Join us for an insightful episode featuring Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, as he shares his expertise in the rapidly-evolving landscape of data infrastructure and Artificial Intelligence. Hosted by theCUBE's John Furrier, this conversation takes place at the prestigious New York Stock Exchange, spotlighting SingleStore's strategic position and the innovative partnerships shaping the future of AI infrastructure. Verma's insights reveal the dynamic intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
In this episode, Verma discusses the transformative role of databases in AI development and the critical importance of modernizing data estates to capitalize on new AI capabilities. According to Verma, integrating data effectively can significantly enhance AI's operational efficiency, emphasizing the need for organizations to harness their own data. theCUBE analysts explore the future of enterprise technology, echoing Verma's predictions for AI-driven disruption across various industries. Don't miss out on the key takeaways from this engaging discussion. Learn more about SingleStore here: [SingleStore](https://singlestore.com). #AI #Cybersecurity #DataInfrastructure #SingleStore #NYSE
Stay connected with the latest in tech innovation by following the full series with theCUBE at NYSE Wired.
00:00 - Intro
00:06 - Launching into New Ventures: A Market and Partnership Overview
04:31 - AI Evolution: Infrastructure Trends and Applications Across Markets
08:57 - Modernizing Data Estates for the Future of AI and Agents
11:58 - Challenges with AI Hallucinations and Data Reliability
16:11 - Advancements in Data Technologies and Enterprise AI Integration
19:32 - Shifts in Enterprise Data Usage for AI
23:30 - The Future of System Software and Applications
31:24 - Disruption in Professional Services and SaaS Models
35:15 - Navigating the Future: AI, Innovation, and Strategic Roadmaps
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Jyothi Swaroop, DDN
Join us for an insightful episode featuring Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, as he shares his expertise in the rapidly-evolving landscape of data infrastructure and Artificial Intelligence. Hosted by theCUBE's John Furrier, this conversation takes place at the prestigious New York Stock Exchange, spotlighting SingleStore's strategic position and the innovative partnerships shaping the future of AI infrastructure. Verma's insights reveal the dynamic intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
In this episode, Verma discusses the transformative role of databases in AI development and the critical importance of modernizing data estates to capitalize on new AI capabilities. According to Verma, integrating data effectively can significantly enhance AI's operational efficiency, emphasizing the need for organizations to harness their own data. theCUBE analysts explore the future of enterprise technology, echoing Verma's predictions for AI-driven disruption across various industries. Don't miss out on the key takeaways from this engaging discussion. Learn more about SingleStore here: [SingleStore](https://singlestore.com). #AI #Cybersecurity #DataInfrastructure #SingleStore #NYSE
Stay connected with the latest in tech innovation by following the full series with theCUBE at NYSE Wired.
00:00 - Intro
00:06 - Launching into New Ventures: A Market and Partnership Overview
04:31 - AI Evolution: Infrastructure Trends and Applications Across Markets
08:57 - Modernizing Data Estates for the Future of AI and Agents
11:58 - Challenges with AI Hallucinations and Data Reliability
16:11 - Advancements in Data Technologies and Enterprise AI Integration
19:32 - Shifts in Enterprise Data Usage for AI
23:30 - The Future of System Software and Applications
31:24 - Disruption in Professional Services and SaaS Models
35:15 - Navigating the Future: AI, Innovation, and Strategic Roadmaps
In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment, theCUBE’s John Furrier sits down with Jyothi Swaroop, CMO at DDN, to unpack how AI infrastructure is powering real enterprise outcomes at the intersection of tech and finance. Swaroop outlines DDN’s 27-year engineering roots – from shipping its first product to NASA to serving 7 of the top 10 financials and 6 of the top 10 automakers – and explains why the conversation has shifted from “storage” to “data.” He details how DDN’s role in the “picks and shovels” layer of AI underpins sovereign AI deploymen...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What is the current status of DDN's revenue and what events are taking place related to the company's growth?add
What is the background and customer base of the company being discussed?add
What types of solutions does the company provide for different customer needs regarding storage and data?add
What is the role of business development (BizDev) at DDN, and how does it approach its sales strategy?add
>> Let's start. Welcome back, everyone. I'm John Furrier, theCUBE. Here in our New York Stock Exchange CUBE Studios powering the NYSE Wired program. Jyothi's back in the studio, CMO, among other roles at DDN, BizDev, all the enablement field work. Jyothi, great to see you. DDN's continuing to do great, word on the street is revenue's up. Congratulations.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's always great to be on theCUBE.>> It's kind of quiet. The bell's rung. All the trading floors are closed.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Hey, but the energy's in the walls.>> Energy, there's a machine. They call the machine here. I love it here, but the market is still smoking hot. We've had a lot of guests come in on a mixture of expert series around data center build up from a facility standpoint, real estate. Vultr was in here early. We're going to have a panel tonight. A special event here at the NYSE. You're going to be on there. I'll host it. You'll be on there with Kevin from Vultr. And the big discussion is that if you look at the growth that's coming, because a lot of the IPOs that have happened in this new opening up of this new window is crypto and non-AI companies.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Right.>> I mean, Figma's not an AI company. It's a software company that's got done things differently and super fast growth. But the AI wave is coming on the IPO. We see it. When it hits, we'll see, but you guys are enabling it. You're the infrastructure piece.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Correct.>> And it's not just storage anymore, it's data.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Right.>> This is huge. So you got your fingers in a lot of pies, NVIDIA, X. Over a billion dollars in revenue.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> .>> Around a billion. I think VAST Data is roughly around close to 200 plus million, 300, whatever. I don't know. They're private. So I don't know the actual numbers but I think their rumored valuation is 30 billion in this next round, which is massive step up. I mean, this launched two years ago actually in theCUBE Studio. What's your valuation?
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Well, I don't know. Going by that comp you can do the math, right? You can go three to four X on that valuation. So I mean, jokes aside, look, it's a hot market. It's a hot market for a reason. So there's two pieces to this AI momentum, right? There's the gen AI and the agentic AI piece where companies like ServiceNow and others are thriving, building meaningful business outcomes and applications for customers. And then there's the AI infrastructure piece where it's NVIDIA and DDN and the likes that we're powering the... Some people like to call it the picks and shovels of AI, and there's everything in between that, which is the data layer. So at DDN, we're happy to see this momentum. Competition is a good thing for the market, and we're loving leading that race in terms of revenue and growth and things like that. And yeah, we spur each other on I suppose.>> You've been on many times on theCUBE. We've had both founders on from DDN, very technical company. Just highlight some of the facts that people should know about because we document on theCUBE, major customer wins in the most strategic cutting edge areas that everyone's working hard on. What are some of those areas? Just clarify, clear the air, what's the areas where DDN's winning and why?
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Yeah, so let's start with the founders. So we're a 27-year-old company. So we've been around the block since our early HPC days and we shipped our first product to NASA no less. So our customers are 7 of the top 10 financials, 6 of the top 10 autos, every three-letter government agency you can think of, largest sovereign AI deployments around the world, largest AI factories around the world. NVIDIA is a customer, XAI is a customer. I could go all on and on and on, swells me with pride. It all begins from... The underpinning of all that success is we're all a bunch of engineers at DDN. The founders are massive geeks at heart who are able to translate that tremendous knowledge into business outcomes for customers. And the company pursues that same DNA. The kind of people we hire are also passionate technologists who are also able to deliver that message out. I'm a great example of that. I'm a software engineer, a failed one, but I'm CMO.>> You're ran your age just now. It's a good win to be a programmer that's kind of retired or failed or not-
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Never really took off to be honest. But it's there. The software engineering underpinning is there that allows me to kind of translate the founder's vision to something that's meaningful to our customers. So DDN's roots are in HPC, high performance computing, that gives us this unfair advantage in this world of AI. So one of the things that most people don't talk about when it comes to AI is the ROI of AI. Everybody talks about it as if it's science experiments that they're running. At DDN we've proven with our revenue growth and our install base and the customers that we have that we're actually showcasing tremendous ROI in enterprise AI, in sovereign AI and AI factors.>> In what way? Can you give an example?
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Sure. So there's plenty of examples. So AI is not the same for everybody in terms of business outcomes. So as CMO, I'll give you my own example. I initially looked at incremental value, improving my workflows. Can I not hire 20 people to achieve what I want to achieve? Can I achieve it with 10 people? So incremental things with AI, make that step up. And then there's the transformational stuff, which is a drug discovery company. Can I accelerate drug discovery from 10 years to a year? Material sciences, can I build this new alloy and look at it at the atomic level with a hundred thousand GPUs providing the compute that's required to do that and so I can accelerate my outcomes? So it's a wide area of outcomes.>> So the outcomes are driving the ROI. It's not a cost structure.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> It's not a cost structure. No. Look, again, I'll speak to my own team. It's not about letting go of people as the world wants to have you believe at all times. It's more about supercharging what you have. Think about that. You spent a lot of time and effort hiring the best people into your company and on your team. It's your job as a leader to leverage AI and the benefits of it to supercharge what you have. Yes, of course the side effect is you slow down hiring as a result, but it doesn't mean all of a sudden half your team goes away because if your business is booming, you need those people to manage these initiatives.>> And if you're growing, you'll need to hire the new people, but they have to have the requisite to fit into the new operational role, which is dealing with agents, dealing with generative AI tools.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Right.>> Any tools jump out at you right now that you think are game changing? I mean, obviously MCP has been a big movement this year that's opened up a lot of doors for agentic. Any things that you're seeing that you can share?
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> So again, the technology mindset that I have and we have at DDN, we are a build it yourself type of company. I mean, if we are in the AI infrastructure business, we need to know how to drink our own champagne and build on top. So I'll give you an example. First, sales enablement. We were talking earlier on. We've built our own agent that's able to surface this up to the field in real time. All of the great content that we produce. So our field doesn't have to mix and match. Do some overthinking.>> Saves time.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Yeah, exactly. Saves a bunch of time. Also they're->> They're pecking for stuff.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> And they're effective. Research takes a long time. Not everybody has access to theCUBE in real time. So for them to kind of do that in real time and be effective in their meetings is one great example of agentic AI. But we've used that across distribution channels, content creation, on and on and on. And we're only getting started.>> Well, I appreciate the plug for thecubeai.com. Go to thecubeai.com, check out our beta. We got some action going on. But this does speak to the new normal, which is the AI enablement's coming. Again, the infrastructure CapEx build out. The new storage fabrics that are being re-architected are going to enable the value creation and extraction, which goes public eventually here. So I want to ask about that because I've been hearing on theCUBE for the past year, more than ever in the past 16 years, the following phrase, I want to get your reaction to it, how it relates to how you work with NVIDIA and all the other guys. Get the architecture right, and the software will... You can swap out new algorithms. Reaction to that? Do you agree? And if so or not, what am I missing?
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> No, it's right in that that's how it's being done right now. In the world of AI, John, our CEO, Alex loves this phrase. He calls it unreasonable velocity. Things move so fast that what was right today is not right tomorrow. There's a better way to do it. But today's world is there's a reference architecture published by the likes of NVIDIA that we follow. We're part of their reference architecture for the largest deployments. And the customers get that blueprint. It's like building this building out here. There's a blueprint and then you fine tune, you remodel, you go as fast as you can, and then you course correct and you course correct. So that reference architecture is probably the best place to start if you're building out your own AI infrastructure today. But then also there are NCPs from CoreWeave to Vultr to others who will give that to you out of the box if you don't want to overthink building your own infrastructure. And also our great partners at Google. DDN is now offered as a one-piece service by Google Cloud, which is amazing.>> Why is DDN winning? Share the reason. Is it the architecture, the fabric, speed, performance, cost, all of the above?
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> It's scalability, it's performance, it's trust, it's ROI of our deployments. If customers don't see ROI, they'll drop you like a hot potato. So customers have been with us for 27 years, many of them, and they continue to buy from us. It's because they are seeing tremendous ROI, whether it was in HPC or now today in AI. So I think with most companies, if you want to be as successful as DDN or even more, focus on the ROI you're delivering to your customers, because AI is a big investment today.>> All right, I want to ask you about storage fabrics. It comes up a lot. A lot of the AI infrastructure, large-scale clusters and systems. NVIDIA's got some big announcements coming up tomorrow and then Monday at Hot Chips in Stanford. The gigawatt scale, they're talking about scale across data centers, scale up, scale out obviously. But the role of the storage layer and where the data sits is looking a lot like memory in the old days. So you're hearing a lot about storage fabrics. How do you guys view that at DDN? Because storage is being renamed data. And it's almost like the old days that people talk about files or they're on storage. So files to storage, now it's storage to data platform. So I think no one's really going to talk about storage in the same way that we used to talk about files. Like I stored files. And so you think about that, that's clear. So I always say storage company, you're really a data company. But as a data company, what's the new architecture in this... What is a storage fabric first of all, and what does that mean for you guys as now a data layer company?
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Yeah, it's a great question. So first of all, storage has become this bad word because it's like everything is now about data and storage. Let's not talk about storage, just focus on data. Yes, on the one hand, it's true that the value is in the data, but the data needs to sit somewhere. But on the other hand, I'm playing devil's advocate here, storage also is increasingly commodity. Who cares? It's a place to store something. So the value today, if I just do the marketecture of AI, it's the compute infrastructure, NVIDIA, AMD, other. It's the storage that stores the data. It's the data workflow and data fabric on top of that storage. The storage is efficient enough to surface it up and accelerate that data. And then it's the agentic and the gen AI applications that you build on top. So as a company, we're in that middle layer where we go... We straddle very cleverly between storage and data depending on the outcome our customers want to drive. So for example, if someone's building out a massive AI factory or a sovereign AI infrastructure, we can provide them an integrated storage and data platform. But if someone's already got some traditional storage in there and they just need the data layer to accelerate whatever's in storage and surface it up to your application or saturate the GPU that you've paid a lot of money for, that's okay with DDN as well. That's where we shine too. So we don't really->> Play in both use cases.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Exactly. So we don't really care how the customer or the industry views this layer. But what we are cognizant of is data is where the value is. Without managing the data, your GPU is not good enough. I mean, if the GPU is the engine of a Ferrari and if your fuel quality is crappy->> Or it's slow to feed the engine.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Exactly. So it doesn't matter you have a Ferrari, it doesn't really matter. So we're the gasoline that's the highest quality gasoline that's being pumped into this Ferrari GPU.>> Yeah, I had a great conversation with Alex at Supercomputing last year. I remember him having a great conversation around that whole dynamic of integrating into the engine or the GPUs, and that was intentional. He was really excited by that. How's that going? What's the relationship like with NVIDIA? What is DDN's relationship with some of the big people spending like X and others? Share some of the commentary there.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> I mean, we have a very privileged and tight relationship with NVIDIA. They're both a customer and a partner of ours and have been for a long time. And it's very interesting to watch them. I mean, if this AI universe is a solar system or whatever, they're the sun in the middle. Everyone's just rotating around them. They have the gravitational pull and they're driving this market today, and they are spurring on all the innovation with us as well as we partner with them. Their innovation from their chips every year is just ridiculous. It's an order of magnitude better and faster. And for us to keep up with that, we have to move almost as fast as NVIDIA is moving because they are our customer. They're using DDN's data fabric to power their own super pods. All their super pods from Eos to Selene to everything that they're coming up with. And that's again, a matter of pride, but also a big challenge for us to keep up with this really great company that innovates faster than anyone else in this market. Yeah, it's a seven year relationship.>> You guys have to maintain also performance because performance is one of those things where it's the threshold, it's a minimum table stake.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Right. So performance, see, it's an interesting thing. If you're a business buyer on the customer side, you don't care about performance. What is the business value? Yeah, it's fast. So what? I just want this outcome, right? If I got it a second later, is that a problem? It's fine. I can wait another second. But it's about translating that big performance jump into dollars for somebody. That is the key challenge. And in the world of AI, that is more pronounced than ever because you not saturating your GPUs and getting complete horsepower of the GPU, all of it. Using all of it at one go is going to cost you money. Like saturating your GPUs at 20% costs you a lot of money. Get it to 80, 90, 100% on your->> And make sure they're delivering to the outcome you want.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Exactly.>> I mean GPU speed on bad outcome is bad.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Exactly.>> All right, we're going to have a panel tonight with Vultr. Talk about the relationship with Vultr.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> Yeah, so they've been a great, again, another customer and partner for us. They are the neocloud provider in AI. They are very agile company. We've loved working with them together and targeting enterprise AI customers together. So if there are enterprises that feel like, oh, we're not ready to invest in our own AI factory, we still don't know the outcomes we want to drive, but we see the value in AI and we want to start building these incremental benefits into our AI workflows or build an agent that we want to kick the tires on, et cetera. A neocloud provider like Vultr is a great place to start and scale. So it's been a great partnership. We're going after lots of verticals together, from finance to healthcare to life sciences, and more to come on that.>> Jyothi, great to see you. We've got the panel coming up. We have to kind of change venues, but I want to get some insight from you. I know you also do BizDev, not just marketing CMO and you also do sales, a lot of the field stuff with customers, and you've been very efficient in your job. What are some of the BizDev motions you have? Is that targeting industries? What does BizDev mean for, business development mean for DDN? I mean, I know sales mean sell more DDN products. What does BizDev mean like partner signups? Take us through what that means.
Jyoothi Swaroop
>> So it's a few things. First of all, at the fundamental level, BizDev is essentially knocking down doors for sales to walk through, right? That's what it is. Whether you do it through a partner or directly with the end customer, that's different sales place for BizDev. So at DDN, our team is about... It's their focus. I'm trying to get them to be surgical because not every company on the planet operates the same way as it relates to AI in terms of their buying decisions. We have to get hyper targeted. So the BizDev function at DDN wakes up every day to see if they're getting more and more hyper targeted by leveraging the tools that we've provided them with. And then of course, then see if you want to partner with somebody like a Google to go after the same customer or a Vultr to go after the same customer, or do we go direct. It's a better fit for us to go direct.>> Got it. Well, thanks for coming on. We'll see you at the reception upstairs here at the NYSE. DDN really kind of making waves in storage. Obviously the revenue numbers speak for themselves, but the founders have been on theCUBE multiple times. Technology solutions with product market fit in this AI world makes a big difference as the systems are getting re-architected to handle the performance and the large global scale. Of course, this is the big investment in CapEx, the power of gen AI. Of course, theCUBE's doing its part to bring you all the action. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.
