One of the largest players in the data infrastructure market announced on Tuesday that it would be teaming up with Microsoft Corp. to power the next wave of agentic AI.

Vast Data Inc. will be collaborating with Microsoft on its Azure platform to provide customers with high-performance AI infrastructure in the cloud. Enterprises will have access to Vast’s suite of data services, including unified storage and data cataloging for supporting complex AI workflows.

“The objective is to basically bring all of the goodness of what we call the Vast AI Operating System to Microsoft customers,” said Jeff Denworth (pictured), co-founder of Vast Data. “We’ve been collaborating with them for, I’d say, the better part of two years now. The objective is to basically open up data access to all of the customer’s data sets for all the different compute platforms that Microsoft offers.”

Denworth spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante at SC25, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed key challenges for enterprise AI, developing edge networks and a potential public offering. (* Disclosure below.)

Bringing data to agentic AI

Azure customers will have the opportunity to leverage Vast’s capabilities such as InsightEngine and AgentEngine for running intelligent, data-driven workflows and accelerating vector search, retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and data prep. Vast’s AgentEngine fuels agentic AI with real-time data streams to enable continuous AI reasoning across hybrid cloud environments.

“We want to build an agent builder that allows you to put agents directly on top of your data,” Denworth said. “The whole market has changed over the last 12 months, now that reasoning models are here. With the generative AI era, you basically pump a lot of data into some sort of training run. Now, data systems become an integral part of my compute framework. Our belief is that the world is about to embark on one of the largest technology refresh events in history, now that people realize that they need to uplevel their data infrastructure to feed these new agentic systems.”

The Vast AI OS combines distributed computing services such as storage and reasoning into a unified layer bridging cloud, edge and data centers. The edge is a particular focus for Vast, according to Denworth, as seen by the recent partnership the company formed in March with Akamai Technologies Inc. to improve AI inferencing at the edge.

“It’s a very, very vibrant part of our business,” he noted. “We made an announcement with Akamai earlier this year, kind of similar to some of the stuff that we’re doing with Microsoft, Google and CoreWeave. They want to build out a full edge network with Vast.”

With Vast’s steady stream of partnership announcements, a positive cash flow over 12 consecutive quarters and a gross margin of nearly 90%, there has been speculation that the privately held company could soon go public. Denworth was asked by theCUBE whether an IPO was imminent.

“We have everything in place to go and be a public company in terms of all the teams in place and things like that,” he said. “Are we reporting on a quarterly basis internally to the board? We are to the company, we are. I think we’re probably still a few quarters away from being really ready.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of SC25:

(* Disclosure: Vast Data Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Vast Data nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE