After departing one fledgling company to lead IBM Corp.’s global storage business four years ago, Ed Walsh is returning to the startup world he knows quite well.

Walsh (pictured), who previously served as chief executive officer of four startup companies, including Avamar Technologies Inc. and Storwize Inc., has been named CEO and a director at ChaosSearch Inc., provider of a cloud data lake platform for scalable log analysis.

“It was a hard decision to leave IBM, but it was a very easy decision to go to Chaos,” Walsh said in an exclusive video interview with SiliconANGLE. “I knew the founder, I knew what he was working on for the last seven years. I was just blown away at their fundamental innovation, how they’re driving to get insights at scale from your data lake in the cloud and slash costs dramatically.”

Walsh spoke with Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon and host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio theCUBE.

Search and query in S3

The company’s founder and chief technology officer, Thomas Hazel, started ChaosSearch about four years ago as a secure, scalable log analysis platform in a multitenant or dedicated software-as-a-service environment using an Amazon S3 as a hot data store.

“The reason it differentiates itself is he built, from the ground up, to do this on object storage, while basically everyone else was using 30-year-old technology,” Walsh said. “Put your data in S3 and we’ll index it, give you APIs so you can search and query it.”

Walsh is joining ChaosSearch at a time when the company appears to be on an upswing. In late July, the firm issued a release announcing “substantial growth in revenue from new customer adoption and existing customer expansion” for the first half of 2020.

“Players are all struggling with the same thing: how to add more value for clients,” Walsh noted. “We’re building a full-stack solution for log analytics because there’s a really good way to prove just how game-changing the technology is. If I can make how you store your data and index it become 80% more cost effective, that’s a big deal.”

Storage turnaround at IBM

Walsh’s departure comes at a time when IBM’s storage division has been enjoying its own measure of success after a period of decline. When he rejoined the company in 2016, IBM’s storage business had endured four years of losses.

This track record led Vellante to question the serial entrepreneur, during a 2016 interview on theCUBE, about whether Walsh had been brought in to sell the operation after he rejoined IBM.

“I was not brought in to do that,” Walsh told theCUBE at the time. “This is massively strategic to getting people to the next era of computing, period.”

Two years later, IBM was generating notice for a revamped product line which included nonvolatile high-speed storage. More recently, IBM reported solid revenue growth for its DS8900 storage array in the first quarter of 2020, despite a global slowdown due to the pandemic.

“For innovation at IBM, there’s almost an embarrassment of riches inside,” Walsh said. “We went from four-and-a-half-year product cycles down to two-year product cycles, so we were able to innovate and bring solutions to market much quicker, and that’s what clients are looking for.”

In the ChaosSearch public announcement of Walsh’s hire, the former IBM executive described the firm’s “unique and innovative approach” for turning cloud object storage into a fully indexed and searchable database as a key reason for his decision. Walsh indicated that he planned to move quickly and extend what he views as the company’s market advantage.

“You’re going to see us be the best log analytics company there is,” Walsh said. “You’re going to see us go to Google, Azure and also IBM Cloud. Our core technology is not necessarily competitive with anyone else, because no one else is doing this.”

Here’s the complete video interview:

Photo: SiliconANGLE