Innovation, Alignment and Navigating Competing Priorities with Cohesity’s Vasu Murthy

Hi, everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv. Really, uh, glad to introduce you to a first timer here on Techstrong tv.

It's always great to have a new person join the club. I'd like you to introduce you to Vasu Murti. I may not have done that right.

But I'll do the best they can. That sounds perfect. Vasu, how are you?

I'm doing great. Uh, great, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Thank you. It's our pleasure. Uh, Vasu is the senior vp, chief product officer, CPO over at Cohesity.

And, um, so Vasu, as I mentioned, thanks for being here. Vasu. How long have you been CPO over there?

About six months right now. Not too long. Oh, Okay.

Not too long. Give us an idea where, you know, of your journey. How did, how'd you wind up here?

Well, it's a long journey. I always like to build things. I was an engineer and I'm still engineer at heart.

And, uh, initially I used to build software and products, and now I'd like to build companies and businesses. Um, but in a long career I've done consulting, uh, founded a company startup that was acquired by Oracle. I was there for eight years.

In the last six before joining Cohesity, uh, I was at Rubrik for about six years. Oh, sure. You know, seeing that company through the IPO, uh, it is a tremendous event.

And I'm at Cohesity right now trying to help, you know, more customers realize cyber resilience, get more, um, more out of their data. What a great career. That's a good stuff there.

You know, I think as we were talking off camera, most of our audience has heard COHEs heard of Cohesity. I think even more of our audience knows Veritas and stuff like that. But, you know, for those who haven't connected the dots, or maybe you're not familiar with Cohesity or even Veritas, how would you describe Cohesity to them?

Alan Cohesity was founded about 12 years ago, and it started a new wave of companies in this area. You know, our con co uh, founder Mohi Aaron was also a co-founder of Nutanix. He bought the concept of Nutanix into secondary data.

What does it mean? So it's not just having a robust data platform, but also having an execution platform on top of it where you can, you know, develop applications to make more sense of the data or more use of the data. And the first application that was super popular is the backup application.

So the Cohesity, uh, really was, uh, founded as the first use case being protecting customer's data so we can recover faster. But turns out in the last five years, six years, cyber breaches have started and they've been really taking on, uh, the world. And so we, we developed a new set of applications to make cyber recovery, right?

Recovery from cyber attacks even more faster, even more easier. Um, and the last thing is the whole company was founded on making more from secondary data. Turns out with Genai, the unstructured data we hold is now, uh, the new unstructured data lake.

And so we are developing applications for customers to make, get more out of their data. So it's a history of getting more from secondary data, which includes backup data, archive data, and, and, and, um, they've been pretty successful at that with largest companies of the world adopting our platform recently. We acquired Veritas in December, in fact.

And Veritas is a very storied company with a long history in this industry. And they've have, you know, I think for, for, for the longest time, they were the number one player of the largest companies using Veritas for their data management and, uh, especially, um, uh, backup and recovery. And we now have all of those customers in our family.

And Veritas has done a tremendous job of keeping their platform up to date. Um, you know, with the changing development architectures and platforms. And now we are one company, probably the biggest company in this, uh, space with the largest amount of revenues, huge number of customers.

And now our challenge and, and our opportunity is to get all of these customers to a better place in terms of cyber resiliency, better place in terms of getting more outta their data, including ai. Absolutely. You know, it's interesting.

I, I saw this happening. It was during Covid, actually, right? And, you know, I wasn't tra none of us were traveling, but I was talking to people on Zoom all, all the time, and all of a sudden after 10 years of everybody's focus being on app dev and applications, and the app and the app security, people started saying, wait a second, the data is what's important, data management, data protection, right?

It's about the data. And then, and now, now AI comes, you know, generative AI and now agent ai, you know, and, and everyone really realizes now that there's gold in those, in that data, right? If you know how to Absolutely.

How to mine it and how to Yes. Use it vector and everything else. And so we've seen a re a return to the primacy of data.

Yes. At the same time, interestingly, in security, we've, we've seen the pendulum swing from prevention to resiliency, to response to, you know, look it, you're not gonna stop every attack. What you do after your attack determines whether you win or lose, right?

Thing. So for Cohesity, man, those are two mega trends that you guys are riding, kinda like a rocket ship right into space. Um, good for you.

Good for Cohesity, right? Un unbelievable now. Yeah.

Um, that's true. So in fact, with Veritas acquisition and putting the, all the data into one platform, we have hundred exabytes plus of data, hundreds of exabytes of data, amazing amount of data, and we can't, uh, you know, we can't wait to get, um, our customers be able to use all the data. Absolutely.

So, I mean, you sit here now Vasu, at this inflection point where you've got hundreds of exabytes, it's like thinking, you know, how long 20 light years is from here, right? It's hard to put your head around it, but hundreds of exo bytes of data. We've got ai, we've got, you know, people wanting to improve their resilience.

Where do you go from here as the chief product officer? What do you see as the mission and how do you, how do you accomplish that A then Yes. So it's, it's a great opportunity and privilege, um, to be in this position.

Now. Customers have the data under in our platform, and we have an opportunity to help them be resilient to cyber attacks. We have an opportunity to help them get more of the data and be resilient, be compliant with their, uh, regulatory, uh, requirements as well.

But, uh, you know, when, when two companies come together and we have products that have been there for a while, uh, we want to, again, make sure everybody is focused on the customer outcomes and maintain the customer relationship rather than individual products, right? So it's not about the products, it's about the customer obsession, making sure the customer be able, continue to keep the promise that we have our customers to be, to make them secure, uh, to make them, uh, better, uh, with, with using their data. And how do you build an organization that focuses on that?

Because it's very easy for human nature to say, Hey, this is my product, this is my code, you know, when I'm, when is my code gonna see the light of day? Uh, it's really getting everybody at the spirit of the customer obsession, customer relationship, uh, and to make sure, hey, how are we solving the customer problem and keep it front and center as they go up day to day, prioritizing what we do first, what we do next, and what we don't do. And so, building an organization like that, for me, that is customer obsessed.

Uh, that where the decision process is clear and we have the right people in the right place. And that's a challenge. So me, my job is as, as a, it's a, it's a people job, uh, because I have leaders who really know how to do this stuff.

They know, they know the product, they know the technology, they know the customers, but how do we orient them? So they are, continue to be customer focused, continue to keep customers, uh, top of their minds and not like, what is my product? What is my code?

You know, so, so that is really how I see my job. Absolutely. Um, but you know, specifically, and, and look, you're as good as your team, right?

I know that as a CEO too, right? We, we can't do it all. But like, what gets you excited in terms of what you might be able to accomplish in the next year to three years?

So, um, I've, I've been traveling a lot. I've been meeting many customers. I can see the sparkle in their eyes when we say, Hey, all the backup data that you have can now be leveraged with gene ai.

I know every company's experimenting with, uh, gene AI projects, uh, but they always struggle with gathering all the data in one place, making sure the data is clean made, making those data is secure, and, and it's, again, auditable and turns out our platform is ideal for doing all of that. Um, and so I want to make sure we are focused on helping customers achieve those goals, as well as cyber resilience is still, we are an infancy. Uh, you know, most organizations of the world are not cyber resilient.

And so we are using AI as much also in our recovery capabilities. Being able to look for threats in the data, making sure data is clean, detected early, being able to investigate better in an incident response, being able to practice and, um, practice and practice and prepare so when the incident happens, they can bounce back faster. And also always make sure it's not just about recovering applications.

Make sure data is secure so data cannot be stolen. So all of these problems we have that customers are looking for help, our job is to continue to build products, um, that, that meet these, meet these requirements better, make it easier for customers to consume these things and make them more secure. And that is the goal.

And if you look at the product one level down, what does it mean? So, you know, building the right set of teams, also building the right set of priorities, uh, you know, how, what do you prioritize? Uh, so we definitely going to invest a lot in ai, not only in helping customers leverage their data, but also in making our products much more easy to use.

In fact, that brings to the recent announcement with the recovery agent we did, um, which is really the first time in this industry where you have an AI agent helping with the cyber, um, incident response, uh, with the recovery preparation practice, and, and eventually for the, you know, recovery in terms of a breach as well. And, you know, you, that was gonna be my next question. What about agent ai?

So obviously you guys are already rolling with, with agents to do that. Do you envision more agents or maybe agents that have more capability beyond, you know, uh, identifying that, Um, Alan, so genetic AI for us is AI embedded in the product that knows how to do stuff. It's just not telling you stuff or what to do.

It actually is doing it. Um, and of course we have to tread the line carefully because we are talking about customers assets, uh, you know, highly valuable application. So we are not gonna get let right now, Hey, I just go do its thing.

But it's about collaboratively working with, uh, the user. For example, in recovery agent, we look at the estate that customer has, and we'll recommend a blueprint. We'll say, Hey, it looks like these VMs are named together.

Looks like you are reporting on these VMs together. They must represent an application. And so why don't I create a recovery group with this application?

Um, I know you want to practice, rehearse the recovery and another separate configuration for actual recovery. So let me suggest these configurations for you. Um, and once you created this blueprint, we can say, looks like you haven't run the blueprint for a while.

Shall I schedule it to run every quarter? Do you have all the infrastructure ready, or that looks like in your recovery, this specific assets are taking much longer. So, you know, when you create another blueprint with the same database, you should expect you can really get the four hours you want, it'll probably gonna be eight hours.

So this level of, um, assistance in, in preparing and practicing cyber recovery is really what I think we are really unique at. In fact, we have built in some operators in there where it'll automatically do the malware scanning. Um, it'll automatically do data classification as required, um, as, as, as an assistance to, um, to, to our users.

And I think, you know, working with ai, it'll, it's gonna make us more productive and hopefully more safer because it's gonna catch things that we didn't catch. But we are not there in a place where, um, ai, it'll just do its own thing and, uh, you know, run the blueprints by itself. Without asking your permission, it is still in assistive mode.

Uh, but it really is embedded into the product. So you're not trying to figure out what it says and trying to do it, but it'll actually do it for you. Love it.

Let me ask you a question. With all of that functionality, what does that mean for the interface? Is it really just, I mean, do we, do we, are we all moving to just a chat interface, a chat bot interface where we're just talking to the agent, telling it what to do, what not to do, or it's reporting back to us?

What, you know, there, there's a whole system of, you know, uh, of, of, of UI design that seems to be maybe going away, right? I mean, you know, all of these great best practices we have for developing, uh, IDs and, and user interfaces. What do you think?

So now I, I run design and our information development documentation and product teams, and I don't think it's going away. In fact, the, the user interface evolved because it's a great way for us to consume complex information. Think of an architecture diagram and think of trying to talk about the architecture diagram in chat.

I mean, just doesn't work, does it? So you, you know, a blueprint of how, what to execute a flow chart is best presented visually. Sure.

Uh, the chat is a limited interface. In fact, I find it painful because now you don't type it in or speak to it, but think about how long can we keep the thought in our head when you're trying to say something complex. So, um, documents, pictures, diagrams, extremely important when you're dealing with complex systems, which are our organizations are.

So I expect inventory to look like inventory. Uh, we all our visual, um, you know, uh, visual, uh, capabilities, because the world is complex, it's in three dimensions. And so I would rather in fact, see it coming in three dimensions, uh, rather than it going in a, getting relegated to a chat interface.

Um, what if you could in a virtual world, look at the servers, put them where they are, look at the connections between them, um, you know, that is the kind of, uh, innovation and visual interfaces that, that we are waiting for right now. Most of interface, the 2D, that's fine, 2D is very good. Uh, but I know I don't see, uh, complex IT operations being done on a chat, uh, chat bot at all.

That happens to be the easiest way to get to these agenda capabilities. But our agents are not like that. So when you recommend a blueprint, it actually is gonna do the work for you.

It's gonna show you, Hey, this is the blueprint I'd recommend, what do you think about? Then you're gonna can go change things in there and, um, and, and then say, okay, I accept it. So I feel like visual design and dealing with complex systems is gonna see a lot more, um, revitalization in this agent.

KI agents are working with us in getting the stuff done, uh, rather than being constrained to a chat and if in fact is still gonna be there. But I, I don't think it's gonna be as prominent as it was in the last couple of years. Turns out that was the only interface that was really available for those technologies today.

Yeah, agreed. Vasu we're about outta time. You know what we didn't mention for people who want to get more information, what's the website?

And it's kind of the on-ramp here. com will get you, uh, where you want to be. And, um, it has all the data that you need.

And, uh, including, you know, the recovery agent capabilities that we announced, uh, recently, uh, we really look forward to connecting with more customers around the world and, um, you know, helping them be cyber resilient, get more from their data with the JK. I love it. Vasu, please don't be a stranger, right?

Come back soon. Keep us posted. Best of luck in this position.

What a great, what a great time to be in this position, right? It just is a real convergence here. Uh, thanks for coming on.

Text drunk tv. We're gonna take a break. We'll be back in a minute.