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David Friend

President & CEO at Wasabi Technologies, Inc.

Boston, United States

David Friend is the co-founder and CEO of Wasabi, a revolutionary cloud storage company. David’s first company, ARP Instruments developed synthesizers used by Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin and even helped Steven Spielberg communicate with aliens providing that legendary five-note communication in Close Encounters of the ThirdKind.
Friend founded or co-founded five other companies: Computer Pictures Corporation – an early player in computer graphics, Pilot Software – a company that pioneered multidimensional databases for crunching large amounts of customer data, Faxnet – which became the world’s largest provider of fax-to-email services, Sonexis – a VoIP conferencing company, and immediately prior to Wasabi, what is now one of the world’s leading cloud backup companies, Carbonite.
David is a respected philanthropist and is on the board of Berklee College of Music, where there is a concert hall named in his honor, serves as president of the board of Boston Baroque, an orchestra and chorus that has received 7 Grammy nominations. An avid mineral and gem collector he donated Friend Gem and Mineral Hall at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
David graduated from Yale and attended the Princeton University Graduate School of Engineering where he was a David Sarnoff Fellow.

David Friend Points
Academic 0
Author 75
Influencer 32
Speaker 0
Entrepreneur 45
Total 152

Points based upon Thinkers360 patent-pending algorithm.

Thought Leader Profile

Portfolio Mix

Company Information

Company Type: Individual
Minimum Project Size: Undisclosed
Average Hourly Rate: Undisclosed
Number of Employees: Undisclosed
Company Founded Date: Undisclosed

Areas of Expertise

Cloud 36.18
AI 30.79
Big Data 34.38
IoT 30.04
Entrepreneurship 33.38
Customer Experience 30.09
Startups 30.54
Innovation 30.04
Data Center 30.23
Digital Transformation 30.03
5G 30.04
SportsTech 30.22

Industry Experience

Publications

7 Article/Blogs
Fast-growing firms will find freedom in a multi-cloud world
ItProPortal.com
September 23, 2019
Why the future of data storage is multi-cloud.

The digital universe - just like the physical version - is expanding at a phenomenal rate. According to IDC, worldwide data will grow 61 per cent compounded annually to 175 zettabytes in just six years, with as much of the data residing in the cloud as in data centres.

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Tags: Cloud, Data Center

Wasabi’s 2019 Update
Wasabi
September 19, 2019
2019 has been a year of tremendous growth for Wasabi. Not only have we expanded our brand and customer base, but we’ve also expanded across the Atlantic to open our first data center outside of the United States. There’s so much new growth happening at such a rapid pace that it can be hard to keep up with it all. So for those of you who have blinked once or twice this year, this blog will serve as a catalogue of all the changes you might have missed at Wasabi in 2019.

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Tags: Big Data, Cloud, Data Center

Why You May Be Looking at A Multi-Cloud Future
Computer Business Review
September 04, 2019
No provider can be the best at everything

Remember when IBM ruled supreme in hardware services? In the post war period, you couldn’t walk into a corporate data centre without seeing the IBM logo printed on the surfaces of almost every machine in the vicinity, writes David Friend, CEO & Co-founder, Wasabi Technologies.

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Tags: Cloud, Innovation, Startups

What AWS’ Growth Slowdown Means for the Cloud Industry
Wasabi
August 08, 2019
Amazon’s second quarter earnings left something to be desired. The company’s report detailed declines in stock price, revenue growth rate, and, alarmingly, a slow-down in the growth of Amazon Web Services. Long the tech giant’s reliable cash cow, AWS’ growth has fallen 4% this quarter, from 41% to 37%.

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Tags: Cloud

The Washington Post Is Way Off Base When it Comes to Big Data
Wasabi
July 25, 2019
Sports and data collection have always gone hand in hand. It seems today’s sports fan must also moonlight as an amateur statistician. Batting average, yards per carry, field goal percentage—these terms are as common in sports circles as home run and touchdown. And this stats-sports collision is just as prevalent on the fan side as it is in the front office. The “moneyball” revolution, brought to life in a 2011 Brad Pitt film, turned baseball statisticians into accountant-recruiters who transformed meager budgets into capable teams by weighing a player’s statistical performance against his salary. The Oakland Athletics’ 2002 “moneyball” season is one of the most famous in franchise history and saw the team finish first in the AL West.

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Tags: Big Data, Cloud, SportsTech

Wasabi Technologies CEO on why businesses need to love data storage
Intelligent Data Centres
July 22, 2019
Data is at the very heart of contemporary enterprise, particularly when it comes to Big Tech i.e. Facebook, Google, Amazon. Even manufacturers that produce and distribute physical goods, such as Unilever, could not exist without a huge amount of data. The consumer goods giant has established 27 data centres to date across the world that deliver insights that drive logistics, marketing and product development.

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Tags: Cloud, Data Center

The advent of 5G will lead to ‘industry 5.0’: here’s what you need to know and how your company needs to prepare
ItProPortal.com
June 26, 2019
Next generation internet speeds are just around the corner, with the promise to transform how we engage with and consume content. Pilots for 5G are already underway in the UK with an estimated 1.5 billion people are anticipated to be connected to 5G networks by 2024 according to a 2018 Ericsson report.

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Tags: AI, Cloud, IoT, 5G

1 Book
The Bottomless Cloud: How AI, the Next Generation of the Cloud, and Abundance Thinking Will Radically Transform the Way You Do Business
Hybrid Global Publishing
January 15, 2019
Electric power and the evolution of utilities fueled the growth of industrialization and the incredible innovation of the 20th century by allowing companies to focus on what they where best at rather than the generation and management of power. Electric power and the evolution of utilities fueled the growth of industrialization and the incredible innovation of the 20th century by allowing companies to focus on what they where best at rather than the generation and management of power.

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Tags: AI, Big Data, Cloud

2 Founders
Wasabi
Wasabi.com
January 01, 2018
Wasabi makes saving data simple, affordable, fast and secure. Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage removes the complicated decision of where, how and whether to save your data, and empowers you to transform your business and organization through cost savings and disruptive speed and performance.

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Tags: Big Data, Cloud, Entrepreneurship

Carbonite
Carbonite.com
February 01, 2005
Carbonite provides a robust Data Protection Platform for businesses, including backup, disaster recovery, high availability and workload migration technology. The Carbonite Data Protection Platform supports any size business, in locations around the world with secure and scalable global cloud infrastructure. To learn more visit www.Carbonite.com.

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Tags: Big Data, Cloud, Entrepreneurship

1 Industry Award
The Top 25 IT Industry Disrupters Of 2019
CRN
July 31, 2019
As part of CRN's Top 100 Executives Of 2019, these are the people who pushing boundaries and turning the IT market on its ear.

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Tags: Big Data, Cloud, Entrepreneurship

8 Media Interviews
Spiceworks Event Video
youtube
September 16, 2019
Spiceworks Event

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Tags: Cloud

David Friend, Wasabi CEO: Cloud storage will be a commodity – and clever vendors can make the most of it
Cloudcomputing -News.net
August 02, 2019
Boston-based Wasabi Technologies has a clear business strategy. “We only do storage,” CEO David Friend tells CloudTech. “We don’t do compute, we’re not going to buy supermarkets, or make movies or TV shows – we just do storage and we’re very good at it.”

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Tags: Big Data, Cloud

This Is Why Investors Should Worry About Amazon's Future
Forbes
July 27, 2019
Amazon shares are down 2% since it reported second quarter earnings that missed analysts' profit estimates.

But that's no reason to worry about Amazon —after all, it's been well-known that CEO Jeff Bezos trades off profitability for growth. And in the quarter just ended, Amazon's top-line growth accelerated to 20% as it invested $800 million in the logistics needed to make one-day shipping work for Prime members, according to the Wall Street Journal. Amazon also lost more money in its Indian e-commerce business than expected.

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Tags: Cloud

Wasabi Partner Network (30 Second) | Wasabi
youtube
July 23, 2019
The Wasabi Partner Network Program puts partners in control to resell or bundle the service and set their own pricing options for end customers.

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Tags: Cloud

How Wasabi Is Taking On Amazon in the Cloud
Bloomberg
May 15, 2019
Wasabi Technologies, Inc. Chief Executive Officer David Friend discusses how the company is taking on Amazon.com in cloud storage. He speaks with Bloomberg's Carol Massar on "Bloomberg Technology." (Source: Bloomberg)

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Tags: Big Data, Cloud, Startups

Wasabi + Veeam Partnership | Wasabi
youtube
May 15, 2019

A Veeam and Wasabi partnership offers a high-performance cloud backup and recovery solution that's much more affordable than any other options.

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Tags: Cloud

Greybeards talk cloud storage with David Friend, Co-founder & CEO, Wasabi Technologies
Greybeards on Storage Podcast
March 27, 2019
This is our first time talking with David Friend, (@Wasabi_Dave) Co-founder and CEO, Wasabi Technologies, but he certainly knows his way around storage. He has started a number of successful companies, the last one prior to Wasabi was Carbonite, a cloud backup company.

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Tags: Big Data, Cloud, Startups

Wasabi Technologies' David Friend Talks About The Cloud's Future
CRN
July 27, 2018
The industry said he was out of his league when he launched Carbonite in 2006 – and now the online backup service is a billion-dollar business.
Cloud expert David Friend is on a mission to do that again with his latest startup, Boston-based Wasabi Technologies. Friend co-founded the hot cloud storage company in 2016 with the mission to create a next generation cloud storage architecture.
’When people look at products like Amazon, they have fast and expensive and slow and cheap. Our view is that you don’t need those distinctions because we’re faster than their fastest product and, at the same time, we’re cheaper than their cheapest product,’ said Friend.
The company offers hot storage that delivers fast and low-cost cloud storage with 100% Amazon S3-compatible API. Friend says traditional cloud storage solutions are inadequate because they don’t meet the price-performance requirements demanded by today’s data.
’What we see in the future is the same thing that happened in the hardware business, where they say I’m going to buy servers from Dell, going to buy storage from EMC, I’m going to buy software from Oracle and so forth - and I’m going to put them all together into the systems I want.’
Friend expects the same thing to happen in the cloud industry, and it will be the MSPs that will bring the pieces together for a customer.

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Tags: Big Data, Cloud, Customer Experience

2 Videos
Top 5 Cloud Storage Predictions for 2019 Update | Wasabi
YouTube
June 17, 2019
A mid-year check in on Dave and Dan's 2019 cloud storage predictions.

https://wasabi.com/blog/11-nines-dura...

Follow Dan on Twitter: https://bit.ly/2FdmydA
Follow David on Twitter: https://bit.ly/2t59Wgg

Follow Wasabi on Twitter: https://bit.ly/2JAOYAN
Follow Wasabi on Facebook: https://bit.ly/2MqkYWj
Follow Wasabi on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/2JP1D2r

https://wasabi.com/

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Tags: Cloud

The Bottomless Cloud — Book Trailer | Wasabi
YouTube
January 16, 2019
The Bottomless Cloud challenges the scarcity-driven mindset by taking a hard look at how industrial age business models are failing us by regarding data as a commodity and a cost that needs to be constrained, rather than an near infinite resource that can be mined to build entirely new sources of value and insight. From Uber, to Nike, to Netflix, The Bottomless Cloud is defining the tenets of success in the 21st Century by changing the way we view data, from being a byproduct of business to a foundational driver of radically new business models.

Learn more about the Bottomless Cloud at https://wasabi.com/bottomless-cloud/

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Tags: Cloud

Thinkers360 Credentials

5 Badges

Blog

2 Article/Blogs
2020 Predictions for Cloud Computing (Part 2)
Thinkers360
November 03, 2019
Editor's Note: The following predictions are part of a 2-part series of cloud predictions from David Friend, CEO, Wasabi … To see Mr. Friend's profile and portfolio on Thinkers360 please visit David Friend. 4) The rise of multi-cloud: Hyperscalsers like AWS claim to “do it all” when it comes to cloud. In 2020, cloud customers will proclaim, "I want to pick the best storage, the best AI software, the best CPUs, the best CDN, etc. I want it to all work together." Standards will emerge so that it will be much easier for SIs and CSPs can put it all together for their customers. Executives should look at each piece of their data system from storage, to compute, to content delivery, AI, and make sure they’re getting the best service for the amount they’re paying. 5) Importance of Channels: As customers have more choices among cloud vendors, more expertise will be needed to needed to guide their choices. Channels can become experts at cloud-based implementations. As much as some of the hyperscalers would like to cut out the middlemen and deal directly with the customer, increasingly the need for multi-cloud strategies will empower the channel partners. The channel grew up selling and managing "boxes" from Dell, Cisco, HP, and many others. In the future, they will make their money by selling and managing software and services from Azure, Wasabi, Veeam, and other non-hardware products.

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Tags: Cloud, Digital Transformation, Data Center

2020 Predictions for Cloud Computing (Part I)
Thinkers360
October 31, 2019
Editor's Note: The following predictions are part of a 2-part series of cloud predictions from David Friend, CEO, Wasabi … To see Mr. Friend's profile and portfolio on Thinkers360 please visit David Friend. 1) Public Clouds: The Public Cloud will continue to grow as business owners resist further monetary investments in their own private data centers. Buying and baby-sitting a roomful of servers can be a pain in the neck and often tangential to a company's core business. As a result, savvy executives should look at outsourcing this hardware infrastructure to the cloud in 2020. 2) Private Clouds: Hyperscalers like AWS will alienate many of the companies they would like to have as customers when those companies realize they can outsource their existing physical infrastructure while maintaining control over how their data is used. Meanwhile, some cloud services, notably storage, will blur the lines between private and public cloud as the world starts to understand the paradigm of data storage as just a commodity, like electricity or bandwidth. In 2020, executives should investigate how their company’s data is being used by their storage providers and consider alternatives. 3) Hybrid Clouds: For a variety of reasons, many applications still need to run either entirely on-premises or on some combination of proprietary gear plus cloud. Most large organizations still have enormous IT footprints with hundreds or thousands of servers to back up. Increasingly those servers are getting backed up to the cloud. The "hybrid cloud," will reign for years with the balance changing slowly over time. Executives with on-prem data should make sure they have a hybrid cloud backup strategy in place in order to maximize redundancy and increase efficiency.

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Tags: Cloud, Digital Transformation, Data Center

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David Friend