aiTech Trend Interview with Shailesh Manjrekar, Head of AI and Strategic Alliance of Weka - AITechTrend
aiTech Trend Interview with Shailesh Manjrekar, Head of AI and Strategic Alliance of WekaIO

aiTech Trend Interview with Shailesh Manjrekar, Head of AI and Strategic Alliance of Weka

What do you do at Weka, and what do you build with your team?

My title is Head of AI and Strategic Alliances. I am the subject matter expert for all things AI and spend my time building our AI strategy, solutions, and alliances around it.

What are some of the industrial sectors that Weka caters to?

The primary vertical we go after are Lifesciences, FinTech and AI/ML, but are also getting traction with other verticals like High-Performance Data Analytics and Oil and Gas which are adopting GPU’s and looking for performance and cloud scalability.

What are some of the common challenges customers approach Innodata Weka with?

For each of these verticals, customers have become data-driven to the extent that their business models, competitive advantage, and efficiencies depend on deriving actionable intelligence and insights from the data. Infrastructure and particularly access to data with storage and storage I/O often becomes the inhibitor in achieving this goal. This is when they turn to Weka Data Platform to deliver the highest performance, eliminate silos, with the scalability and economics of the cloud.

What are some of the distinctive features of the Weka Data Platform that differentiate you from your competitors?

We are a cloud-native data platform, designed grounds-up to leverage new and high-performance storage media like NVMe flash as the performance tier and S3/Object as the capacity tier, in a single global namespace. We are software-defined, which then lends itself to multiple deployment models at the edge aggregation, core, and cloud. It also provides the customer a choice of how to deploy on their hardware platform of choice, buy as an appliance or deploy in AWS.

With technology advances in 5G, Edge Computing is expected to be even bigger than cloud computing. Also, edge endpoints are getting intelligent with Edge AI. Storage needs to now cater to Edge ( aggregation), Core to Cloud data pipelines. This needs storage stacks to provide data portability and data mobility. Weka being software-defined is very well placed to leverage these new trends

Where do you see the biggest areas of Augmented Intelligence in Life Science?

Augmented Intelligence is used for Genomics ( NextGen sequencing), Drug discovery, and protein folding, as well as Precision medicine in Healthcare for PACS, EMR ( Electronic Medical Records), and HER ( Electronic Health Record) anomaly analysis.

What are you learning right now?

Currently looking at how data is getting mined leveraging DataOps and AIOps across composable datastores and how customers are leveraging technologies like Low Code Application platforms, Hyperautomation, and Augmented Intelligence for productivity gains and efficiencies.​

Do you have some final thoughts?

DataOps, AIOps, and Xops will be needed to tame data deluge and derive insights and actionable intelligence for Composable businesses.

Bio for Shailesh Manjrekar, Head of AI and Strategic Alliance of Weka

Shailesh Manjrekar, a Forbes Technology Council member, is responsible for https://www.weka.io/ AI strategy and technical alliances, aligning Weka’s product roadmap and validating the software on key platforms in our target markets and use cases, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), genomics, finance, and high-performance computing (HPC). Before joining Weka, Shailesh was head of AI at SwiftStack, where he was responsible for the product, solutions, and corporate development. Prior to SwiftStack, he held roles at Vexata, EMC, NetApp, Brocade, Force10 Networks, and he also held positions at Hewlett Packard and Aarohi Communications. Manjrekar holds an MBA from San Jose State, College of Business, Certification in Mastering Product Management from Haas School of Business, UC Berkley, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mumbai

Bio for, Weka

Weka offers a Limitless data platform that was built to address the storage challenges posed by modern applications that leverage Cloud, GPU compute through innovations in how Flash is used. Built on WekaFS, the Limitless Data platform offers the simplicity of NAS, the performance of SAN or DAS, and the scale of object storage.