 Portworx has always been a tremendous partner to our customers, right? I mean, we don't look at ourselves as a vendor, we actually look at it as an extension of our customers' esteem. Welcome, Uttiha, for less talking. Today, we have with us Venkat Ramakrishnan, Vice President of Products and Engineering for Portworx by Pure Storage. Venkat, it's great to have you on the show. Soapil, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Of course, we have covered Pure Storage Portworx earlier, but it's always a good idea to just quickly brief folks what are you folks all about? So Portworx is a data management platform for Kubernetes, more than just a data management platform. We handle everything from the data for Kubernetes from cradle to grave. Of course, everyone knows about Pure Storage. Pure is a leader in Flash and is initially driving this out of the data centers. Probably Pure Storage acquired Portworx in about October 2020 to add another software business that can cater to not just the traditional enterprise workloads, but also the modern workloads like containers and Kubernetes. So we are an independent business unit inside Pure. Internally, we are called Cloud-Native Business Unit. Outside of the world, we have Portworx. Can you talk about the evolution of DevOps and also kind of emergence of platform engineering? But let's also look at how the data is changing because we are creating and consuming massive amount of data which is kind of creating different challenges for team. And these teams also happen to be the same teams who are also dealing with data. The modern world is not just a lot of data. Modern world has a lot of apps also and a lot of services. And in the new digital first world or a world driven by digital experiences, the ability to help developers and application teams rapidly develop, prototype, develop, deploy and iterate on apps is as critical as managing the rapid expansion and explosion of data. Now with Kubernetes, both of them converge. You have a lot of different applications and a lot of which generate a lot of data, right? Now Kubernetes does a fantastic job of giving ability for application teams and I'll get to the DevOps and platform teams in a second but giving the application teams an ability to completely deploy and run their applications in a quite an automated manner in their cloud and data center. But what about data, right? I mean, you, as I said, when you have a lot of applications that are delivering a lot of experiences and enabling workflows and driving higher productivity, you got to run into a problem of an explosion in data and also not just that but ability to manage the data, put governance around it, be meet regulatory controls and you need a data platform for that. And that's what Portworx essentially is. Now let's talk a little bit about why, where is DevOps and where does it come from and what is the emergence of platform engineering due to this ecosystem, right? So if you traditionally looked at DevOps, obviously, like if you go back a few years, the life of a DevOps engineer was probably one of the most difficult along with people in IT. So people in IT kind of sort of dealt with applications that were kind of mature, had a vendor behind it, they would bring it in, they kind of babysit it and kind of treat it like a pet. A DevOps engineer inside a large software development shop is internal or external facing, had to deal with a lot of different kinds of software built for different environments and support them to run in production and God help them, there's one little change that had to be done, right? So what typically happened as these modern applications evolved and as the applications had to be deployed in different environments to go live to cater to different customer needs, there was a need to unify the packaging of the applications so you can deploy them everywhere. So that is where really containerization came in, right? You could build from your laptop, run it in the cloud or in data center, right? Now what that led to is a unification of the platform where you can now build your application, put it in a single platform that manages all of your containerized apps and then gave the DevOps teams a single control point to put a lot of policies and governance and compliance and regulatory stuff and take care of handling all of these application requirements, the deployment requirements of a large organization, much more simpler in a single platform than having these hundreds of different application platforms that try to wrangle them and unify the requirements around how to deploy and run apps. And that led to the emergence of the platform engineering, right? Where now a lot of different larger organizations have a platform engineering team that standardizes how to deploy and run apps. But it hasn't simplified their life essentially until Kubernetes came and then Portworx associated with it simplified how to deploy and run apps in production. Essentially kind of being the most important tools or species or software or solutions in the hands of a platform engineering team. How much adoption of platform engineering because once again, when we look at things like DevOps, these are not like kind of really like practices are where people say, hey, these labels, but realistically when you look at platform engineering versus DevOps and a lot of other disciples and practices, how much adoption you're seeing there and what is the actual impact that is happening on the team because a lot of time we talk about all these new terms, new cultural changes, but organizations who are actually solving all those problems, they get overwhelmed. Hey, now we have to embrace this. Sometimes there's a lot of confusion. So what are you seeing in the market? What we are seeing in the market is that platform engineering is taking hold as a very important discipline in a lot of enterprises. In the modern world, every business is a software and services business. You have to build digital apps to serve your customers better. We have customers like JCI, a customer with a great pedigree, 125 years of existence has always been the forefront of industry and home automation. As you can see with their open blue product, they have taken that and then digitized their entire customer and building management experience on multiple clouds, right? So I mean, the reason I'm giving that example is that the digitizing of apps is touching everybody and every business needs to be a software business in order to survive and it cannot be no longer a small sliver of their investment or a outsourced group anymore. It needs to be a lot more of, you have to be a software, a SaaS business or digital apps business in order for you to succeed. So what that leads to is to have these, the platform engineering becomes the core, the crux of where all these applications come and live out their life inside an organization. And that's where a lot of investment is going in. So we see that has kind of evolved to become one of the most important functions in an enterprise. Now it has, this evolution has taken a lot of great steps. I mean, it is not, it was not easy. If you asked me 2016, 2017, how my life was, definitely it wasn't easy, right? It was, you know, all of the tools and all of the pieces of software, everything, Docker, Kubernetes, Portbox, everything was going through its maturity cycle, right? I think we're in a great state now if I can use the, crossing the chasm example, I think we are well past the chasm here, right? We're past the early adopter, late adopter stage. We're essentially entering the late majority where every enterprise has a cloud strategy. Every enterprise is an application strategy that's for homegrown internal facing apps and for external facing apps. And every enterprise has to be a software business in order for it to succeed and they're adopting Kubernetes as the platform for running apps in production and absolutely to, you know, and using Portbox as well. So we are in that late majority adopter stage and platform engineering has definitely taken a hold as the de facto place where enterprises are standardizing their applications on. Since you're talking about, you know, crossing chasm, I also want to talk about, you know, the fact about Kubernetes or cloud native is that it is complicated, it is complex and look at the landscape, how many logos are there and things are not going to become easier. The complexity is not going to go away. What we have to do is to help users deal with this complexity. Talk about how platform engineering enable developers, teams to deal with this complexity of Kubernetes and cloud native. It's funny you mentioned complexity and the vendor landscape. And I always joke internally that AI is the new Kubernetes, right? If you go on the AI landscape, you know, there's like companies popping up every two days, right? You know, it's like how we will look at, you know, the world has changed considerably since chat GPT was announced and now all of these LL and everything coming out. We look at everything with the lens of how can AI accelerate this? How can AI replace this, right? Essentially Kubernetes has gone through that but because it's such an infrastructure play, it is so invisible, how it has transformed a lot of different businesses, right? I mean, you look at it, open AI built chat GPT on a 7,000 node Kubernetes cluster, right? So, but how many times did we talk about how much, you know, the GPT, the transformations that are happening in Kubernetes because such an invisible layer, right? So it has definitely taken hold, right? It has, you know, it is, there is definitely a lot of different offerings, but anytime a transformative technology like Kubernetes or AI come, a lot of people try to solve the problems slightly differently, right? Because obviously there's people see the power of it and what happens in the long run is the offerings that solve the pain of the most customers and has the most commercial viability and has the best execution went out, right? Sometimes they may look the same, sometimes the product offerings might, you know, the surface may appear the same, but definitely in the details and this is a long game and you have to really help the customers out, partner with them, co-create with them and evolve with them. And those are the vendor offerings that, you know, that usually survive out in these kinds of transformations. So my recommendation to our customers is always to look for partners that will invest with you in the long run that want to grow with you and co-create with you and, you know, and how to evolve the, how this platform will evolve because today's requirements may not be tomorrow's and how their business evolves is how the platform will evolve too. What advice do you have so that organizations should approach because there are a lot of who are in the early phase of it, opting, you know, platform engineering kind of disciplines processes so that they have things in the right order in the right place, what advice do you have for them? You know, my call to action to all of, you know, all of the organizations is, it's very simple, architected right from the get go, right? You know, there's, as you've mentioned, there are a lot of options out there, right? But look for options that actually give you enterprise class support is widely deployed and proven and has had a long deployment history in the market and architected right from the get go. And, you know, and sometimes it's easier to get, oh, let me try the free option, let me try something else. And, you know, you don't build serious enterprise businesses with no enterprise class support from your vendors, right? So architected right and, you know, build that culture of, you know, how do you make your applications deployment and management more and more self-service where your developer teams are more empowered, but, you know, and you don't have to get in the way of tinkering the infrastructure for them, right? That's what Kubernetes offers. That's what, you know, vendors like Portworx and everybody else offers is to how to create that self-service infrastructure, right? Now, it's important to also understand that, you know, there are different kinds of offerings, right, that come in, right? Pick the ones that, you know, have delivered the end-to-end capabilities, not like day zero capabilities, not like day one, you need a vendor to partner with you all the way from day zero to day two and beyond and evolve with you, right? So look at the history as well as to, you know, how they can kind of evolve with you and go through with you in the journey, right? Those are three things I would say, you know, how you kind of like navigate in this path, right? But architecting it right and seeing the, you know, and then having the vision of how do you standardize, how do you consolidate so you can, you know, have a, you know, much more unified approach towards app development deployment and running in the organization. So you can control at one or two points and the entire organization benefits. We are seeing those are the kind of leaders that are coming out as winners in this game. The amount of progress, development, new technology that we are seeing, we are lucky to be in this phase, you know, where we keep seeing new technology, which is also kind of intimidating because we have to keep ourselves updated with what's going on. How organizations, because there are two things, first of all, just because there's the new shiny object does not mean every organization should move and embrace it, you know, there are so many comics about that as well. Oh, we should move to the cloud. Once again, just kind of, you know, expanding on your advice is that when new things come up, should organization look at, hey, the new thing is coming, we should embrace it or they should start with what problem they are trying to solve and then look at tools and solutions that they might need versus going into reverse. And second thing is that how they should also have kind of parallel where they can continue to evaluate new technologies while keeping, you know, something which is stable and working and not getting overwhelmed with, hey, let's just move to Copenhagen, let's move to the next shiny object. Does this question make sense? That's absolutely, it makes terrific sense. And I'll tell you, this is my rubric when I look at new tech, right? I look at it in three different dimensions. I say, how can this new tech help enhance our customer experience? How can the new tech help enhance our product experience, right, how our product functions, you know, how can it deliver more value? And how can we power this new tech, right? Can we do anything in our product that can actually help power this new technology more and enhance it, right? So, but many times it's important to understand almost all of the new technologies go through the hype cycle, right? There is going to be like the initial hype and there's going to be a truck of disillusionment and it is very important to figure out how to level up the investment at what level, right? So usually learn at the top of the high cycle through the truck of disillusionment, you're actually in the learning cycle, right? So don't invest too much or learn, learn more, learn more, right? And then when you know that you're hit almost about to hit the bottom, you cannot obviously time it, right? Then that's when you like really go up level the investment because now you've understood what are the, who are the fireflies? What are those things that will vanish and where the real deal is, right? I mean, then you can go after it. So I think anytime when customers and you know, others look at a new tech, I would look at it as a learning opportunity more than an investment opportunity at the beginning, right? Continue to learn and continue to see where you can apply and go back to the rubric I mentioned is like which are the three categories I can leverage this to enhance and drive business value, right? And then go from there. And then if any of them click, make a mild investment and see, get customer feedback and iterate on it. How is Pure History helping these teams to once again is stay on the journey and keep moving forward? Portworx has always been a tremendous partner to our customers, right? I mean, we don't look at ourselves as a vendor. We actually look at ourselves as an extension of our customer's esteem. We partner with them, right? When our partnership starts, almost at the first presentation, especially when we meet a new customer, because we go in and we're looking to troubleshoot. What are their pains? We're not trying to sell anything there in most of the cases. We're also kind of learning and understanding where is our customer? What are their journeys? What are their pain points? So our approach is very consultative, right? Because a lot of customers have gone and said, maybe not, or our team goes and says, maybe they're not either ready for us or they don't have a similar problem that we are trying to solve. But hey, let's keep in touch and let's understand what the revolution is looking like and how we can help them kind of share our common knowledge a little bit to help them out, right? So we're essentially a partner more than a vendor. And from a value standpoint, what Portworx really does is that Portworx hides the complexity of the underlying infrastructure, physical virtual cloud to our customers. So essentially they have a global fabric that they can deploy and run their apps and they can, they automatically get HA, data protection, encryption, data security and they get the backup and recovery and DR and then complete suite of data services that we can manage from day zero to day two for them. So we deliver data and storage and database automation at scale for our customers. So they never have to worry about the, and deal with the intricacies of it and continue to serve their application teams, you know, a lot better, right? So that is where we essentially partner and simplify the lives of our customers. Essentially, a lot of tell you like one customer court is one of our customers said, pre-prior to Portworx, they would never had a holiday season where, you know, they were not pulled into their office, they were on call. After Portworx, they could go to watch a Thanksgiving game or like a holiday game and they never had to worry about their infrastructure because Portworx, you know, handles all of that for them. Thank you so much for taking time out today and of course talk about this topic. Thanks for all those insights and I would love to chat with you again. Thank you. Something like an amazing questions. Thanks for having me here. I really look forward to connecting with you again and sharing more about our journey and how our customers are innovating.