Guest: Sathya Sankaran (LinkedIn) 
Company: CloudCasa by Catalogic (Twitter)

Catalogic Software is spinning off CloudCasa as an independent company to focus on cloud-native technologies and market, while Catalogic will continue to serve the traditional market. But why is Catalogic planning to make the company fully independent when we are seeing consolidation where traditional players are acquiring cloud-native start-ups? In this episode of TFiR: Newsroom, Sathya Sankaran, Chief Operating Officer of CloudCasa by Catalogic, joins Swapnil Bhartiya to talk about the motivation behind this decision and how it puts CloudCasa in a unique and powerful position in the market against heavyweights like Kasten by Veeam.

Here are some of the highlights of our discussion:

• The primary driver of the spinoff is to get focus within the organization. In many ways, CloudCasa and Catalogic were already operating as completely two separate business units:

– They have no shared IP.

– They have dedicated teams to their products.

– They haven’t operated under one roof in the last 2.5 years.

– Catalogic with its DPX product line is focused on Windows and Linux and file shares, they are going to focus on the cybersecurity angle, which is to drive the god-mode offerings such as early detection of ransomware and rolling back of the files that are impacted by ransomware.

– CloudCasa is going to focus on the cloud-native opportunity.

– They have different customer profiles. The Catalogic customer base is very heavy on Windows, Linux, and file shares, which are not the customers that are making the transition to Kubernetes.

• Not every application running in the cloud is cloud native. In steady state, it can be made cloud native because part of running everything in the cloud is to effectively utilize the resources you have available. There will be a lot of efficiency changes and it will lead to re-platforming. Kubernetes is in prime spot because it is already evolving as the OS for the cloud.
• For cloud-native workloads running on the Kubernetes platform, CloudCasa is looking to add value by providing mobility, resilience, and protection for data.
• 80% of Kubernetes users are moving to a SaaS model or a hosted Kubernetes engine model because by nature, Kubernetes is a very powerful and flexible framework, but it is also complex. Users want the complexity to be handled by the professionals in the cloud provider so they can focus on running their workload on that provider.
• Part of CloudCasa’s focus as an independent organization is going to be not just in remaining a commercial business, but also becoming friends of open source—not free and open source—and provide value to what’s missing in that community. There is a big customer base (~1 million clusters) sitting in the free and open-source tool Velero. CloudCasa wants to figure out a way to meet those users where they are and add value to what they are already running.
• Traditional backups and traditional backup windows require knowing ahead of time what is being backed up, sizing an infrastructure for it, and building an appliance for it. Being a true cloud-native company, CloudCasa has already solved that problem with auto-scaling through Kubernetes. It can scale to cloud level; no need to decide and know what needs to be backed up and how it should be sized, and how it should be structured ahead of time. Being light, nimble, flexible, and fast, it can react to demands on the flow.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.