Dave Tyler: You have around 30 years of experience across many of the biggest names in the sector - which presumably was a large part of why Infinidat wanted to bring you in to helm the business. What was the draw from your side?

Phil Bullinger: I was really attracted to the Infinidat opportunity because of their great reputation as well as the fantastic customer experience around the product: in my years in enterprise storage, whenever I came across an Infinidat customer they were never shy to talk about how much they loved the platform. I know - again from my own experience - that behind every great product is a great team, and since I joined the company in January these first few months have been incredibly positive - everything I had expected and hoped to find here has been reinforced.

There is a real focus on innovation, but crucially the customer comes first in every conversation we have: it's genuinely a part of the DNA of the company. I know a lot of businesses say that, but so much of how Infinidat is organised pivots around the customer experience, whether it's our L3 support team, our technical advisers in the field, or how the product itself operates. I've been delighted to find the extent to which the company is organised around the customer.

DT: Tell us a little more about the specifics of your role and how you fit in to Infinidat's strategy?

PB: I've been blessed on many occasions in my career to lead companies through growth and scale: stepping into a business at a specific point in its lifecycle where it had good products and satisfied customers, and the task then was to efficiently scale the business to new levels of success. That is exactly what we're focussed on right now here at Infinidat: investing in engineering, sales, marketing, and raising the profile of the company in the markets that we're targeting.

We have a lot of momentum as a business: throughout 2020 we had sequential growth - every quarter was larger than the one before. Q4 saw very large growth, year over year, and having just completed our first calendar quarter of 2021 I'm really pleased to say it was a record for the company. That gives us a lot of confidence and impetus as we look ahead to the rest of 2021.

DT: Given the global situation as we start to come out of the worst of the pandemic, how has the storage sector been affected?

PB: There are some points that might look contradictory: from a macro-economic point of view there are emerging tailwinds in the global economy. There is no doubt that in the last year Covid-19 had both a positive and a negative impact on business. Large enterprise spending was constrained last year, and many enterprises were uncertain as to what the future held. But at the same time there were fundamental drivers of storage activity as well, because of the pressing need for digital transformation. Companies - of all sizes - were moving as fast as they could to transform their businesses around, what frankly, has become a digital economy, based around digital user experience and digital connectivity.

How companies use their data is now the primary determinant not just of whether a company will be successful, but of whether it will even continue to exist going forward. What we're starting to see right now is projects that may have been on hold for a year coming back to the forefront. As a result, we're finding our own sales activity globally is seeing more 'lubrication' in the process as customers are much more interested in investing in transformational projects.

DT: What is Infinidat doing to address not just the post-Covid world, but the way businesses see data and storage more generally?

PB: This is the key question for us at Infinidat: what are customers motivated now to do with their data infrastructure? The landscape looks very different today to ten years ago, with the advent of the public cloud where data and applications are accessed via the internet as opposed to locally. As new models have emerged, private cloud remains a crucial part of almost every business infrastructure - so almost every customer has a hybrid model.

There has been a lot of hype around seamless movement of data and applications from on-premises to off-premises (and back again!), but the fact is that most enterprise customers tend not to pursue that line. They are more likely to think about which applications or data are super-critical to the business, need the highest levels of performance, availability and of course security - and those will go into a private cloud. For almost all of our customers, Infinidat forms the centrepiece of their private cloud infrastructure, because of our massive scalability, great reliability, and enterprise data features - all at lower costs than our competitors and often offering better performance than all-flash systems. It's easy to see why Infinidat then becomes a compelling consolidation platform.

As the intersection of digital transformation, private cloud architecture and Infinidat come together, that's what is creating such momentum around the business for us.

DT: What about partners? I know Infinidat puts great store in its relationships with the likes of VMware and AWS - how important are those companies (and others) to your continued success?

PB: Those two are really good examples of solution ecosystem partners for Infinidat. Customers don't generally buy just a platform - they buy a solution to a problem. Those solutions almost always involve an ecosystem web of ISVs, applications, compute, network, and storage - so we're very cognisant of the fact that Infinidat has to be tightly integrated and closely working with a whole range of different partner offerings.

Infinidat has also always emphasised the very highest levels of integration with VMware: even from our very first release we had an exceptional level of native integration. These days some of the largest VMware deployments at enterprise customers are on Infinidat simply because we integrate so well and provide the scale that those customers need. I believe we are solving the long-standing issue between application administrators and storage administrators: when you can give the VMware administrator the native ability to manage our storage, snapshots, replication etc., that can really help them to manage the overall application infrastructure of that enterprise.

As well as VMware and AWS we also have critical relationships with companies such as Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, Red Hat, and tight integrations with SAP and Oracle and other enterprise ISVs.

DT: Who would you say Infinidat views as its primary competition in today's market?

PB: At its simplest our competitive landscape is other primary storage systems you would find in an enterprise sovereign secure data centre - but there's more to it than that. You can look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for primary storage and see all the 'usual suspects'. We compete against the best and most capable primary storage products that branded system OEMs and storage companies are bringing to the market.

The public cloud has raised the tide for all the boats; the world currently only stores a fraction of all the data that it generates. This means that companies are constantly striving to work out how to collect, and reason over, and drive insight from, more and more data. Public cloud models have certainly accelerated that, and therefore more data is being created in the enterprise, and some of that data - usually the most important parts - will almost always be on-premises, or in a colocation, in a private cloud architecture. The way I look at it is that the cloud is a driver for business activity, and business activity drives data, and data of course drives storage, which is good for Infinidat and our business opportunity.

Our customers trust our products and support to protect petabytes of their most important data - data that they 'hold most dearly', and which needs the very highest levels of availability, protection, and security.

More info: www.infinidat.com