“The most exciting sea change in my career”: Wasabi CFO reflects on AI’s transformative impact
Michael Bayer and Craig Stockdale at the storage company explain how Wasabi is tackling these major issues in the channel.
For Michael Bayer, CFO at Wasabi Technologies, the growth and adoption of AI is something he has never seen before in his life.
“This is among the most exciting sea changes I've seen in my career,” he told CRN Australia exclusively.
Bayer has been in the technology industry long enough to see the internet, mobile and cloud have their disruption moments, but AI for him, is bigger.
"This one is more exciting than all of those put together,” he noted.
“[AI] is going to fundamentally transform how we as humans interact with systems, and I think it's exciting.”
On whether he thinks there is a bubble brewing in the market, he said, “Call your stock market analyst to talk about that.
“I don't think this is going away. I think this is a fundamental shift in how things work.”
He added, “Just like the PC market was disrupted by laptops and then mobile devices. I don't need my PC anymore when I have [my phone] sitting right next to me.
“It is going to get that much more exciting as AI capabilities are everywhere, and they're in my car and in my phone and in my laptop and in my refrigerator. It's going to transform how we do everything.”
As AI capabilities and adoption increases, this puts pressure on their data needs. Craig Stockdale, country manager ANZ at Wasabi Technologies said speaking to partners and customers their data requirements are “continuing to explode”.
"It's an ongoing challenge,” he explained.
“How do I store this data? How do I go about doing it cost effectively in a predictable cost regime? It's something that's on the tip of everyone's tongue.”
No sign of slowing down
Looking into the future, Bayer doesn’t see any sign of excitement around AI and data slowing down.
He believes that 2026 is the year where every company will turn into an AI company. For Wasabi, they’ve started on that journey.
"We just had an exciting development in our own internal systems, where we had our first completely autonomous sales transaction happen. We told our inside system, ‘hey, do this’, and it created a sales quote.”
"I was excited about that happening, because it's the first [sale] but so much more is going to come after that. What I mean by that is we are an AI company now we're fundamentally changing the way that we code, the way that we go to market, the way that we run our internal operations.”
As Wasabi heads into 2027, they’re going to get out of experimentation and begin thinking about the real hard ROI on their AI investments.
“Right now, the outcomes are too unclear, we don't even know what to measure. But we're busy thinking about a year from now, what are we going to be asking ourselves about these AI investments,” he said.
“We're now instrumenting the business so that a year from now, when we have questions about what's working and what's not, we'll be able to answer those questions.”
He added, “It's super exciting, and I don't see it slowing down. It's not a bubble. It's transformative.”
Commentary on the Ramageddon
As the memory shortage continues, vendors are trying out new methods and ways of working to ensure their partners and customers aren’t severely impacted by Ramageddon.
Bayer said Wasabi is facing a “supply chain constraint period”.
“It's not just the normal cycles that we go through of waxing and waning demand that is traditional for every part of the IT supply chain,” he said.
At Wasabi Technologies, Bayer said the company’s focus is making sure they can accommodate to their customer’s demands.
“We want to make sure we're always available and always have capacity for [our partners], we think quarters ahead as to what our customers are going to need, and then we make sure that we're delivering that,” he said.
Stockdale calls this supply chain shortage the “perfect storm”.
“It’s creating confusion, it's creating supply chain issues for a lot of our channel partners,” he said.
“It's requesting our channel partners to look at being more, more innovative and creative. Rather than a hardware led approach, they're now looking at a services-led architectures to be able to go and combine some good technologies.”
Stockdale explains some of the initiatives Wasabi is undertaking to educate and enable their partners.
"[We are] doubling down on hybrid and multi cloud enablement. That is a important thing for our partners to be to understand,” he said.
“If you can't get disk drives and you can't get memory and you can't get what you need. We need to re architect the solution, or we need to think differently about how we service that customer. In that case, that's an opportunity for Wasabi.”
Stockdale ended that this is a “real opportunity”.
“That’s why I call it the perfect storm, because we're at the right place at the right time with the right product, and we can really make an impact for Australian businesses and Australian partners.”