Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Portworx CEO Murli Mohan Thirumale (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What does the ecosystem look like in terms of competitors? Does Portworx have competitors?

Murli Thirumale: Yes, we do. I’ll give you an example of the competitive environment by giving you a few use cases so that we can talk about why our competitors are not able to do what we do. An awesome example is how widely we are deployed.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Portworx CEO Murli Mohan Thirumale (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me double-click down on one more layer based on what you have said. Is Portworx sitting on top of the traditional storage players? Is it like a caching solution on top of the existing one?

Mohan Thirumale: Yes, it’s not unlike caching, but it’s doing two things. One is exactly what you describe. It’s a software layer that sits on existing storage that people have.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Portworx CEO Murli Mohan Thirumale (Part 2)

Murli Thirumale: What has been driving the world in the last five years has been app agility. It’s how you develop apps anywhere really quickly. Apps are changing, and it’s a very competitive environment. People are using an application to win in their business whether it’s in banking or if it’s a service provider.

The desire is to be able to make rapid app changes and deploy those changes very quickly. That’s led to a new technology called containers. It’s pretty prevalent right now.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Portworx CEO Murli Mohan Thirumale (Part 1)

I’ve known Murli for 20 years and love how he marries strategy and deep technical domain knowledge. 

This conversation is extremely technical, and you’d get a precise view of what’s happening in the storage industry as a player like Pure Storage tries to move up the stack and acquire a startup like Portworx.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Florian Winterstein, CEO of Jedox (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I want to hear your perspective on what I’m thinking. One trend that I am picking up on the market is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). We have a lot of SaaS companies. Some of them are starting to build a platform as a service. They are opening up their platform to integrations and APIs to build applications on top of and creating an ecosystem. Is this part of your strategy? Are you doing a Platform-as-a-Service strategy?

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Florian Winterstein, CEO of Jedox (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: My next question is double-clicking down to your FP&A use cases. You started off talking about data lakes and leveraging data more aggressively. Could you talk about the technology infrastructure that you are working with?

What ERP systems are you drawing from or interfacing with? What does the integration layer look like? Are you using the integration layer technology like the Snaplogic or the Neilsoft? How are you architected?

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Florian Winterstein, CEO of Jedox (Part 1)

Jedox is doing an excellent PaaS play in Financial Planning and Analysis (xP&A).

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as Jedox.

Florian Winterstein: I’m 48 years old. My home base is in Munich. I lived in Switzerland for a while as well as a couple of years in the US and Singapore. I see myself as a global citizen.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: John McEleney, Head of Strategy, PTC (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: My short experience with CAD in the early 2000’s timeframe was that mechanical design is one of the highest exit barrier industries. People don’t want to get out of the system. It makes innovation very difficult.

John McEleney: We had a slide deck that said what’s happening in our industry. Over the last 20 years, not a lot.