Wayne Lam Builds Cirrus Data To Solve Data Migration Challenge
Wayne Lam is an exuberant, self-described serial entrepreneur who has been building businesses helping customers solve their computing and data storage challenges since his undergraduate days as an electrical engineering student at Cooper Union in Manhattan, New York City.
Lam, his brother Wai and their long-time team of engineers co-founded Cirrus Data, a developer of cloud, data center and storage area network applications for data migration and caching services. Founded in 2011, Lam is the CEO of the Jericho, New York headquartered company. This founder’s journey story is based on my interview with Lam.
Cirrus Data Co-Founder and CEO Wayne Lam.
Cirrus Data
Cirrus Data is part of the boom in data migration software and services. The process of moving data from point A to B is increasingly important as companies look to keep up with data storage trends by moving their on-premise data to cloud computing infrastructure, including multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. The global data migration market reached $11.49 billion in 2022 with an expected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.5%, according to Markets and Markets.
Lam was getting set to leave FalconStor Software, a virtualisation data storage company he co-founded with ReiJane Huai in 2000. The company went public and became a high-flying growth company named to the Forbes fastest growing tech companies in 2008. But the company had become controversial, when Huai was investigated for financial misconduct. The company was forced to pay fines and ultimately delisted from NASDAQ to OTC. Huai died of an apparent suicide in 2011.
“I had a group of really seasoned engineers, my brother for example, along with several other programmers, available. We saw that the FalconStor solution was good, but hard to deploy and I think that FalconStor could have been a lot more successful if we overcame the issue, but we never did,” says Lam.
Lam and his team came up with a concept they called “Transparent Datapath Intercept” or TDI that would make it easy to deploy and allow for data migration without disrupting the datacenter. “We decided to start a company just focusing on migration. And once we made that decision, we meant it to be a stepping stone, once we validated the technology to do much bigger things. And that was 11 years ago. And we never got out of it. Why? Because, we become incredibly successful in migration,” says Lam.
Companies like Walgreens, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Volkswagen and over 500 organisations worldwide are using Cirrus technology to migrate any block-level data from any environment to any other environment with no business disruption. Its flagship Cirrus Migrate Cloud is a data mobility-as-a-service solution publicly available on the AWS, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud marketplaces. It relies on systems integrators, managed service providers, channel resellers, and partners like HPE, IBM, Dell Technologies, Hitachi, NetApp and CDW to distribute its technology, as well as working with systems integrators like Accenture, HCL, TCS, Capgemini and others.
Despite the 100 person-plus company’s continuing strong growth and seeming bright future given the near insatiable demand for data migration and mobility services, Cirrus has never taken institutional venture funding and founded the company raising funds only from friends and family. Within the first two months of founding the company, Lam and his brother raised over $4 million, giving the company ample financial resources to build the TDI technology, attract employees and gain customers. Lam sees it as an advantage to not be beholden to outside investors in order to make the right decisions for long-term success.
Lam was born in China and moved to the U.S. when he was 10 and points to his grandmother as inspiration for his entrepreneurial drive. She came to the U.S. first among his family in 1949. “She came to the U.S. all by herself when she was 30 and started a coffee shop to make money and provide for her family,” says Lam. In 1975, she applied to immigration to have Wayne and his family join her in in the U.S. running the coffee shop. Wayne’s father took over running the shop when his grandmother died. But Lam had different ambitions than running a coffee shop.
“I guess that kind of entrepreneurial spirit was passed along to the children and I probably inherited it the most. She was also an avid Buddhist monk. I don’t share this a lot with other people, she taught me about Karma and how to treat people right or it will come back to haunt you,” says Lam. As a scientist, Lam views the concept as superstition, but one that makes good common sense. Nonetheless, Lam has his own charitable foundation and also endeavours to apply the concept of treating people right with employees and customers.
“I consider myself very lucky. I share the typical American immigration dream, right from day one. I don’t want to ever work for anyone. And it’s all about building a team. And because I treat my team really well, my core team has been with me going back several companies,” says Lam, who was both talented, ambitious and lucky to be accepted at Cooper Union College where he started his first company.
Each of Lam’s companies were named after aircraft names because of his love of airplanes going back to his childhood building model airplanes in order to cope with the challenges of being a new comer to a new country and culture at 10. His first software company, Cheyenne Software, was named after flying in his co-founder’s Cheyenne airplane, a turboprop made by Piper Aircraft. Subsequent companies were similarly named. FalconStor was named after Falcon Jet, made by Dassault.
In developing the name of his current company, Lam says, “It had to be something like ‘serious data,’ so that led to Cirrus Data which turned out to be a really good name because we offer cloud data migration and security.” It also happened to be the name of Lam’s own personal Cirrus aircraft.
As for the future? Lam has no interest in taking the company public, but might consider being acquired if the terms were right. “It took us 11 years to build up a respectable migration business. So I’m sure we can use that to fund the other developments in data protection and data analysis. Short of a liquidity event, there’s plenty to do,” concludes Lam.
