Edge Executive Insight – Tenry Fu, CEO and Co-founder , SpectroCloud – Rising Star of the Year FINALIST
In the lead up to Edge Computing World, we’re taking some time to speak to key Executives from the leading companies. Today we’re talking with Tenry Fu, CEO and Co-founder of SpectroCloud
Tell us a bit about yourself – what led you to get involved in the edge computing market and SpectroCloud
My name is Tenry Fu and I am the CEO and Co-founder of Spectro Cloud. Engineer at heart, my career of 20+ years has always been in tech and software innovation. Some of the domains include security, enterprise distributed systems management, and multi-cloud management. I started my career at McAfee, and later at VMware – leading the vCenter product. It was at VMware when I saw the potential of cloud, which motivated me to co-found CliQr Technologies where I served as a CTO. CliQr was a multi-cloud management platform startup, which pioneered the concept of consistently modeling and managing applications across multiple platforms (data centers and public clouds), removing all the complexity from IT Ops teams. It ended up being quite successful, resulting to an acquisition by Cisco in 2016. The third chapter beings in my career, where I led the Cloud Business Unit’s multi-cloud management and private cloud solutions based on technologies such as OpenStack and Kubernetes. At Cisco, I witnessed the rapid adoption and interest of cloud native technologies and containerization, with Kubernetes as the foundational technology – it was now becoming the new infrastructure building block. In 2019, I left Cisco along with two ex-CliQr executives to start Spectro Cloud. While being a brand new story and chapter in my career, Spectro Cloud’s mission is similar to CliQr: taking a cutting-edge, powerful and increasingly popular technology (Kubernetes) and paradigm shift, and making it accessible and manageable for any organization and team out there.
What is it you & your company are uniquely bringing to the edge market?
Edge is probably one of the most challenging “locations” to deploy and manage computing resources, let alone the – by design – complex cloud native stack that containers and Kubernetes reflect. The challenge is simple: can IT Ops and platform engineering teams use one single tool to manage heterogeneous environments to deploy and manage Kubernetes stacks? With our Kubernetes management platform, Palette, any team can easily deploy and manage any type of Kubernetes stack (including any distribution or integration that is required for applications to run), just like they would do in the public cloud or in their own data center. For our customers, the challenges and complexity of edge locations are complete removed: infrastructure-heavy dependencies, intermitted connectivity or no connectivity at all, security concerns, scale, availability, etc. Under the hood, we have managed to develop a pretty sophisticated architecture and solution that no-one else can offer in the industry.
We make deploying an edge Kubernetes cluster as easy as just scanning a single server with a QR code and plugging it into power. To enable this, our architecture is based on packing enough intelligence “at cluster” (or at the edge location) so that it is completely autonomous, even in air-gapped environments. This gives not only the confidence to our customers that whatever they need to deploy will work (and as mentioned our approach is completely open), but also means that they can scale to thousands of clusters, something that was not possible before! At the same time, Palette is a full-stack management solution, meaning that users can manage any Operating Systems, Kubernetes distribution, but also any integration or pack (open source or commercial) that an application is required to have above that – no one else offers that in the market. Finally, we make it possible to deploy even on single-server deployments and we support every tech layer deployed 24/7. For one of our early adopters, General Electric Healthcare, this translated to up to 90% savings on cost, as they now don’t have to send highly-skilled engineers to every edge location they manage. For all of the above, Gartner recognized us as one of the Cool Vendors in Edge Computing for 2022 – the only one that focused on Kubernetes management!
Tell us more about the company, what’s your advantages compared to others on the market, who is involved, and what are your major milestones so far?
Every company will say that “it is about the people”, but in our case we are more like a… globally decentralized family. It is basically the same old gang from our first startup (CliQr) that got reunited and expanded to tackle a new startup adventure, solving yet another tech problem. This makes us invincible as it takes away the unnecessary friction when people work every day together. Most of us in the expanded core team know each other pretty well, which means that we love to… disagree and challenge each other, promoting a healthy environment of entrepreneurial mentality, where every leader is their own CEO, running their own business: engineering, product, sales, marketing, etc. A major milestone for us was our Series B funding round last March, our growth from less than 40 people last year this time to now 120, our global expansion to EMEA. We went from practically no structured sales and marketing and little brand awareness last year this time, to now becoming one of the “Cool” (as per Gartner) players in the edge and broader Kubernetes space. Last year this time we were announcing our industry-unique solution for managing bare metal Kubernetes and in March we announced our equally (if not more) unique edge approach. And there is more to come with two big announcements, one of them on edge this fall and another one later at Kubecon at Detroit.
Beyond the people, growth and the recognition, from a technology perspective, we are big believers of leveraging the innovation coming out of the open source community and extending that to make it enterprise and production-grade. We have strong IP that resulted in patents and as with previous technology paradigms shifts, our “edge” is still around the ability to re-think a problem from scratch, rather than gradually adding features on top of what the existing competition offers. When it comes to Kubernetes management, we did exactly that! We started from a blank whiteboard, taking into account all the modern requirements for an enterprise to confidently deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale.
How do you see the edge market developing over the next few years?
We recently sponsored a survey among 300+ organization that already use Kubernetes in production environments and the results were staggering: 35% of Kubernetes production users already use Kubernetes at the edge today; with 66% of those expect their usage to grow in the next 12 months. 81% of all our respondents said that there are “compelling” use cases for edge in their industry. We see Edge as the next phase of “multi-cloud” with compelling use cases across every vertical and an amazing potential for growth in the next few years. What makes Edge so interesting, is the fact that is so much more than an “IT computing location”: it is intrinsically tied to empowering business models, and new capabilities that modern edge-optimized apps can deliver. We are probably still in the “testing the waters” phase – and this is where we come in – but the future is definitely promising!
What are the main trends you see about integrating edge computing into different verticals?
I see a few industries or verticals that early adopters for edge computing: Retailers, Restaurants, Smart Manufacturing, Healthcare Providers, Oil & Gas, Cruise Ships, and Telcos, Media and others. Other than AI/ML and data analytics, other common use cases include running user-interactive cloud native applications, aggregated IoT device management solutions and data processing. Vehicles, cruise ships, and airplanes are becoming a moving edge location with endless possibilities.
