Unicorn in the Making: Datrium CTO Sazzala Reddy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you work at Cohera?

Sazzala Reddy: I was there for a year or so. Then I started looking around. I had a friend who happened to be in a networking company called Cosine Communications. It was a slightly bigger company. Then the market crashed.

I saw the sign on the door that this is not going to do well. I started thinking about what to do next. I had friends who went to Data Domain. It’s a backup company. I had some friends who went to a company that was doing database column stores. The professor was with another company called RTI, which eventually became Vertica.

I chose to go to Vertica just to see how it is. I was there for a very short time. Maybe six months or so. Then I decided to bail out because I was not sure how that was going to go. I went to Data Domain ultimately.

Sramana Mitra: What years are we talking now?

Sazzala Reddy: Data Domain was 2003. 

Sramana Mitra: What role were you playing in Data Domain?

Sazzala Reddy: I joined as a software engineer.

Sramana Mitra: How long were you there?

Sazzala Reddy: I was there for nine years. Data Domain was a very successful company. They changed the whole industry and how people do backups. EMC bought the company in 2009. I became the CTO of the Data Domain division in EMC. I left in 2012.

I was thinking about what I wanted to do. There was a company called SpringPath. I joined SpringPath as employee number one. I was the Chief Architect there. I helped build the core foundation of the platform. They wanted to sell to Cisco, and I wasn’t ready to be bought by another big company.

I left and formed a team of five founders including me. We worked together in a basement and we started Datrium. 

Sramana Mitra: What is Datrium?

Sazzala Reddy: We provide cloud data services for large enterprises.

Sramana Mitra: Elaborate.

Sazzala Reddy: We focus on a particular use case. We build a broad data mobility platform where you can easily move from one cloud to another and provide data services to companies. I’ll give a concrete example. Large enterprises have data centers which are physical data centers living on their sites.

The challenge is that when you have disasters, the business is down when the data center is down. People replicate the data and keep another data center. The challenge with that is, it’s very expensive. The process is very complex. All the different pieces of equipment have to work together. It’s not a very easy task.

What we are offering is, we provide you a path where you can shut down the second data center and leverage the cloud as your second data center like an on-demand data center. We turned the whole process of disaster recovery into a simple SaaS product.

The advantage is that it’s like paying for insurance after you have a disaster. You don’t have to buy a lot of servers until you actually have a disaster. You can come back on premise when the disaster has been resolved.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Unicorn in the Making: Datrium CTO Sazzala Reddy
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