Interview With Henri Richard, Board’s Member, and Piyush Mehta, CEO, Data Dynamics

Henri Richard is a retired professional now spending time advising IT and storage companies, among them Data Dynamics. He led NetApp’s worldwide field and customer operations for 4 years, before being at SanDisk more than 3 years and previously worked for Freescale, AMD, Webgain, IBM, Seagate and Conner Peripherals. He likes building and flying large remote control airplanes and driving his cars while enjoying his 8 grandchildren.

Piyush Mehta, 46, is CEO of Data Dynamics since 2012. Before that, he was CEO of SANpulse Technologies for almost 6 years and previously CEO of Integration International Inc. for more than 8 years.

StorageNewsletter.com: Did the Covid-19 impact Data Dynamics business? As you sell software, I imagine sales got accelerated?
Mehta: First, I hope that everyone continues to stay safe and healthy during this pandemic. With respect to your question, we continue to maintain strong growth rates. The pandemic has created even a greater need to provide secure access to the right data at the right time.  Ensuring data access meets internal and external governance and compliance requirements is a core focus for enterprises globally.  This is where our Unified Unstructured Data Management Platform brings relevance and value. We’ve seen large interest and traction across our product portfolio. 

Data Dynamics has changed for a few quarters with new people, new executives and an acquisition in the content indexing space. Could you give us a snapshot of these with a key figures?
Mehta: Data Dynamics is truly in hyper growth mode. Our family has grown almost 300% since the beginning of the year. We’ve added members across the organization, a transformative CTO in Helen Johnson to our executive management as well as leaders across our R&D, Go to Market and Customer Success Teams. The teams have expanded geographically as well with additions in the US, UK and India. We have ensured ‘smart’ growth as we’ve invested in strategic areas across our business but done so whilst meeting our commitment to profitability and shareholder value. A true rarity for tech companies in today’s world. 

And recently you appointed Henri Richard to the board of directors. What is your goal with this election?
Mehta: Henri brings experience and wisdom and will be an invaluable member of our board. He is a friend and someone I’ve gotten to know over the past few years, huge respect for him. His understanding of the data management space and the challenges faced by customers will provide tremendous value. This in conjunction with his past success in scaling out go-to-market and operations will be of huge value as we continue to expand globally.

What were the triggers that decided you to join Data Dynamics’ board?
Richard: With the exponential growth of data volumes, I witnessed an increasing need for customers to find better ways to manage compliance and movements of their data. Data Dynamics addresses these pain points with a well integrated platform and is poised to grow significantly in the next 3 years. Piyush wanted to add bandwidth to his board so we can help him manage this growth.

Will you wear a specific hat as a board member, advising Piyush’s team for new partnerships, new positioning, new go-to-market?
Richard: I am of course going to help on the GTM front but, based on my past public board experiences, will also be chair of the compensation committee.

Back to the market, what are the trends you saw in the data management space? Did Covid-19 change these trends you identified before?
Richard: Customers increasingly deploy resources and money to extract value from their data rather than simply managing it. This means that storage solutions must be self healing, self maintaining, easy to use and require minimum overhead so that within a flat to declining IT budget customers can shift budget to extracting that value. We are now in the era of the data scientist not the data storage expert, This took a short pause during Covid-19 as customers had to tackle serious operational challenges but it is the inevitable long term trend.

Coupling content indexing with StorageX to better understand users’ file data environments is a differentiator against competition. How is it integrated? As an add-on and priced as an option or you offer it by default?
Mehta: Our Insight AnalytiX software provides content level analytics, with the first release focused on Privacy Risk Management. When you combine the analysis we provide via our StorageX Analytics on meta data with output from Insight AnalytiX we help enterprises find a practical approach to solving their compliance challenges. Integration between products takes place via a coupled API and this also provides us flexibility to integrate input and output with other software in the ecosystem, driving ongoing operational value. Each software is priced based on capacity and there are bundling options to drive greater value. 

NetApp is an OEM of Data Dynamics (DD). How was the product coupled with FAS systems and what are the features that make NetApp + Data Dynamics a winning combination?
Richard: We were not an OEM of DD but a partner. We often bundled (and I believe continue to do so) the DD software in transactions where we faced large  estate migrations to NetApp. The value of the DD migration platform comes in 2 dimensions: much faster time to completion and much lower risk of execution. But today I am really excited about the analytics capabilities that DD recently launched as it will enable customers to do much smarter migrations and drive better ongoing management of their data.

What about cloud especially with the 3, 4 giants? How does the cloud impact and change the data management space?
Richard: Well, it’s fate to see that cloud created a jump ball situation that upends the storage industry in a major way. Traditional storage vendors without a credible and seamless public cloud strategy are going to struggle in the long run. That is where NetApp created a significant opportunity and time to market leadership for itself. 

For StorageX and the rest of the portfolio, how is the cloud integrated and leveraged?
Mehta: Our Unstructured Data Management Platform can be deployed in the cloud and utilized to accelerate adoption of legacy workloads to the cloud in a compliant manner. We are seeing an unprecedented transformation to technology infrastructure. As every customer looks to transform to a hybrid model, the need to understand legacy infrastructure, and intelligently migrate workloads to the hyperscalers of choice is a core challenge. Our platform’ ability to identify both metadata and content, drive policy based intelligent data movement and ensure the correct placement of the data automates the entire process and accelerates cloud adoption by months if not years. 

And containers are hot with the domination of Kubernetes. How does StorageX work in such environment?
Mehta: We are working with containers both from an internal use within our product architecture and how we would manage data associated with them for our customers. I can’t share more on this currently but you will see more on this over the coming months via our product announcements. 

How do you see this container dimension connected to storage? NetApp acquired Spot recently and embraced cloud and application and data mobility very seriously, what could be the DD playbook in that space?
Mehta: Unfortunately we cannot answer this at this time but you will get the answer to your question over the coming months via our product announcements.

What can we expect in the coming months for tour company?
Mehta: We continue to grow at a healthy pace and in a manner that drives shareholder value. We will continue to invest across all areas of the business with a continued focus on ‘customer first’. Our customers can continue to expect software that addresses their data management challenges under a single platform with robust features and functionality and an ecosystem around the product of best in class training and support. We continue to expand our go to market via strategic partnerships and you will hear more around this in the coming quarters. 

And on your side, your top 3 priorities?
Richard: Help Piyush in the push to the cloud, support the team in any GTM engagement where I can bring value and help shape the strategic plan for the next 3 years.

Listen to the interview in French with Henri Richard
October 13, 2020

Read also:
Henri Richard Board’s Director, Data Dynamics
Storage veteran worked at NetApp, SanDisk, AMD, IBM and Seagate.
August 28, 2020 | Press Release
Data Dynamics Closed $9 Million Financing Round
Developer of file management solution
July 7, 2020 | Press Release
Unified Unstructured Data Management Platform by Data Dynamics With Addition of Insight AnalytiX
And release of StorageX 8.2 [with our comments]
June 11, 2020 | Press Release