Seth Georgion is a Senior Sales Engineer at Komprise. His IT experience spans data storage, VARs and founder of an Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) platform. Seth joined Komprise in May 2024. We caught up with him in between customer visits to learn more about his day-to-day at Komprise as well as the experiences that brought him here.
Welcome to Komprise, Seth. Tell us more about your role.
Thanks! I divide my time between three groups—internal, customers and partners. Educating and supporting partners is where my experience really matters, from my time working in the VAR world. I take the approach of solutions expertise not products, which helps in the field and with our customers. After the deal closes, I help with the transition to customer success and participate in all the follow-up meetings and handle the implementation.
Why did you join Komprise?
In my last job at EVOTEK, a Komprise partner, we were using Komprise at one of our customers. I wanted to switch from a VAR partner role supporting many products and focus on one platform to help solve a key problem regarding how enterprises manage a hybrid cloud environment. By hybrid, I mean managing two or more data storage platforms in two or more places.
You need a storage-agnostic solution like Komprise Intelligent Data Management, which brings a unified view and analytics across the entire environment. This is powerful, because we don’t have to tell the story from a single vendor perspective. I was also impressed with Komprise because the software solution can go between protocols, from network storage to cloud storage, and it has a no lock-in approach with Transparent Move Technology.
You’ve been a founder and a CEO of two different companies. How have those experiences shaped your career to date?
My career has had some lucky breaks. I came from the customer side before I started my first company, Locust Storage, which was on the first wave of object storage. That experience showed me the power of how to change and disrupt markets. I went to EMC (now part of Dell) to work on new disruptive ideas in midrange storage. After that merger, I got to join up with three other EMC guys and we started an artificial intelligence company (Totem AI) for five years. That was wonderful. We built the first AI clouds for Medtronic and the U.S. Olympic Committee. I have a patent in artificial intelligence licensed to Medtronic which is in production with patient healthcare.
Given your experience in both AI and storage, two areas that intersect with Komprise, how do you see the opportunities today for customers wanting to change the way that they manage data?
I always focus first on the customer’s needs. I won’t shoehorn AI if it doesn’t belong. But when we find customers that want a way to start to engage, especially with generative AI, they need data pipelines to do it.
It’s one thing to come up with the idea that you have an algorithm you want to run. When you say I want to do this at scale across my enterprise, you need a pipeline to do it and that’s part of the Smart Data Workflows pipeline.
I suggest to customers that they build their own inferencing systems for AI. The goal is to make the AI model tailored for your business on your servers and in your cloud. A storage-agnostic approach to data management is again so important.
Can you share any tales from the field?
I was in a meeting with an executive at a large media company and was trying to talk to him about the potential of our technology. He was a tough one to convince. So I showed how once we move your data into a cloud service like AWS, you can just click on the file and it opens up directly. This was a moment of pure revelation. I was showing him this because we were talking about ransomware recovery. I said you can just click on the image and it opens right away. Every other vendor in this industry puts data in proprietary formats in the cloud. You can’t just click on it. And he was like, that’s it. He wanted a quote.
What is the most challenging—and conversely rewarding—part of being a sales engineer for a SaaS company?
I have not yet walked into a first customer meeting where they didn’t look at me like I was knocking on their door with a vacuum in my hand. You are following behind every other sales guy at every other vendor that has shown up there. That’s very different than coming from a VAR where you have respect out of the gate because you have this long flowing relationship. The most rewarding part of the job is if you can get control of that room and turn your prospect into somebody who is willing to listen. And if it becomes a collegial thing in the end, and you can pull together a vision that is transformative for their business and they can see that too, it is amazing.
What advice do you have for organizations that are struggling with growing unstructured data volumes and costs?
I always encourage them to leverage the power of the hybrid cloud to manage costs while increasing performance. I want them to tier cold data up into the cloud on object storage (S3 protocol), so that they can reduce their on-prem footprint and drive those costs down dramatically. To increase data resiliency and performance, the savings can and should be partially reinvested back into the primary storage platforms.
What do you enjoy doing in your free time?
I used to race motorcycles—superbikes–but now I spend most of the time with my kids.
