 Hi, this is your host Sapin Bhartia and we are back with our 2023 predictions and today we have with us once again Satya Sangran, GM of Cloudcasa by Katalogic. Satya, it's great to have you back on the show. Thanks for having me back. Before I ask you to go grab your crystal ball, I would remind our viewers quickly a bit about the company. So tell us about Cloudcasa. Cloudcasa is a Kubernetes dedicated backup as a service. We've always been a product company. We're challenging ourselves to deliver this as a service which again takes more out of the plate of a customer who's already dealing with a lot of complexities in Kubernetes. We're trying to make the backups and disaster recovery and cloud migrations and cloud portability easy for those customers. At the end of the day, security is now everyone's job and cyber resilience is what makes you prepared and be that last line of defense for your environments. And we essentially deliver that as a service for Kubernetes users. You can protect your workloads. You can recover your workloads in respect to whether it's a calamity or whether you're a cyber casualty. We allow you to bring that data set back pretty quickly with us. Let's look at your crystal ball and tell us what predictions you have for 2022. And let's see what predictions you have for 2023. Awesome. My first predictions for 2023 is that there is not going to be a slowdown in digital transformation. Markets notwithstanding. I think we're all wondering whether there is going to be a recession or not. Are we going to enter that territory? Some people think that we're already in that territory and some people we think we are going in and out of the territory. But irrespective of what the markets do, I think when it comes to digital transformation in 2023, I think it's full steam ahead. Because whether you're growing or whether there is a recession and there is a lot of cost pressures, I think Kubernetes and Cloud Native is all about one converting a cost to an OPEX model. And Kubernetes is all about platforming so that you get the most of that model. I think both those models are going to be very resilient. They will continue and they'll be full steam ahead. In fact, just like COVID and pandemic did by accelerating a lot of digital transformation projects, I think you're going to see that you don't let any good crisis go to waste. If 2023 becomes a crisis year for markets, I think technology will evolve to completely utilize that crisis and advance itself going forward. So I think my first prediction is that there's not going to be any slowdown in digital transformation irrespective of what happens to the markets this year. My second prediction for 2023 is that I think backups are going to be the new borders for organization. Look, we're in the middle of a war or some may call it military operation. And there is a lot of uncertainty. But one thing is clear. We are in the middle of a cyber war from an IT industry perspective. Anybody that's got a data of importance, you are under attack irrespective of your nationality, irrespective of your industry. If you have something of importance, cyber crimes are on the rise and you are a target at this point. And oftentimes, your last line of defense is backups. And I think the ransomware and malware folks are picking up on that and essentially treating that as the borders. This is the last line of defense that they needed to breach because the minute they breach backups, they leave you extra vulnerable. So you have no other option to go back to if again, your backups are breached. So treat your backups like they are your borders and protect them. Don't treat them as secondary data. Treat them as as your last line of defense that will keep you sleeping at night and protected out all times. So that I think is my second prediction for 2023. People are going to come after your backups are protected. My third prediction is mission learning is not learning for missions. What I mean by that is that there is going to be so much AI ML advancement over the next year. It's going to become ubiquitous. We're already seeing people utilizing GitHub co-pilots to write code. And now the latest sensation, people are asking a chat bot, a chat GPT online to ask it to solve important challenges. One thing is for sure. Yes, it will allow you to get your job done quickly. Use it as an aid, but do not treat it as a substitute for knowing your basics because AI can be very, very effective, but it can also be confidently wrong. So when you start utilizing code generated by machine learning, can you start utilizing solutions suggested by AI and put it in production? It will require a level of resiliency in your IT operations because guess what? If you do not understand what you're putting in production, things are going to break and it is going to take a longer period of time for you to resolve those. So down times are going to be longer. It's going to take you longer to get back to operations because you do not understand what you just applied. So just know that machine learning is we don't learn from that. The good thing is it produces code, but unless you understand whether it's good or bad, we're not yet in a state where you can take that and apply that in production and you can be very confidently wrong several times. So I would say AI and ML are here to stay. It is going to be ubiquitous, but understand how you're leveraging that AI and make sure you have a resilient architecture and infrastructure whenever you are utilizing that AI because you have to be able to trace back and solve problems when something goes wrong. My fourth prediction and this is for the cloud native world and the Kubernetes community we operate in, Kubernetes will get more complex before it gets easier. And what I mean by that, just this last QCAN, Swapnel was there, I was there. We saw 290 sponsors at open source community event. That's a lot of vendors trying to fill gaps in this ecosystem. It is a telling sign that there are plenty of gaps in this ecosystem. We're moving very, very fast and there are gaps that this ecosystem players, a lot of vendors coming in and addressing those gaps. But now you are spoiled for choice. You're going to have a lot of options in front of you and oftentimes you're not even going to know which is the right option. And so curation of these options is in itself is going to be, I think a market in this ecosystem. But just know that yes, it will eventually get simple, but this influx of commercial solutions targeting these problems in the open source community is going to make things a bit more complex for you, even if it's in terms of purely selection of those right solutions and putting them in place. So I think Kubernetes is going to get a little more complex over the next year before it will eventually become very, very simple and more accessible to more of the tech community. My fifth prediction is going to be around a very specific technology. It's called Qboard and many of you may not have heard it. Qboard is a project, it's an open source project that essentially allows you to run virtualization workloads inside Kubernetes. So effectively, a lot of people today run Kubernetes on VMs, but think of the vice versa scenario. You can actually run VMs inside Kubernetes. So this is not completely new, but it's definitely up and coming. But with the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom and a lot of the uncertainty surrounding it, and there is now new rumors on what's going to happen to Nutanix. So you have two big players, the number one and number two in this market, both seeing some disruption. And I think this can be a huge boom for this open source ecosystem and open source project, which allows you to create a lot of hyperconverged offerings where VMware or virtualized missions as well as containers can be operated and orchestrated through a single platform. And I think the number one and the number two player in the market are both ripe for disruption through an open source ecosystem. So we're watching that very closely again as a backup provider. We're looking at how we could protect those workloads if people do make that shift. But I think in 2023, it will be the year of CubeWhat's evolution as a mainstream orchestration and virtualization platform. Excellent. Thanks for sharing these predictions. Now, if I ask you what is going to be the focus for CloudCasa in 2023? For 2023, for CloudCasa, it is going to be going all in on the cloud native ecosystem and the Kubernetes ecosystem. As we talked about in our predictions, we expect cloud native or digital transformation to be a key effort for all organizations, whether you're trying to get lean, whether you're trying to grow fast, whether you're trying to cut costs, answers to a lot of these questions is going to be digital transformation. And the digital transformation means you're embracing cloud native technologies and you're re-platforming to make the most of the cloud native technologies. So that acceleration, again, irrespective of what the factors are going to be, is going to be key for CloudCasa to embrace. And that's why, again, we are a backup as a service that is built on the cloud for the cloud with Kubernetes for Kubernetes. We want to embrace that and we want to go full steam ahead with CloudCasa. The second thing is obviously we talked about resilience. It could be for cyber crimes today. It could be for ML generated or AI generated code in future. But one thing is for short, things will break. And whether it was disks and hardware in the past and cyber crime in now or mission learning in future, one thing is for short, something will break. And when something that is breaking, you need to have a resilient architecture to recover from and continue operations. And we're going to make that possible with CloudCasa. And we're going to keep up with the speed at which the ecosystem is evolving. Lots of great things coming up in the world of Kubernetes. There is edge computing coming up quite a bit. There is QBot, which we talked about, a way to run both virtualized missions as well as containers in a single platform. I think at the end of the day, as an insurance provider, my job is to follow the data. I think data is going to go here. And we're going to have solutions ready for our customers to use when they start adopting these modern cutting edge leading solutions. If I ask you, what are the challenges that you see will be there in 2020? I mean, you already talked about a lot of opportunities. We talked about a lot of, you know, bed of roses stuff, but I do feel that you talk about Kubernetes will become more complex before it becomes easy. And you also talk about, you know, despite the whole fear of recession, that there will be growth in the tech industry. So talk a bit about the challenges that you also see maybe there in 2023 for companies like CloudCasa to solve. One of the challenges, and this is an open-source community, right? I think back in the day, people bought from companies like IBM. I think there used to be a saying that if you embraced, you know, if you bought a solution from IBM, you never lose your job, right? And so there was certainly brand value that carried a lot into people's choices, right? I think we're seeing almost the opposite end of the spectrum where companies are now saying, hey, I want complete open-source technology. I want to know what I'm using and how it was created, how is it maintained, and how do I even contribute to solving a problem if I run into a problem, right? So I think the open-source community completely comes with a completely different view into these things. But remember that it is a community solution and you always solve for the majority in the community. And so I think one of the challenges is for any adopter of these things, if you don't fit a mold, you could be left behind. And this is when commercial solutions can certainly pick up that slack. So I think for us, the challenge is, as a commercial vendor, right now the thought process is my default option is open-source. How do we embrace that open-source technology and contribute to it and actually solve problems for the customer? And how do we solve problems around the edge cases that the community doesn't solve for a lot of the minority folks that are in there? How do we solve their problems? I think those are both challenges for us in 2023. We're looking to embrace. How do we better embrace an open-source solution like Valero? And how do we solve real customer challenges while embracing that ecosystem going forward? Satya, once again, thank you so much for taking time out today and share these predictions with me. And of course, I'll have you back again for 2024. But I can also have a scorecard to see how many of your predictions turn out to be true. I didn't say that in the beginning, so there is no pressure on you. But thanks for your time and I look forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you. I look forward to seeing that, Satya. I'm happy 2023 to you as well as your large audience. I think 2023 is going to be great for all of us and look forward to reviewing that at the end of the year with you again.