Interview with VP Muddu Sudhakar & VP Karthik Kannan of VMWare- Interviewer Katerina Noskova, Videos by Lilia Taran & KC Leung

Aug 28, 2012 No Comments by KC Leung

Watch live video from kctv88 on Justin.tv

Sudhakar Muddu, co-founder and chief executive officer of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Cetas, said he founded the company 18 months ago because he wanted to provide a way for companies to sift through “massive amounts of data” to identify “core customers” and make sure that they “come back every day.”

He told India-West here after speaking in a panel at the recent TiE conference (I-W, May 25) that his start-up received a big boost from The Indus Entrepreneurs Silicon Valley, which provided him a “conference room as our garage space.”
The company was funded by Clearstone Venture Partners, True Ventures and two angel investors — Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; and Dan Warmenhoven, chairman of the storage company NetApp and its former CEO.

Cetas built its team quickly, attracted customers and traction in the marketplace. The result was its acquisition by software maker VMware. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Muddu said three other companies had shown interest in acquiring his company, but Muddu and his team thought VMware was “the best fit.”

“The Cetas team has been driving the democratization of analytics and business intelligence by dramatically lowering the barriers to entry for all companies, from small businesses to large enterprises,” Richard McDougall, VMware’s chief technology officer for application infrastructure, said in a recent blog post.

EMC, VMware’s largest shareholder, also liked the acquisition. Muddu, an Indian American entrepreneur originally from Kakimada, Andhra Pradesh, previously co-founded of Kazeon, which was acquired by EMC, where he joined the cloud computer and big analytics team as a general manager. Muddu left EMC to found Cetas.

Many companies have massive amounts of customer information in their databases, but they don’t know how to mine it. Cetas’ software tracks data in real-time and is able to manage unstructured data generated by other programs.

According to industry analysts, it exploits open-source code known as Hadoop, which spreads tasks across many relatively inexpensive servers.

“Cetas was built faster, with fewer people, and cheaper, than any of the enterprise grade product companies in our history,” Clearstone Ventures managing director Sumant Mandal said in a recent article on the company’s Web site.

”Faster sales, deployment and delivery mechanisms allowed the company to get product to market on a smaller first round of capital,” he added.