Comtrade Group’s Vladan Atanasijevic on Disaster Recovery

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. Welcome back here to Techron tv.

Want to introduce you to Vladin and I'm gonna do my best on this. Vladin, anvik, Vladin, Vladin Vic and I, anvik. Maybe, maybe we're gonna call him Vlad.

Vlad, welcome to Text Drug tv. Just for the record, say your name correctly, so your family hears it. They, they don't think, oh, that guy butchered it.

Thank you. So my last name is Vic. Sorry, Elizabeth Long, my name is Vlada, but you can call me la.

So, you know, there was one very good famous basketball player in NBN. He played the Lakers and Sacramento kids. So is pretty To pronounce.

Yeah, no, that Vlad has become, especially for basketball fans. Uh, a very popular name. Right.

So good, good for you. And Vlad, thank you. And I appreciate you, you coming on and, and talking to us today.

So Vlad, you are the, uh, COO Chief Operations Officer at a company called Comrade Group. And before we get into Compr Group, let's talk a little bit about your background. How did you come to become a COO over here?

Well, we need to go back to I'm more than 30 years in business. Originally, I'm a software engineer, so I was educated from the military engineering. So my background was military engineering.

And actually I started carrying my career in gun factory. So I am a producing the software for, for the, you know, the, the gap picture is very, very old established 1853 in my hometown. This is where I'm original.

So basically I think it's pretty good basic, you know, if you are starting to become the military engineer to be, to produce the software you need, think about a lot of things. Not only about innovation, but you also need to think about availability. So I start by career, that group and then, you know, to different, different stories.

10 years ago I started with the software engineer. Nine years ago I was on chief corporation officer for the whole, so you maybe remember the yugos. So that company was producing the stead cut.

So, you know, after nine years I started as a programmer, but then I was on still level, uh, in the board of directors possible for the call it, there was about 46 companies in that room. But then I do the contract delete, and then I start my own company stock, the outsourcing call. So that was the huge start.

Sure. You know, like typically to go out to your conference zone. So I step out, I created a software outsourcing company, but we were entertained at that time, the Microsoft boutique, very, very profitable Microsoft technology.

And we, our clients was through the premise software company. Now they were creating a software from the HP but also from the Microsoft themself. And then five years later they acquired my company.

Then with was few steps. I was the GM of few companies, then I stepped out rejoined. So I did a lot of things from the corporate perspective, but also, I don't know, did I short share my story?

But actually thank you. It's a fascinating story. I haven't heard people talk about the Hugo in a long time.

I'll be honest with you. It's been a long time, but in many ways then Harold did a lot of the, you know, the small smart card, the minis, all those. I mean that, that's taken us back.

So Vlad comrade, yeah, some of our audience is probably familiar, but I'm gonna bet a lot of our audience isn't. How would you describe Comrade to them? COMT is only born in 1990s and we have, I would say two major, major.

One is in distribution and the second one other one is the stock develop. So, you know, we start with one branch as a distributor of the railroad known brand. They're speaking about at the Arctic region.

We, this is where the original, the company was bought and then, then there was two companies, one focused on distribution of the title de uh, compact Like channel, Like channel. And then the company who was doing the stock development more than 1000 engine and then, you know, joined 2008 company, acquired the other companies and became the biggest company in this area providing the services global from the early beginning in 1990s, we start working with and the, for hp we create one of their products for the disaster power called Data Protect. Because this is the original, how we start being really deep, deep in this disaster recovery.

Then can the other customers that we were providing develop for that such as automotive industry in industry, you know, then we created several companies back in this 30 years, three zero years, we spin off several companies. For instance, in 2020 we spin off company called Company Digital Service to end up and company listed with the new stock exchange spin of that company. Then, uh, 2021, the spin of the other company called very well known in Disaster recovery world.

And actually being capital acquired KU from us. So, you know, you see that 30 years ago we started doing software develop and business from the real tech company coming there is still of several companies, but still some of the knowledge is here. Why?

Because the, the one part of the company services remain to contract. And then we named the company for quantity three six. So the quantity 360 was what we actually speaking about all the knowledge from those 30 years when we start building some specific solutions, the product opened is still here.

But in short, I don't know that I give you any idea about the, if we are, think about the pillars. Revenue is around 500 million euro thousand million of per year. And we have around 3000 employees in different Wow, That's sizable.

That's a big company. It's a big company. So, and, and well what's funny is even though you've spun off companies that got acquired by Bain and stuff like that at your heart though, there's still the, uh, Dr.

Disaster recovery kind of expertise within the company. Um, and and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that today. Right?

Look, I'm like you, I've, I've been in technology a couple, couple minutes myself, right? A long time. 30 plus years.

And over that time, you know, there was a time where disaster recovery to me meant you had big tape machines, right? And a tape library. And then that tape library was very automated.

There'd be like a robotic arm that would pull that tape out and get, but you know, and, and thank God we never had to really restore very often. 'cause what we found out is it could take weeks to restore something if it, if it went bad, right? The so, but DR has always been i 23 years, I'm down here in Florida now, right?

And our fear is always that some big hurricane is gonna come and wipe out the data center and how are we gonna, well, you know, cut off all the power. We need generators, we need backup, we need offsite backup, we need everything, right? The cloud came along.

The cloud made a huge difference in terms of DR because we were no longer high to a data center or even a company's data centers. We, we could be in this region and that region and mirrored here and mirrored there. And it kind of changed the DR game.

Then we started, started seeing things like ransomware and all of a sudden having a DR that was off pre not connected. Wow. What a lifesaver that was for a lot of companies.

So we've seen a, an evolution of it's not, it's not your father's disaster recovery anymore. Talk to us a you know what, but I'm not in it. You are in it Vlad, You know, What's the latest and greatest.

Yeah. Funny thing when I start my professional career, I started in IBM computer center, so I remember the taste. You remember those, huh?

Me too. By my own, you know, Uhhuh. And yes, as you said, you know, we in the, for instance, in one of the companies, we have two computer center and there was one other, you know, disaster recovery center because we replicated the data mostly over the weekend, you know, Sunday, Saturday, Sunday, and yeah.

But in the technology dramatically changes, as you said, the, the internet then the cloud, you know, all those dramatically changed, but what didn't change for all those years didn't change. The reason why you need to have disaster economy. So first of all, you need to have the business continuity.

So the business continuity is the best, but it was 30 years ago, 2000 today. What's changed? The speed of technology change.

The impact of technology on whatever business you're doing is not much big. What does it mean? It means that you really need to invest in advance to the disaster car.

What is the typical mistake back 30 years ago, but now it should be invest in disaster recovery before the disaster happen. Or it's always, always smarter and cheaper to invest in front of, you know, to be, to, to act in the front of the any disaster. So this is what we happen, but now based on the cloud technology, it bring us a lot of, let's say, decrease of the cost.

You know, it's much easier now not to have all the premises. You remember how it was, you know, given the cooler as as a house. Now you don't need to think about it.

But now it's really the matter of the privacy because when you order your own, you know, the disaster recover as a service, it's very nice. It's easy to, you know, just click and tab it. But on the other hand, you know, it's about just two, I would say very, very challenging things.

One is about the privacy of the data and the second who is responsible for the data. Meaning it's somebody who is your cloud provider. They are not responsible to keep your data back up from the data is not only about the data, it's also the application.

You have all your business application in the cloud and you know, they said, okay, it might lose. We don't guarantee you that it'll be there. So what does it mean is the, you, you want to prevent disaster, we need to stick.

Okay, how can I really have the fully operated? And then now we are planning to this either hybrid month or specific service product. So this is where we as a quantum 360 or let's say the company experience, okay, let's do the analysis.

What is variable you need? What kind of the data application we need to recover, how fast need to do it? And then to different product speaker, I dunno, did I a little bit?

No, No, I, I think you're dead on Vlad. These are, these are the things that we, we need to do here. So you, you know what I see, you didn't mention AI though.

Everything we hear about today is ai, but I've heard people say AI is gonna make DR much easier. It'll be totally automated, easier to back up, easier to restore. What are you seeing on that?

I have to come back to my history because in some particular years I was running system integration in the 12 countries around the Southeast Europe and uh, we have major clients in banking division. They down, both of them are sensitive being different type of sensitivity. Why?

Because with the banks, you know, if, if the bank is not running all the time, they're losing the line. Then there is reputation. They loss the data.

It's totally disaster. Now why, why I'm explaining those two things. It's about the business continuity and it's about the data.

Now for the banks, they wanted to have disaster recovery because the, the, the sector banks and the regulators forced them to have, for us as a system rate was easy money because we offered itself. But then problem came the in the moment when they really need to prove if something happened, they need to run the, they're speaking about the needs now in the government. Totally different.

They is okay for us to, they start offering the service to citizens in one day or three days. It's not of critical as that, but we need to recover and to secure all the data, Don you must secure them. There is no data bricks.

So Don things actually forced us about this. All those things. Business, how to ensure that the service will be in the banks, the real time industry will continuously, and then in the government to keep the data monitor.

Then you can force to, let's say, to postpone the, let's say the, as the answer of those questions and what you need to keep Mark, have the solution that you provide, how together, how to, this is actually what we do believe that it's most critical model. Now we said about the ai, AI I don't think can replicate the, the human in all in the aspects to do this replication of the database of the just do the snapshot of some application. It's fine.

And then when it comes to run the service around it, I'm not sure that it will be running. Just like, so we are also using a lot of machine learning AI stuff to make it very efficient in productive to do this application. But when it comes to run the service, then somebody needs to monitor and then jump in and to, this is our Understood, you know, Vlad, I I feel like I I we missed, I, not that we missed, but I didn't explain it good to the people out there.

When we talk about comrade, it's Comrade group is sort of the parent organization, right? Comrade group and you're the COO of comrade group. But the whole DR thing that we're talking about is part of Comrade 360 is, is that correct?

One part is because we are, we uh, we to the product development for some different vendors such as, well, such as hp, such as cyber forecast, this is what we are in the other companies, we system integrators and then we are offering those service. So we are using some of the products from the vendor. We are aware the, and then implementing and giving them business continuity.

So there are different things that we are the first we the customers, they want to go some consulting, how require business, what, what type of disaster recovery solution we would like to set up. It's one thing, if there is a way we would like to build some product because we it several times, then system come in and or say then may all the requirements and the whole product develop side the cloud. We do believe the, the answer because the cloud, yes, it's time to help, but at the end of the day, you know, some the data like to keep on new premises because of different maybe the volume of data you have ations very, very, very cost.

It's expensive for to put all more data in the, maybe the, You know, you think about it, right? The cloud was supposed to take the expense side of that. But what we found out is it's still cheaper to keep the stuff in your own data center then into cloud.

You need to really understand what, what impact to your business, critical point of view, data cost point of yourself and then to do the best for our business. Absolutely. Vlad, we're almost out of time, but I wanna make sure for people out here watching who's, you know, look, Dr is every single company watching this needs a DR plan, right?

What's the best, like what's the path? What website should they go to to engage with Compr? What's the website they go?

Yeah, website is comp three com. Our quarter of that company is in Boston, Massachusetts. And we have the GM store that running operation us they can find is easy to find, to understand how to approach us, what to see, what would be the, the, the, the right question.

They carry the case studies. That's the best way to get know about that. And what, what's the web address?

I didn't hear it colleague. Is it compre group do com. Compre 360 what?

com. Perfect. Alright, Vlad, that's the one thing if I, if I don't get anything else out, I want them to know where to go get that.

com. Vlad, I want to thank you for coming on today and giving us what a fascinating story. You know, like, like a lot of work in it.

A lot of it isn't sexy. A lot of it is just the nuts and bolts of how, how we do business. Disaster recovery is one of those things, right?

We kind of take it for granted. Yeah, of course we gotta do it, but people sometimes need to be reminded. Unfortunately, it's when disaster strikes that they get reminded.

But it, it's good to know when you don't need it, that it's there and, and how important it is and work and how people like you and the folks are compr, you know, work on it so that when we do need it, it works the way we want it to. Thank you. Keep up the great work.

Okay. And we'll have you again soon. Thank you.