Data has tremendous value; bigger budgets are always in demand, but what information technology staff appear to want more than anything else is time.

Datrium Inc. recently conducted a survey of 540 IT professionals and found that 87% of respondents would prefer to automate routine tasks so they could spend more time on strategic initiatives. And over 40% noted that time spent managing legacy infrastructure was keeping them from reaching IT transformation goals.

In response, Datrium has just released a new set of tools designed to address these very concerns.

“How do you actually automate those mundane tasks that take multiple groups to solve?” asked Tim Page (pictured), chief executive officer of Datrium. “There’s a lot of work that goes into that across multiple groups, and we set out to solve those issues.”

Page spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. Also speaking with Burris in separate interviews were Sazzala Reddy, co-founder and chief technology officer of Datrium, and Bryan Bond, director of IT infrastructure at eMeter Corp., a Siemens Business. They discussed the recent release of a new multicloud platform, data applications to automate IT tasks, customer use cases, and the importance of helping companies meet digital transformation challenges. (* Disclosure below.)

New platform and applications released

Datrium recently announced the Automatrix platform, a secure multicloud data offering that provides compute, backup, disaster recovery, primary storage, encryption, and data mobility from a software-defined converged infrastructure. Accompanying Automatrix is a suite of autonomous data applications designed to simplify and automate IT tasks.

A central focus of Datrium’s solution is to provide a way for various IT capabilities to stay with the data as it moves between on-premises and cloud environments.

“It’s got to be easy; it’s got to be consistent; you’ve got to get rid of a lot of the management issues,” Page said. “Automatrix will have primary backup, disaster recovery, all of the policies within that and encryption built-in from the very beginning. It’s released, it’s out, and it’s ready to go.”

One of the solutions that will run on the Automatrix platform is ControlShift. It’s a disaster recovery-as-a-service app that supports VMware and Kubernetes. It enables snapshots of data every five minutes and tests system compliance every half hour. Datrium plans to support failover to VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services by the end of this year, with support for Microsoft Azure in 2020.

“It’s one of our first data-management applications which helps you manage data in two different locations,” said Reddy, who noted that ControlShift’s continuous compliance checks provide an extra level of data security. “That gives you confidence that your disaster recovery plan is going to work for you when you need it.”

Positive early results

By targeting storage, backup, disaster recovery, mobility and security with an automated cross-platform solution, Datrium believes it can go right to the heart of the frustration brought out in its survey of IT professionals who yearn for more time to focus on critical business needs. Early proof-of-concept results are already validating this approach, according to Reddy.

“If you want to be in the on-demand economy and move fast in your business, these things cause friction,” Reddy said. “Last quarter, we had 40 proof of concepts out in the field and 30 have adopted already.”

One Datrium customer — eMeter — was an early Automatrix adopter and has seen its impact firsthand. The company supplies smart grid infrastructure software to enterprises and was looking for improved storage application performance.

“We do not manage storage anymore with the Datrium product,” Bond said. “Our recovery time objective and recovery point objective matrix is down to seconds instead of minutes or hours. Those types of things allow us to provide a much better level of service to our customers.”

Finding an easier way to handle storage management is showing appeal for other enterprise customers as well. When TransCore LP, a radio communications device provider, saw its vehicle toll tag business grow from thousands to millions of units per quarter, the company turned to Datrium for help with a scalable storage management solution.

Datrium’s self-protecting enterprise cloud and “always-on” storage solutions allowed TransCore to get a handle on its rapidly expanding toll tag business.

“We’re in an on-demand economy which expects instant outcomes, which means you have to digitally transform,” Page said. “To do that, you’ve got to transform IT.”

New funding and European expansion

Datrium’s recent announcements highlight its own transition from a previous focus on NVMe flash storage to offering a broad multicloud data management platform. Prior to the recent announcements regarding Automatrix and ControlShift, the company’s core on-premises product was DVX which facilitates NVMe flash storage on server compute nodes with faster data reads.

It’s been a busy time in recent months for Datrium. In September, the company raised $60 million in Series D funding, led by Samsung Catalyst Fund.

This was followed by the news in April that Datrium would expand into Europe in keeping with its focus on building enterprise business. The company has hired 30 new field representatives, with a base in the United Kingdom. Datrium also disclosed that it would adopt software subscription pricing for customers moving licenses from on-premises storage to public clouds.

Datrium’s recent announcements are designed to further position the company as a data platform provider with storage, backup, and disaster recovery solutions that mesh seamlessly with the ability to move data sets securely between on-prem operations and the cloud.

And, as its own recent survey has demonstrated, the ultimate payoff for IT organizations is time.

“To be able to set up your policies, check them, and make sure you have true disaster recovery with a recovery time objective of zero, it’s a tough thing,” Page said. “We’ve done it.”

Watch the complete video interview below. (* Disclosure: Datrium Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Datrium nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE