Krishna Subramanian, co-founder, president and COO of Komprise, was recently named a “2021 Top 100 Women of Influence” by Silicon Valley Business Journal. Subramanian’s history of influence in Silicon Valley includes building three successful venture-backed IT businesses and holding senior leadership positions at major tech companies, including Sun Microsystems and Citrix. She has successfully generated over $500M in new revenues, applying her industry expertise in SaaS, cloud computing and data management. Below are excerpts from an interview published in Silicon Valley Business Journal.
How has the pandemic changed how you lead others?
KS: Remote work can be very isolating, so I use chats and texts to replace the hallway conversations at work, and we always have our webcams on so it feels more personal.
How has the pandemic changed your outlook on life and work?
KS: It has taught me the importance of enjoying the little things in life — baking cookies with my daughter or sharing a laugh with a colleague.
What’s your strategy for getting your business back to normal after the pandemic?
KS: As a software company, we transitioned pretty easily to remote work, but we are going to a hybrid in-person model.
What would you like to accomplish in the next year?
KS: Scaling our go-to-market expansion and revenue momentum globally.
What’s the best piece of advice you have ever received?
KS: Successful entrepreneurs are not afraid to take risks, but learn to not repeat the same mistake.
What is the biggest challenge facing women who want to take on leadership roles?
KS: The lack of sufficient role models means each woman has to push forth and break glass, which is hard.
A female CEO or business icon you admire?
KS: Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo — a successful female immigrant leader who created growth with positive societal impact.
How do you unwind after work?
KS: Hiking and hanging out with my family.
What was your first job?
KS: High-performance software engineering to make parallel machines run faster.
What was your favorite pop-culture discovery during the pandemic?
KS: Podcasts — I am currently listening to Obama’s podcast on my walks with our dog.
Komprise Intelligent Data Management and Path to the Cloud for File Data
Subramanian was also recently interviewed by The Next Platform, discussing Komprise’s trajectory, customer challenges and our latest product release which focused on global data management with multisite control. Here are a few excerpts:
On customer challenges with data management:
“Customers don’t have a single vendor, they have a heterogeneous strategy, mainly because there’s so many options to them,” said Subramanian. “They may have different flash storage, different cloud data storage, different file storage, and so on and so on and different backup vendors.
Visibility into data is a big problem. IT doesn’t know what users are doing with the data and yet IT is supposed to manage all those environments.”
On Komprise Intelligent Data Management 4.0:
“With the multisite architecture, which is available now, enterprises can retain local control while getting centralized management across multiple sites through what Subramanian refers to as a sort of ‘uber-Director’ to help drive both performance and cost improvements. It’s an important step as large enterprise customers like Qualcomm, Pfizer, Cadence Design Systems and NYU Langone Health expand their use of the technology.
“A lot of our customers started using us at a departmental level and now they’re using us across their enterprise,” Subramanian says. “They’re making us their standard and that’s where multisite helps because it covers the entire enterprise and users across all their geographies. It’s showing the evolution we are making in the market where we are becoming the data management platform for these companies. We’re also getting demand from service providers who want this capability.”
Going forward, the company will continue to focus on the deep analytics in the platform, with more capabilities being announced later this year, Subramanian says. Large enterprises can have billions of data files across their global environment and need to be able to draw on that data to the find the information they need. Komprise now can take queries and create a virtual data lake based on those queries.”
To learn more about Komprise’s latest product release, check out the blog.
