Exclusive Interview with Piyush Mehta, CEO of Data Dynamics

Piyush Mehta describes how data can transform a company with the right approach

Data analytics is thriving in this data-driven culture to work with different kinds of data such as structured, unstructured, and semi-structured. Companies need to leverage the right data to drive customer engagement and sufficient revenue in the highly competitive market. The global big data and data analytics market is expected to hit US$684.12 billion in 2030 at a CAGR of 13.5%.

Here is an exclusive interview with Piyush Mehta, CEO of Data Dynamics, who has explained the importance of data and how the company offers a file storage platform for effective data storage efficiency.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the products/platforms that your company offers.

Data Dynamics provides a unique offering in the marketplace with a holistic solution to data management. A holistic solution entails the ability to help customers understand their unstructured data, both its metadata and the data within the unstructured environment. With unstructured data having personal and business-critical information in conjunction with its growth of 40-50% year over year, management, security, and compliance of this data are vital to an enterprise. Examples of this data include seismic data in the energy sector or tick data in financials or genomics sequencing in biotech.

The company provides a single platform that enables actionable insights, allowing enterprises to identify and classify business-critical and personal information whilst ensuring it is protected, and stored in the 'right' locations.

The four pillars that make up the platform are analytics, mobility, security, and compliance. The analytics pillar provides insights into the metadata and the data itself, creating powerful insights into risk identification and optimization opportunities. Answers to questions such as personal or business-sensitive information being within the files scanned in conjunction with who has access and ownership of those files. This combination of parameters helps in identifying areas of potential exposure as well as means of optimizing when data is not utilized for lengthy periods of time. The analytics pillar is enhanced by the ability to tag and classify the data, adding 'structure to the unstructured'.  The mobility pillar addresses use cases for cloud migrations, storage consolidation and refresh ongoing asynchronous replication, and life cycle management. Mobility provides support for all file and object platforms locally and to and from the cloud. The third pillar is compliance— in a world where ransomware has become a key focus, understanding what data is stored and how critical it is imperative. The team can identify, classify, and ensure that the data meets internal and external compliance requirements. The fourth pillar supports data security. Leveraging the platform, customers are able to take risk-identified files and quarantine them from access, creating an air-gap equivalent security measure. It also provides audit logging and immutable reporting leveraging blockchain technology. This offers enterprises the ability to report internally and externally on who accesses what data when without any alteration or modification.

The platform provides the holy grail that enterprises have been looking for to deliver a comprehensive means of managing their data.

2. With what mission and objectives were the company set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Great question and one that unfortunately doesn't have an answer with a 'theatrical flair'!

The short answer is the company builds solutions based on interactions with customers and their needs. Data Dynamics engages with each enterprise customer to understand their challenges, find common themes amongst them, and then build solutions that help address their pain points.

The team started the journey in 2012 by helping customers address the challenge of migrating to next-generation file storage platforms. That made them realize that most customers have little to no insight into their data. Thus, it built an analytics capability that could give key metadata parameters to better optimize their storing of the data. As the company deployed the analytics engine, it was asked if the team could look within the data to provide additional insight, this led to expanding the analytics engine and building out a compliance pillar. Since the mantra has always been to not just provide information but make it actionable, the team built the security pillar that allows customers to take action based on findings from the data. The journey continues as it interacts with customers and learns more about their challenges and how the team may expand the platform to support their needs.

3. Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

This is a milestone year for Data Dynamics as the company team will be celebrating its 10th birthday! In these first ten years, it has been recognized multiple times by Storage Magazines as the product of the year, won Red Herring, as well as other accolades. I am most proud of the team the company has. What makes Data Dynamics stand out amongst the rest is people. The commitment of the group, the process, and the technology put out together in this organization allows the team to meet the needs of customers.

The team has worked and is working with 26 Fortune 100 companies. That's a big statement as it's no easy task to engage and meet the expectations of some of the largest organizations in the world.  The ability to do what one is doing and to do it successfully demonstrates the trust that enterprise, and by enterprise, I mean the Fortune 1000, place in the team.

4. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

It's the people. Every person at Data Dynamics is here because they want to be here and are passionate about what the team is doing. They are here because they feel a sense of family and team that it strives towards. If one has a passionate, intelligent, and committed team as Data Dynamics does, one can't lose! So, to me, it's all about the team people.

5. How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes by adopting the company's technology innovations?

Data Dynamics is innovative in many ways. It doesn't start with any presumptions, and more importantly, it is focused on co-innovate. When I say co-innovate, the team works with customers to understand their problems and strive to identify solutions. I would say that I am probably the most non-technical CEO a technology company can have! Because technology is an enabler to a solution, I believe if one understands the business problem, there is always a way to figure out the technology.

It often starts with a blank canvas of the customer problem, then takes the customer into the conversation, and then starts putting the pieces together that provide value to customers, always keeping them apprised and garnering feedback along the way. So, when the company thinks about the journey that it is taking a customer through, it's not in isolation where the team is developing purely on their own but engaging customers and partners to understand the market voids and then collaboratively building solutions that help them address true business problems.

6. How does your company's strategy facilitate the transformation of an enterprise?

Everybody says data is the new oil. The decisions that enterprise data allows one to make is the true value differentiator and a competitive differentiator. The biggest challenge for most organizations is they have a good grasp of their structured data; it sits in a relational database and it's easier to understand the correlation. In the unstructured world, there is little to no knowledge of the data sprawl that exists, where it exists, so how does one garner value if one doesn't understand what, when, why, within the context of what one is looking at.

The ability to provide customers that insight, tell what they have, tell how it correlates to certain aspects of a business, and allow them to classify and put context around it is what makes Data Dynamics different. The team puts structure around the unstructured. All of that has tremendous value, and more importantly, everything it does is not just identification and reporting; it has actionability. "We are not just telling you that you may have a problem or not telling you we found it; we are giving you empowerment and an ability to act on it. That's a huge value differentiator and to do it holistically across the four pillars that I mentioned truly creates a unique proposition for global enterprise customers.", Piyush puts forward.

7. How can C-suite executives leverage data to deliver business value to their organizations?

The biggest challenge that C-suite executives have, or I would say any senior executive has, is either a complete lack of data or a complete deluge of data which means that they are overwhelmed by so many data points that they don't even know where to look. It isn't good either way. Having the correct information at the right time is the key. And the word, that matters is information and not data. Data is just a raw format while the information is how one can correlate it and create something that garners intelligence and create value from it. The ability in terms of the analytics the team does, correlations it makes, reporting it provides, not just regurgitating what it collects, provides intelligence into the decision-making process with automated and flawless execution.

Telling an executive one may have risk, please take a look, and then provide a means to remediate gives executives the value they desire in a comprehensive manner.

8. How can businesses efficiently extract value from data without increasing cost and complexity?

The interesting part of data is that every enterprise company spends 10s if not 100s of millions of dollars on data storage. They replicate data for disaster recovery purposes, create tertiary, fourth or fifth copies from the backup, and archival standpoint. It is only good when one can extract a value from the data. Very few companies build effective practices that allow one to understand what data one must have, its context, and how to leverage it at the right place at the right time. That means an understanding of metadata and implementing a classification system that allows one to quickly identify where that data is in one's organization's tens and millions of data points. It also requires access to the data in an effective manner with limited latency for business-critical operations. Data is only as good as the value that can be extracted from it! Making better business decisions, whether those decisions are automated by business processes or made by humans, requires having access to the right data at the right time in the right manner. In addition, the solution must be able to meet the needs of the business, with exponential growth, the need to ensure the solution can scale is imperative.

Today's business environment is extremely challenging and those that succeed will have been empowered with information, have risk mitigation built into their processes, and be able to derive value from the data they generate.