David Grant, President at Nasuni, highlighting the company’s growth, key milestones, and innovations in scalable data solutions. Talks about the integration of AI, data security measures, and strategic principles for implementing Nasuni’s platform in thee following Q&A:
————–
Welcome, David, to our CIO Influence Interview Series! Give us an overview of the major milestones that have shaped your leadership journey at Nasuni?
Thank you for having me! There’s been quite a list of milestones that I can mention, but I can’t take credit for them – we have an amazing, dedicated team at Nasuni that has made our growth to this point possible. Without them, we are nothing.
What I can say is this: when Nasuni was first founded, cloud adoption was only in its infancy, with most customers hosting their data on-premises and using the cloud sparingly for specific use-cases or workloads. It wasn’t until five or so years ago that we started to see cloud data storage take center stage for enterprise IT strategies across all industries. Then, the pandemic accelerated that even further, allowing Nasuni to provide a perfect product-market fit for enterprises that required scale, security, and performance.
Also Read: Intel’s Lunar Lake Processors: Arriving Q3 2024
In the midst of all these market shifts, Nasuni has continued to experience success after success and steadily grow our business by 30% every year. We’ve expanded our global presence well into EMEA; made two acquisitions to further our product innovation; grew our leadership with several key appointments including a new CINO, CRO, CMO, and Head of Corporate Development; hit the $100M Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) mark in 2022, which is an extremely difficult goal for young companies to achieve; achieved 48% growth in new customer bookings in 2023; worked with over 850 enterprise customers spanning 70 countries, including household names like Autodesk, American Standard, Barnes & Nobles, Patagonia, Western Digital, and more; delivered top decile gross revenue retention rates of over 98%, and net revenue rates of 118%; and, most recently, received a strategic majority investment from global investment firms Vista Equity Partners, TCV, and KKR, which values Nasuni at approximately $1.2 billion. This number validates the size of the market opportunity that is greater than $25B and is ripe for disruption. It’s significant, because we play in a market that has not evolved much or kept up with cloud innovations in 25 years.
As I mentioned earlier: these accomplishments are because of our employees. Happy employees lead to happy customers, which in turn create a great business. Since I’ve been with Nasuni, we’ve never stopped hiring, and we’ve never had any layoffs despite the recessions, pandemic, and fluctuating political climate. We have been granted several ‘Great Place to Work’ awards. Our employees also deliver a great service to our customers, of which our top NPS scores and top decile customer retention rates speak for themselves. I think it’s safe to say there’s a reason why firms like Vista Equity expressed interest in Nasuni – we’ve been on an upwards trajectory for quite some time, and we have one of the most innovative products on the market.
Nasuni is renowned for its scalable data platform that addresses unstructured data challenges in an AI-driven world. What are the latest innovations that differentiate Nasuni from other data management solutions?
Our biggest differentiator is how much we care about our customers’ success, and how we partner with them to make sure that the solutions they receive from Nasuni are the solutions that they truly need. In fact, every product innovation and update we make has been guided by honest conversations with our stakeholders.
Our secret sauce is our hybrid cloud architecture that couples the scalability and security of the cloud with local edge performance. This hybrid cloud architecture is the combination of an infinitely scalable global file system, coupled with edge caching capabilities along and cloud object storage. This allows companies to consolidate their enterprise data into a single instance. With Nasuni, they can easily scale, protect, and manage that data – while delivering it to where it needs to be for performance and insights through AI.
At a high level, the Nasuni File Data Platform differentiates itself in three key ways: scalability, security, and performance. We enable effortless scalability for enterprises through our ability to consolidate, secure, and give access to their data and files from a single “control deck.” And, because we already partner with the top cloud providers (Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud), there are no storage limits. Our built-in security features provide proactive defence from cyberattacks and the ability to rapidly recover in minutes, even seconds. For example, we have customers who have recovered 1 petabyte of data in just 27 seconds – that is almost unheard of! Finally, we pride ourselves on our fast edge performance. We improve business productivity by allowing customers to access their files from any location without changing their everyday workflows. It’s this intelligent caching at the edge that makes the Nasuni File Data Platform a leading hybrid cloud solution.
Scale is one of the key values of moving to a cloud model for data storage. Current legacy on-premises file storage infrastructure is limited by the hardware. Customers hate having to constantly plan for capacity and buy new hardware. In today’s agile environments, with data growing so exponentially, it is impossible to keep up. Thus, the cloud is the key to enabling effortless scalability. Another area of scale is managing multiple locations. If you have dozens or hundreds of office locations, it is impossible to manage these storage silos. With the cloud, you have one global gold copy to manage, all from one console.
Also Read: Top Misconceptions Around Data Operations and Breaking Down the Role of a VP of Data Ops
The integration of AI in data management is crucial today. Can you talk about the benefits of leveraging AI to enhance the platform’s capabilities and how Nasuni is leveraging it.
Who doesn’t want to talk about AI? The truth is, though, Nasuni takes a realistic, more rational approach to the AI craze. We know that AI can help companies automate, analyse, and build upon their current IT strategies. We see other vendors in the market all the time, labelling themselves as AI companies without helping their customers understand what they actually need to do before they make (often massive) investments in the next “big thing.”
Instead of trying to create a new AI widget, we enable data infrastructure to be AI-Ready. Without proper data management, you cannot have a successful AI initiative. Nasuni’s core platform differentiators are what makes our product the ideal solution to plug and play into any AI use-case – before you go all in on adopting the hottest new AI trend, you need to make sure you can consolidate, secure, and provide access controls to your data to get the most value from AI. Only then can you feel confident to run AI services from leading providers like our partner, Microsoft. For instance, we have been helping customers optimize integrations with key partner AI technology such as Microsoft Copilot.
Could you highlight more on the initiatives Nasuni is undertaking to help enterprises transform their data from an obstacle into an opportunity?
Our product is designed to help our customers get the most out of their data. You don’t want to be just storing data, but you need to store the value of that data so you can more confidently make decisions. Earlier this year, we launched a new product called Nasuni IQ. NIQ provides data intelligence capabilities to help enterprises manage their data by allowing them to quickly monitor usage patterns, make proactive data management decisions, and better enable the delivery of intelligent insights. This helps them get ready for AI, lower costs, and improve security.
We will continue to innovate and build upon our product, as we’ve always done. Companies simply shouldn’t have to worry about all the nuances that come with managing their physical infrastructure. After all, we know it can be extremely time-consuming to figure out where all your data is, how to protect it, and how to best utilize it for business needs.
Companies just need to be able to collaborate. To have visibility into what’s going on in their business. To feel confident that their data is protected, and that they can get back up and running again in no time if there’s an attack. Everything we do is to help customers become master “orchestrators” of their data, and that will never change. Because of this, in the coming months, you can expect innovations on all fronts relating to security, AI, and hybrid cloud within the Nasuni File Data Platform.
With data security as a top priority, what measures does Nasuni implement to protect enterprise data across hybrid cloud environments?
Security is a significant cloud differentiator because traditional storage infrastructure has a major security flaw, which is why attacks such as ransomware have often targeted the storage infrastructure layer. This flaw is that legacy storage requires you to also deploy a secondary backup storage device and software. That forces companies to manage silos of primary AND secondary storage hardware and software. It becomes a management nightmare and a major security risk. With Nasuni, data protection, including backup and disaster recovery, is consolidated into one core platform.
In addition, we added ransomware detection to our platform. We can leverage visibility at the edge to monitor and block suspicious activity, isolating any infected files or systems for our customers. We also warn customers of potential threats before they can harm their data through our detailed incident reports. Recovery is then made quick and easy, only recovering the impacted files, so that customers can get “back to business” in just a few clicks.
Also Read: How CFOs and CIOs are Collaborating to Drive IT ROI
And, because we deploy on cloud object storage, we inherit the security and durability of our cloud partners Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud.
Before we wrap up, David, could you share five key principles you’d advise companies to consider when implementing a scalable data platform like Nasuni’s in their tech stack?
Sure! First, decide if moving file storage and data protection to the cloud is for you. If you have explosive data growth, costly data centers, a distributed workforce, and security threats, you should look to modernize you file storage infrastructure with a cloud approach.
Second, don’t let your team be too comfortable with their existing approach. It is easy to get comfortable with something that has been around for 25 years, but change is required to move the business forward.
Third, don’t let vendors ‘cloud wash’ you. Many legacy storage vendors claim to be cloud,’ but have really just dressed up the same architectures that have been around for 25 years. You need to be born in the cloud.
Fourth, as with any IT modernization effort, there are some decisions that have to be made on the technical details. Customers that have the best experience include their key decision makers in the onboarding process. This means security, networking, storage, and key end-user stakeholders.
Lastly, start with the end in mind. How do you want and need your Nasuni File Data Platform to be structured for your users in multiple offices, your applications on-prem or in the cloud, and remote users? Develop a plan for a great user experience after the transition. Some customers opt for a “no impact” cutover where everything looks and feels on Nasuni like it did before. Developing a detailed architecture design and migration plan with the help of Nasuni Professional Services, makes the transition go much more smoothly.
[To share your insights with us as part of editorial or sponsored content, please write to psen@itechseries.com]
David Grant is responsible for all field operations, which include sales, marketing, alliances, professional services, customer success and experience.
Dave is a veteran marketer with 20 years of experience in senior leadership roles at software companies – from startups to multibillion-dollar operations. He joined Nasuni from Veeam Software, where he was the senior vice president of global marketing. Prior to Veeam, he served as the vice president, marketing at VMware. Dave also served as the CMO at two startups. Desktone, acquired by VMware, and Watchfire, acquired by IBM.
Dave has a master’s in finance from Dalhousie University and a bachelor’s in marketing from Saint Mary’s University.
Nasuni is a scalable data platform for enterprises facing an explosion of unstructured data in an AI world.
The Nasuni File Data Platform delivers effortless scale in hybrid cloud environments, enables control at the network edge, and meets the modern enterprise expectation for insight- and AI-ready data. It simplifies file data management while increasing storage access and performance. Its best-in-class file recovery protects customers against a range of cyber threats and eliminates the need for specialized backup and disaster recovery – all while cutting the cost of infrastructure by up to 65%.
Organizations worldwide rely on Nasuni, spanning across the manufacturing, construction, energy, consumer goods, and public sectors. Nasuni’s corporate headquarters is in Boston, Massachusetts, and the company delivers services to over 70 countries.
