Because big data isn't enough -- platforms need to offer smart data as well.
It’s been a year or so since I last caught up with Komprise, the data management vendor that was founded by Krishna Subramanian, a well-respected Silicon Valley veteran who has successfully founded, built, merged and acquired businesses — both as founder/CEO of a startup backed by tier-one VCs and as corporate development leader at Sun.
Her previous startup, Kaviza, was focused on eliminating the cost and complexity of my personal pet hate, virtual desktops, and — notwithstanding my distaste for the space — was acquired by Citrix in 2011. Subramanian then did her obligatory two years of duty within Citrix before embarking on her new thing.
Her new thing is still broadly in the data space, but this time Subramanian is taking a wider view. Komprise is solving the problems around a rapidly increasing scale of data that organizations manage.
The problems here are twofold: First, there is huge value trapped within the data that Komprise aims to expose. Second, Komprise aims to deliver economic benefits by creating a more dynamic, flexible and efficient approach toward data management. As the pure cost of storage goes down, adding capacity is easy; managing that capacity is hard.
Subramanian believes that 80% of the storage cost today is in managing data — all of that pesky migrating, operating, backing up, protecting and finding relevant data. Which is where Komprise comes in: Its software solution uses analytics-driven intelligence to automate data management functions across on-premises and cloud storage silos. All without any change to existing storage, applications or users. Simple, huh?
Well the customers seems to think so. Since I last checked in, Komprise has delivered production software and scored some big customers — reference names include AIG in the insurance space, big genomics customers and Electronic Arts in the media space.
And the allure is obvious. Komprise promises to ensure that data is stored in the most appropriate place based on context. Best of all, it doesn’t require hardware — Komprise runs as a virtual machine. Partnerships with a variety of storage vendors means that customers’ needs are met — Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, SpectraLogic and Scality are just a few examples.
All of this commercial and product success would seem to be having the desired effect since, alongside the platform becoming generally available today, Komprise is today announcing a $12M Series B investment round, led by Walden International, with participation from existing investor Canaan Partners and notable luminaries including Bill Moore (co-founder of ZFS, ex-EMC fellow) and Sanjay Mehrotra (ex-CEO of SanDisk).
To ensure that general availability doesn’t cause any issues with regard to scaling Komprise, the company is also talking up its data management grid, which builds upon the core Komprise analytics-driven platform but adds on-demand linear scaling to ensure no central bottlenecks exist.
Komprise is differentiating itself from other data management solutions based on the fact that it requires no hardware, deploys in 15 minutes, is storage-agnostic without any storage agents, uses analytics to intelligently manage, archive, replicate and protect data across both on-premises and cloud storage, and scales on-demand to handle massive scale. Scaling Komprise simply involves a single button-click to add more virtual appliances — and the Komprise grid automatically load balances, manages high availability through redundancy, and provides disaster recovery.
It looks to have been an impressive 12 months for Komprise, which has quietly but studiously built a product, a channel and a customer base. It is, to be honest, what one expects from entrepreneurs with extensive track records of success — another reason that those VCs were so happy to jump on board.
