The past few years have seen explosive growth in data worldwide, leading to enterprise pains and opportunities alike, spanning: dramatic increases in storage costs, enterprise priorities for cost-optimized cloud migration and accelerated AI adoption plans as cloud-based AI and ML services mature.
Amid these trends, Komprise has seen rampant market uptake of its value proposition for unstructured data management. To learn more, VMblog spoke with Krishna Subramanian, Co-Founder, President and COO at Komprise.
VMblog: Last year was a strong year for Komprise, with 115% growth in sales, according to your recent press release. Explain the reasons behind this momentum and what kind of customer environments benefit the most from your software?
Krishna Subramanian: As the rampant growth of file and object data continues, customers realize they need a data management layer that gives them a view of all their data and helps them modernize and move to the cloud with intelligent data mobility. Komprise is used by data intensive customers in markets such as pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, genomics, hospitals, research institutes, police departments, media and entertainment companies, and universities. We doubled the rate of new customer acquisition last year, and our existing customers are also expanding their footprint: both of these contributed to our strong growth.
VMblog: On your website, you talk about the need for an “independent data management layer” that can look across all cloud and on-premises storage silos and move data between them without lock-in. What does that mean exactly?
Subramanian: Data outlives the storage it lives on – and as data growth continues to explode, customers can no longer afford to manage data in storage silos and use limited proprietary tools within each storage silo. Most enterprises have a multi-vendor, hybrid cloud environment. They want visibility across all these environments, they want to tier, migrate and replicate the right data to the right storage tier regardless of vendor and most importantly, they want users to be able to easily search, find and use data wherever it lives. Storage-based data management is limited, proprietary and does not enable the use of native cloud services. This is why customers are adopting an independent data management layer. Enterprise IT teams don’t want to be tied down. They want to deliver data services to the business, which means they need to be able to move their growing volumes of unstructured data whenever and wherever they wish without penalty and without cost-prohibitive licensing requirements.
VMblog: And what if a company has only one storage vendor and has limited data in the cloud? Is the above still relevant?
Subramanian: We have many customers who have a single storage vendor on-premises and are using Komprise to manage and tier data because they want to take advantage of the power of the cloud on their data without lock-in. Komprise Transparent Move Technology (TMT) is a patented solution that tiers data across file and object storage at the file level with full native access at each tier. This means unlike storage-based tiering that puts proprietary blocks in the cloud that are meaningless, users can access data moved by Komprise both as files from the original location and as objects directly in the cloud. This file-object duality is key for customers who want to use data in the cloud for legal hold, or for additional lifecycle management or to run cloud analytics and data processing services. Ultimately, IT organizations need to ensure that they always have access to and control of their data no matter where it lives and the flexibility to manage data without hassles or licensing fees.
VMblog: Storage roles are changing, albeit slowly. What do storage departments need to do differently to deliver data services rather than storage hardware management?
Subramanian: To move from storage management to data services you need the ability to abstract storage resources in hybrid cloud environments and automate the movement of data across those resources. The job of procuring and configuring hardware has become much less complex with cloud and DevOps automation. Storage architects will need more knowledge about running multi-cloud cloud infrastructure, data usage and data lifecycles-cutting costs and supporting business-led analytics programs. They will have tighter collaboration with data owners/LOB, to understand their requirements for performance, durability and availability and then automate the provisioning of storage as needs change over time.
VMblog: Can you tell us the top three ways that organizations benefit from using your software?
Subramanian: First, Komprise helps organizations understand their data wherever it lives. Our software analyzes data across all your storage-on prem and in the cloud-to forecast savings. It can show you the age of your data, last time accessed, owners and other variables to help you decide how to best manage it. The first step to managing your data for cost and value is knowing what you have and where it is.
Second, Komprise does smart data migration, which means we move your data in a way that doesn’t impact users with our patented Transparent Move Technology. Users access their files just as before using industry standard symlinks–no need to look for them -and with full metadata and file fidelity at the new location. Users also get direct access to data moved to the cloud without needing to rehydrate it first to the original storage box which incurs extra cost. They can then connect data sets to powerful cloud tools like Snowflake or Azure Sagemaker for analysis. Our goal is to make data migrations easy, lower cost and pain-free for users and storage admins alike. And then, ensure that data that has been moved to the cloud isn’t just parked there but can be leveraged.
Thirdly, Komprise provides a foundation for data monetization. With so much innovation in the cloud these days in analytics, machine learning and AI, it’s crazy to not leverage these new affordable and scalable services. But getting the data to these tools and services is not easy. It’s usually an inefficient manual effort, and in the past, organizations have tried to create a centralized repository of data but that has proven increasingly difficult and expensive given the size of data and its distribution across data centers, edge systems and multiple clouds. Komprise makes this easier because we are constantly indexing customers files, creating a Global File Index. Users can search for data with specific parameters like date/owner/file type, so individuals can search for precise data sets and then send it to an analytics platform. Komprise can continue to identify, tag and move data automatically to the target location, under policies that users create. This lowers the risk of big data projects and makes it easier/cheaper to start using these tools. In some cases, AI and ML tools will add additional tags to further categorize and organize data-such as “containing PII”– making it more useful and discoverable.
VMblog: A trending topic is managing unstructured data so that it can be used for value-driving activities, such as AI or ML projects. Is this top of mind for most enterprise IT organizations or only in certain sectors?
Subramanian: For decades, managing data entailed collecting, storing and occasionally accessing it. The focus has been on managing costs and ensuring reliable access to users. That has all changed in recent years as organizations seek to leverage new insights from the massive amounts of data stored in myriad locations, from corporate data centers to the cloud and the edge. Analyzing unstructured data is becoming pivotal because machine learning relies on unstructured data-and most sectors are keenly interested in the world of AI and ML. Enterprises need to rapidly parse through data – much of it unstructured – to find the information that will drive business decisions. It won’t be long before unstructured data analytics becomes a mainstream requirement for competition.
VMblog: What do you think needs to happen for unstructured data management to really take off and become mainstream?
Subramanian: A few years ago, Gartner noted that our industry doesn’t have a data storage problem, it has a data management problem. That’s why we founded Komprise. We see the world moving from storage administration to strategic data management and analytics. From data locked away to data free for users to securely access when needed. But a few things still need to happen. Enterprise IT teams need to stop the endless cycle of buying more storage every three years, treating all data the same and using the cloud as a cheap storage locker. Instead, organizations need to focus on delivering data services to the business. With this new focus, they can develop strategies and adopt tools that will turn their growing volumes of unstructured data into data value, rather than living by the traditional set of data storage metrics. Liberating unstructured data so that it can be cost-effectively used in a variety of new analytics applications – in the cloud or otherwise – should be the goal. And we know that organizations want to use these tools. The trick is getting the right data sets to these tools, quickly and efficiently in order to drive actionable insights and outcomes that will drive better business performance.
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