Vasu Murthy is Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Cohesity, bringing over 25 years of enterprise software experience in data security, protection and analysis. Prior to joining Cehesity, he held leadership positions at Rubrik, Oracle and Datascaler, contributing to product growth and large-scale innovation.
Stickiness is the leader in AI-driven data security. More than 13,600 enterprise customers, including more than 85 in Fortune 100 and nearly 70% of the global 500, rely on cohesion to enhance their resilience while providing AI-generation insights into a large amount of data. The company’s solutions are made up of a combination of cohesion and Veritas’s enterprise data protection business and protect data in the cloud and protect data
You co-created DataScaler, which was later acquired by Oracle. The courses in your entrepreneurial journey still guide your decisions today?
In the early stages of DataScaler, finding product market fit is our main goal. Although we have many passionate prospects for this product, passion does not always translate into repeatable use cases. The power lies in asking the right questions. If you just ask “What do you want?” or “Will you use this?”, people often think about what they want to use or need in a perfect world in an ideal way of thinking, and it doesn’t always reflect their needs in everyday reality.
If something really matters to the client, then there is a good chance they will be effective or entertaining. They may be using clumsy products they don’t like, spending more money or handling things manually, and hopefully they can come back. A better question is: “What are you doing today hard?” or “What can save you time or money?” When you start with the right question, you will find something worth solving.
What prompted you to decide to transform from a giant like Oracle to a fast-paced world of Rubrick and later cohesion?
I think my career is a series of tasks. Reid Hoffman calls it a “change tour” in his book The Alliance. For me, the typical task lasts 2-3 years, ends with the specific results of the business, and then it’s time to work on something new. When I was at Oracle, I got a project with a three-year mission. After I was done, I asked, “What’s next?” They said, “Big Thing!”, so I formed a team and started the next task. That cycle repeats itself and challenges each time.
At the end of my third mission at Oracle, I was eager to do something with the speed and perspective of a high-growth startup, which brought me to Rubrik. After Rubrik’s IPO, I spent some time thinking about what’s coming and set out to join a team facing exciting challenges, which is my role in Cehesity.
What unique opportunity do you see in cohesion that leads you to believe this is the right next chapter in your career?
Cehesity’s recent acquisition of Veritas’s enterprise data protection business is exactly the project I’ve been looking for. Making a smooth transition for a large customer base while integrating a company is both challenging and beneficial. I have the honor of contributing to the transformation that shapes culture, influences product development, and enables our employees and customers to succeed.
You join the cohesion before Veritas acquisition. What is your first focus when the CPO enters this high-risk moment?
For CPOs, understanding customers and employees’ mindsets is as important as understanding products and markets. Our customers are global and our employees have experienced different experiences. It is crucial to get one message out of all these resonant messages.
Apart from communication, my top priority is to increase the speed of innovation we provide to our clients and win the right to continue to expand our footprint. The opportunity to guide our customers to achieve the future of data security and AI.
Stickiness has a strong AI advantage. How do you consider AI as a product layer with embedded functionality?
Cohesion leverages AI in every way – from detecting anomalies and classifying data to helping customers accelerate and enhance network recovery. The hundreds of data we manage are a great opportunity to unlock AI-driven insights from the entire platform.
Sticky is built from scratch, which makes us unique in this market. Cohesion supports multiple applications from the start and has a strong position on data in many use cases. Customers pay us to bring their data to our platform, which provides us with a powerful opportunity to build and deliver applications on it.
How do tools like Cohesion Gaia redefine how businesses interact with data?
80% of enterprise data is unstructured and traditionally difficult to manage or analyze, and the generated AI provides opportunities to extract insights and value from it.
To leverage unstructured data, it is necessary to collect from multiple sources to ensure it does not have unnecessary private, sensitive data, and provides rags and other ways to gain insights in immutable views. Even if data is available, huge efforts are required to build an AI infrastructure to provide insights.
The sticky data platform has collected and obtained data from all locations, and we have also built Gaia, a full-fledged RAG application that can gain insights from data. This allows users to interact with their data in natural language, resulting in valuable insights and seamlessly unify corporate knowledge across a variety of data types and locations.
What is the most exciting customer use case you’ve seen so far?
There is so much data around the world that many customers don’t even know what they have. Being able to unlock and leverage more information is very powerful for the business. One aspect that I found particularly interesting is the concept of data sovereignty. In today’s geopolitical climate, countries are increasingly concerned about whether the data stored in their borders can give their citizens control. The key question in particular AI is whether these AI services are hosted in the cloud. People are worried about whether they can query and access the data.
Stickiness stands out to me in this case as it provides a solution by implementing local data management. With cohesion, customers don’t have to move data to the cloud or worry about entities that are managed in other countries. The increasing focus on data sovereignty and “data gravity” means that more and more organizations want to keep things local, and we can work with hardware partners and NVIDIA to deliver the solution accurately.
How do you ensure you are aligned with products, designs, and documents, especially when you launch an AI-First experience?
The success of a company depends on all the functions of harmonious operation, not just products, designs and documentation. Ideas can come from anywhere, and when people feel heard, they feel a sense of ownership that drives the best outcome.
It is important to include all stakeholders early and to ensure they have a say in the results. Product teams need to be good idea curators and help prioritize, designers need to keep customer experience at the forefront, and documentation teams need to focus on providing the necessary online guidance to minimize the time spent in documents by working with designers. AI plays a huge role in developing and delivering this experience.
What frameworks can help you prioritize customer pain points, visionary innovation and technical debt?
When prioritizing and shaping our approach, it starts with the first principle. Frames can help communicate this, especially when they are aligned. That said, I think most products can usually be divided into three types.
First, there are few customers with new products, among which innovation should be the main focus. Then you have the core product of bread and butter. Innovation is important here, but solving customer pain points should also be an urgent task. Finally, you have long-term mature products. In this case, the focus shifts more to managing customer pain points and technical debt.
What are your goals for the sticky product portfolio over the next 12 to 18 months?
Since the acquisition, we have discovered so much that it has been between Sticky Hair and Vertias’ enterprise data protection business. This is the fastest I’ve ever seen two product kits. In the latest iteration of Veritas, they transformed the backup solution into a set of microservices in the container. Instead, cohesion begins with a container-based application platform, built on a flexible data layer. So, Veritas services can be put on the cohesive platform, and things work seamlessly since both data platforms are available.
Over the next 12 to 18 months, we expect workload support, data security and AI services to be common for all of our customers. We also build a seamless upgrade path for all our customers to get a future proof platform for their data.
The product I am particularly excited about is the new agent AI network orchestration solution for recovery. It is the first new product to work with Sticky and Veritas, which provides customers with easy network recovery preparation, testing and automation to enhance security posture, increase confidence in incident response and demonstrate compliance.
Would you give other CPOs some suggestions to browse this AI-based landscape?
People feel the need to incorporate AI into the application immediately. Often, this is the form of making workflow easier and helping people become more productive. Although this is useful to customers, it is unlikely that customers will pay more for this incremental productivity increase.
True AI differentiation requires rethinking workflows that are completely AI-powered. The technology is developing rapidly and will become more valuable as AI accuracy improves. Artificial intelligence can be great for natural language interactions, and the core logic still requires a lot of verification, monitoring, error correction and scaffolding. While AI-powered applications will improve over time, money can be made in AI and data infrastructure.
Thanks for your excellent interview, and hopefully readers who know more should visit Sticky.
