Throughout his professional career Sameer Padhye has learned to deal with problems quickly. Before diving into the tech world he was a commercial airline pilot. It barely needs explaining why issues need to be overcome swiftly at 30,000 feet.
As CEO of FixStream, an artificial intelligence platform for IT operations, communicating that message has been more difficult – even if the core business could save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in minutes. And with an increasing number of firms switching to hybrid cloud applications, FixStream’s importance has never been higher.
FixStream, which was founded in 2013, allows companies to understand the root causes of system failures. “FixStream gives you a complete footprint of the application and the infrastructure that that application is consuming, whether it’s in the hybrid state,” Padhye tells Red Herring. “So the ability to detect the root cause is one of the most common value propositions people derive from FixStream.”
In some cases, Padhye adds, FixStream can save companies to the tune of 500%. When data goes down it can cost around $300,000-400,000 to revive. In one recent case the cost was $72,000 per minute.
“What normally takes a day or a week, FixStream can identify that within a minute, because most of those dependencies are constantly computed in the background,” Padhye says.
Hybrid is almost ubiquitously used by leading companies today. But the interaction between cloud applications, and those on-premises, can cause issues. FixStream’s technology offers continuous monitoring, preventing and diagnosing any issues that arise.
FixStream’s solution can also be effectively leveraged for those “in migration or thinking about migration, to understand what the dependencies are, and how the migration should be done,” says Padhye. “60-70% of your preparation is either identifying the challenge – or in the case of migration identifying the dependencies.”
In 2014 Mumbai IT giant Tech Mahindra saw the potential in Padhye and his team, and acquired a 75% stake for $10m. It has allowed FixStream to grow, and to win clients including Orange, AT&T, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Airbus and many more.
That has made it easier for the company to show potential clients how it can be of value. But Padhye wants to scale throughout the United States and Europe, and is hiring a number of salespeople “to get the message out, build the brand.” Then he will begin hiring additional engineering talent.
Padhye’s team will soon have its first customer in Japan, Padhye adds. “So it’s a balancing act between the growth and the supply.”
FixStream is making plenty of headway – for instance, partnering with Nutanix to enter the hyper-converged infrastructure space. It has also signed a distribution deal with CenturyLink – and Padhye says that news of partnerships will keep coming in the following months.
Also in the near future is how FixStream can suit the needs of clients using the Internet of Things (IoT). The explosion in IoT adoption means that endpoints will increase tremendously. “All this information is coming back and it’s interacting with the core application that’s running in the data center, which is using that information to provide some sort of value–whether it’s turning on the city lights, or whether it’s water gates, temperature–all of this information will be brought into the data center,” says Padhye.
“More and more applications are going to be increasingly life-saving, like 911-types of applications,” he adds. “So once you roll it out, and people depend on it, it becomes extremely important. Most of these will be virtualized, with massive scale. You need to detect the application environment very quickly.”
That speed, visibility and value proposition is what has propelled Padhye, and FixStream, to the success it has built in just four years of operation. Given the speed at which hybrid and IoT applications are multiplying, it is success that looks set to continue for years to come.
Padhye has long since downed his aviator hat. But his second life as a tech CEO is already taking off.