 Hey, everyone, welcome back to our event. Data-driven starts with intelligent infrastructure. This segment is called Unleashing the Potential of a Data-Driven Enterprise. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I'm very pleased to welcome Ashish Nadkarni to the program Group VP and General Manager Worldwide Infrastructure Research at IDC. Ashish, welcome, great to have you. Thank you for having me. So I hear that you recently had a great opportunity to attend an industry event where you got to talk with a lot of company execs about the data infrastructure in the data management market. So you and I are gonna have a conversation with that in mind. Love to hear from you what you learned, what you concluded, and most importantly, some of your key takeaways for IT leaders. So Ashish, as more enterprises across every industry are really striving hard to become data-driven, I wanna get your thoughts on some of the challenges they're still facing when sending up a data infrastructure. That's a great question. I think the first thing I would say there is that as companies become data-driven, they need to ensure that the storage infrastructure which houses the key data elements that their company relies on, that storage infrastructure is implemented very efficiently. It requires that there be a tight connection between what we call as a data plane and the data persistence layer. That connection actually allows these companies, their workloads, the applications to make the most out of the data, being able to intelligently weave through the different data sets. And at the same time, also be able to look forward in terms of how that analytics is done and how the intelligence is gathered from those data sets. Now, what happens is if the storage is not implemented efficiently, then you're going to start to have challenges. You're not going to be able to bring out the potential in all of the data that you're gathering and collecting and keeping in your infrastructure. So basically, storage solutions have to be implemented efficiently and vendors have to be able to deliver that connection between the data plane and the storage infrastructure natively in a way that makes it seamless for these companies to implement that storage infrastructure. So as those organizations, as we talked about in any industry are really striving to not only become data driven, but to leverage the intelligence that you talk about and you look out on that data horizon, what are some of the things that IT leaders really need to be ensuring to ensure that their infrastructure is future ready? And the second part is, how do you define future ready? Yeah, so that's another great question. I think the future ready part of it comes from making sure that these organizations can bring in newer workloads as they are modernizing their existing workloads. Now, we hear about cloud all the time, but what really cloud is is the organization embracing an agile pay as you go cookie cutter infrastructure that can then be designed to work for the organization as it sort of switches from these traditional workloads to modern cloud native workloads. It requires that the not just the infrastructure be modern and agile, but also the consumption of it. It cannot just be the way that people consumed infrastructure a few years back, which was a very capital intensive process. It requires companies to be more optics friendly or embrace the infrastructure consumption in an optics friendly fashion. It requires them to embrace what we call as a hybrid cloud operating environment. And ultimately, what it is is, you cannot just say one thing or the other. So in the past, it was all about on-premises traditional infrastructure. In the future, it's all about a hybrid model which takes what is public cloud and connects it with on-premises workloads or on-premises infrastructure in a way that delivers an agile infrastructure across your entire infrastructure state, if you will. And at the same time, you are able to deliver what your business needs in an agile and flexible fashion. You mentioned being modern and agile agility key there. With those in mind, when you're talking to customers and you're in conversations, what do you advise them to be looking for when they're evaluating technology providers that they need to help them solve those challenges so that they can truly become data driven with an infrastructure to your point that's future ready. So I think the first I would start by saying that, sometimes putting all your eggs in one basket can be a dangerous proposition. People need to think about their environment as a flexible operating entity, something that can be decoupled from the rigidity that we've had in traditional environments. So whether it is hybrid environments which make a use of public cloud and on-premises infrastructure. So with that in mind, I think, and the second thing I would say is that workloads are changing. So it's not just your traditional business workloads but also modern cloud native workloads. So with all of that in mind, I think you need to look for storage solutions that offer number one, the hybrid operating model, natively, meaning that they should be able to seamlessly make use of all of the real estate footprint that you have at your disposal. And that includes public cloud services. The second I would say is that it needs to be a combination of performance optimized solutions and capacity optimized solutions that operate together in a seamless fashion, which means that when your workloads require lots of performance, you can deliver that when your workloads are looking for that capacity footprint so that you can tear off some of the colder datasets or datasets that are no longer active. Then you can do that in a seamless fashion. The third, as I mentioned earlier, is that connection between the data plane and the infrastructure or the data plane and the persistence layer. What that allows you to do is not just query the data but also get that intelligence from the data in a sort of a native fashion, which then minimizes some of the overhead that your IT decision makers have to do to gain that level of visibility into their data real estate. I would also say that increasingly we are seeing this trend where different business units are combining their efficiencies, if you will, to get the most out of their real estate, infrastructure real estate. And what I mean by that is the operational technology and the internet of things technologies and the IT technologies are being combined to deliver a seamless experience powered by a common infrastructure footprint. So the solution has to support that convergence. So the IT or the convergence, as we call it, needs to be part of the storage solution. And then the last thing I would make as a comment here is increasingly customers are concerned about the carbon emissions footprint, the sustainability footprint of their overall IT and data centers, as we know, are huge contributors to the overall, the carbon emissions, if you will. So people are looking for ways to make their real estate, data center real estate efficient. And so the storage solutions that they're looking for must support those in a measurable fashion, meaning that they should be able to give you the, not just the return on investment, but also how efficient are they? And so going from what you had before to what you would be implementing in the future. With those recommendations in mind, I'm glad that you brought up the ESG factor. In our last minute, Ashish, talk to me about some of the key takeaways from the recent assessment that you've done of Hitachi Ventura. Where do you see tech providers investing like Hitachi, why are customers engaging? Give me that 60 second overview. Sure, so let me start by first saying that I am a long time fan of Hitachi in the sense that I've been using Hitachi products for a long time in my previous life before I joined IDC. And so I've seen this journey for over 10 years now, almost 15 years, 16 years. And I've appreciated the fact that Hitachi has, Hitachi Ventura has made some significant strides in modernizing their storage portfolio, going from what it used to be as a sort of a data center-based portfolio to be a modern, software-defined portfolio that can offer not just the foundational element for the storage infrastructure, but also some of the key data analytics, software-defined capabilities that are mandatory almost in a modern ID infrastructure. What I also appreciate is the fact that they have solutions now that can deliver the data intelligence and the efficient ID footprint that is necessary for most modern applications to scale. They have done significant strides in providing solutions that offer that IDOT conversions on a common infrastructure platform. And then lastly, I will say they have a flexible consumption as pay-as-you-go model that is quite modern, it quite comprehensive. And they are also at the forefront of articulating the efficiency of their storage for the modern, highly sustainable green data center. Green data center's modern agile. Ashish, thank you so much for coming on the program, talking about how organizations across every enterprise can set up a data infrastructure that allows them to truly leverage data to be data-driven. We appreciate your time, we appreciate your insights. Thank you. And we appreciate you for watching as we've talked to you about in this program, we know more enterprises are striving really hard to become data-driven so that they can deliver greater value to the customers, that's what they want. But in addition to solving for complexity and security and sustainability, IT leaders are also facing economic pressures in a market that we know continues to evolve. Therefore, the right infrastructure and the right provider will be key to achieving business goals today and in the future. We invite you to learn more about how Hitachi Ventura can help make your infrastructure future ready and you can do that by clicking on the link below. Don't forget also all these videos are available on demand to watch and rewatch and of course share at theCUBE.net. Also check out siliconangle.com for the news and analysis, there we're gonna summarize all the highlights of this program. This is Lisa Martin and on behalf of theCUBE and Hitachi Ventura, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.