Virtana Corp – Simplifying Enterprise Cloud Complexity and Accelerating Digital Transformation to Drive Human Progress

“With Virtana Platform, you can plan smarter for migrations, scale smarter to increase your competitive advantage, and act smarter to simplify all your IT operations.”

Virtana Corp provides an AI-powered multi-cloud management platform to simplify hybrid cloud complexity, de-risk cloud migrations, and reduce cost by 25 percent or more to accelerate digital transformation. The company’s ultimate mission is to deliver the highest quality infrastructure monitoring and analytics to its customers. Virtana now has over 150+ global 2000 enterprise customers such as AstraZeneca, Dell, Apple, Geico, Costco and NASDAQ. They rely on Virtana’s expertise in workload performance to solve their most critical IT performance and availability issues.

Christina Richards, CMO of Virtana, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review on how this company is hastening digital transformation with a radically simple multi-cloud management platform.

Virtana Corp | Synopsis

A Flashback to how it all began

Virtana was founded in 2008 with a mission to deliver the highest quality infrastructure monitoring and analytics to customers. Since then, more than 150+ global 2000 enterprise customers have relied on Virtana’s expertise in workload performance to solve their most critical IT performance and availability issues.

“Our vision is to provide a simple integrated software platform that leverages high-definition precision data insights to manage, monitor, and secure any workload on any cloud for hybrid IT customers. Our purpose is to simplify enterprise cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation to drive human progress. We know this sounds lofty, but it is true – and it is something our company has been doing for years,” said Christina.

Leveraging a Multi-Cloud Management Platform Trusted by Millions

Virtana helps enterprises operating in hybrid cloud environments—or planning to—know before they go to the cloud. The company gives enterprises the right tools to manage the complexity of modern infrastructures, which includes

on-premises, multiple public clouds, and private cloud environments. It delivers AI-powered unified observability for migrating, optimizing, and monitoring hybrid and public cloud, providing a single control plane across all delivery systems. As a result, its customers can:

• Know which cloud service providers to select based on applications and workload requirements and when to keep them on-premises
• Examine, track, and forecast costs
• Monitor application workloads

With Virtana Platform, you can plan smarter for migrations, scale smarter to increase your competitive advantage, and act smarter to simplify all your IT operations. This unified multi-cloud management platform collects high-fidelity data and applies AIOps technologies, including machine learning and advanced data analytics, to deliver precision observability of singular workloads to make data-driven decisions about what to move and where while ensuring you meet SLAs and stay on budget.

Future of Cloud

Virtana predicts that 2022 will be the year of cloud arbitrage. Cloud arbitrage is the ability to choose cloud providers for specific services based on which one offers the best functionality or support at the lowest price. The emergence of industry-specific clouds, and the fact that cloud flex does not necessarily require public clouds, means companies are no longer limited to just the big three providers but will have more choices. Be prepared to see smaller options emerge as a reality.

Additionally, hybrid cloud complexity will only continue to grow. Based on a May 2020 Equinix Hybrid Cloud Trends and Strategies E-Book, the number of companies “committed to or interested in a hybrid cloud strategy has increased from 81% to 93% since 2017.” How well organizations successfully manage complex computing, storage, and services environments composed of on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and public clouds will drive their ability to achieve business results ultimately.

Virtana’s Dream Team

“Our executive leadership team believes that it is equally important for companies to address talent and culture as much as they address customer churn or competitive advantage. Virtana’s culture directly influences our ability to fulfill our vision with our platform, so our customers can accelerate the digital transformation of their own vision and purpose to drive human progress,” said Christina.

She added, “We recently went through a months-long process that resulted in five core culture behaviors. I use the word “behaviors,” not “values” as they relate to culture, and this is deliberate. Values are passive—they are simply qualities. They signal how you should be but do not help you achieve that state. Behaviors, on the other hand, are concrete. They are expressed as actions, which provide a roadmap for how to get from here to there.”

“Core culture behaviors define what we expect and encourage every person in the company to do. It is how we work, treat customers, and treat each other. It also provides a way for everyone to know what to prioritize and how to make decisions, even without specific instructions. When practiced effectively, core culture behaviors create an exciting workplace and, more importantly, a sustained competitive advantage,” explains Christina.

The five core cultural behaviors include;

• Embody people-first servant leadership
• Foster customer obsession and innovation
• Promote diversity and inclusion
• Measure what matters (OKRs)
• Help each other

The Road Ahead

“As we all know, the IT industry is moving toward increased use of Kubernetes and container-based applications. Virtana Platform will soon be enhanced to support container migration planning and container rightsizing. Following the release of the Free Tier for our Virtana Optimize product in October, we plan to launch a Free version of our Virtana Migrate solution which will allow users to gain full visibility into existing on-premises workloads and the tools to make the best decisions about application priorities, grouping, and deployments to can gain deeper insights and get cloud migrations right the first time, every time. This free version leverages detailed demo data taken from real-world on-premises environments to give users insight into the power of Migrate,” says Christina.

Speaking about the new products, Christina added, “Virtana Migrate leverages the breadth of data collected and provided by our on-premise performance management solution, VirtualWisdom, to classify, organize, and plan for migrations to containers, among other platforms, and provides pricing for containers across multiple cloud vendors as well as on-premises. Virtana Optimize offers rightsizing recommendations for containers. Connections into AWS EKS, Azure AKS, and Prometheus to provide recommendations that take into account both performance and costs.”

“Virtana platform will continue to evolve over the next several years as we add increased capabilities to further provide cost management, governance, and rightsizing capabilities. The Platform will be further enhanced as we take our rich heritage in on-premises IT infrastructure monitoring to ensure customers get the right insights across both private, public, and hybrid cloud environments to ensure ongoing performance and availability of their entire IT infrastructure through a deep understanding of all workloads whether they are on-premises or running in the cloud,” concludes Christina.

Going for Gold: Awards and Accolades Won by Virtana Corp

• Named by CRN as one of the ‘20 Coolest Cloud Monitoring and Management Companies’ of the 2022 Cloud 100.
• Named ‘Best Company Culture’ and ‘Best Company for Women’ by Comparably in 2022.
• Received ‘Customer First’ status from Gartner and in the past 12 months received all 5 out of 5-star reviews from customers.
• Named to the ‘World Technology Leader’ Top 200 list
• Named by Industry Tech Insights as one of the ‘Top 10 Companies Revolutionizing Healthcare’.
• Named by the Silicon Review as one of the ‘50 Leading Companies of 2021’.
• Named by Business Insider as one of the ‘Top 10 Players Reducing Cloud Costs’.

“We help enterprises operating in hybrid cloud environments manage the complexity of modern infrastructures, including on-premises, multiple public clouds, and private cloud environments.”