Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rao Papolu, CEO of Cavirin (Part 1)

The cyber security market is intensely rich in startup activity and equally rich in threats. This conversation explores some of the challenges of CISO’s face today.

We will bring you some CISO interviews soon to extend this conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and Cavirin.

Rao Papolu: I studied at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras. I started working through UPSC as a scientist forthe Department of Defense in India. Then I moved to the US in 1987. I was a visiting scientist at Michigan University – Ann Arbor. From there, I went to Tokyo. I lived in Tokyo for 14 years. During my 14 years, I ran two companies. I was involved in investment banking. JP Morgan was the last company.

From there, I moved again to the United States. In 2001, I established the SRA group. SRA is a holding company. Then I started a product. It’s a middleware application stack in the open source arena. I established the company in 2005 called SRA OSS. I wanted to ambitiously grow more and more. We started investing in various technologies. I chose three technologies. One is data center. Another is wireless. The third is media and entertainment.

As a parent company in Japan supporting all these investments, I invested these three technologies. There is a company called End Solution where we invested as a partner. Subsequently we acquired the technology. The technology originated from Bell Labs. I was the Founder and I started Cavirin in 2012.

Cavirin is cloud automation for virtual resource. We made it in the AWS marketplace in early 2014. From there, we accelerate our growth. We are the only company that has hybrid support. The company has been growing so fast. The cloud adoption from the market has really helped drive and solve various interesting problems for the enterprise.

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you a very simple question which always helps me understand the positioning of a company. What other competitors do you see in deals when you go out and sell? Whom are you having to tackle as competitors?

Rao Papolu: When the market has a lot of competitors, that means there is a lot of opportunity. Cloud adoption is fantastic. Cloud is accelerating. I see some competition in cloud technologies when it comes to cloud support. There are companies supporting Docker containers. There are companies supporting only for enterprise data center space.

We built a phenomenal platform and through the platform, we support end-to-end. Not only end-to-end but also through API-driven platform. That means we support hybrid cloud. We also support Docker containers. We also support multi-cloud.

Even though AWS has built a phenomenal market lead in the cloud space, there is a gap in the enterprise market. You see Azure’s growth has been phenomenal.

Sramana Mitra: Market shares are shifting quite a bit.

Rao Papolu: Google is following and they have been spending a lot of money. What is enterprise looking for? Enterprise is trying to build the perfect cloud. When cloud adoption is there, there is a huge risk in the  market. The instances come and go. You have to have a continuous visibility and continuous security these days. Imagine how many things happen in the cloud. You should have a strong vision and mission to support the enterprise together with data center. That’s where we are. We are the company  that supports hybrid cloud.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rao Papolu, CEO of Cavirin
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