decisions isn’t getting longer. So like, yeah, I really feel like edge systems have a long life here. Like there’s going to be more and more movement of wanting to take certain applications. Not all, but certain applications just have to run outside of a data center or outside of cloud. And the best example is it’s not a financial one, but a best example I can think of is think about an autonomous vehicle. Think about all the stuff that’s going on with robotaxis and Mr. Musk and all that kind of jazz of self self-driving cars. If you need to make if the car needs to make a decision of whether to hit the brakes, swerve around somebody, or just keep on going because it that decision cannot be made in the cloud. There’s no way. It’s just not enough time. Right? So there’s an exaggerated example, but.

 Kevin Rosenquist: It illustrates.

 Bruce Kornfeld: It well. Yeah, exactly. And we see, you know, we see massive growth I think like, you know, depending on who you talk to, whether it’s IDC or Gartner. But the analyst firms are predicting a 3,035% CAGR compound annual growth rate in edge computing. It’s something like a $200 billion market now going to 500,000,000,000in the next seven years. It’s just everyone’s predicting this is the wave of the future. And we see a lot of it teams rethinking and thinking about how do I get ready for this.

 Kevin Rosenquist: So you’ve had a storied career in tech. You were with Dell for a while, right? Um, was there any particular thing about store magic that, like, like the edge computing idea that really grabbed you?

 Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah. Listen, I joined Store Magic a little more than seven years ago. Spent a bunch of time at Dell starting their external storage business back in the day, and a couple startups in between that were quite successful. All kind of in the storage space. But I’d say the thing that’s interesting about store magic that keeps me here is that we have thousands of happy customers around the world that absolutely love our tech. And, you know, we get this moniker of his. It just works. Set it and forget it is what we hear from our customers. They just install our software. It does what we say it’s going to do. The server fails, all of the applications move over to the other one. It’s just we have a lot of happy customers out there and um, the edge is a real thing and it is it is growing. So our technology is kind of focused on the edge where the market is heading, which is fun. We have lots of happy customers and, you know, put all that together and it’s, you know, it just seemed like a great place to join. This is my this is Bruce seven and a half years ago. And a great place to stay because I’m, you know, I’m having fun. I’m enjoying it. And we get to see how our technology is becoming more and more relevant over the years. In fact, there’s been something going on in the industry. I don’t know, Kevin, if you follow all this, but it’s made the news pretty loudly like Broadcom bought VMware about a year or so ago. Right. And they they completely disrupted this market. So VMware was I think I can say this fat dumb and happy. They have dominant market share 90% of the market of hypervisors right. Virtual servers. Broadcom basically said we bought them. We’re changing the pricing model. And all of a sudden they have customers that are significantly unhappy. There’s a lot of unhappy customers out there. They’re focusing on their 2000 biggest ones. But these edge customers that we’re that we talked to are all upset frustrated.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. Prices.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Prices are going through the roof. So what we’ve done is we’ve come out with a new product in the last six months or so called Svtci, which is similar to Svtci, but instead what we’ve done is we’ve added our own hypervisor. So we’ve come out with a full stack solution that now has a VMware alternative built in. So the reason I brought it up now is it’s making my job even more fun, because now I get to go compete against VMware more directly and solve customers problems that say we hate VMware, we’re done with them. We need an alternative hypervisor. What do you got? And now we have a solution. So we’re you know we’re excited about that. We’re having fun in the market. Our customers are responding very, very favorably. And it’s just a great place to work. And we’re having a good time.

 Kevin Rosenquist: That’s just that’s being that’s just jumping, you know striking while the iron’s hot. Because I mean any time that that happens where we lose, where a company, you know, takes over another company and then all of a sudden the customers are like suffering. That opens the door for people that are more customer focused, like you guys are to, to to come through the door and, and take over.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Absolutely.

 Kevin Rosenquist: That’s awesome.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah.

 Kevin Rosenquist: What have you learned throughout your career as far as balancing driving innovation? You know, in complex industries like storage, data management. You know, you drive innovation, but you also have to keep your company’s customers happy, not try to not try to bite off too much. And like, how do you balance where you are and where sort of where your company is and how they service their customers versus where you want to go and how you want to innovate?

 Bruce Kornfeld: Great. That’s a great question. And this is something that I say struggle with. It’s not a struggle, but it’s something I deal with every day. Sure. It’s hard. And I’ll just say I’ll just take a quick side story. I’ll just say this. The overall answer I’d have is it’s hard and it’s easy to make mistakes. It really is. And I’ll just tell a quick story from my career. Is that I don’t know if you saw it on my LinkedIn, but I’m a founder of a company. It was a mobile app targeting business users, and it was to make texting more efficient for business people. And the concept was we’re getting texts, which is still true today, by the way. We’re getting texts and emails and communication all over the place. How do you organize it? How do you know who to respond to first? How do you make sure you follow up with people in a timely manner? So that company was called gist. It was spelled g I s t.

 Kevin Rosenquist: And it’s I know, I know about gist. I had I used just for a minute.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Oh, I love you. Really.

 Kevin Rosenquist: I’m serious, I did, because, uh.

 Bruce Kornfeld: It’s so great to hear was.

 Kevin Rosenquist: You’re the founder, sweetheart or.

 Bruce Kornfeld: No, I was the founder. Maybe it’s a different company. Oh, you made me so happy, Kevin.

 Kevin Rosenquist: No there’s something I know about this gist. Right, guys.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Get your shit together is what it stood for.

 Kevin Rosenquist: I didn’t know that. No, I totally I totally know this. This I’ve definitely seen this. Funny.

 Bruce Kornfeld: That’s awesome.

 Kevin Rosenquist: I remember, I thought I remember talking to somebody who was part of that.

 Bruce Kornfeld: I’m trying to think who else might have been. But anyway, listen, I came out with this idea. I started a company. We built an app and we didn’t get massive commercial success. We didn’t hit that hockey stick, right? We couldn’t go viral. And believe it or not, WhatsApp beat us. That was the time when WhatsApp was just starting, right? So any rate, even though they’re not really targeted at business users. But my point is, it’s really hard to innovate and hit the market at the right time with the right features. And that’s what product people think about all the time, is how do you keep your customers happy with new new features, but not miss the mark on something new? So that’s something that we deal with all the time. And I’ll just say, you know, I will say we got a little bit of a, um, we got a little bit of an assist on this from Broadcom because they made this decision easy, right? If Broadcom didn’t disrupt the market and cause lots of customers to question their VMware investment, it probably would have been a harder decision for us. Who do we innovate. Do we bring out a new hypervisor? What about VMware? What do we do.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Broadcom made this them. Yeah right.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah. Broadcom made this one easy.But yeah. And there’s also a balance. You know we’re a small company but there’s also a balance between how much can you do and how much capital you have. Go raise money. Go get investors. Go get VCs so you can afford more tech and more innovation. Or do you self-fund from profits. And these you know, these are the things that go on at our executive team all the time. So yeah, there’s a balancing act. And we’re excited though because, you know, because this little assist that we got from Broadcom we know the market’s there. So that’s kind of de-risked it. Now what we’re doing internally is we’re innovating. How do we how do we do things even better. How do we focus our products so that we’re solving an edge problem, whereas VMware was solving a data center problem. Right. VMware targets everywhere, but we’re kind of very kind of rifle focused on the edge, so that that gives us more freedom to innovate on a smaller scale for smaller sites, which kind of helps fuel our thought process.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Mhm. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So,if there’s any businesses, particularly in the financial sector who might want to think about their data data strategy. What do you recommend people prioritize over the next year.

 Bruce Kornfeld: So for data strategy for financial. Yeah. So I would say um, they should really be thinking about where they run applications. Um, it’s very easy to say no, let’s just go sign up for this payment system or that payment system and pay up, you know, pay a lot of money for a cloud based system that still requires on site tech. I think the thinking though, that could change. So I would challenge everyone to think they may think of it as old school, like, oh, nobody, nobody runs applications on site anymore. Well guess what? People do and there’s reasons for it. And I think what’s happened at the edge for edge computing is that technology has gotten very powerful and very inexpensive. So for instance, this is where their thinking could potentially change is it’s not okay if I need to run applications myself, I need a big IT team. I need, you know, pick a number $100,000 per site for hardware and software and services. No, it’s not like that anymore. You know, they don’t need it. People on site because software has gotten so, so simple and fancy that they don’t have to have it people. The hardware side has come down significantly. You can run most any branch, office or retail location on two physical servers that cost $10,000 for both of them, and you throw some management software on top. I mean, you can have a whole solution running per site at ten $15,000. And that’s that should be achievable for most of these locations versus think about what the cloud bill could be from every location if you’re sending data back and forth. So I would encourage them to rethink architecture like think about new ways of doing things. And there might be some tech out there that can help you save a lot of money and headache that you hadn’t thought of in a while, because I think the world’s kind of got caught up with, well, I just I just use the cloud. I just use the cloud. That’s just the way.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Things are, right? Everyone just thinks about the cloud. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Well, listen, Bruce, thanks so much for being here. I really enjoyed chatting with you and thanks for giving us all the tips and telling us about store magic.

 Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, Kevin, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Me too. Thanks, Bruce.

 Bruce Kornfeld: All right. Thank you.