A new series of customer initiatives recently launched by DataCore includes a simplified licensing/pricing model, product enhancements, a customer loyalty program, and community platform to foster development through the sharing of best practices and success stories. These customer-centric programs are designed to simplify, automate and reward expansion, and will help drive accelerated adoption of software-defined storage technologies throughout the globe.
Rizwan (Riz) Pirani, who recently joined the company as chief product officer, is an instrumental force in implementing these customer-focused campaigns, along with key members of the expanded leadership team, including CEO Dave Zabrowski and CMO Gerardo Dada. Riz is well known to many in the storage industry, having served in a number of senior leadership roles at Citrix Systems, Inc., prior to joining the DataCore team. During his tenure at Citrix, Riz led the worldwide software development of XenApp, as well as hundreds of product releases, constantly evolving delivery models with a customer-first focus; spearheaded the transformation of it‘s virtualization portfolio to the cloud; and structured the company‘s move into big data and analytics.
We sat down with Riz to learn why he chose to join DataCore and what his future plans are for the product portfolio.
What is your vision for the product lines/technology?
RP: DataCore continues to be a technological leader in the software-defined storage/hyperconverged infrastructure market. Its products are immensely applicable to enterprises today, as evidenced by the exceptional growth and diversity of the partner community. The deep emphasis on features such as high availability and disaster recovery, along with the plethora of data services at exceptional performance levels, has been quoted by many partners — and even competitors. But perhaps the biggest endorsement of value stems from the ROI achieved by customers by the elimination of the incessant hardware refresh costs in their datacenters.
With this stable and enormous base of exceptional technical value, we are now primed to transform datacenters with focused investments in modern technologies. For example, container data services are expected to revolutionize the computing industry with innovative solutions, and we are well placed to offer monumental value in this space. Additionally, predictive data analytics is a domain DataCore is uniquely suited to helping its customers capitalize on. The applicability of prescriptive services along with proactive support for an efficient datacenter will help propel DataCore to the forefront as a trusted partner to customers.
What are you most looking forward to in the coming year at DataCore?
RP: The growing market for optimizing datacenters puts a premium on software-defined storage providers. I believe that we have an exceptional opportunity to increase the company’s value proposition – ubiquity of a portfolio that is compatible with any compute environment, across any storage network, virtualizing any block storage array – while providing a diverse set of data services coupled with exceptional performance!
With worldwide R&D centers, we also have the ability to leverage skills and talent across many international centers of development. Lastly, the company’s transformation of operations to leverage an intense agile paradigm will result in extraordinary efficiencies.
With opportunities galore, I am thrilled to be a DataCore citizen in its best era yet to come.
