In recent years, India has made steady progress in creating niche solutions in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI), the cloud, mobility, green tech, etc. India possesses all the elements required to be a global innovation engine, including a big market potential, an exceptional talent pool, and a thriving culture of frugal innovation, says Ajeya Motaganahalli, MD, India R&D, Pure Storage (a provider of enterprise data flash storage solutions), in an interaction with Sudhir Chowdhary. Excerpts:
What is Pure Storage’s India growth strategy?
Pure Storage strongly believes in the India growth story and is aligned with a larger national narrative such as ‘Make in India’. Our strategy focuses on creating cutting-edge solutions for global enterprises, right here in India. We have made a significant investment in India and our recently launched R&D facility is a major step in that direction. Our R&D centre in Bengaluru attracts talent comparable to that found in the US and Europe. India will play a key role in Pure’s global innovation strategy.
What is the contribution of India’s R&D centre to Pure’s global product portfolio?
Our teams in India aren’t just extended arms of the teams in the US but have responsibility for whole product lines. Our Portworx team here, for example, recently built PX-Backup and Backup-SaaS, two key products that are being deployed globally, from the ground up and also contributed significantly to Portworx Data Services (PDS), a game changer in the Kubernetes world. We are also investing significantly in India to develop Flash Blade, Pure’s scale out architecture for supporting Object and file workloads.
How do you see the engineering and technology talent landscape in India?
One of the main reasons we selected India, and Bengaluru specifically, is the availability of top talent here in the areas that are important to Pure Storage. In our Data Management Talent in India Report, we found that India currently makes up more than 10% of the global data management talent pool. Even more significant, of the more than 700,000 data management professionals in the country, more than three-quarters will be at an advanced level in terms of experience in three to five years and this bodes well for the future.
How does Pure Storage ensure the security and reliability of data centres for Indian enterprises?
Data security is without a doubt a top priority for CIOs in the country. At Pure Storage, we believe that data needs to be protected to the greatest standards possible. Pure Storage does this by using AES-256-bit encryption to protect data while it is at rest. Moreover, our data encryption occurs without any impact on performance and while maintaining full data reduction capabilities. In addition to encryption, we have a feature called SafeMode that takes immutable snapshots that cannot be tampered with even by someone with administrator access. In the event of a ransomware attack, these backups can be restored in a matter of minutes to minimise business disruption.
How does Pure Storage help enterprises reduce their carbon footprint?
Environmental sustainability has become a priority for most organisations and CIOs are being asked to do their part by building a sustainable technology infrastructure that can contribute to the organisation’s environmental goals. Pure Storage has set the standard by developing products and business models that enable clients to significantly reduce their energy consumption and e-waste. Pure’s solutions have been tested and proven to reduce energy usage by up to 80% compared to other flash-based storage systems.
And through our unique Evergreen storage model, we are helping our customers avoid wholesale hardware changes every three to five years. Around 97% of Pure Storage arrays that were purchased more than six years ago are still in use today.