The rapidly increasing number of businesses storing data in the virtual space has propelled a revolution in backup and recovery. While nearly every enterprise is embracing modernization, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. In order to help every customer find their right-sized data storage strategy, Infinidat Inc. takes a collaborative, adaptable approach to business, according to Brian Carmody (pictured, left), chief technology officer of Infinidat Ltd.

“Your customers are way smarter than anybody in your business, because they’re closer to where the rubber meets the road,” Carmody said. “We end up being able to leapfrog incumbents with ivory-tower models of innovation not building the things that customers need for their next big challenge.”

Carmody and Marc Creviere (pictured, right), principal systems engineer of US Signal Co. LLC, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed Infinidat’s customer-first approach and how the enterprise storage solutions company has helped IT solutions company US Signal improve its own offerings. (* Disclosure below.)

Social product management

Demand in the analytic and cloud and service provider spaces has driven explosive growth at Infinidat over the past year. The company announced four new products in March, including its InfiniBox F6212, InfiniSync, InfiniGuard, and Neutrix Cloud, all aimed at streamlining business continuity and cloud computing. It also surpassed four exabytes of customer deployments over the summer, according to Carmody.

As an IT services provider, US Signal has also been riding data’s growth wave. The company’s infrastructure footprint has doubled year over year, in part enabled by Infinidat’s support.

“We’ve got a whole stack; we’re network, co-location, data protection, infrastructure as a service, and disaster recovery, all as managed services. As soon as that data leaves the customer premises, it never leaves our assets,” Creviere said.

With the demand for storing massive amounts of information increasing every year, Infinidat aims to maintain overall reliability and low cost as customer needs scale. To better serve companies like US Signal at the individual level, the company designed a Social Product Management program that engages businesses as collaborators early in the product development process.

“We come to them with ideas, we bring prototypes, and we have the kind of relationship where we can iterate on things from ideas all the way through to general availability,” Carmody said.

Infinidat’s open product pipeline dialogue has enabled greater agility and given US Signal a competitive edge in terms of executions on time frame and cost, according to Creviere. “It outperforms the platform that we came from by multitudes of degree. [Our] previous platform [took] multi-day preparation for an upgrade. [Now], we do 40 minutes a piece and we’re done,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: Infinidat Inc. sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. Infinidat, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE