Muddu Sudhakar, Investor | theCUBE on Cloud 2021
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2021-01-22

Muddu Sudhakar, CEO & Investor, joins Dave Vellante for theCUBE on Cloud 2021.

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https://siliconangle.com/2021/01/21/aiseras-muddu-sudhakar-looks-beyond-compute-and-storage-for-new-opportunity-cubeoncloud/

Aisera’s Muddu Sudhakar looks beyond compute and storage for new opportunity

SPECIAL COVERAGE: THECUBE ON CLOUD BY MARK ALBERTSON

After serving in senior-level executive positions over the past two decades for influential enterprise technology companies such as VMware Inc., Splunk Inc., EMC and ServiceNow Inc., Muddu Sudhakar has developed a sense of where the tech industry is headed.

From his perspective, that next wave will not involve simply compute or storage but service delivery models and artificial intelligence as well.

“I’ve been an investor and board member of so many storage companies,” said Sudhakar (pictured), a serial entrepreneur currently working on a new company, Aisera, that emerged from stealth mode last year. “There’s no way as an investor I’ll write a check for compute or storage. If you want to create a next-generation Wi-Fi remote working environment where AI is at the core, I’m interested in that.”

Sudhakar spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during theCUBE on Cloud event. They discussed the economies of scale offered by cloud providers, expectations that the vast majority of enterprise workloads will ultimately move to the cloud, changing dynamics for firms built around software-as-a-service models and his work on Aisera Inc.

Economics drive cloud adoption
Sudhakar’s interest in new technologies expanded as part of his enterprise experience with prominent companies and an appreciation for industry trends in the cloud world.

“In the initial days, it was all about startups, new workloads, dev test and QA test,” Sudhakar said. “Now real production workloads are moving towards cloud. What will drive cloud for the next 10 years will be economics of scale. If you don’t move to the cloud, you won’t save money.”

While a global pandemic accelerated digital transformation for many firms, a majority of the enterprise world continues to run workloads on-premises, according to Arvind Krishna, who took over as chief executive of IBM in April. At that time, Krishna claimed that the world was just 20% in cloud.

Sudhakar believes that ratio will soon change dramatically.

“In the next five years, 70% of workloads for the enterprise will be in the cloud,” Sudhakar said. “That’s your cost savings, that’s where you’ll see economies of scale and that’s where all the growth will happen.”

Companies may ultimately save money because cloud service providers have the ability to tailor delivery of a cornucopia of solutions based on usage instead of a licensed lock in. This will force major software-oriented businesses to join the parade as well, according to Sudhakar.

“Anything that’s storage will be in the cloud,” Sudhakar said. “If you really want to use containers and Kubernetes, it has to be in the public cloud. I’ll bet that at some point Zendesk and ServiceNow will either be run on the public cloud or they’ll have to get a product on public cloud. All of the SaaS vendors will move into the public cloud.”

Taking over SaaS
The technologist foresees continued dominance of the cloud firms based on ultimate ownership of the SaaS business and an ability to leverage significant economic clout.

“I call cloud platforms aircraft carriers, but they aren’t going to stay aircraft carriers. They’re going to own the land as well,” Sudhakar said. “They’re going to move up to the SaaS space. That’s a $2 trillion market cap between Amazon and Azure. Who’s going to compete with that?”

That’s why he’s not trying to take on the major cloud providers. Sudhakar is currently chief executive of Aisera, a startup focused on the application of robotic process automation for both internal organizational tasks and customer-facing areas as well.

The rise of remote collaboration technology in a pandemic-driven world and continued expansion of AI capabilities have created new business opportunities for the entrepreneur.

“Not everyone is going to come back to offices, even after COVID,” Sudhakar said. “This whole collaboration through Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex is part of a new game now with video, audio and chat solutions. We are going after the collaboration game. I want to create the next-generation ServiceNow.”