Storj CEO Winegar: Distributed storage uptake big in 2025

A new CEO is taking the reins at Storj Labs Inc. following a busy 2024 for the company.

Colby Winegar was promoted to CEO of Storj last month, after serving as chief revenue officer and in other executive roles for the past two years. He replaces Ben Golub in the role, who now serves as executive board chairperson.

This year Storj acquired Valdi, a cloud compute provider, in July. In October it acquired PetaGene, which created the distributed mount client CunoFS for file storage.

Storj sells a distributed object storage service, meaning object data is fragmented over a network of client nodes and data centers and reconstructed for use upon request. Vendors selling distributed storage, such as Storj, say these services provide increased security and reliability as one node cannot possess all the data if compromised.

In this briefing with TechTarget Editorial, Winegar discusses the future challenges for Storj adoption, possible acquisitions and other distributed storage market concerns.

Editor's note: This Q&A has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Colby Winegar

What's the next hurdle for distributed storage adoption in the enterprise?

Colby Winegar: We've crossed the chasm from the early adopters. When we first started, you would see us explain a lot about what this distributed technology is and how it works.

The second big milestone that we've run into is customers saying they need [Storj] in SOC 2-compliant data centers. We launched Storj Select, which geofences customer data to only be in compliant data centers. Now that offering gets us access to this huge market of enterprise customers that can use our product to replace [AWS] S3 object storage, and that has been a big change for us. We have [Storj Select] in the U.S. data centers now. We're bringing out that same product in Europe within the next month and think that it will accelerate adoption.

A challenge facing generative AI is the copyrighted or PII material being appropriated into private models. Considering the nature of distributed storage technology, how would Storj address these concerns?

We haven't gotten deep on that. We don't know what kind of data [is stored by our customers] most the time. But [if the customer] wants this data only to live for a month and then be deleted, we can provide those kind of features. We're also not going to go and analyze everybody's data they're storing on us.

Distributed storage is tied up in crypto tokens and blockchain to ensure payment for storage services. Do you see that model evolving?

When people say it's blockchain-based storage, we say no -- that's not right. We don't use blockchain to make our product work, it's completely independent. Yet the token [crypto payment] helps us to be more efficient. It's not critical to provide the service, but it is very helpful [for paying operators of our] 20,000 nodes all over the world. We use the token instead of doing foreign exchange and dealing with all those issues.

Are any other acquisitions by Storj planned for the immediate future?

Winegar: We didn't have a strategic initiative to go out and buy companies. [Valdi and PetaGene] were both opportunistic and really hard to pass up. We always knew that, in the longer term, we would get into [cloud] compute as we evolved into a platform company.

I think going forward, we're going to do a pause for a bit on this. [We'd] certainly be open to do [acquisitions], but [over] the next three months to six months we need some time to just focus on building those businesses.

Tim McCarthy is a news writer for TechTarget Editorial covering cloud and data storage.