Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: A corollary question, whom do you see in deals?

Sash Sunkara: From a DR perspective, we often see Zerto. We used to see others too. Zerto has quite a strong foothold in the lower end service providers, more in the SMB space. We are starting to see some of them in enterprises. We’ve beaten them in quite a few of the enterprise deals. We do address enterprise complexity very well. In the cloud management space, we see competitors like Red Hat. In a pure migration deal, we sometimes we see Arasimi but not as much as we used to. There are internal tools as well.

Sramana Mitra: When you win deals, do you win deals because of your integrated solution?

Sash Sunkara: We do. We just finished a deal with IBM where they are looking to do several things. They currently have their own data center but they want to migrate that into the cloud to move production. They absolutely want to have DR instantly as they move these production workloads to make sure that they’re available. We’re migrating those applications to a production data center.

Once we do that, we’re replicating that to a DR site, which is another cloud. Then setting up the DR policies to be able to fail over. Ultimately, we’re going to be providing them a single pane of management to be able to manage all of these resources. They’re going to a single cloud now from a production perspective but they plan to go to other clouds like Azure, Amazon, and Google Compute Engine.

For them, the reason they picked us is not only can we meet their needs tactically, but it is also strategically about where they want to go. One of the big things that enterprises have learned over the last 15 to 20 years is lock-in is not something they can afford. They want to make sure that their strategy is about hybrid and it’s multi-cloud. That’s something we deliver with our current platform.

Sramana Mitra: Segment your customer base for us. Where are you finding the sweet spot?

Sash Sunkara: Our differentiation shines in the enterprise – anything from the midsize to some of the larger clients. We tend to focus on larger clients because they’re bigger deals. We have some SMB customers as well. Majority of our clients are midsize to larger enterprises. From a vertical perspective, we’ve done a lot in healthcare. We’ve done much in consumer and retail. We’re just starting to make traction in the SaaS vertical as well.

If you have an Oracle database, what are you doing to do with that? You’re not going to put a part of your solution stack somewhere and have Oracle database somewhere else. What are you going to do with Oracle Rack? What are you going to do with your SQL Cluster? What are you going to do with network storage?

One of the big problems with cloud is you cannot count on like-for-like. If you have network storage and network appliance in your data center, you can’t count on that being there in the cloud. They could be using a a completely different technology. What we really do for the client is we abstract all of that away. We allow them to go anywhere regardless of the technology they have at their source.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware
1 2 3 4 5