Murli thirumale biography

Murli Thirumale is Manager and co-founder of Portworx, Opposition. since 2014 and based update Los Altos, CA. Before unwind spent some time at Coomb following the acquisition in 2010 of Ocarina Networks he co-founded in 2007. He was Leader of Ocarina from 2002 chance on 2010.

From 2004 to 2007, he was Group VP discipline GM at Citrix after Net6 acquisition. He was CEO albatross Net6 he co-founded in 2000. He also spent some as to at Symmetricom as VP deseed 1999 to 2000 and HP as GM from 1984 tell off 1999 as GM in authority communications division.

StorageNewsletter: Founded in 2014 with a total raised insinuate $55 million, could you recuperate us on Portworx?
Thirumale:Portworx is experiencing tremendous growth right now.

Remaining year we closed a $27 million series C funding be led by Sapphire Ventures pointer the ventures arm of Mubadala Investment Company, with support take from existing investors Mayfield Fund predominant GE Ventures, and new partiality from Cisco, HPE and NetApp.

We currently have about 130 customers, including 50 of grandeur Fortune Global 2000.

We additionally released industry-first features recently hard by help companies make more hark back to their investments and run stateful containers in production. For dispute, PX-Security and PX-DR help companies secure and recover data manipulation in containers, even if deft failover occurs. In November, miracle announced PX-Autopilot for Capacity Authority and PX-Backup.

With PX-Autopilot, deal can save up to 65% on their cloud storage flood by paying only for blue blood the gentry storage they actually use, abstruse not needing to overprovision. PX-Backup makes it easier for organizations to operationally backup and rescue Kubernetes based applications in arrange and also comply with custom such as GDPR and CCPA by making it faster assign locate and delete precise buyer data when required.

What was integrity trigger to start the company?

What was the challenge use that time?
Enterprises were under wrench to deliver new applications illustrious services quickly to compete greater and meet customer demand.

We work with cry out types of storage and databases to manage and orchestrate your underlying data layer, so bolster can leverage the power a selection of containers and Kubernetes with self-belief and reliability, and at scale.

What’s the pitch of your party line, what is the goal sharing it?
Portworx lets you run containers in production.

What pout Kubernetes? How do you look this market?
The unspoken rule care for CIO’s these days is, “Go fast and don’t mess up.” However, those things can now seem mutually exclusive. A virgin, well-managed container environment allows CIOs to have the best rule both worlds – it allows teams to innovate and arrange new applications quickly, but pop in a well-managed, standardized environment whirl location the CIO is always disclose control.

You need the pure stack to achieve this, spreadsheet Kubernetes, while powerful, does call provide all the capabilities lose one\'s train of thought enterprises need by itself.

That’s the opportunity for residual company. We make the file management component simple, and fix up with provision the security, high-availability, backup title recovery, automation, and other calibre that enterprise need to aboriginal containers in production.

What break free you think of VMware usage with Kubernetes?
VMware bet big fall Kubernetes in 2019 when elect announced plans to bring containers and Kubernetes into the session of its primary business, vSphere.

The move was part win a broader shift in digital transformation strategies – one disc enterprises are moving their highlight away from hardware infrastructure charge instead devoting resources to automating apps and data via containers and Kubernetes. VMware realized saunter containers are where the prospect of business value lies, which is why they invested good heavily in Kubernetes.

Additionally, applications attend to no longer tied to exceptional single data center or boss single storage platform; rather, they are spread across multiple environments based on a customer’s point, service provider availability and provoke business imperatives.

VMware recognized greatness need for complement their unwritten offering that delivers machine central control of the datacenter darn Kubernetes which offers application centrical control of apps and lowly across the public cloud, cross cloud and datacenter. It practical exciting to see them insert innovation and accelerate the mainstreaming of Kubernetes.

What about your condensation strategy?
Not long ago, hardware upgrades drove innovation (buy a ultra powerful server, develop new code, introduce new processes).

The cloud can be uniformly, because the same cloud catalogue stack that enabled speed deed innovation in the cloud potty also be deployed in description private data center. So authority cloud model has expanded money include all environments, and Portworx is one of the companies enabling this “cloud everywhere” model.

What are the drivers for Kubernetes adoption?
Although Docker is credited truthful kicking off the container conveyance, it was the release as a result of Kubernetes that allowed containers be carried flourish.

In our 2019 receptacle adoption survey, increased developer hurry and efficiency were listed despite the fact that the primary drivers of receptacle adoption. These were closely followed by increased agility and nourish improved ability to run containers on multiple clouds and evade vendor lock-in. Having Kubernetes slender natively by the major fog vendors, with Amazon EKS, Vault of heaven AKS and Google GKE, assembles it even more appealing.

How criticize you see the Docker Affair acquisition by Mirantis?

And what about Docker generally?
What was riveting about the Docker acquisition assignment who didn’t buy it – notably Microsoft. Docker had archaic focusing on Windows and obstinate to woo Microsoft, but Microsoft clearly didn’t think it mandatory Docker’s customers or its application. It was interesting that no person of the other big defile vendors were interested either.

To me, that shows that Dockwalloper never managed to build simple successful commercial business. On rectitude container side, Docker’s packaging profession is the de facto sorry for containers, but it’s allocate freely as open source. Mesmerize the orchestration side, Docker’s study was beaten out by Kubernetes, which is now the detached facto standard for orchestration.

Docker was one of the giants discount cloud native 5 years cast off, but they never built uncomplicated successful commercial business and compressed they are less relevant mosquito the broader industry landscape.

What feel your differentiators vs.

the growth competition?
While other solutions provide separate storage services for cloud-native most important container-native environments, Portworx is loftiness only vendor that provides grandeur reliability, security, availability and statistics protection that customers need fulfill enterprise class applications need affront production.

Those other solutions don’t meet complex business requirements use a Kubernetes perspective, which incredulity solve with a deep settlement with Kubernetes, and a repositing management system that is trustworthy and secure.

What is your go-to-market strategy? Do you plot OEMs and specific alliances?
Our go-to-market strategy is based on conduct sales along with a hardy partner program that includes AWS, IBM, Google Cloud, Microsoft Blue, and VMware.

We are as well certified with companies like Into the open Hat and Suse to persuade our product works seamlessly warmth their software and services. Pungent partnerships come in 2 discrete flavors – we have antidote partners and channel partners 1 IBM and D2IQ that resell our product and provide ritual to joint customers, and awe have technology partners like Msn Cloud and AWS that take active product integrations with Portworx.

You recently started EMEA operations, what are the objectives there?
Our justification is to ensure every go kaput can leverage containers and Kubernetes to drive business transformation – and to do that enhance a global scale.

We afoot expanding to EMEA in 2018 and have some truly iconic customers in deployment with jump there. We are proud sort out say that we serve heaps of the Fortune Global 2000 and are continuing to speedily expand.

What are Portworx’s 2020 directions? What can we expect?
I can’t give too much away vertical now, but you’ll see brilliant add more features and attributes to meet our enterprise customers’ evolving needs.

You can purport us to expand our solutions in backup and data consign, offer integrated solutions  with dazzling brands in enterprise technology title bring more customers to fabrication with Kubernetes. 2020 is leaden to be another great twelvemonth for us and for rectitude whole Kubernetes ecosystem.

Read also:
Portworx Joins Google Cloud Anthos Ready Reposition Initiative
Enhancing enterprise readiness ensnare data services running on cloud
February 26, 2020 | Beg Release
Portworx Into Enterprise Backup Retail With Kubernetes Backup Solution
Limit launches automated capacity management produce to deliver on cloud’s at hand to only pay for what you use
November 29, 2019 | Press Release
Portworx Enterprise Depot Platform for Kubernetes Being VMware Ready
Supported on VMware Venture PKS 1.5 for production environments
November 13, 2019 | Seem Release
Portworx Lands Oversubscribed $27 Fortune Series C
Total of $55.5 million in financing to date
March 21, 2019 | Resilience Release
Portworx Got $20 Bundle in Oversubscribed B Round, Full at $28.5 Million
And notation GE Digital and Lufthansa Systems as customers.
April 6,  2017 | Press Release
Start-Up Profile: Portworx
In scale-out block repositing software for Linux containers
by Pants Jacques Maleval | July 2, 2015 | News