Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Dani Golan, CEO of Kaminario (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is it worth while for us to do more use cases or do you think you’ve covered everything that you want to explain in your use case? Is there any nuance that you would be able to highlight with additional use cases?

Dan Golan: We can absolutely highlight some more use cases.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Pick another one.

Dan Golan: Let me take up ZeroChaos. ZeroChaos is a global SaaS provider for workforce management solution. This is a cloud provider that truly needs scalability and consistent performance in any mixed workload. For them, it was all about customer experience. Customers complain that they do get inconsistent experience and they wanted to make sure that they absolutely give very consistent behavior in any parameters.

With us versus other alternatives that they’ve examined, we were the most consistent, and we really gave them 5x performance improvement. What customers like and what ZeroChaos is telling us is that in the past, they were mostly occupied in maintenance. They were trying to make sure that they tune their infrastructure constantly to perform.

With us, the performance and the consistency comes out of the box. That really frees up IT to think about the business and how they can enhance the business effectiveness. They are much more free to help the business versus attending to problems. That’s just unbelievable for these customers.

Sramana Mitra: As you look out into the horizon, what are the key trends in your space and where do you see open problems?

Dan Golan: If you holistically look at enterprise storage, this is a tremendous market. The enterprise storage market is around $50 billion. You can see the traditional deployment actually decreasing while the use cases are going to the private and public cloud. That is a tremendous shake out. The reason is you have six companies really controlling 85% of the market. All those six are declining in market share.

New type of customers are realizing that modern technologies like Kaminario are giving them far better operational benefits and it truly changes how customers are consuming and deploying storage. If you look into the future, we believe that this trend will continue. More and more corporations are going to deploy private and public clouds or, at least, will think of the fundamental requirements, which are flexibility, ease of use, scalability, and cost efficiency. This is where we spend most of our time developing our platform and our software.

Sramana Mitra: This is specifically not about you and your company. This is about new entrepreneurs. If you were to advise new entrepreneurs to go look for open problems to solve, where would you point them?

Dan Golan: That is a great question. If you look at the cloud, one of the elements where customers need help is around Big Data and how to extract more out of the data. There is no doubt that data is growing exponentially. How to convert data into valuable insights is the key. We’re investing a lot in, what we call, Kaminario Clarity.

Clarity is our own real-time analytics that is deployed in our own cloud with very sophisticated machine learning to truly mine the customer environment to give them valuable insights on their environment. I believe that Big Data and data science is the future. If you look at trends like Internet of Things, that will just increase the demand for Big Data. The amount of data with Internet of Things will accelerate. The amount of data that each device will generate is going to explode. Their future is around how to utilize that data.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, except that it is also an incredibly crowded field. We do cover Big Data and we cover Internet of Things in the same mode that we cover cloud computing. These are extraordinarily crowded spaces today.

Dan Golan: I absolutely agree with you that those are crowded spaces. I believe that if you are very focused on not boiling the ocean, but taking a part of those questions that need to be answered on a specific vertical, this is where you can gain a lot of interesting ideas.

Sramana Mitra: I think most of what’s going on right now is fairly precise, focused, vertical cloud stuff. Your point is well-taken. You have to find a niche where you have a competitive edge and where there is a gap in the market. I agree with that. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Dani Golan, CEO of Kaminario
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