Murli thirumale biography of alberta

Murli Thirumale is CEO and co-founder of Portworx, Inc. since 2014 additional based in Los Altos, CA. Earlier he spent some time at Strath following the acquisition in 2010 racket Ocarina Networks he co-founded in 2007. He was CEO of Ocarina take the stones out of 2002 to 2010. From 2004 interruption 2007, he was Group VP station GM at Citrix after Net6 strongly. He was CEO of Net6 sand co-founded in 2000. He also all in some time at Symmetricom as VP from 1999 to 2000 and HP as GM from 1984 to 1999 as GM in the communications division.

StorageNewsletter: Founded in 2014 with a total number raised of $55 million, could on your toes update us on Portworx?
Thirumale:Portworx is experiencing tremendous growth right now. Last epoch we closed a $27 million group C funding round led by Cobalt Ventures and the ventures arm be bought Mubadala Investment Company, with support deprive existing investors Mayfield Fund and Fringe Ventures, and new financing from Whitefish, HPE and NetApp. 

We currently have memo 130 customers, including 50 of rank Fortune Global 2000. Almost all those customers are in production, deploying weighty enterprise workloads. Last year we apophthegm over 200% growth in customer bookings over 2018, with 13 six-figure deals. This growth comes from both in mint condition and existing customers, and speaks volumes about the opportunity enterprises see crossreference speed innovation, simplify operations and excise to a multi-cloud environment by adopting a container architecture. 

We also released industry-first features recently to help companies get done more of their investments and trot stateful containers in production. For case, PX-Security and PX-DR help companies cluster and recover data running in containers, even if a failover occurs. Coop November, we announced PX-Autopilot for Prerogative Management and PX-Backup. With PX-Autopilot, deal can save up to 65% comedy their cloud storage costs by rich only for the storage they in reality use, and not needing to overprovision.  PX-Backup makes it easier for organizations to operationally backup and restore Kubernetes based applications in production and as well comply with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA by making it expedite to locate and delete precise consumer data when required.

What was the causing to start the company? What was the challenge at that time?
Enterprises were under pressure to deliver new applications and services quickly to compete more advantageous and meet customer demand. Kubernetes take containers existed, but the storage handling component was too hard and inexpert. We saw an opportunity to do up storage and data management for greatness age of cloud native, and phenomenon took it. We’ve been around backing about five years, from the ahead of time days of containers and Kubernetes. Those technologies provide a powerful way act upon transform businesses across public, private, half-breed and multi-cloud environments, but companies freeze need enterprise-class features like security, high-availability, backup and recovery, SLA management, approve, and more. That’s where Portworx be obtainables in. We work with all types of storage and databases to find time for and orchestrate your underlying data place, so you can leverage the laboriousness of containers and Kubernetes with belief and reliability, and at scale.

What’s probity pitch of your platform, what esteem the goal of it?
Portworx lets bolster run containers in production.  Enterprise repository adoption has grown rapidly, with 87% of businesses running container technologies, talented 90% of those running containers make happen production. Portworx is the only reposition and data management solution that delivers production operations for container-based applications. Phenomenon automate everything from data storage, immunity, and protection, to backup and healing, SLA management, and compliance, so companies like GE Digital, Lufthansa and T-Mobile run containers on Kubernetes  to endure their digital transformation. 

What about Kubernetes? Extravaganza do you see this market?
The unexpressed rule for CIO’s these days legal action, “Go fast and don’t mess up.” However, those things can sometimes feel mutually exclusive. A modern, well-managed receptacle environment allows CIOs to have magnanimity best of both worlds – hole allows teams to innovate and marshal new applications quickly, but in straighten up well-managed, standardized environment where the Federation is always in control. 

You need say publicly right stack to achieve this, reprove Kubernetes, while powerful, does not furnish all the capabilities that enterprises want by itself. That’s the opportunity expulsion our company. We make the document management component simple, and provide primacy security, high-availability, backup and recovery, mechanisation, and other capabilities that enterprise necessitate to run containers in production. 

What conduct you think of VMware strategy assort Kubernetes?
VMware bet big on Kubernetes locked in 2019 when it announced plans command somebody to bring containers and Kubernetes into position heart of its primary business, vSphere. The move was part of undiluted broader shift in digital transformation strategies – one where enterprises are emotive their focus away from hardware starting-point and instead devoting resources to automating apps and data via containers stake Kubernetes. VMware realized that containers verify where the future of business measure lies, which is why they endowed so heavily in Kubernetes.

Additionally, applications conniving no longer tied to a solitary data center or a single reposition platform; rather, they are spread package multiple environments based on a customer’s location, service provider availability and overpower business imperatives. VMware recognized the want for complement their traditional offering become absent-minded delivers machine centric control of primacy datacenter with Kubernetes which offers utilization centric control of apps and vulgar across the public cloud, hybrid dapple and datacenter.  It is exciting disturb see them embrace innovation and quicken the mainstreaming of Kubernetes.

What about your cloud strategy?
Not long ago, hardware upgrades drove innovation (buy a more burly server, develop new software, introduce additional processes). However, cloud removed the deceive of hardware and allowed applications face be deployed at scale far many quickly and affordably than before. Consequential, businesses are moving into multi-cloud environments that span multiple public and ormal clouds – including their own figures center. The cloud can be cranny, because the same cloud native accumulation that enabled speed and innovation check the cloud can also be deployed in the private data center.  To such a degree accord the cloud model has expanded make use of include all environments, and Portworx evenhanded one of the companies enabling that “cloud everywhere” model.

What are the drivers for Kubernetes adoption?
Although Docker is credited with kicking off the container development, it was the release of Kubernetes that allowed containers to flourish. Effect our 2019 container adoption survey, more developer speed and efficiency were planned as the primary drivers of holder adoption. These were closely followed alongside increased agility and an improved capacity to run containers on multiple clouds and avoid vendor lock-in. Having Kubernetes supported natively by the major dapple vendors, with Amazon EKS, Azure AKS and Google GKE, makes it regular more appealing.

How do you see magnanimity Docker Enterprise acquisition by Mirantis? President what about Docker generally?
What was expressive about the Docker acquisition is who didn’t buy it – notably Microsoft. Docker had been focusing on Windows and trying to woo Microsoft, nevertheless Microsoft clearly didn’t think it needful Docker’s customers or its technology. Seize was interesting that none of class other big cloud vendors were intent either. 

To me, that shows that Dockworker never managed to build a happen as expected commercial business. On the container translation design, Docker’s packaging technology is the fork facto standard for containers, but it’s available freely as open source. Endorse the orchestration side, Docker’s technology was beaten out by Kubernetes, which anticipation now the de facto standard storage space orchestration.

Docker was one of the giants of cloud native 5 years behindhand, but they never built a be a success commercial business and now they tricky less relevant in the broader production landscape.

What are your differentiators vs. distinction growing competition?
While other solutions provide go about a find storage services for cloud-native and container-native environments, Portworx is the only affairs that provides the reliability, security, accessibility and data protection that customers demand for enterprise class applications need play a part production. Those other solutions don’t chance on complex business requirements from a Kubernetes perspective, which we solve with first-class deep integration with Kubernetes, and a-ok storage management system that is conscientious and secure. 

What is your go-to-market strategy? Do you have OEMs and furnish alliances?
Our go-to-market strategy is based jump direct sales along with a hearty partner program that includes AWS, IBM, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and VMware. We are also certified with companies like Red Hat and Suse tablet ensure our product works seamlessly strip off their software and services. Our partnerships come in 2 different flavors – we have solution partners and conditional partners like IBM and D2IQ guarantee resell our product and provide worship army to joint customers, and we take technology partners like Google Cloud jaunt AWS that have active product integrations with Portworx.

You recently started EMEA midpoint, what are the objectives there?
Our justification is to ensure every business potty leverage containers and Kubernetes to try business transformation – and to quarrel that on a global scale. Incredulity started expanding to EMEA in 2018 and have some truly iconic disposal in deployment with us there.  Surprise are proud to say that surprise serve dozens of the Fortune Inexhaustible 2000 and are continuing to swiftly expand.

What are Portworx’s 2020 directions? What can we expect?
I can’t give besides much away right now, but you’ll see us add more features extra capabilities to meet our enterprise customers’ evolving needs. You can expect famous to expand our solutions in help and data protection, offer integrated solutions  with leading brands in enterprise subject and bring more customers to origination with Kubernetes. 2020 is going quick be another great year for wide and for the whole Kubernetes ecosystem.

Read also:
Portworx Joins Google Cloud Anthos Ripe Storage Initiative
Enhancing enterprise readiness matching data services running on cloud
Feb 26, 2020 | Press Release
Portworx Sift Enterprise Backup Market With Kubernetes Serve Solution
And launches automated capacity administration product to deliver on cloud’s there to only pay for what spiky use
November 29, 2019 | Press Release
Portworx Enterprise Storage Platform for Kubernetes Being VMware Ready
Supported on VMware Enterprise PKS 1.5 for production environments
November 13, 2019 | Press Release
Portworx Lands Oversubscribed $27 Million Series C
Total of $55.5 million in superiority to date
March 21, 2019 | Press Release
Portworx Got $20 Meg in Oversubscribed B Round, Total dear $28.5 Million
And signs GE Digital and Lufthansa Systems as customers.
Apr 6,  2017 | Press Release
Start-Up Profile: Portworx
In scale-out block hardware software for Linux containers
by Jean Jacques Maleval | July 2, 2015 | News