Yottaa, an impressive application-oriented CDN, has kicked off a new stage of corporate transformation. After launching an initial set of Web Application Optimization technology – primarily centered around CDN, FEO, monitoring and security – Yottaa recently extended its technology to optimize the entire customer’s journey and maximizing online and mobile end user engagement. The key takeaway from our latest interview with CEO Vick Viren Vaishnavi is that Yottaa is no longer content with the IT-dominated Web Acceleration approach typical of CDNs. The company’s new executive team is injecting unique insight to evolve the conventional IT-centric view of Application Optimization with a pluggable platform approach. This approach to business technology includes increased automation and built-in intelligence, and intersects areas that have historically been Marketing, eCommerce or deeply Technical silos: analytics, application optimization for web and mobile presence, user experience management, and more.
Vick Viren Vaishnavi, recently brought on to head the company, is a future-focused, enterprise software technology veteran. Beginning his career in networking infrastructure, he has realized success in the areas of analytics, optimization and security. After helping to lead companies like BladeLogic and Aveksa, Vick has become an expert in Data Center Automation, Identity & Access Management, and Application Performance Management. Yottaa attracted his attention with its efforts towards creating a customized end-user experience, and its focus on application optimization. We spoke to Vick about his perspective on the industry and his plans for Yottaa.
Q: You’ve had a lot of success building and selling companies like BladeLogic to BMC for $800M and Aveksa for $300M to EMC. Can you tell us about that experience and how it’s going to help you at Yottaa? Do you see Identity & Access Management at the edge for Yottaa?
A: My passion is bringing innovation to the marketplace, and building successful companies. I definitely plan to leverage my domain expertise in a multitude of different technology areas to continue innovating at Yottaa. You can look forward to seeing it firsthand circa the end of this quarter, particularly in the networking area – think networking from the perspective of an end-user’s experience, and for the first time being able to understand and pinpoint the resulting business impact.
We will bring concepts inspired by Identity & Access Management together with Layer 7 analytics, resulting in increased security. Added features will include real-time bot detection and separation and mitigation of bad traffic to maintain a higher Quality of Service for legitimate traffic, an expanded PCI architecture, and Web Application Firewall enhancements. On the Cloud operations side, we are contemplating a different way to integrate Data Center Automation with those capabilities, which is another area in which I have previous experience.
Q: Initially, when Yottaa built its CDN infrastructure, it was built on top of Amazon and other cloud providers. Today, it seems that Yottaa has a hybrid infrastructure that leverages both dedicated infrastructure and the cloud. What is your plan in regards to your infrastructure and how are you going to evolve it over time?
A: In truth, some of Yottaa’s first patents were for a unique, hybrid architecture and Cloud Service for optimizing Web Applications. In 2014 we expanded our dedicated infrastructure to improve performance and delivery for key geographies. Since I came to Yottaa a few months ago, we have accelerated the process of expanding our infrastructure in three main areas. Continue reading Interview with Vick Vaishnavi, CEO of Yottaa #1 →