One of the biggest challenges facing every enterprise is how to attend to their growing volumes of data, seeking out new derivative sources of data value. But sifting, analyzing and retooling data requires ongoing changes in computing infrastructure, data operations, and corporate culture.

In the spirit of data refinement, data protection and software-defined storage company Veritas Technologies LLC acquired Aptare Inc., a provider of analytics solutions for hybrid cloud environments. Fresh off the acquisition, the two companies now face the challenge of merging efforts to enable better data utilization for enterprise users.

Jyothi Swaroop (pictured, left), vice president of global marketing at Veritas, and Rick Clark (pictured, right), president and chief executive officer of Aptare, spoke with Peter Burris, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed the acquisition, the data marketplace, and the relationship between retooling data and sources of business value (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Burris: The notion of creating new options in the value of data is intrinsic to the questions of digital business. That suggests we need to think more about data protection — not just from the standpoint of protecting data once it’s been created and is sitting there so that we can recover it, but new types of utilization, new ways of thinking about data. Does that resonate with you?

Clark: Absolutely. One of the things we’re seeing in the marketplace is — certainly over the last 10 years — the data center has become so complex. There’s this mess of fragmentation of data across highly virtualized infrastructures. And then when public clouds came along, customers didn’t really know what workloads they should move up into those clouds.

What we saw as a huge problem is the areas of cost inefficiencies, massive problems of risk, and then obviously the amount of money that companies are spending on compliance. And so what we were really focusing on is the gaps — what do you not know … about your data? So we’d really measure the heartbeat of the data protection environment, and from that we could actually see where are your risks, where are your exposure, where are you spending too much money … and where’s your opportunities.

Burris: Now talk about how Aptare rounds out the Veritas portfolio as it pertains to these things your customers ask for — taking data closer to outcomes and away from a device orientation?

Swaroop: The question … customers are asking us, or were asking us before Aptare came into the picture, was: “At the infrastructure level, how do I know how much I’m spending on my data protection environments? Do I know where the growth is? Is it all in the traditional workloads of Oracle SAP, or is it in virtual, or is it in the cloud? Am I putting too much data on tape? Is it costing me enough? Can I extract the value from that data?”

So they were asking us infrastructure, visualization, and IT analytics questions, which only Aptare could answer.

Burris: Talk to us about how customers helped knit you two guys together.

Clark: We had some of the largest companies on the globe actually using our software — many of the Fortune 10 are using our software — JP Morgan, Chase, Qualcomm, Western Digital — and they came to us with these very precise problems around how to optimize … risk within the environment, how to streamline obviously the cost and compliance. We found that they were very common questions. And so we actually created this agnostic intelligence built into the software — a rules engine that would be able to correlate data from all of these disparate data sources, whether it’s on-prem or in the cloud. Tying that together would provide impactful insights to our customers; they could solve real-world problems. And we would do it with kind of what we call the easy button.

One of the big problems with a lot of software products out there today is their are point solutions to manage parts of the infrastructure. So companies wanted a single pane of glass where I could see everything across all of my storage, all of my data protection, on-prem and cloud — and that’s really what we bring to the table, that single pane of glass. And we do it very simply, at scale for the largest customers. And that, in many ways, was the synergy obviously with the partnership with Veritas.

Watch the video interview with Swaroop and Clark below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Veritas Technologies LLC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Veritas nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE