Prateek Kansal, Head of Engineering for Komprise’s India Operations, in conversation with CIO&Leader.
Head of Engineering
Komprise India
In today’s data-driven landscape, managing unstructured data poses a critical challenge for enterprises across diverse industries. Unstructured data, including documents, emails, videos, and social media content, often expands rapidly, leading to increased storage costs and complex management requirements. In a recent interview with CIO&Leader, Prateek Kansal, Head of Engineering, India Operations at Komprise, discussed his company’s role and trends in unstructured data management. He emphasized the significance of data mobility without vendor lock-in and underscored the importance of prioritizing data security and compliance during storage and movement. Here are excerpts from the interview:
CIO&Leader: What unique propositions does Komprise offer?
Prateek Kansal: Komprise focuses on unstructured data management, a space often overlooked compared to storage management. We provide a state-of-the-art SaaS solution that helps customers manage their unstructured data across various storage platforms, both on-premise and in the cloud. Our solution offers strong ROI, rapid setup (within 15 minutes), and comprehensive data analytics, allowing users to understand data usage patterns, growth, and access details. Additionally, our Transparent Move Technology enables seamless data archiving and access, helping customers optimize storage costs and data management workflows.
CIO&Leader: Can you explain how you ensure data mobility without vendor lock-in?
Prateek Kansal: Komprise is designed as an open platform, utilizing standard protocols like NFS, SMB, and S3-based APIs. This approach allows us to integrate with various storage platforms without locking customers into a specific vendor. We store data in its native format, providing customers access anytime without proprietary constraints. For added security, data transfers are encrypted over HTTPS, ensuring secure data mobility across different environments.
CIO&Leader: How does your platform help organizations manage and analyze large volumes of unstructured data?
Prateek Kansal: Our platform includes deep analytics capabilities through the Global File Index, allowing customers to run custom queries on their data metadata. This feature helps identify data patterns, usage, and storage efficiency. We provide detailed reports, such as orphan and duplicate data reports, enabling customers to optimize their storage and manage data effectively. Our analysis helps organizations save significant storage costs by archiving data to cost-effective storage solutions while maintaining accessibility.
CIO&Leader: How do you ensure data security and compliance during data movement and storage?
Prateek Kansal: We prioritize security by ensuring data remains under the customer’s control, whether on-premise or in their cloud accounts. Data transfers are encrypted over HTTPS, and we support secure file protocols within customer data centers. We offer encryption options for stored data, aligning with customer-specific security requirements. Additionally, our customer success team provides best practices and support to ensure data security and compliance throughout the data lifecycle.
CIO&Leader: What are some key industry sectors that benefit from your solutions?
Prateek Kansal: Our solutions are versatile and benefit various industries, including pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, federal organizations, manufacturing, retail, financial services, insurance, and education. Each sector deals with significant data sprawl and compliance requirements, making our unstructured data management tools highly valuable for optimizing storage costs, enhancing data security, and improving workflow efficiency.
CIO&Leader: What future trends do you foresee in unstructured data management, and how are you positioning yourself to address these trends?
Prateek Kansal: With the advent of generative AI, the efficacy and scope of AI tools and services are expanding rapidly across diverse industries. This trend not only enhances decision-making capabilities but also streamlines workflow efficiencies through automation. However, a key challenge lies in curating and feeding precise data into AI workflows to optimize outcomes effectively.
Furthermore, the evolution from single-vendor to multi-vendor enterprise infrastructure is essential. With multiple cloud and on-premises storage options emerging, companies increasingly opt for hybrid environments. This shift accommodates data generation across diverse locations, from central data centers to edge computing sites worldwide. However, managing this distributed data poses challenges, often leading to data silos. We address this complexity by offering a unified view of data across silos and edges. Our Mobile File Indexing and analysis tools enable organizations to comprehend their data comprehensively. This consolidated approach ensures a holistic understanding of data trends and patterns, crucial for informed decision-making and operational efficiency.
We are focusing on helping customers feed the right data into AI workflows, optimizing cost and efficiency. We have launched the Smart Data Workflow Manager, enabling intuitive workflow definitions to streamline data analysis and movement. Additionally, the trend towards hybrid and multi-cloud environments increases the complexity of data management. There is a strong need for a consolidated view of data across silos, empowering customers to make informed decisions and manage their data more effectively.
CIO&Leader: Can you share an example demonstrating Komprise’s impact on a customer’s data management strategy?
Prateek Kansal: One of our customers aimed to save a million dollars in their first year of enterprise deployment. By using Komprise to archive old data from high-cost on-premise storage to cloud storage, they achieved and exceeded their savings goal. Our deep analytics provided valuable insights, enabling them to optimize data storage and reduce costs by 70%. This case illustrates how Komprise’s solution helps organizations achieve significant cost savings while maintaining data accessibility and compliance.
CIO&Leader: Could you elaborate on Komprise’s collaborations with storage vendors and how these partnerships enhance your offerings?
Prateek Kansal: At Komprise, we actively collaborate with a range of storage vendors to enhance the impact and effectiveness of our offerings. Our partnerships extend to major cloud providers such as AWS and Azure, where we work closely not only on their storage services but also in creating joint solutions that integrate with AI workloads. This collaboration ensures that our customers can manage their data efficiently using Komprise while leveraging the robust storage capabilities of these cloud platforms.
We have also established strong partnerships with companies like NetApp, Pure Storage, and Nutanix. These collaborations focus on optimizing the integration of our solutions with their API stacks to ensure seamless functionality and optimal performance. Our joint solutions enable customers to utilize their storage resources more effectively, both on-premises and in the cloud.
Furthermore, we have extended our partnerships to include on-premises object stores, ensuring that our offerings cater to a diverse range of storage environments. By working closely with these vendors, we ensure our customers can use Komprise’s solutions to their fullest potential, achieving efficient data management and storage optimization across various platforms.
CIO&Leader: What are Komprise’s expansion plans in India, and how do you envision the growth of your operations here?
Prateek Kansal: We have significant expansion plans for our operations in India. Since joining Komprise, I emphasized the importance of building an independent development center rather than just an outsourcing hub. Today, India plays a pivotal role in our global engineering capabilities, with nearly 80% of our engineering workforce based here. This includes a comprehensive team that manages not only engineering but also support, product management, and customer success.
Our expansion plans include broadening our engineering footprint and enhancing our support and product management teams. We are also exploring opportunities to expand other functions, such as finance and marketing, in India. Currently, our global engineering team comprises about 85% of our Engineering team is in India. We are committed to leveraging India’s talent pool to drive innovation and deliver superior solutions to our customers globally.