It’s been an exciting week for the Druva team as we welcome Mike Palmer, our new chief product officer!
The last few weeks have seen several new faces come aboard; from Sue Bostrom joining our board in October, to Guy Churchward who will be a key advisor to the Druva family, to Mike’s appointment this week to our executive team as CPO.
As many of you might know, Mike joins us from Veritas, where he was executive vice president and the CPO. During his time there, he was responsible for managing a $2 billion product business, leading the development of a portfolio of software defined storage, data protection and data compliance products serving enterprises globally. Mike’s role was critical to the growth of Veritas through his industry knowledge, keen eye for technology trends and overall business acumen. Mike is well known throughout Silicon Valley and the tech community for his impressive achievements at Veritas as well as his time at Seagate, where he led the cloud services business unit, and at Verizon Business, where he held several leadership roles, including head of global engineering and head of product strategy and alliances.
With all that said, we want to welcome Mike to the Druva family as he starts his new role leading Druva’s product team and driving the development of the industry’s most robust and scalable data management platform for the enterprise.
For those interested in learning even more about Mike, we caught up with him to talk about what he thinks of his new role and also what excites him most about Druva.
Welcome to Druva, Mike! We’re so pleased to have you with us. So our blog readers would like to know a little more about you. Firstly, what interested you in joining the Druva team?
Thanks for the warm welcome, I’m so pleased to be here. Firstly, the data management and data protection market is a hot industry right now, as data itself has become more relevant than ever to businesses. Not only is it now critical to helping them perform their core operations reliably, but it also helps deliver further value through technology such as analytics, AI and machine learning. Meanwhile, data management has become more complicated as businesses must manage data across different geographies, partners, infrastructures, devices, and data types (structured and unstructured).
Many of the players in this market are trying to hold onto customers and models built in the last technology wave, such as appliances in data centers, or leveraging legacy enterprise applications built on the back of serving legacy client server applications.
I see Druva as one of the few companies building to where technology and companies are headed – the cloud. Cloud remains at the top of the priority list for most enterprises and is already a major technology spend for most mid market companies. I’m excited to be part of a company that is laser focused on building native cloud architectures and cloud-based services that help organizations leverage this to move their business forward.
What technology trends are you seeing in data management that are most interesting and could be an opportunity for Druva moving forward?
There once was a time when the corporate CIO would make all of the product decisions, but increasingly product users are now deciding what products are coming into their company and environments. As daily users become the decision makers, technology decisions increasingly hinge on the ability to make day-to-day activities easier. They are now looking at how native the architecture of the product is to the workload supported, as well as how compatible it is to the system already in place. They care about the “look and feel” being consistent with the application it is servicing, and that the administration is similarly intuitive. For those using services such as AWS, users want to know that the service is highly scalable and capable of leveraging the AWS environment to the fullest (in other words, is it architected for the cloud vs modified to run in the cloud?).
If a service checks all these boxes, and can also offer a pay-as-you-go model that delivers compelling value for money compared to other competing solutions this makes the decision so much simpler. The simplicity alleviates the need to build additional expertise and the cloud-scale capability eliminates the need to scale a product differently from others already deployed. Overall, it makes their job much easier.
Druva has already done a great job moving down this path but there is much more opportunity out there. While performance, UX and the pay-as-you-go consumption model are critical, we have an opportunity to deliver more value on the data itself. Ever-evolving data privacy laws (GDPR) combined with increasingly broad adoption of compliance and governance requirements all focused on ever-increasing datasets generated across the enterprise, makes Druva all the more compelling a choice given our ability to architect end-to-end solutions within the AWS infrastructure leveraging the scalability, security and stability of the AWS cloud. It’s an enviable space to be in.
Lastly, anything fun or interesting we should know about you?
I’m an extremely competitive person. Outside of work, I spend almost all of my free time coaching competitive soccer for my young daughters. It has taken me as far as Sweden and on a near-relentless tour of a three-hour radius around the Bay Area.
I’m an avid pianist and speak three languages including Swedish and Spanish.
I also love to travel. I’ve flown an average of 250K miles per year for the past ten years – I love to meet people in person and have found that the world is shrinking in a lot of good ways. The problems of businesses are now largely the same no matter where you are. A company moving to the cloud in Ireland has the same needs as one in California or Singapore. The ability to serve that kind of global audience is exciting.
For more information please visit our press release, here.