Komprise is a California-based enterprise that was founded in 2014 by Kumar Goswami, Krishna Subramanian, and Mike Peercy and it aims to solve the pressing issues with unstructured data. It helps to analyze, mobilize, and access file, and object data across clouds with zero lock-ins. It provides multi-cloud data management as a service. Here is a brief from a recent interaction between Prateek Kansal, Head of India Operations and Engineering at Komprise, and team IT-Voice.
Prateek: What is the vision behind Komprise? Where do you want to see the organization in the next 5 years?
Prateek Kansal: Komprise founders launched the company to solve the two most pressing issues with unstructured data: managing its rampant growth across multi-vendor storage and clouds and unlocking data value. Komprise manages at the data layer, independent of the underlying cloud or storage, by providing visibility into data across silos and right placing data so customers save 60%+ costs. Komprise indexes data into a Global File Index so users can search and curate the right data to ingest into data lakes and data warehouses. Komprise is leading a new category for Unstructured Data Management that spans the $18B infrastructure market and the $90B data analytics market. Komprise’s patented Elastic Grid architecture and Transparent Move Technology (TMT)™ enable petabytes of data to be analyzed and moved while ensuring data remains accessible from the original location as files and from the cloud as objects. The opportunity today, and which is intrinsic to our near-term and long-term goals, is to continue advancing our platform to help organizations leverage multi-cloud environments and cloud-based AI/ML and data lakes while always improving storage efficiencies by right-placing and right-sizing data. Our latest product update, Komprise Deep Analytics Actions, is an important step forward in this journey for our customers.
We are constantly innovating to deliver more value for our customers. Our current focus is to help customers leverage our Deep Analytics capabilities to deliver granular search for finding just the right data across all storage to feed cloud-based data analytics tools.
Prateek: How piled up unstructured data is a hindrance to the growth of any business? How Komprise’s solution is there to the rescue?
Prateek Kansal: Data storage costs are getting out of control, and our recent industry survey found that most organizations are spending over 30% of their IT budgets on storage. Over two-thirds of the cost of data is not in the store but in its active management. For every piece of data, companies typically keep a few backup copies and a replication copy for disaster recovery. If your data is growing at 30%, it’s more accurately 90-100% when you factor in all the copies of the data. There are plenty of hidden costs in cloud storage, however, so one needs to be careful how they move data to the cloud. The major cloud providers have dozens of different unstructured file and object storage offerings. If you don’t put your data in the right place and control egress costs, you may end up paying more than if you were storing it in your own data center.
The key here is that over 80% of data is not actually actively accessed and is cold. This cold data can be stored on cheaper storage and does not require the same level of backup and replication. Therefore, you need to treat hot data and cold data differently. Komprise uses an analytics-first process to look across the customer storage environment whether that is in the cloud or on-premises, to determine which data sets are cold and could be moved to less expensive storage. This analysis also allows users to understand their data better – not only age, but who owns it, how often it is accessed, and what types of files it encompasses—among other parameters. One of our customers, Pfizer, wound up cutting 75% of their data storage and backup costs, all without users having to notice any change. [Read the blog on Pfizer’s cloud data migration]
Prateek: What are the tech solutions Komprise is building in India?
Prateek Kansal: The engineering team in India is responsible for building some of the most critical functions of our product. We are taking a lead on building and sustaining the Komprise Deep Analytics engine. India staff have also helped deliver our cloud data management capabilities which are instrumental for customers adopting multi-cloud storage. The India team is a strong contributor to everything which Komprise delivers to the marketplace. We also have a great customer support team in India, which ensures 24/7 coverage working with our U.S. support team.
Prateek: What are some of the trends to look out for in the Data Management segment?
Prateek Kansal: India is a growing economy with new start-ups and companies revolutionizing the lives of so many people. Many new technologies and industry trends are driven by data analytics and machine learning and B2C companies are leveraging customer data to constantly enhance customer offerings. At the heart of all these companies is data and unstructured data is always the lion’s share of data. We expect unstructured data to grow exponentially in India. As India is a cost-conscious region, organizations are looking at solutions to help them understand and retain relevant data while finding ways to optimize their storage costs and align data management with user/marketplace goals. Our customers around the globe have been able to attain significant cost-saving and simplify their data management workloads and we are certain we can help data-heavy companies in India achieve that. Additionally, as cloud-based services for ML, AI and data lakes mature and grow in popularity due to their scale, affordability, and user-friendly features now are the time to integrate unstructured data with these analytics tools. This will be a major trend and challenge for enterprises globally in the coming year.
Prateek: Tell us about the hiring plans in India.
Prateek Kansal: As I mentioned earlier about the strong impact our team in India is making, we are constantly looking to hire talented people at our India office. Currently, we have many open roles across different functions, including several engineering roles in Bangalore and senior-level opportunities. Since we are growing our team, we are also looking to hire for product and operations leadership. We are looking to expand the India operation by over 50% in the coming year.
For any such interaction opportunities, you may write to us at [email protected].
