From the Gumshoe article comments section: Dr KSS MD PHD on ANY June 17, 2015 We occasionally veer off biotech here, and since making money together here is our collective goal, I thought I would pass on this idea: Sphere 3D ($ANY), a cloud play in which I have a long position. A good friend of mine is also long and has done quite extensive due diligence on it. The company is likely to announce major deals with Microsoft next month. ANY’s lead program is called Glassware.
Below are some notes and notions about $ANY passed on to me by this friend.
“The below observations are the main points I have taken away from the NYC presentation last night. ABSOLUTELY no doubt how joined at the hip Sphere is with MSFT. When their VP says that Glassware allows MSFT to do what they couldn’t do, then you know we have some pretty powerful IP. The abbreviations are regarding speakers EK Erik Kelly (CEO), PT Peter Tassisoupolos (sp?)(Pres), PB Peter Bookman (ANY strategist/V3 expert) LO Larry Orecklin (MSFT VP) GetSmart (IHUB poster- likely a stock broker/financial type from Toronto)
Bottom Line — MSFT needs the entire family of Sphere products to make both Azure and Windows10 work. V3 for virtual desktops Glassware to allow legacy apps and OS (operating systems) to be run on current electronic devices and allow ultra-thin operating system with never seen before security SnapCloud Storage solutions
All 3 of these areas could be a company worth billions unto themselves, together they provide a synergy not seen in the IT arena today. Each of these 3 technology sectors Sphere currently has are the leading products in their field. This is not fancy hyperbole. V3 was independently tested against competitors and were much faster, GW is the only program known that can virtualize ANYTHING, including legacy applications, operating sytems, mainframes, etc. SnapCloud is nearly infinitely scalable, cheap, and reliable. You may ask how our pack-leading product lines get even better? EASE OF INSTALLMENT AND MAINTENANCE. These systems usually take months to install and get running right, not to mention training time, and then the time spent daily keeping them running. Our products install in times from minutes to hours, require next to no training, and are basically maintenance free. We provided MSFT with the goods to dominate the business, they provided the marketing power to be able to get our products (in conjunction with their Azure and W10) into basically every enterprise level down to small business level organization as we can also compete head to head on the price of our offerings. Nobody can price us out of the picture.
If you don’t feel at ease with your Sphere investment today, you shouldn’t be investing because you won’t find a better stock with a better reward/risk ratio. We have no risk as I see it and massive revenues staring us in the face in the near future (within months to a quarter or two).
Don’t sweat the daily price gyrations as we still have a massive short position trying to save their asses (as I believe many are facing extinction when this finally takes off) and thus trying to keep the price down for now.
Remember SnapCloud out within a month Glassware to be offered within a month via Azure Novarad starting refreshing their 400 medical customers in 3rd qtr Many other partnerships should be showing revenue gains very soon G-series sphere appliances (with Glassware installed) available 3rd qtr Sphere to be named a MSFT Azure GOLD PARTNER within a month Analyst reviews should start to be seen within a few weeks to a month (?) Institutional buying expected soon
1 Per Justfactsmam: (buyout may be earlier than many expect)
E.K. said last night: Our revenue not of interest to MSFT its about the IP.
Translation: Revenue of interest to Market for SP…but not relevant to an acquirer like MSFT…so they are not waiting to see ANY’s revenue … so what are they waiting for?….that’s the point…the wait could be over anytime, but E.K…”not giving ourselves away…without starting with a “B” we don’t begin to talk”
2 EK…”had recently gotten a call from Amazon.” (Sphere not limited to MSFT only, Amazon had called recently and who knows who else? Bidding war to ensue?)
No small comment is that. How long before Google and others want to dance too? Apple, IBM, VMware…you paying attention?
Company acting smartly….no exclusive contracts.
3. Company is still blown away by how many entities; businesses, governments, school districts, etc. are still working with outdated systems(Windows 7, XP, etc.) that can’t be easily migrated to the cloud. Incredibly time consuming and expensive, unless it’s virtualized and that’s where we come in. (This should be a massive revenue stream for ANY)
4. There is no question that ANY is a very important partner for Microsoft and the growth curve is significant with many different verticals and other partnerships. The horizontal growth is significant as well. Larry Orecklin -Microsoft was very good and was very clear on ANY being a very important partner for MSFT because they can do what no one else can with their disruptive technology. Peter T and Eric were very professional and the presentation was excellent. There was a clear discussion regarding Dockers versus ANY and it is clear to me that if Dockers has a pre-IPO valuation of 2 Billion plus, then ANY has a very bright future and tremendous upside potential. Peter Book man is a very bright guy as well and I enjoyed my discussion with him. Off to the bell ringing
5. GETSMART…(good to see you again)…and you mention “Larry Orecklin” -Microsoft was very good and was very clear on ANY being a very important partner for MSFT because they can do what no one else can with their disruptive technology.
But is Larry just an Evangelist for MSFT?
“Larry joined Microsoft as General Manager of the rapidly growing System Center and Virtualization Business Group, responsible for product planning, marketing, and delivery of Virtualization solutions and private cloudmanagement solutions.”
You prompted an answer from me in mentioning Larry Orecklin….
BEFORE MSFT….Larry was President of Quantum Corp’s Storage Solutions Division (NYSE: QTM) On behalf of Overland ” Kelly assembled a group of private equity investors and engineered the purchase of Snap Appliance from Quantum Corp. for $10 million. ”
ERIC KELLY, while at Overland Storage, acquired SNAPSERVER line of NAS devices from LARRY ORECKLIN, while Larry was President of Quantum Corp’s Storage Solutions Division (NYSE: QTM)…LARRY then was hired by MSFT to become GM of VISUALIZATION SOLUTIONS….
AS I believe PB has already asked: “have we caught the dog by the tail or has the dog caught us?”
Are we “just” Partners? It was no coincidence that Larry was Keynote speaker at Nasdaq last night for Sphere3D.
Am I hearing the whispering of “come home to mama!”
6. AWS is not unaware of Snapcloud (OS for S3d’s Virtual Cloud Storage)
We clearly learned last night that Snapcloud is NOT proprietary to MSFT, nor is SNAPCLOUD limited to Snapservers….
IT APPLIES and can be adopted by ANY AND ALL NAS environments!
So “how many Snapservers” are out there for Snapcloud is irrelevant…the question is HOW MAY NAS ENVIRONMENTS are out there to access and utilize SNAPCLOUD? (Above is extremely important as this means almost the entire spectrum of LARGE enterprise type organizations will be able to switch over to SnapCloud!!!)
7. …Getsmart…pretty much told you…when L.O says “we need GW” to be complete…tells it all…
They understood better than me. (referring to Investment Bankers that were in attendance regarding the degree of closeness between ANY and MSFT)
8. Jason Katcher from Google Edu Chromebook was at presentation last night. His thoughts:
“EK – Snapapp turned into separate company back in early 2000s where he worked with Larry. Snapcloud is inside Azure now.
Larry leads all developer evangelism. He and EK go back nearly 15 years. What S3D has is really interesting and helps us do things we can’t do. (MSFT saying they need ANY for both Azure and Windows10 whereas we don’t “need” MSFT to succeed although their partnership will certainly aid us in revenues) New Caney was example of a solution that was some on prem,- some in cloud with Azure and packed in a container to 10k users.
EK – going through history of S3D. Talking about MSFT, he says “and that is all I can share with you…today.” My sense is he was holding back saying more.
PT – when MSFT visited them came to see GW but company decided to show the whole stack including RDK (for ex how do you get a TB of data into the cloud). Demos later show to show UNIX, Mainframe and even XP offices. Says can replace Dropbox with sync and share? Not sure on this one, but is what it is.
300k snapcloud units. Much bigger margins with a cloud offering than a box. Snapcloud app will be released within next few days.
They do not compete with Docker. Docker is meant to containerize newly written apps, while S3D is going after existing apps to put into container. Much bigger market. Also stated again that they are the only company who can containerize Windows apps.
Roth analyst who covered Overland said he would likely start coverage soon. Seemed very optimistic although didn’t have much detail to share. Honestly thought he would be much more well versed on cloud overall, diff bw an AWS and Drive for ex.
Overall I was really impressed and glad I finally saw it first hand to make my own judgments. If they get any sales moving and/or strong PR from MSFT it really should be lights out for a platform that can solve some real tech issues.
Jason Katcher
ps. PT also shared in a comment, that they impressed MSFT with the “ANY DEVICE” mantra…by accessing a Mainframe with an XBOX…with native delivery
9. PT…”GW can replace Dropbox with sync and share”… valuable to MSFT? (another major company we can replace as our product makes theirs obsolete)
10. Wow the presence of both L O and Hong on ANYs opening bell podium speaks volumes on the relationship bw S3D and MS… (2 high level MSFT V.P’s – very unusual for MSFT to have these caliber of people at a bell ringing – shows extremely strong support for ANY)
11. The link below is not regarding the NYC presentation comments, but is an article regarding MSFT XBOX and how the new Xbox1 will be able to run programs that had been written for the older Xbox’es that SO MANY of the gamers love. As far as I know, Glassware is the only program that can take the old programs and allow them to be run on the new XBOX1 so I have to think this is another partnership revenue stream for ANY with MSFT. Notice they never say how they are able to do this, thus Glassware is their “secret sauce” for the time being. Just another revenue stream for Glassware and according to the MSFT program mgr for containerization it will be years before the IT sector realizes the full range of applications for containers so the future can only explode with additional revenues for ANY.
arch1 June 17, 2015 .DR Kiss Thank you for this post I think it has great possibilities.$MSFT is going to have great difficulties in getting business to switch from XP-W7 to Windows Ten despite free upgrade for first year after July 29 release. Cloud is the future and Glassware reputedly has the best virtual machine to make it seamlessly available. Thanks for link to Merck,,$79 sounds right to me. frank
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Curt June 17, 2015 Re $ANY: I’m not tech savvy and not sure whether this June 15th announcement from IBM has significance with regard to these postings: “On Monday, IBM announced it will invest about $300 million over the next few years and assign 3,500 people to help develop an up-and-coming technology known as Spark. IBM called Spark “the most significant open source project of the next decade.” This was very good news for a two-year-old startup called Databricks, founded by the people that invented Spark, and who, today, officially launched their commercial version of Spark. Spark is a free and open source software program managed by the organization that runs many open source projects, the Apache Foundation. In the past year or so, it has become a phenom in the world of big data computing, where companies collect huge amounts of information, store it on low-cost commodity computers, and use a variety of free software to work with the data. Spark has gained attention because it crunches through vast amounts of data super-fast. It won a contest in 2014 known the Gray Sort Benchmark, which measures how fast a system can sort 100 TB of data, or 1 trillion records — Spark took 23 minutes, smashing the previous record of 72 minutes. It is also popular because Spark can be used with other big-data technologies, especially the popular method of storing lots of data, Hadoop. Spark basically replaces an older method of working with data stored in Hadoop invented by Google, known as MapReduce. Spark is not the only free and open source project that replaces MapReduce. Apache Storm is another.”
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arch1 June 17, 2015 Curt No competition between the two. Spark would be used for data retrieval on huge data bases,,,ie rapid search function and is open source. Hard to make money on spark. $ANY has more than one app. but Glassware provides a virtual machine,,ie It fools operating system into thinking it is running on a standalone computer,,,whereas there may be several VMs running on one Windows install.Public libraries do that,, so at the end of the day when the vm is full of viruses and nasty leftovers from porn sites they just wipe the vm out and start fresh the next day with a new/pristine virtual machine. That is not to say that IBM will not make $$$$$ on Spark but IMO buying $IBM would be how to buy into it. frank
Ahagelthorpe, I tried to link directly to the table in SEDI that shows the acquisitions and dispositions of equity and post it but when I tested it I ended up on the SEDI start page.
So here is what I can tell you: I just used Lucror's link in post #29108 to get to the site (start page). Then you have to figure a few things out. One thing I discovered was the Issuer Number for S3D is 00029936. It is also useful to know they are identified under the classification of "Industrial products - technology - software. You probably will have to enter S3D's proper name = Sphere 3D Corp. You have to get it right. I sorted by the Insider Transaction detail. That is about all I can remember as I had several stops and restarts to figure out the above items were the choices I needed to finally get there.
The path could be easier but if you fiddle around and use the above info I think you will find it. Good Luck!
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