Recently, HyperGrid, a market leader in hybrid Cloud Management Platforms (CMP), announced that its Board of Directors had appointed Manoj Nair, previously the
Company's Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder, as CEO successor to Nariman
Teymourian. To find out more about this promotion and what it means to the future direction of HyperGrid, VMblog was fortunate to sit down and speak with Mr. Nair to get a first hand account of his thoughts and his plans.
VMblog: First off, congratulations. You've been promoted within the company to the CEO
position. Before we jump in too much,
can you tell us a little about your background and how that has prepared you for your new role?
Manoj Nair: My appointment as HyperGrid's new CEO really is the
culmination of a professional life spent working both hands-on and in
leadership positions at Cloud and Cyber Security organizations - two critical
trends that I believe will take on even greater importance for businesses as we
move forward.
I have been fortunate to have worked for and with some of
the best leaders in the industry during my time at companies like Data General,
EMC, RSA, VMware & HPE. I have learned a lot from these leaders and from my
mistakes along the way that have helped me be prepared for this role. One of
the most important ones that I learned from the CEO of EMC Federation, Joe
Tucci, was that one can be appointed as a manager of a team, but it is only the
team who can choose one as the leader. I am most honored to be chosen by the
brilliant and hardworking team at HyperGrid as their next leader and for the
Board's faith in my ability to do this job.
From
an industry background perspective, prior to co-founding HyperGrid and serving
as its CPO, I was the GM for the multi-billion dollar converged cloud software
business at HPE, where I had the ability to truly understand how customers are
looking for Hybrid solutions increasingly in their cloud journey. Looking
further back, I served as SVP leading strategy and R&D for public cloud at the
EMC federation of companies (EMC, VMware, RSA) and this experience was a great
exposure to how technology companies had to morph in supporting customers push
to the Cloud Model. I also had the honor to work closely with the venture team
at EMC Ventures and spent time with several cloud startups prior to and after
sponsoring investments with that team. The true start of my cloud journey
started when I was SVP & GM at RSA for the Enterprise & Consumer Identity
protection portfolios, including the flagship SecurID business. Me and my teams
got introduced to the power of cloud providers like AWS & Azure as a
business transformation and innovation engine that we leveraged to transform
our product portfolio to a SaaS model - the lessons learned from that
experience was foundational in first hand understanding of the customer
drivers, benefits and pain points associated with Cloud adoption.
The
experience I gained from these roles not only has contributed to my views on
what it means to do them right, but I believe also has shaped my vision for how
they can/should be integrated to meet businesses' needs as cloud adoption
continues to accelerate and the threat landscape continues to evolve.
VMblog: The cloud market is evolving rapidly, what's your take
on how things stand today in 2019? What
is your current view of the market?
Nair: As we sit here today, in 2019, there is no question that
the number of businesses adopting the cloud for either some or all of their IT
architecture and operations continues to accelerate and exceed industry
expectations. Gone are the days where cloud adoption was for new companies or
new greenfield applications, customers are now migrating their most mission
critical applications (We'll have an announcement in a few weeks on how we are
partnering with one of the Cloud leaders in assisting with cloud migration
planning of one such mission critical application suite).
At the same time, I don't think we've truly realized the
full potential of the cloud and that there is plenty of additional new services
and benefits businesses can realize as they get better at planning and managing
their multi-cloud strategies. I believe the key to making this happen is
increased visibility and understanding of their application requirements and
the strengths and weaknesses of the various clouds. Parallel to that, we need
to provide assurances to businesses adopting the cloud won't become a
management or budget nightmare, and that their applications will remain secure
and compliant with industry and government regulations. Looking further into
2019, I believe additional exciting trends will become of greater impact in the
market, a variety of which I covered in a predictions
piece for VMBlog earlier this year.
VMblog: And where do you see things headed?
Nair: From my perspective, I believe 2019 will be even more
exciting than last year was. From the industry perspective, I expect to see the
market experience a bit of a hockey stick in growth - we have officially
reached the point where businesses in every market segment have accepted the
cloud is in their future, so I believe this will drive the market higher. I
also believe the market will continue to see an elevated rate of consolidation
driven by traditional data center equipment and cloud providers seeking to
improve cross-cloud management capabilities for their vast user bases.
VMblog: How do you see HyperGrid's differentiation?
Nair: HyperGrid stands out for a variety of reasons. First and
foremost, our flagship Cloud Management Platform (CMP) solution, HyperCloud,
combines the power of machine learning and analytics for vastly superior cloud
management capabilities across cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google
Cloud Platform (GCP) and VMware, among others. We do to the public cloud
something similar to what Google search indexing does to the internet., our
constant crawling and benchmarking of every major public cloud data-center,
instance and service running and all the metadata available over the last three
years has resulted in a unique datalake that allows for very interesting
analytics and capabilities across our platform.
Furthermore, HyperCloud is different than other solutions on
the market because the platform takes a proactive approach to cloud planning,
cost management, governance, security and compliance for complete transparency
into cloud operations without the guesswork. We also recently announced a next-generation
cloud governance module, Cloud GovSec, that enables seamless operations and
oversight of all cloud assets by providing monitoring, control and policies
that do not require security and IT teams to change how they access public
cloud resources. It instead operates out of band so that enforcement is pervasive
and continuous regardless of how resources are provisioned and managed by
developers and other users.
The innovation the HyperGrid team has achieved over the last
12 months, and the validation we have received on it has been truly amazing.
Really good stuff, including HyperGrid recently being named a Visionary in
Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms, and HyperCloud achieving
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Management Tools Competency status for Cloud
Governance. We have also been listed on
the VMware Solutions Exchange and AWS Marketplace, as well as named an Azure
Solutions Partner and a Google Cloud Technology Partner, providing a broad
range of turnkey capabilities to assist Azure & GCP customers in
provisioning and managing workloads in both environments.
VMblog: It's early, but do you have any initial thoughts on
strategy? What is your vision for the
company?
Nair: Given the market conditions I referenced earlier, I believe
the future for HyperGrid is bright! I am focused on two key pillars: continuing
to innovate with a focus on solving business challenges rather than for
innovation-sake; and, building out HyperGrid's sales, distribution and
marketing functions to support the accelerated growth strategy I have set the
company on. Our new Cloud GovSec module was a first step on the innovation
front and we anticipate having more news on the product front throughout the
year.
On the go to market front, we actually just announced three
key additions to our executive team. Heading up our sales organization is SVP,
Worldwide Sales, David Weier, who will drive our enterprise sales strategies
and field operations, expand the sales team to meet increased demand from
global enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs), and ensure customer
success. Said Syed, our new VP & Principal Technologist, Cloud Technology
Solutions, who will lead our cloud solution architects and customer success
teams, as well as be the lead evangelist for HyperCloud to our customers,
partners and developer communities; and work with the Cloud Technology
Solutions team to drive adoption of the HyperCloud Platform and leverage its
extensibility to deliver verticalized solutions that will be made available via
HyperCloud's customer community portals. Lastly, our new VP of Marketing, Peter
Lunk, will drive our go to market communications strategy, as well as lead
HyperGrid's product line positioning, demand generation, and field marketing
efforts.
VMblog: What do you believe will be your biggest challenge as
you take the reins?
Nair: There are always unforeseen challenges that arise when
your assume a new role, however I am entering the CEO position with a lot of
support around me, with the fantastic leadership team at HyperGrid, the Board
and our industry advisors, strategic design partners & customers. That
being said, we are in a hot market so rising above the noise will be the key
challenge we all are faced with. I feel like we are have already taken steps to
put the company in position to capitalize on the growth opportunities before
us, so I am confident that the best has yet to come for HyperGrid!
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