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M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Bhaskar Gorti, CEO of Platform9

By February 25, 2022March 10th, 2022Article

Moving from Oracle Corporation’s Senior Vice President to CEO at Platform9
Moving from Nokia Software’s president and chief digital officer to CEO at Platform9, Bhaskar Gorti is ready to speed up their go-to-market to support large-scale deployments and solidify their place as the leading open distributed cloud service

M.R. Rangaswami: Based on recent experience, what did you see happening in the cloud landscape and what are some of the unmet enterprise needs and opportunities to innovate?

Bhaskar Gorti: My recent experience was with Nokia as its President of Software and Chief Digital Officer, but I’ve been in enterprise software for most of my career, including as Senior Vice President and General Manager at Oracle Corporation, enabling B2B customers to modernize and become cloud native. Many of these customers have large, traditional non-cloud IT technologies to run many keep-the-lights-on operations in addition to cloud-based products for competitive differentiation.

A few years ago, a lot of companies talked about moving all of their IT infrastructure and applications to the public cloud. But what they all have realized is that moving infrastructure to the cloud is simply not enough to complete a cloud-native transformation. Companies who have tried to migrate from on-premises to a public cloud, or from one public cloud to another public cloud, know it’s not a trivial task.

The problem they are all trying to solve is how to have the flexibility and choice of using their own infrastructure for cloud-native applications while delivering a unified management and consumption experience of a public cloud.

Platform9 provides an elegant solution to this problem: delivering the power of cloud computing on the infrastructure of customer’s choice – whether that be public clouds, private infrastructure, or edge-sites – powered by Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies. Our platform delivers an open distributed cloud service, offering a neutral third option to public clouds and costly, time-consuming DIY.

Flexibility is crucial for enterprises to be able to drive their digital transformation and match their cloud capabilities to their business needs, and Platform9’s open distributed cloud is the optimal solution.

M.R.: Why did you join Platform9?

Bhaskar: I have known Platform9 and have interacted with Sirish Raghuram and Platform9’s other co-founders a few years ago while I was at Nokia developing a cloud-native software stack and looking for alternatives to DIY cloud-native orchestration and container management.  Platform9 has built and matured some phenomenal cloud-native technologies; they are a unique example of a disruptor company which has done very well with their platform and are leading in the cloud-native market segment. I was impressed with Platform9’s team, mission, and vision, especially their customer success stories, so when the chance to work alongside them came along I couldn’t pass the opportunity up.

My main goal is to help Platform9 build and grow the open distributed cloud category in order to allow enterprises across multiple new industries to reach their cloud-native transformation goals. By speeding up Platform9’s go-to-market to support more large-scale deployments of our software at major organizations across verticals, we will solidify our place as the leading open distributed cloud service.

M.R.: What are the biggest challenges and concerns you see customers facing?

Bhaskar: One of the things that I have learned over the years is that the most difficult task is to make complex things extremely simple. Customers are trying to solve very complex mission-critical problems of navigating between hyperscalers, on-premises data centers, and edge solutions. And it’s all so complex – what they really need is an open, cloud-agnostic platform to bring simplicity, agility, and a fast track so they can really focus on what is more important to them: organizational agility and competitive differentiation using modern cloud-native technologies.

With prior generations of technology, it was relatively easy to migrate to a new platform. In this new world of cloud-native, you cannot port. Simply lifting-and-shifting doesn’t really provide any agility and cost benefits. You have to start from scratch and build your cloud-native infrastructure and applications using a very different approach, grounded in cloud-native principles and technologies. This journey is fraught with challenges and cultural changes that most companies struggle with. They can benefit by using a partner like Platform9 with a cloud-native DNA and a platform that can speed up their transformation.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

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