Datos IO: The Right People, the Right Market, the Right Time

We are thrilled to be partnered with Tarun and Prasenjit, founders of Datos IO, who just announced their Big Data recovery solution for customers of scale-out databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB.

Early stage investing always comes down to two things: people and market. Datos IO has both in good measure.

People build products. In the enterprise space, we often find that the product visionaries behind the next great success come from the ranks of the legacy incumbents. Their deep domain knowledge enables them to recognize the flaws in the current products, and their entrepreneurial drive seeks to redefine or disrupt the market.

It was immediately clear that Tarun and Prasenjit are the types of people we’re looking to support. Tarun didn’t just sort of understand the data management and application recovery domain:  He was a product manager at Data Domain, THE 800lb gorilla in the category. Prasenjit didn’t just know a little bit about storage systems and software: He helped architect the very first iSCSI storage controller at IBM Research.

The best startups have founders who are magnets for talent. They are magnets because of their world-class abilities and their vision, and because they are compelling storytellers. They also have the ability to become great leaders if they are good human beings with a track record of treating people the right way and having the highest level of integrity. Tarun and Prasenjit are all of the things we look for in a set of founders.

The other equally important factor in investing in Datos IO was our belief in the market opportunity and timing.

To remain competitive in today’s economy, startups and enterprises are making data a top priority, allowing them to engage and understand customers like never before. This data-centric world encompasses social, mobile, and cloud environments and an increasing number of real-time applications that generate unprecedented levels of business insights. Think IoT, on-demand commerce, mobile front-ends, real-time analytics, digital advertising, fraud detection, and much more.

The demands of Big Data are forcing enterprises to rethink their entire IT infrastructure stack. We’ve had a front seat from the beginning of this process through our founding investments in DataStax and MapR. Growth rates for these new distributed apps and databases has reached critical mass. Companies are standardizing on NoSQL platforms, providing tailwinds for an estimated 35% CAGR in the NoSQL market from 2014-2020, according to some analysts.

As enterprises adopt scale-out databases to remain competitive, IT groups need a next-generation recovery platform to manage their mission-critical applications at the core of massive revenue streams. Tarun and Prasenjit come from this world, and they understand that managing recovery with Python scripts is not going to cut it.

Datos IO is introducing the first big data recovery platform that offers a “single state of truth” for distributed applications. Maintaining consistent versioning across all scale-out data stores for enterprise applications is a big deal, and not just for application owners and heads of IT infrastructure. DevOps can formulate versioning and recovery mechanisms to orchestrate delivery of applic
ations including test and deployment, continuous integrations, and version control. And of course DBAs must ensure that new databases offer the same kind of enterprise-grade data lifecycle management capabilities as in traditional relational databases.

Tarun and Prasenjit have addressed the question of recovery in their past lives at Data Domain and IBM, respectively, and we’re extremely fortunate to partner with them as they reinvent it for the new data-centric world.