Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Dani Golan, CEO of Kaminario (Part 1)

Dani Golan discusses trends in enterprise storage.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with an introduction to Kaminario and yourself.

Dani Golan: It’s a pleasure to talk to you. It’s exciting times in IT. If you look at the macro trend—whether it’s cloud computing, Internet of Things, Big Data, the explosion of data is at the center of all that. Kaminario is the next generation storage company that caters to the modern infrastructure. We are essentially the data backbone for data that resides in the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about what kind of customers you cater to.

Dani Golan: That is an excellent question. In order to qualify that, let’s look at the big trends in IT catering to the new business models. If I have to characterize the new business environment, it’s far more dynamic than ever before. IT, on the other hand, didn’t keep up with this dynamic nature. In fact, I think it’s quite the opposite. It’s complex. It’s slow to adapt.

Kaminario was established to disrupt this and to build the next generation storage that can support the next generation businesses. To your question, 80% of our customers are cloud providers of various types. As such, we have very dynamic customers with dynamic growth needs. Their data needs to grow very fast. They want to do that in a simple and cost-efficient manner.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s pick maybe three of your customers that are representative of unique and interesting behavior, and let’s double-click down and do some use cases. That will help us understand what is unique and what is differentiated here.

Dani Golan: Absolutely. SaaS is a growing segment in cloud providers. We talked about the sophistication of businesses. Customers are sending all types of application or business process into the cloud. They are consuming them as a service and not on premise. Those SaaS companies are usually growing very fast because, for every new customer, it’s a step function in the amount of data and amount of compute that they need. They need to be very agile in how they react to customer’s demand. Lastly, since the infrastructure is a big part of their expenses, they need to make sure that the cost is not going out of hand.

Let me give you an example of SpotOption. It’s a global binary option platform that actually has very sophisticated operations. On the one hand, you have the front-end that serves the global clients as a trading platform. At the same time, they’re doing quite a sophisticated analytics on top of the trading to make sure that they’re providing the best sophisticated tools for their customers.

Those are very different workloads that are competing for the same resources. They are working on the same data. How do you give this very diverse workload the proper storage infrastructure? With Kaminario, they are able to improve their performance in orders of magnitude. Even more important, the order of magnitude was very consistent.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Dani Golan, CEO of Kaminario
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