Exclusive Interview With Tim Page, CEO, Datrium

He is:

• CEO of Datrium Inc.

He was:

• COO, Sprinklr
• COO and EVP global sales, VCE

StorageNewsletter: Why did you join Datrium?
Tim Page: I vetted this company for many months and was really impressed with the quality of the engineering team and the product. Datrium solves some of the most difficult IT problems in the enterprise with a simple and elegant system that provides a uniform solution on-premises and in the cloud. Unlike most start-ups that are under investor pressure to get to market, Datrium was afforded three years and a large team of engineers to architect and build a system that solves many challenges across multiple silos in IT with a single product. Datrium was fortunate to attract the best engineering minds in Silicon Valley and employs more Ph.D’s than many university computer science departments. This patience paid off as enterprises are adopting Datrium DVX to optimize their IT investments, improve IT agility, and mitigate risk. Given the team and the customer success, I am very excited to be part of the Datrium journey.

You were part of the founding team at VCE and grew that business to $3 billion+, how do you see the market evolving?
Enterprises are all in some stage of digital transformation. This has increased the pressure on IT to be more strategic and nimble. They have to leverage both public cloud and data center technologies as spending time managing complex, on-prem IT infrastructure is no longer acceptable. IT must find ways to simplify their infrastructure now so they can spend more time on the strategy and execution of growing their digital business.

You talk with enterprise leaders, what are they telling you they want today?
Most of the IT leaders I talk with struggle to break free from the high maintenance of legacy infrastructure so they can spend more time supporting business growth. They are looking for a simple solution that enables them to respond quicker to changes in their business and reduce risk; and of course, they want to do this for the minimal spend and best return on investment.

Evolving cloud services have changed user expectations, how should enterprise IT respond?
Public cloud services have clearly reset the bar in terms of how fast IT must respond to user and business requests. Complex and siloed infrastructure just cannot support the enterprise demand for faster time to market. IT must find ways to consolidate, simplify, and automate tasks so they can meet or exceed service levels. Datrium is simplifying IT infrastructure and processes, making it easy for customers to leverage IT into a competitive advantage to the business.

It seems like every day another major provider has a security breach; how can enterprises manage this risk going forward?
IT leaders have a lot of angst over risk and compliance issues ranging from lengthy recovery times, extended downtime, and complex regulatory requirements. Datrium recommends all data be encrypted as soon as it is created to reduce risk and meet stringent compliance requirements like PCI, HIPAA, and SOX – and that’s what we do. At the end of the day, our customers sleep better at night knowing their data is safe. After all, we call it blanket encryption for a reason…

How do you compare Datrium and competition especially the usual suspects such Nutanix, VMware, Dell EMC, HPE or Cisco?
We are often compared with HCI vendors like Nutanix and Dell EMC, but our customers ultimately choose Datrium because we solve the limitations of legacy, hardware-defined HCI by offering performance at scale, built in, verified backup and DR, and data that is always secure. Other customers are refreshing their legacy storage arrays from Dell EMC or HPE and they prefer the simple VM centric management, always on data efficiency, durability, and security with cloud integration and DR orchestration that Datrium delivers. In either case, Datrium provides significant advantages to our customers when it comes to aligning their IT investments to the strategic priorities of the business, making IT more agile and mitigating risk.

With your arrival as CEO, the company started to change, could you summarize your journey for the last few months and your next steps?
It has been very energizing to discover the depth and breadth of the Datrium product. I am so excited about what we have and it’s been fun to be out in the field talking to customers and prospects about the business problems we can solve for them. We’ve been focused on closing out a great year and planning for massive growth in 2019. Making sure that enterprises can easily understand the value of Datrium, building out our channel and geographical expansion, are some of the important things we are working on now. And of course the product is not standing still – there are some amazing things we are going to be able to do for customers as we further enhance our cloud services.

How did you finish 2018 financially?
We closed 2018 with our best quarter ever – a quarter in which we closed the biggest deal in company history, saw a strong increase in our average selling price as we gained further traction in enterprise accounts and successfully sold into the typically challenging Epic use case in healthcare. We replaced a few of the vendors we talked about earlier in some key accounts too.

Under your tenure, Datrium raised a new round of $60 million for a total of $170 million, what is the plan now? An IPO on the radar?
It’s all about execution now, if we meet or exceed our plan, we will be in a strong position to choose the best path forward in the future. We are investing in our go-to-market teams including sales, marketing and the channel and in our product organization.

The OEL go-to-market seems to be ignored so far, any reason for that? Is it something you consider now?
I wouldn’t say that we have ignored it – but we certainly have prioritized connecting directly with commercial and enterprise customers for our initial go to market. This is where we are learning the most about the business issues that need to be solved and how we can apply a radically simplified approach to make the hard things in IT easy. Longer term, we are of course exploring potential OEM routes to market to accelerate our growth.

How do you see big players such AS Cisco and HPE finally with a solution based on acquisitions? Are they serious on HCI?
It’s typical of the larger vendors to rely on acquisitions for innovation. If they are focused on filling an HCI gap, I think they are looking in the rear view mirror. Enterprise customers are demanding more than just an evolution of converged infrastructure or a slightly better way to do what they have always done. HCI came to the marketplace from the commercial space as an easy to use low-end solution and is not necessarily the best match for enterprises with their unique scaling, availability and resiliency requirements. The big IT players are just beginning to realize this. For example, NetApp recent offering in this space follows the Datrium model of logical separation between stateless commodity servers and a stateful scale-out storage tier. We are excited to be bringing a solution to market that bridges traditional silos in IT – compute, storage, backup, DR and security in a simple, easy to install, easy to manage solution. We are looking at the road ahead and we see a great opportunity.

Where is IBM? Any chance you sign with them or Red Hat?
Datrium already partners with Red Hat. It’s one of the many workloads that can be run on Datrium along with VMware, Docker, databases and so on. Longer term, we will have to see how IBM incorporates Red Hat into their portfolio and we’ll listen to what our customers need to guide how we engage.

What about VMware?
VMware has been a great technology partner since Datrium founding days. We are excited to see VMware’s transformation from a software vendor to a strategic enterprise cloud player with a consistent set of products across customer data centers and public clouds. Datrium customers are particularly thrilled by the joint VMware and AWS cloud offering: VMware Cloud on AWS. Datrium has been successfully collaborating with VMware in this area and has several new cloud products coming out in 2019. Watch out for our upcoming CloudShift release.

Beyond storage – compute separation, what are the Datrium differentiators vs. competition?
Datrium self-protecting enterprise cloud delivers radically simple infrastructure for IT that is uniquely optimized for both performance and efficiency. Our ease of management extends across the entire data lifecycle including storage management, data protection and recovery, security, replication, hybrid cloud and disaster recovery. Enterprises can now run and protect applications with unprecedented speed and agility while mitigating risk.

In terms of product, could you share your roadmap?
It’s all about helping customers better manage their data throughout its lifecycle, wherever it happens to be – on-prem, at a DR site or in the public cloud. Our roadmap will be attacking established price/performance norms, establishing new pricing and delivery models and bringing new cloud-based capabilities to market that will completely change the game for our customers. Stay tuned, it’s going to be an exciting year.