Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I think we understand what you’re doing and what’s happening in this emerging trend of having to manage this copy data. You’ve been in the space. You’ve done other companies in the data management space. What is your observation from an industry-level perspective? What are the trends? What are the open problems?

Ed Walsh: Obviously, there’s a reason I chose to do Catalogic. I think it fills a big void there. In general, there’s a $38 billion storage business that helps people build private clouds. People are trying to build their own environments inside their four walls. They are trying to have cloud economics that are similar to what people are doing in the public cloud, but they’re stuck with some old processes that makes them almost impossible to keep up with economics—the way we backup and replicate, and the way we protect our environment. In a typical enterprise, you have one copy of data. It’s not just for copy data management. In the public cloud, it’s much more efficient. You just wouldn’t do some of these things. You do different ways of archiving. What’s happening is people are looking at both and building it inside my four walls with the same economics. It’s a challenge. They, over time, built up their own processes to have resiliency and protection.

The other thing is, how to leverage some of the economics and the scale of the cloud. How do I secure and use the storage, and leverage the compute? Can I use a more efficient dev ops or analytics type of compute to spin off Hadoop nodes instead of trying to do that in my own private cloud? It brings up a whole bunch of challenges around process, security, and also infrastructure and how you do that orchestration automation. You’ll see it play out into what people are doing in their own portfolios. You’ll see Flash types of technologies, which are more expensive but dramatically better performing. People want to get the economies but they’re stuck in their own process that really affects almost everything people are doing in this particular industry segment. So far, they have decided not to necessarily go completely public cloud for a whole bunch of hosting reasons. That’s a dramatic change for what you build and how you run environments.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software
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