News Coverage - Networking Daily - Tuesday May 11, 2004
Interview with BlackBall's President Patricia Brown
Patty Brown, President and Chief Operating Officer of
BlackBall, Inc., details the unique features of her company's storage management solution.
ND: Tell our readers a little about your company.
PB: BlackBall, Inc. started as a vision, not four years ago. It started with Al Shugart, our Chairman of the board,
inventing the rotating storage disk, and subsequently, the storage industry was born.
Robert Brown was also a critical to future technology, compiling the best team in the industry to bring to market a product
called Back-up Exec, which still grosses about a billion dollars in revenue annually. Today, BlackBall is the next-generation
storage management solution.
ND: Do you have any New products?
PB: Yes we are introducing BlackMagic WorkGroup and Server Editions, respectively. Currently, we are shipping our third
generation of BlackMagic Personal Edition.
ND: Could you compare the position of your products and their technology against the current Market?
PB: Today's application solutions consist of document management, content management, digital asset management and
storage management, and sluggish, costly SQL databases are required. BlackMagic delivers one unified solution to the problem
you face with finding and managing your files.
With today's complex integration of many applications and system software to deliver the capabilities of BlackMagic, there is
no equal. Environments today require multiple-operating-system support, and we are the only company to support Windows, Linux and
Sun Solaris. So currently, there is no real competition, but in the future we can look for the WinFS and/or Longhorn, which is
scheduled to be out in 2006.
ND: What products do you see as being hottest this year?
PB: Of course, I'm going to say BlackMagic. But with all due respect, I see the wireless market as the hot ticket, and
BlackMagic encompasses that.
ND: To what do you attribute your company's success?
PB: I would have to attribute our success to hiring the best and brightest. From hiring the inventor of the original search
engine, ht://dig, which by standard is the teaching tool for all the universities in the United States, to Asking Al Shugart to be
on our board of directors and having him now sit as our chairman, it's all-encompassing technology has come full circle.
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