Guest: Venkat Ramakrishnan (LinkedIn)
Company: Portworx by Pure Storage (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Pure Storage, the leading provider of enterprise-grade, all-flash block, file, and object storage, acquired Portworx in October 2020 to cater to modern workloads like containers and Kubernetes. Portworx is an independent business unit inside Pure Storage and is a complete Kubernetes data services platform.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Venkat Ramakrishnan, Vice President of Products and Engineering for Portworx by Pure Storage, shares his insights on the current trends in the market, particularly in the platform engineering space.

Current Trends in the Market:

• Everything is driven by digital experiences. The ability to help developers and application teams rapidly prototype, develop, deploy, and iterate on apps is as critical as managing the rapid expansion and explosion of data.
• Applications that are delivering experiences, enabling workflows, and driving higher productivity but are challenged with how to manage the explosion of data, put governance around it, and meet regulatory controls.
• Every business needs to be a software business to survive.
• We’re essentially entering the late majority adoption where every enterprise has a cloud strategy. Every enterprise has an application strategy, both for internal-facing apps and for external-facing apps.
• Platform engineering has become a very important discipline in a lot of enterprises. It is the de facto place where enterprises are standardizing the way they deploy and run their applications.

On Generative AI:

• It is a transformative technology. It is the new Kubernetes.
• Everything is looked through the lens of how AI can accelerate or replace something.
• Vendors are popping up every 2 days. People see its power and try to solve the problems in different ways. In the long run, the offerings that solve the pain of the most, have the most commercial viability, and have the best execution will succeed.

Advice for companies looking to adopt Platform Engineering:

• Architect it right from the get-go. Look for options that actually provide enterprise-class support, widely deployed and proven, and have a long deployment history in the market.
• Build that culture of empowering your developers and making your applications, deployment, and management more and more self-service.
• Your business evolves and your requirements today may not be the same as tomorrow’s. Always look for partners that invest with you in the long run, that want to grow and evolve the platform with you.

Advice for companies looking at New Technologies:

• New technologies go through the hype cycle. At the beginning, don’t invest too much, but learn more.
• Look at the tech in different dimensions: How can this help enhance our customer experience? How can this help enhance our product experience? How can this enhance and drive business value? How can we power this new tech? Can we do anything in our product that can power this new technology?
• If any of them click, make a mild investment, get customer feedback, and iterate on it.

How Portworx helps companies:

• It hides the complexity of the underlying infrastructure.
• It provides a fully integrated solution where they can deploy and run their apps and they automatically get persistent storage, data protection, encryption, disaster recovery, data security, cross-cloud and data migrations, and automated capacity management.
• It has a complete suite of data services that it can manage for the customer from day zero to day two.
• It delivers data storage and database automation at scale.
• It simplifies the lives of its customers. One of them said, “Prior to Portworx, they never had a holiday season where they were not pulled into their office. After Portworx, they could go to watch a Thanksgiving game or a holiday game, and they never had to worry about their infrastructure, because Portworx handles all of that for them.”

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.