Entrepreneur in Data Recovery : The Sanovi Way

NASSCOM EMERGE 50 Showcase 3

Sanovi is the leading management solution to ensure that primary and data recovery (DR) data centres are aligned to meet business set recovery objectives of recovery time and recovery point for critical IT applications.

Key benefits offered by Sanovi DRM:

1. Reduce business exposure to IT outages

2. Achieve higher operational efficiencies

3. Adopt industry best practices

4. Enable an agile organization

Sanovi customers see great value in a central DR dashboard that gives on going real-time view into RPO and RTO. This provides customers with a realistic understanding of their risk in the event of an unplanned outage. Sanovi enables automation of recovery work flows and DR drills. This makes application recovery predictable, eliminates operator error and less dependent on experts being present.

Founder team

Chandra Sekhar

Chandra Sekhar has 19 years of development and delivery experience of large-scale enterprise systems in disaster recovery, storage, server and networking areas. Chandra Sekhar co-founded Sanovi and has contributed to products in the disaster recovery management space. As CTO and VP of Engineering, Chandra Sekhar is directly responsible delivery of Sanovi’s unique DR Management platform. Prior to Sanovi, Chandra Sekhar worked as the Director of SAN engineering at Sanrise Inc., a leading storage service provider. Before Sanrise, Chandra Sekhar held the role of Architect at Sequent (now with IBM). Chandra Sekhar has co-authored five patents, of which two have been granted. Chandra Sekhar holds a BS in Computer Science from the premier Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India.Lakshman Narayanswamy

Lakshman has over twenty years of industry experience in Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery Solutions, Data and Information Management technologies and solutions. In his current role he is responsible for the Sanovi’s product marketing and management. Prior to Sanovi, he co-founded Sanrise, a global storage service provider company. Before Sanrise, Lakshman has held engineering and technology driving positions in the Indian Institute of Science, Auspex & Silicon Graphics. He holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from University of Virginia, USA and has five patents to his credit in the area of Storage & Data Management.The founders respond to queries on their vision and ecosystem.

1. Why did you take to entrepreneurship? Is your company founded by an individual or a team?

Sanovi is founded by a team of professionals that came together based on a shared vision of the business opportunity in the data protection and disaster recovery space. Each of us had grown in our careers and were looking for the next challenge in personal and professional development. Entrepreneurship offered us the stage to forge our technology background, creative energies and our sense of community to assemble a team and build a business from scratch while weathering and growing through the vicissitudes of the business environment.

2. What is your objective through entrepreneurship (e.g. wealth creation, value creation, creating something new, etc.)?

Our guiding principles has been to create and offer something of value to society at large. We believe that business can be a very strong medium of change, creating wealth and value is of important in the ventures we undertook.

3. How do you view NASSCOM’s recognition in their EMERGE 50 list?

Given NASSCOM’s brand name and stewardship of the IT industry, this recognition carries a lot of value to us and send positive signals to upcoming start up companies.

4. What aspects differentiate you from your competition or industry in general?

We pride ourselves in the fact that we followed our heart, our background have been in product development, rather than stick to the tried services model, we bootstrapped the company using a consulting model and developed a product that is the flagship revenue earner for the company today. We stay close to the customer, remain aware of the market and aim to deliver leading edge products that keep our leadership in the disaster recovery management space.

5. How do you view the entrepreneurial ecosystem at present and what can be done to make it better?

Entrepreneurs flourish best when the ecosystem supports risk takers financially and culturally. Financially investors must realize that they are taking risk, be open to change and also allow founding teams to make mistakes and incorporate their learning to reflect the business direction. Culturally, transparency and a willingness to talk about current challenges will go a long way in helping young companies identify opportunities and create value and offer solutions.