CeCors Inc (CEOS)

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Investor Interview with Blake Hunnel, the Chief Information Officer of Foldera, Inc.

Wednesday November 1, 4:30 am ET

Part Three of a Series of Interviews

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--This interview with Blake Hunnel of Foldera (OTCBB:FDRA - News) was conducted by Stephen Gjolme, Principal of the Ibis Consulting Group, an investment relations firm.


Ibis - What do you do at Foldera?

I'm Foldera's Chief Information Officer. I'm responsible for designing Foldera's infrastructure -- making sure our hardware and software work well together to give the end user the best possible experience. It's my job to ensure that our application delivers the highest level of security, scalability and responsiveness while maintaining confidentiality, data integrity and system availability.

Ibis - What did you do before all this?

Well, my first job was a lead dBase programmer working on Kaypro computers. Later I wrote and sold advanced modem software for the Commodore VIC 20. I have consulted with banks to help them improve their infrastructure. I've designed high-availability infrastructures for many companies, and consulted with hundreds of others. In fact, for over 20 years I've worked in technology and information systems. At Exodus Communications, I worked with DirecTV, Aramark, IndyMac Bank and others creating business impact assessments, network infrastructure designs, deployment guidelines and network security audits. Most recently at Dell, I focused on disaster recovery and large storage and backup solutions.

Ibis - OK, good. Lets drill down and hear what makes Foldera so secure?

With respect to hosting Foldera, we use Savvis which is widely known as one of the most secure datacenters available. Their facilities include bulletproof entry points, biometric readers, badge readers and hundreds of cameras. With respect to our application, all data is encrypted, scanned for vulnerabilities and analyzed for abnormal behavior as it passes through our firewalls to our users. This is the same way that some of the big banks do it. Our intrusion detection and prevention system provides extensive reporting, logging and data archiving options for regulatory compliance, trending and baselining. We also employ other techniques to keep user data secure, but for obvious reasons I don't discuss all the security measures we have in place.

Ibis - What makes Foldera scalable?

Using the cluster technology that's built into Oracle 10G, we've designed our database architecture to grow dynamically without any downtime. Our storage infrastructure is also flexible which allows us to meet customer demand without affecting the performance of our application or database. We make extensive use of load-balanced server farms, which means we have the flexibility to add application servers, POP3 servers, mail servers, spam servers and antivirus servers when and where we need them. In effect, we can rapidly grow our infrastructure to meet virtually any demand. Because our application was built from scratch and designed for the web, I believe we will be able to build out our infrastructure and eventually scale to tens of millions of users.

Ibis - What makes Foldera so reliable?

The same things that make it scalable. Our product has been designed and engineered to scale out horizontally, which is similar to the Google infrastructure (GOOG), where individual servers and other hardware can fail without affecting the end-user experience. We realized that businesses will expect Foldera to be highly reliable so we designed that reliability into our application. Foldera has also been designed to take advantage of multiple datacenters which gives us the ability to protect our customers' data and eliminate possible downtime.

Ibis - What makes Foldera maintainable?

If you are referring to our infrastructure, all of our systems are imaged within our environment, which makes it easy to deploy additional resources and upgrades when necessary. We incorporate system and application monitoring, and use a change management process that utilizes industry standard revision control software. Our datacenters are "lights-out" so we don't need to be onsite to make changes or upgrade our environment.

Ibis - What sort of redundancies are built into your service?

We benefited from the extensive datacenter build-outs back in 2000. Our datacenter is hosted at Savvis (SVVS), which is one of the leaders in collocation hosting, and they are very serious about availability. Our datacenter is supported by ten Caterpillar 2000kw diesel generators, twenty-two 135 ton HVAC units, and several entry points for Internet connectivity. Within our environment every component related to our service is redundant to n+1 or greater. If an application server, a database server, a firewall, or any other hardware component should fail, Foldera continues to function without affecting the user experience. We take frequent snapshots of user data which can be used as restoration points for recoverability, and we back up encrypted data to tape. Early next year, I expect to have offsite, real-time data replication over a secure connection. This link will be separate from the Internet and will provide disaster recovery and increase data availability.

Ibis - How do you test the system?

We use various internal modeling tools and Mercury LoadRunner (MERQ) to test our systems under high load. This allows us to predict system behavior and performance levels within the entire network. With these tests, we're able to tune the environment to support the maximum number of users, and to ensure that these users have the best possible experience. We maintain a full test environment which allows us to evaluate the performance of equipment and systems before we deploy them into production. For example, we were able to test a pair of Citrix Netscaler 12000s, to confirm in advance of installation in our production environment that they will deliver the kind of performance that we expect.

Ibis - So how's the datacenter build out going?

It's going very well, we're on schedule for our Q1 rollout.

Ibis - How many users will your system be able to support?

I believe that we will be able to support over two million registered users and give them a rich environment to work in.

Ibis - Where are your datacenters?

As I mentioned before, we are currently partnered with Savvis but for security reasons we don't disclose the physical location of our datacenters.

Ibis - Who are your technology partners?

We work with Oracle (ORCL), Dell (DELL), EMC (EMC), Isilon and Citrix (CTXS) to name a few.

Ibis - Why would a business entrust its critical data to you?

Building and maintaining technology is complicated, time consuming and expensive. It's not generally a core competency of small-to-medium sized businesses, but we do it every day. We can get businesses up and running with Foldera in just a couple of minutes and we can get them started for free.

When it comes down to the datacenter and infrastructure, we didn't compromise or settle for second best on any solution. We use the same database software as eBay (EBAY) and we use the same mass storage system as NBC Sports and MySpace.com. Our firewalls are best in class, capable of handling 50,000 new sessions per second. Our switching backbone is carrier class and can transfer one billion packets per second when fully loaded. As for data integrity and recovery, we are never more than four hours from a secure, encrypted backup or recovery point. With this infrastructure, we offer our business customers a secure, fast and reliable environment for much less time, money, and effort than if they were to build it themselves.

Ibis - Give me an example of an online service that hosts critical data?

Salesforce.com (CRM) is a great example. It offers web-hosted sales force automation software in addition to other services and is in use in many Fortune 500 companies. What's more critical than customer data and price lists?

Ibis - Thanks Blake.

You're welcome.

Ibis - Our next interview will be with Steve Cubberly, Foldera's Senior Vice President of Revenue and Business Development.

About Foldera(TM), Inc.

Foldera(TM) is the free, secure and easy-to-use service that instantly organizes workflow. Foldera combines web-based email, instant messaging, a document manager, a task manager, a calendar, a contact manager and sharable folders into a unified productivity suite, available with a single login from any web browser. Foldera also has the unique ability to instantly sort and file your sent and incoming email, instant message dialogs, documents, tasks and events into folders, on a project-by-project basis, chronologically and in real-time.

Foldera expects to generate revenues from the sale of services such as extra data storage, premium service and support plans, as well as from embedded search and contextual advertising. Founded in 2001, Foldera is a publicly traded company (OTCBB:FDRA - News), headquartered in Huntington Beach, Calif.

For more information or to sign up for service, visit http://www.foldera.com.