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Wednesday, January 6, 2010
The Mover
Iron Mountain's Venkata uses startup skills to grow storage company
By James M. Connolly
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MHT's Galen Moore: Honoring innovation in New England
MHT's Galen Moore: Hiring trends and opportunities
If Iron Mountain Digital is going to successfully spread its wings, Ramana Venkata will have to take a unit of a 59-year-old company and treat it like a startup.
Venkata, formerly chief operating officer for the digital business unit of Iron Mountain Inc., was named president of Iron Mountain Digital in November. He reports directly to Iron Mountain CEO Bob Brennan and adds responsibility for sales and general management to his previous role as COO, overseeing engineering and service delivery.
“My mandate is fairly large. What they want me to do is take Digital today, which has been very successful, and turn it into an organization that builds and sells a large spectrum of information management solutions, moving Digital beyond a world where it sells point solutions,” said Venkata.
Iron Mountain Digital today offers storage-as-a-service solutions in areas such as data protection and recovery, archiving and e-discovery. The next stage, according to Venkata, is to “add intelligence to data as we store it.” That means not just selecting storage media in a hierarchical fashion but managing the data in a hierarchical manner. For example, that intelligence may dictate how long that data is held before it is destroyed.
To build out a suite of management solutions, Venkata plans to fall back on what he learned in the world of startups. That is how he ended up where he is today. In 1999, Venkata founded PurpleYogi, a Silicon Valley company that focused on personalization of the Internet for consumers. That company morphed into an e-discovery company, became Stratify Inc. in 2003, and, with Venkata as CEO, was acquired by Iron Mountain in 2007 for $158 million. He joined Iron Mountain as general manager of the Stratify unit and was promoted to COO in July.
He hopes to bring to his new role “some experience and wisdom from the fact that I learned how to think about a technology strategy,” and experience in financial management. “I learned fiscal discipline from having lived through it,” he said.
“I’ll have to create a situation where we behave like a startup, where you place a premium on getting things done, and I have to manage that type of culture without being bound by the fact that there is a parent organization 30 miles away,” he said, noting that the digital group has to leverage the best of what its parent company offers.
A key to his success, he said, is an ability to hire and to retain top talent.
Venkata, raised in India and a resident of California before this past July, is already facing the rigors of a New England winter.
As for his interest in technology, he says: “Tech is where you build something that makes our corporate or personal life more enjoyable.”
Ramana Venkata
President and Chief Operating Officer
Company: Iron Mountain Digital
Age: 45
Education: Bachelor’s of technology, Indian Institute of Technology; Master’s in mechanical engineering, Stanford University
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