Robert Ham: Surviving in the age of large data

In the hottest it topics, the simplification of it trends and integration concepts for cloud and large data, as early as the founding of the United States CommVault (Cang) company in 1996, was identified by its CEO Robert Ham (N.robert Hammer) as the direction of development, And after years of today's market and industry recognition. Now, CommVault is often seen by Wall Street analysts as an acquisition target for the software business of it giants like HP and Dell. However, Robert Ham denied the acquisition, said: "CommVault Current market value of 2.9 billion U.S. dollars, the single share price from the initial 3 cents to 65 U.S. dollars, ham think there is no company" affordable "CommVault. Earlier this year, the company climbed to the Forbes list of the 25 fastest-growing U.S. technology companies in 2012, with annual sales of $382 million and 28% annual growth at 23rd. Recently, Robert Ham, interviewed by global entrepreneur, talked about his thinking about the big data age and how to compete with powerful rivals such as IBM for a system software company.

About Large data

Let's first define what large data is. The data is now growing at an absolute rate, with a growth rate of 50% per year; Data from the past are mainly from applications, but it may now be generated by machines or social media, which exist in different locations, such as mobile devices, laptops, or in data centers, or even clouds.

From an enterprise user's point of view, so many data are stored in different places, it becomes more difficult for people to make decisions based on this information. Traditional methods of data search, storage, and protection have not been able to cope with the growth of large data, so this is what many big companies, government organizations and telecoms companies are doing, and they have to reinvent the engine to meet new demands. In fact, there is a need for data storage, data security, and even greater business value. In addition, from a consumer's point of view, they also have personal expectations, such as the way they like to access data securely through smart devices.

If you look at big data from an enterprise's competitiveness perspective, they must have the ability to get a lot of data. For example, from the time the data is created, you can access the data in real time and build a data analysis layer on top of it. At the same time, we sometimes have to do a comparison of the existing data to find some trends, but also can synthesize the data from different sources, such as some from the existing database crawl, and some from the social network such as Facebook call. For example, when we look at how to treat a disease, we need to call the human genome map, so that on the one hand we go to a university to fetch data, and to analyze who the gene comes from, their age, and other traits. So the ability in general is that we can define the data, label the data, classify it, and search it quickly when needed.

The problem sounds simple, but it's actually very complicated to solve. If there is a large library in Beijing, if you want to search for information about the weather in Beijing, there may be 10,000 books on the weather, with different content and themes. The quickest way is, of course, to do a one-time search and find the relevant content in these 10,000 books. From this point of view, all kinds of data should be labeled and then sorted, so you can imagine that the amount of content in the world is billions of or even trillions of dollars.

The need for integration

Why do we have the integration of large data business? This may have to be traced back to CommVault's history, CommVault was originally a at&t venture capital company. When the person in charge of the project consulted me, my view was that the company's chances of success were almost nil.: the idea that people were backing up the data was-I had a copy of it, and it was backed up.

At that time the storage is what we call direct-attached storage, a computer external to a storage device can be completed. I thought the problem was not in the backup itself, but in the data. I then inspired them to assume that the data grew 1 million times times, that we had unlimited computing resources, unlimited networks, and that storage was free, what would you do? Some of the big companies at the time did not realize that this was a problem with data, they just saw the surface of the data backup or storage technology itself.

In 1998, I have instructed CommVault to do two things: one is to build a framework that can handle large-scale data, covering hundreds of data nodes, which is what we call a geo-data site; second, if customers want to do data backup, archive, search, do not need to do a lot of products separately , so we want to build a platform to achieve all of these data functions.

This problem is not difficult to understand, but when it comes to solving problems, there are many factors to consider, such as what other companies ignore? To do data, you must have a deep understanding of the application. For example, I put this data here, and when this data went wrong, I had to recover it, if I do not know what the data and application of the situation, the calculation is not clear, the network is not enough to understand, to do data recovery will be difficult, so actually do data management of a software company must apply, storage, A very thorough understanding of the network, computing, and the entire IT infrastructure.

There is one more thing to do, and all the data management work should be automated and intelligent, separating people from the business processes of data management. So we have to understand what we are trying to do to help our clients: Protect their data, save them costs and save labor.

There is also a very critical element, we have a unified data management platform, so we can ensure the security of data. Regardless of the location of the customer access to this data, it is encrypted, we have a unified data key management, therefore, whether it is the cloud or local, or even the device side of the data, we can do data protection. A lot of company's plan is, data for a backup, it has a copy of the same data 1, but also a long-term archive copy of 2, the same data for different uses have many copies, but CommVault's idea is that we only need customers to copy the data once, the same copy can be used for different purposes.

Continuous success and innovation are not easy. For CommVault, innovation is reflected in two aspects: first, it can bring value to customers is called innovation, either you save costs for customers, or to provide customers with better services to protect their data, improve their efficiency; Is our customer satisfaction through the advisory services to continuously enhance the customer and our cooperation between the stickiness, while maintaining our core competitiveness. This is the two manifestations of innovation in our eyes. Moreover, we are not only looking at the present, but we are looking at the future trends. We will set a goal to have a specific implementation plan for the target, what products do we want to do? Which market? How is the whole structure? What is the business process we are setting? The mind must be very clear, know what to do and how to do it.

CommVault1996 year, when the price of 3 cents per share, now is 65 dollars per share, the company's total value of 2.9 billion U.S. dollars, now we can compete with any company, so for us, why to sell it to HP such companies? Judging from the growth rate of our stock price, no company can afford it.

(editor: Heritage)