(lively peaceful music) >> Live, from New York, it's The Cube. Covering "The Cube New York City 2018." Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, everyone, welcome back to The Cube special conversation here in New York City. We're live for Cube NYC. This is our ninth year covering the big data ecosystem, now evolved into AI, machine learning, cloud. All things data in conjunction with Strata Conference, which is going on right around the corner. This is the Cube studio. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Mick Hollison, who is the CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, of Cloudera. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> So Cloudera, obviously we love Cloudera. Cube started in Cloudera's office, (laughing) everyone in our community knows that. I keep, keep saying it all the time. But we're so proud to have the honor of working with Cloudera over the years. And, uh, the thing that's interesting though is that the new building in Palo Alto is right in front of the old building where the first Palo Alto office was. So, a lot of success. You have a billboard in the airport. Amr Awadallah is saying, hey, it's a milestone. You're in the airport. But your business is changing. You're reaching new audiences. You have, you're public. You guys are growing up fast. All the data is out there. Tom's doing a great job. But, the business side is changing. Data is everywhere, it's a big, hardcore enterprise conversation. Give us the update, what's new with Cloudera. >> Yeah. Thanks very much for having me again. It's, it's a delight. I've been with the company for about two years now, so I'm officially part of the problem now. (chuckling) It's been a, it's been a great journey thus far. And really the first order of business when I arrived at the company was, like, welcome aboard. We're going public. Time to dig into the S-1 and reimagine who Cloudera is going to be five, ten years out from now. And we spent a good deal of time, about three or four months, actually crafting what turned out to be just 38 total words and kind of a vision and mission statement. But the, the most central to those was what we were trying to build. And it was a modern platform for machine learning analytics in the cloud. And, each of those words, when you unpack them a little bit, are very, very important. And this week, at Strata, we're really happy on the modern platform side. We just released Cloudera Enterprise Six. It's the biggest release in the history of the company. There are now over 30 open-source projects embedded into this, something that Amr and Mike could have never imagined back in the day when it was just a couple of projects. So, a very very large and meaningful update to the platform. The next piece is machine learning, and Hilary Mason will be giving the kickoff tomorrow, and she's probably forgotten more about ML and AI than somebody like me will ever know. But she's going to give the audience an update on what we're doing in that space. But, the foundation of having that data management platform, is absolutely fundamental and necessary to do good machine learning. Without good data, without good data management, you can't do good ML or AI. Sounds sort of simple but very true. And then the last thing that we'll be announcing this week, is around the analytics space. So, on the analytic side, we announced Cloudera Data Warehouse and Altus Data Warehouse, which is a PaaS flavor of our new data warehouse offering. And last, but certainly not least, is just the "optimize for the cloud" bit. So, everything that we're doing is optimized not just around a single cloud but around multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, and really trying to bridge that gap for enterprises and what they're doing today. So, it's a new Cloudera to say the very least, but it's all still based on that core foundation and platform that, you got to know it, with very early on. >> And you guys have operating history too, so it's not like it's a pivot for Cloudera. I know for a fact that you guys had very large-scale customers, both with three letter, letters in them, the government, as well as just commercial. So, that's cool. Question I want to ask you is, as the conversation changes from, how many clusters do I have, how am I storing the data, to what problems am I solving because of the enterprises. There's a lot of hard things that enterprises want. They want compliance, all these, you know things that have either legacy. You guys work on those technical products. But, at the end of the day, they want the outcomes, they want to solve some problems. And data is clearly an opportunity and a challenge for large enterprises. What problems are you guys going after, these large enterprises in this modern platform? What are the core problems that you guys knock down? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. And we sort of categorize the way we think about addressing business problems into three broad categories. We use the terms grow, connect, and protect. So, in the "grow" sense, we help companies build or find new revenue streams. And, this is an amazing part of our business. You see it in everything from doing analytics on clickstreams and helping people understand what's happening with their web visitors and the like, all the way through to people standing up entirely new businesses based simply on their data. One large insurance provider that is a customer of ours, as an example, has taken on the challenge and asked us to engage with them on building really, effectively, insurance as a service. So, think of it as data-driven insurance rates that are gauged based on your driving behaviors in real time. So no longer simply just using demographics as the way that you determine, you know, all 18-year old young men are poor drivers. As it turns out, with actual data you can find out there's some excellent 18 year olds. >> Telematic, not demographics! >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly! >> That Tesla don't connect to the >> Exactly! And Parents will love this, love this as well, I think. So they can find out exactly how their kids are really behaving by the way. >> They're going to know I rolled through the stop signs in Palo Alto. (laughing) My rates just went up. >> Exactly, exactly. So, so helping people grow new businesses based on their data. The second piece is "Connect". This is not just simply connecting devices, but that's a big part of it, so the IOT world is a big engine for us there. One of our favorite customer stories is a company called Komatsu. It's a mining manufacturer. Think of it as the ones that make those, just massive mines that are, that are all over the world. They're particularly big in Australia. And, this is equipment that, when you leave it sit somewhere, because it doesn't work, it actually starts to sink into the earth. So, being able to do predictive maintenance on that level and type and expense of equipment is very valuable to a company like Komatsu. We're helping them do that. So that's the "Connect" piece. And last is "Protect". Since data is in fact the new oil, the most valuable resource on earth, you really need to be able to protect it. Whether that's from a cyber security threat or it's just meeting compliance and regulations that are put in place by governments. Certainly GDPR is got a lot of people thinking very differently about their data management strategies. So we're helping a number of companies in that space as well. So that's how we kind of categorize what we're doing. >> So Mick, I wonder if you could address how that's all affected the ecosystem. I mean, one of the misconceptions early on was that Hadoop, Big Data, is going to kill the enterprise data warehouse. NoSQL is going to knock out Oracle. And, Mike has always said, "No, we are incremental". And people are like, "Yeah, right". But that's really, what's happened here. >> Yes. >> EDW was a fundamental component of your big data strategies. As Amr used to say, you know, SQL is the killer app for, for big data. (chuckling) So all those data sources that have been integrated. So you kind of fast forward to today, you talked about IOT and The Edge. You guys have announced, you know, your own data warehouse and platform as a service. So you see this embracing in this hybrid world emerging. How has that affected the evolution of your ecosystem? >> Yeah, it's definitely evolved considerably. So, I think I'd give you a couple of specific areas. So, clearly we've been quite successful in large enterprises, so the big SI type of vendors want a, want a piece of that action these days. And they're, they're much more engaged than they were early days, when they weren't so sure all of this was real. >> I always say, they like to eat at the trough and then the trough is full, so they dive right in. (all laughing) They're definitely very engaged, and they built big data practices and distinctive analytics practices as well. Beyond that, sort of the developer community has also begun to shift. And it's shifted from simply people that could spell, you know, Hive or could spell Kafka and all of the various projects that are involved. And it is elevated, in particular into a data science community. So one of additional communities that we sort of brought on board with what we're doing, not just with the engine and SPARK, but also with tools for data scientists like Cloudera Data Science Workbench, has added that element to the community that really wasn't a part of it, historically. So that's been a nice add on. And then last, but certainly not least, are the cloud providers. And like everybody, they're, those are complicated relationships because on the one hand, they're incredibly valuable partners to it, certainly both Microsoft and Amazon are critical partners for Cloudera, at the same time, they've got competitive offerings. So, like most successful software companies there's a lot of coopetition to contend with that also wasn't there just a few years ago when we didn't have cloud offerings, and they didn't have, you know, data warehouse in the cloud offerings. But, those are things that have sort of impacted the ecosystem. >> So, I've got to ask you a marketing question, since you're the CMO. By the way, great message UL. I like the, the "grow, connect, protect." I think that's really easy to understand. >> Thank you. >> And the other one was modern. The phrase, say the phrase again. >> Yeah. It's the "Cloudera builds the modern platform for machine learning analytics optimized for the cloud." >> Very tight mission statement. Question on the name. Cloudera. >> Mmhmm. >> It's spelled, it's actually cloud with ERA in the letters, so "the cloud era." People use that term all the time. We're living in the cloud era. >> Yes. >> Cloud-native is the hottest market right now in the Linux foundation. The CNCF has over two hundred and forty members and growing. Cloud-native clearly has indicated that the new, modern developers here in the renaissance of software development, in general, enterprises want more developers. (laughs) Not that you want to be against developers, because, clearly, they're going to hire developers. >> Absolutely. >> And you're going to enable that. And then you've got the, obviously, cloud-native on-premise dynamic. Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. So is there plans to think about that cloud era, is it a cloud positioning? You see cloud certainly important in what you guys do, because the cloud creates more compute, more capabilities to move data around. >> Sure. >> And (laughs) process it. And make it, make machine learning go faster, which gives more data, more AI capabilities, >> It's the flywheel you and I were discussing. >> It's the flywheel of, what's the innovation sandwich, Dave? You know? (laughs) >> A little bit of data, a little bit of machine itelligence, in the cloud. >> So, the innovation's in play. >> Yeah, Absolutely. >> Positioning around Cloud. How are you looking at that? >> Yeah. So, it's a fascinating story. You were with us in the earliest days, so you know that the original architecture of everything that we built was intended to be run in the public cloud. It turns out, in 2008, there were exactly zero customers that wanted all of their data in a public cloud environment. So the company actually pivoted and re-architected the original design of the offerings to work on-prim. And, no sooner did we do that, then it was time to re-architect it yet again. And we are right in the midst of doing that. So, we really have offerings that span the whole gamut. If you want to just pick up you whole current Cloudera environment in an infrastructure as a service model, we offer something called Altus Director that allows you to do that. Just pick up the entire environment, step it up onto AWUS, or Microsoft Azure, and off you go. If you want the convenience and the elasticity and the ease of use of a true platform as a service, just this past week we announced Altus Data Warehouse, which is a platform as a service kind of a model. For data warehousing, we have the data engineering module for Altus as well. Last, but not least, is everybody's not going to sign up for just one cloud vendor. So we're big believers in multi-cloud. And that's why we support the major cloud vendors that are out there. And, in addition to that, it's going to be a hybrid world for as far out as we can see it. People are going to have certain workloads that, either for economics or for security reasons, they're going to continue to want to run in-house. And they're going to have other workloads, certainly more transient workloads, and I think ML and data science will fall into this camp, that the public cloud's going to make a great deal of sense. And, allowing companies to bridge that gap while maintaining one security compliance and management model, something we call a Shared Data Experience, is really our core differentiator as a business. That's at the very core of what we do. >> Classic cloud workload experience that you're bringing, whether it's on-prim or whatever cloud. >> That's right. >> Cloud is an operating environment for you guys. You look at it just as >> The delivery mechanism. In effect. Awesome. All right, future for Cloudera. What can you share with us. I know you're a public company. Can't say any forward-looking statements. Got to do all those disclaimers. But for customers, what's the, what's the North Star for Cloudera? You mentioned going after a much more hardcore enterprise. >> Yes. >> That's clear. What's the North Star for you guys when you talk to customers? What's the big pitch? >> Yeah. I think there's a, there's a couple of really interesting things that we learned about our business over the course of the past six, nine months or so here. One, was that the greatest need for our offerings is in very, very large and complex enterprises. They have the most data, not surprisingly. And they have the most business gain to be had from leveraging that data. So we narrowed our focus. We have now identified approximately five thousand global customers, so think of it as kind of Fortune or Forbes 5000. That is our sole focus. So, we are entirely focused on that end of the market. Within that market, there are certain industries that we play particularly well in. We're incredibly well-positioned in financial services. Very well-positioned in healthcare and telecommunications. Any regulated industry, that really cares about how they govern and maintain their data, is really the great target audience for us. And so, that continues to be the focus for the business. And we're really excited about that narrowing of focus and what opportunities that's going to build for us. To not just land new customers, but more to expand our existing ones into a broader and broader set of use cases. >> And data is coming down faster. There's more data growth than ever seen before. It's never stopping.. It's only going to get worse. >> We love it. >> Bring it on. >> Any way you look at it, it's getting worse or better. Mick, thanks for spending the time. I know you're super busy with the event going on. Congratulations on the success, and the focus, and the positioning. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Absolutely. Thank you gentlemen. It was a pleasure. >> We are Cube NYC. This is our ninth year doing all action. Everything that's going on in the data world now is horizontally scaling across all aspects of the company, the society, as we know. It's super important, and this is what we're talking about here in New York. This is The Cube, and John Furrier. Dave Vellante. Be back with more after this short break. Stay with us for more coverage from New York City. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018 presented by siliconANGLE. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is siliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. It's the 12th year of the event, the fifth year we've actually had theCUBE here. Dave Vellante, my boss, was here the first year. Every other year, I've been kind of manning it solo. Great community here, I talked to a lot of users and really looking at, you know, some of the transitions that are happening in the industry. This event is all about virtualization and Cloud, and to help me put an exclamation point on everything we've been looking at here, and what's happening in the industry, happen to welcome back to the program Rob Strechay who is the SVP of product at Zerto, someone I've known for longer than I even realize, and you know, been on the program many times, But first time since you've been at Zerto. >> Yeah, first time since I was at Hewlett-Packer Enterprise. So, I'm glad to join you guys here, and great event, glad to be able to get down here today. >> You know, Zerto, company we've known for many years. I happen to know one of the earliest investors in the company, and you know, when I look at two of the biggest industry shows, when you talk about Virtualization and Cloud, it's VMworld and it's Amazon's Reinvent show. >> Right. And, I remember like the first or second year we did Amazon Reinvent, the Zerto booth was like right behind us, and so your company that really spans that gammon, helping customers with that, so I want to get your viewpoint, you talked about why people come here, but what are you hearing from the users? What are some of the big challenges they're facing, and how are they looking to manage some of those transitions? >> Yeah, I think it's really critical to have events like this that are, you know, a lot of different vendors that are here because I think when we see a number of companies going out and looking, and I was with a customer down in New York City yesterday, the software for FinTac. And what they were looking at is, how do we leverage multi-cloud? It becomes very important. They're looking at, it's not going to just be Amazon, it's not just going to be Azure, it's not going to be VMC on AWUS, they're looking at how they're going to have a multi-cloud strategy. And I think that when, what we're hearing from customers is there's a lot of confusion in the market, and I think that's why this program and others are really great at cutting through what is real, what's not real, how do you look for the ability to have that data mobility between clouds but with security. Especially today's like Privacy Day, you know, on the 25th, so, you know, you start to look at it and go, hey, security's a big thing, and a big theme from what people were saying here today too. >> Yeah, and one of the user interviews I really loved today talked about one of the biggest challenges he saw, he said, gosh, security, think about the Intel discussion there, what's that going to mean? And he actually said, performance issue actually doesn't fit, isn't a big deal for him from an architectural standpoint. Security? Oh my gosh, he's in healthcare. (laughs) If he's in violation, or if patient information gets out there, you know, this is the kind of things that put companies out of business. >> Absolutely, yeah, and I think that's what we're hearing. I mean, especially yesterday, it was okay, how do you layer encryption on top of your solution? How do you utilize the different types of secure transfers? How do you make sure the data is secure? There's a lot about that resiliency of the data, and making sure you can get it back, and it's immutable for that matter. >> Yeah, one of the things when we talk to customers, it's funny, in the industry we're always arguing as to what's the right terminology? It's like, I still get to have a company that said they had a convergence problem that they were trying to fix, and also it's like, hyper-cloud, multi-cloud, no, they have a Cloud strategy. And yes, they're using sass, yes, they're using public Cloud, and yes, almost everybody's got something in their data center. How do we get our arms around it? How do I have the services that work with me wherever I am, whether that's data protection, security, replications. So where's Zetro fit in that discussion, and how are customers doing at getting their arms around these challenges? >> So I think a lot of when I'm out talking to the CIO's and the VP's of infrastructure and having those conversations, a lot of what we help them understand is here's where you need to go, and here's the choices you need to make. Are you going to use Azure? Do you have an EA with Microsoft? Because you've probably been paying for Azure credits that you're not using, so start there. It's simple, it cost you nothing extra. Get your feet wet, dip your feet in there. We see a lot of customers of ours that use DR's as a service as the first stepping stone to getting into the Cloud. It's a nice, easy way in, they can get their feet wet, they can test out the performance, the security, they can do user acceptance testing without actually having to go there. They can also get a realistic view of the cost. I think that was talked about earlier today too. With some of the Amazon stuff is that really, you have to understand the cost. It's not the same as owning it on Prime. But then again you're not having the on Prime anymore, so if you can get away with that, when we see people taking strategies, a lot of it is data center consolidation, but maybe now I'm down from six data centers to two. And I still need to have that third copy. Where do I put that third copy? Do I put it at another data center? Do I go to a manage service provider, cloud service provider, or do I go to the public cloud? So, what we try to do is offer them a platform, the Zerto platform, that can actually take them to all those different places. We can take them there and bring them back. Yes, people use use for DR, but really that data mobility and the data flexibility really helps them stay away from the vendor lock-in as well. >> What are you hearing from customers when they talk about vendor lock in? There's very few companies out there that do a good job at being, it's like, oh, the VM ware, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, we can actually help you across the board there. >> Rob: Yeah. >> How much is lock-in a concern, and how do you as a software company stay agnostic and still fit into all of those environments? >> Yeah, the staying agnostic is really tough because some people are nicer than others, you know, to work with, and you know you try to not pick your favorites, but a the same time, we let our customers drive us to where they are going. I think that when we started to look at the bigger picture, people start out, you know, Amazon's the 800 pound gorilla in the space, everyone tries Amazon first. Maybe they didn't like or have the experience they thought they would, it was a lot more work than they thought it was going to be, so they start to look at other options. So when we started out, in 2014 we've been shipping our to Amazon, DR to Amazon part of our platform. Now, over the last year, we've added in the go-to and go-back from Azure, and we'll soon release the next iteration of that next month that will take even further among and across those different platforms. And I think to your point, it's a how can we give our customers choice? If you want to use a manage service provider, such as an IBM where they're based on Cloud foundation from VMWare, you can use that. If you want to then go from there to Amazon, our product will actually enable you to do that. And I think that's what we can do is look at our customers, and they've, luckily enough, driven us to this heterogeneous cloud environment. >> I want to get your comment on something. When people talk about compute moving to a more utility model, but it's not the way utility was where if I'm getting energy, as a consumer, from one place or another, I don't care whether it's wind, solar, or coal, nuclear, because I'm just getting it. When I look at Cloud computing, even infrastructure's a service. There's things that need to happen. When I talk to most software companies, it's yes, I'm going to support across the board, but there's special integration. There's things that I can do to make Amazon better, Azure better, Google better, and it's all a little bit different, and even with things like cooper netties, it's not homonogizing IT. The big problem we see out there is IT is a heterogeneous mess. There's never killing anything, it's all add this and add this, and now we've got a bad episode of Hoarders. >> Yes. (laughing) >> Is what we got, so I'm curious from a customer standpoint and from a product standpoint, maybe you know you could talk a little bit about that. >> I think our customers have been very clear to us that's simplicity, and I think that's what you're getting at is that simplicity is job one for us. If we're not being simple about what we do, and we're not really trying to make it all that one platform, we're not doing our job. We're doing a disservice our customers. So our Azure product looks identical to our AWS looks identical to our IBM looks identical to one of my other cloud service provider's products. Looks the same as your on Prime VMWare to VMWare or VMWare to HyperV for that matter. I think that part of it is that we've taken an approach that, exactly that. We got to be heterogeneous, but we've got to make it all look the same and be the same user experience. So, I think what we as an industry can do better is really focusing on user experience and single platform to help across these because like you said, we have a customer, he uses both AWS and Azure. And he was on of our first customers on AWS and one of our first customers using our Azure product. He said that certain Linux systems actually run better on Azure than they did on Amazon, and that surprised him. But he was able to go up and test them out, put them up there, felt them over, and do them in a test bubble, and see how well they ran, and I think to your exact point it's that was a surprise to him, and I think it's that your mileage will vary with the different clouds, and being able to go there and test on them is very important 'cause you're going to find that, like he did, he's a smaller company, it's a refabrics manufacturer, TenCate, they really focused on having that multicloud strategy because for them, they didn't want to have all their eggs in one basket either, but they found that certain applications ran better on Azure, certain ran better on AWS, so they're going to have that multicloud strategy. >> Alright, Rob, help bring us home. What brings Zerto to an event like this, kind of user groups in general, to VTUG specifically? >> Yeah, so the VTUG, we've been a long term supporter of this, I think since pretty much the founding of the founding of the company, so one of the reasons is a lot of out customers come to... So, we want to support them getting more knowledge out there, obviously we get to reach more customers and more potential customers, but at the same time, it's about the community and building that community. We look for more, in fact, we're starting to do even local user groups of our own. We've seen that the user groups have fallen off, and in particular around disaster recovery, in the IT resiliency, there's really no place to go. You had ISACA, you had different organizations for certifications, but really, that community where I can go and understand what are my peers doing, and get that group learning is so important, and that's why we've been a long term supporter of this. >> Alright, well Rob Strechay, really appreciate you helping me wrap up, put an exclamation point on what's going on here at the show as well as in the industry are all the major changes happening, virtualization and Cloud. Make sure to check out TheCUBE.net for all of our coverage. We have a huge line up of 2018 events. Feel free to reach out to the team. As always, I'm really to get on Twitter, I'm just @stu, @-S-T-U, and thank you so much of watching, I'm Stu Miniman, and you've been watching theCUBE. (techno music)