Kash Shaikh, Virtana CEO: ‘With Virtana’s SaaS observability platform, customers can dramatically simplify migration planning, cost optimization, and monitoring of workloads with flexible IT consumption models, and reduce cloud costs by 20% or more.’

The Silicon Review

Companies now are managing their on-premises and multi-cloud environments with potent observability solutions in place. With an integrated and complete standards-based observability platform, companies can deliver effective, actionable insights. Observability solutions provide a better way for companies to manage customers’ IT technology stacks irrespective of deployment (any cloud or on-premises). Cloud observability is gaining immense traction in recent times as it is extensible and integrates existing tools with the observability solution easily. IT teams and developers also receive in-depth insights, forecasting, analytics, and more with observability solutions. An observability solution allows companies to have more data deployment options and greater flexibility in the hybrid cloud environment.

Globally there are various providers specializing in providing observability solutions, but Virtana stands out from the rest. Virtana provides an AI-powered unified observability SaaS platform to simplify hybrid cloud complexities, reduce cloud costs by 25% or more, and accelerate digital transformation. CRN recently named Virtana as one of the Coolest Cloud Companies for 2021. Business Insider also named Virtana as 2021’s top 10 cloud companies reducing public cloud costs. Founded in 2008, more than 260 Global 2000 enterprise customers, including AstraZeneca, Dell, Apple, PayPal, Geico, Costco, NASDAQ, and Boeing, have long valued Virtana’s software solutions. Based on a “know before you go” approach, the industry’s only unified observability SaaS platform delivers cloud-agnostic migration, optimization, and monitoring of application workloads in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Virtana Platform collects high-fidelity data and then applies AIOps technologies, including machine learning and advanced data analytics, to give customers data-driven observability.

In conversation with Kash Shaikh, CEO of Virtana

Q. Tell us in brief about your Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Optimization.

Virtana Platform enables customers to ‘know before you go’ to the public cloud. It is a single AI-powered observability solution to migrate, control cost, optimize performance, monitor, and drive uptime for their infrastructure across data centers, private and public clouds. With Virtana Platform, customers can dramatically simplify migration planning, optimization, and management of workloads regardless of their location. Through the platform, they can:

Accelerate digital transformation efforts while controlling costs
and improving application availability
Migrate applications to the cloud efficiently and correctly the first time
Optimize cloud costs
based on resources, performance requirements, and risk tolerance
Manage infrastructure for optimal cost-effective performance and availability
Validate cloud configurations and on-premises infrastructure spend before making financial commitments

Q. In an increasingly remote working world, organizations are facing greater pressure to use public cloud services. Tell us about your migration policies.

Many organizations are getting public clouds wrong the first time. It is clear that organizations need greater observability into application behaviors, interdependencies, and public cloud costs before they make a move to the cloud. We are on a mission for enterprises to ‘know before they go’ to the cloud with a data-driven approach that yields actionable insights — a decade-plus of observability and monitoring on-premises to multi-cloud environments removes the hard work of migrating to the cloud and keeps it simple once applications and workloads are moved.

Q. If any updates and amendments take place in technology, training is given to cope up with those changes. Tell us about your training module for

up-skilling employees?

Virtana University provides our staff with online and live training options designed to help them improve their knowledge and skills in using the Virtana Platform to resolve problems, manage capacity, and automate workloads. Learning options include training in using Virtana products and solutions, as well as domain knowledge covering industry standards for storage and virtualization. Access to the online learning portal is provided to all staff and as a no-cost service to all of our customers and partners. In addition, the Virtana Community provides our staff, partners, and customers with a platform to share experiences and ask peers for advice.

Q. Do you provide customizable Cloud Migration services? How does it make an impact for the client?

Cloud migration does not have to be risky — or expensive. For every enterprise, successful cloud migration is not simply a nice-to-have — it is mission-critical. We understand how crucial the journey to the cloud is and have the expertise and technology to help enterprises safely achieve their cloud goals. Cloud migration goes beyond IT — and is one of the biggest and most critical challenges that organizations face today, with profound impacts on future agility and growth. To get it right, you need advanced analysis, experienced advisors, and the right process:

Advanced Analysis - Virtana’s granular workload analytics and cloud simulations help customers forecast cloud performance and risk.
Experienced Advisors - Virtana brings decades of experience to assessing environments and modeling application workloads.
The Right Process - Virtana guides customers to validate cloud performance requirements, provider selection, and migration planning.

Q. Do you have any new products or services?

We recently announced the industry’s first unified platform for migrating, optimizing, and managing application workloads across public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Using artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) technologies, including machine learning and advanced data analytics, our cloud-agnostic Virtana Platform solves the most difficult challenges facing enterprises as they seek to leverage public clouds. The platform provides intelligent observability into which workloads migrate. It also ensures that unexpected costs and performance degradation are avoided once workloads are operating in the cloud. With Virtana Platform, enterprises can make data-driven migration decisions to get it right the first and every time workloads are migrated. The unified platform also dramatically simplifies optimization and management of workloads regardless of their location in an increasingly complex IT infrastructure. The hybrid infrastructure optimization capabilities of the Virtana Platform can deliver a return on investment (ROI) of as much as 145% over a three-year period. The ROI benefits are the conclusion of a Total Economic Impact^™ Study commissioned by Virtana and independently performed by Forrester in July 2020.

Meet the leader behind the success of Virtana

Kash Shaikh, former Dell Technologies senior executive, joined Virtana in November 2020 as President,

Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board of Directors. Shaikh was most recently Global Vice President and General Manager for the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions business for Dell Technologies, which grew 28% under his leadership to $1.7B. Prior to Dell, Shaikh held executive and leadership roles at public companies, including Ruckus Wireless, Riverbed Technologies, Hewlett Packard, Cisco, and Nortel Networks. Kash also serves as a Board Member of Ignited, a non-profit that provides learning opportunities around STEM for teachers. Kash holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from NED University, a master’s in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Wichita State University, and an MBA from Boise State University. Shaikh joins Virtana to maximize the hybrid cloud leader’s success, providing Global 2000 companies with the tools they need to optimize and manage hybrid and multi-cloud environments.