>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Actifio Data Driven 2020, brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back. I'm Stuart Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Actifio Data Driven 2020. We wish everybody could join us in Boston, but instead we're doing it online this year, of course, and really excited. We're going to be digging into the value of data, how DataOps, data scientists are leveraging data. And joining me on the program, Scott Buckles, he's the North American Business Executive for database data science and DataOps with IBM, Scott, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Stuart, thanks for having me, great to see you. >> Start with the Actifio-IBM partnership. Anyone that knows that Actifio knows that the IBM partnership is really the oldest one that they've had, either it's hardware through software, those joint solutions go together. So tell us about the partnership here in 2020. >> Sure. So it's been a fabulous partnership. In the DataOps world where we are looking to help, all of our customers gain efficiency and effectiveness in their data pipeline and getting value out of their data, Actifio really compliments a lot of the solutions that we have very well. So the folks from everybody from the up top, all the way through the engineering team, is a great team to work with. We're very, very fortunate to have them. How many or any specific examples or anonymized examples that you can share about joint (indistinct). >> I'm going to stay safe and go on the anonymized side. But we've had a lot of great wins, several significantly large wins, where we've had clients that have been struggling with their different data pipelines. And I say data pipeline, I mean getting value from understanding their data, to developing models and and doing the testing on that, and we can get into this in a minute, but those folks have really needed a solution where Actifio has stepped in and provided that solution. To do that at several of the largest banks in the world, including one that was a very recent merger down in the Southeast, where we were able to bring in the Actifio solution and address our, the customer's needs around how they were testing and how they were trying to really move through that testing cycle, because it was a very iterative process, a very sequential process, and they just weren't doing it fast enough, and Actifio stepped in and helped us deliver that in a much more effective way, in a much more efficient way, especially when you into a bank or two banks rather that are merging and have a lot of work to convert systems into one another and converge data, not an easy task. And that was one of the best wins that we've had in the recent months. And again, going back to the partnership, it was an awesome, awesome opportunity to work with them. >> Well, Scott, as I teed up for the beginning of the conversation, you've got data science and DataOps, help us understand how this isn't just a storage solution, when you're talking about BDP. How does DevOps fit into this? Talk a little bit about some of the constituents inside your customers that are engaging with the solution. >> Yeah. So we call it DataOps, and DataOps is both a methodology, which is really trying to combine the best of the way that we've transformed how we develop applications with DevOps and Agile Development. So going back 20 years ago, everything was a waterfall approach, everything was very slow , and then you had to wait a long time to figure out whether you had success or failure in the application that you had developed and whether it was the right application. And with the advent of DevOps and continuous delivery, the advent of things like Agile Development methodologies, DataOps is really converging that and applying that to our data pipelines. So when we look at the opportunity ahead of us, with the world exploding with data, we see it all the time. And it's not just structured data anymore, it's unstructured data, it's how do we take advantage of all the data that we have so that we can make that impact to our business. But oftentimes we are seeing where it's still a very slow process. Data scientists are struggling or business analysts are struggling to get the data in the right form so that they can create a model, and then they're having to go through a long process of trying to figure out whether that model that they've created in Python or R is an effective model. So DataOps is all about driving more efficiency, more speed to that process, and doing it in a much more effective manner. And we've had a lot of good success, and so it's part methodology, which is really cool, and applying that to certain use cases within the, in the data science world, and then it's also a part of how do we build our solutions within IBM, so that we are aligning with that methodology and taking advantage of it. So that we have the AI machine learning capabilities built in to increase that speed which is required by our customers. Because data science is great, AI is great, but you still have to have good data underneath and you have to do it at speed. Well, yeah, Scott, definitely a theme that I heard loud and clear read. IBM think this year, we do a lot of interviews with theCUBE there, it was helping with the tools, helping with the processes, and as you said, helping customers move fast. A big piece of IBM strategy there are the Cloud Paks. My understanding you've got an update with regards to BDP and Cloud Pak. So to tell us what the new releases here for the show. >> Yeah. So in our (indistinct) release that's coming up, we will be to launch BDP directly from Cloud Pak, so that you can take advantage of the Activio capabilities, which we call virtual data pipeline, straight from within Cloud Pak. So it's a native integration, and that's the first of many things to come with how we are tying those two capabilities and those two solutions more closely together. So we're excited about it and we're looking forward to getting it in our customer's hands. >> All right. And that's the Cloud Pak for Data, if I have that correct, right? >> That's called Cloud Pak for data, correct, sorry, yes. Absolutely, I should have been more clear. >> No, it's all right. It's, it's definitely, we've been watching that, those different solutions that IBM is building out with the Cloud Paks, and of course data, as we said, it's so important. Bring us inside a little bit, if you could, the customers. What are the use cases, those problems that you're helping your customers solve with these solution? >> Sure. So there's three primary use cases. One is about accelerating the development process. Getting into how do you take data from its raw form, which may or may not be usable, in a lot of cases it's not, and getting it to a business ready state, so that your data scientists, your business, your data models can take advantage of it, about speed. The second is about reducing storage costs. As data has exponentially grown so has storage costs. We've been in the test data management world for a number of years now. And our ability to help customers reduce that storage footprint is also tied to actually the acceleration piece, but helping them reduce that cost is a big part of it. And then the third part is about mitigating risk. With the amount of data security challenges that we've seen, customers are continuously looking for ways to mitigate their exposure to somebody manipulating data, accessing production data and manipulating production data, especially sensitive data. And by virtualizing that data, we really almost fully mitigate that risk of them being able to do that. Somebody either unintentionally or intentionally altering that data and exposing a client. >> Scott, I know IBM is speaking at the Data Driven event. I read through some of the pieces that they're talking about. It looks like really what you talk about accelerating customer outcomes, helping them be more productive, if you could, what, what are some of key measurements, KPIs that your customers have when they successfully deploy the solution? >> So when it comes to speed, it's really about, we're looking at about how are we reducing the time of that project, right? Are we able to have a material impact on the amount of time that we see clients get through a testing cycle, right? Are we taking them from months to days, are we taking them from weeks to hours? Having that type of material impact. The other piece on storage costs is certainly looking at what is the future growth? You're not necessarily going to reduce storage costs, but are you reducing the growth or the speed at which your storage costs are growing. And then the third piece is really looking at how are we minimizing the vulnerabilities that we have. And when you go through an audit, internally or externally around your data, understanding that the number of exposures and helping find a material impact there, those vulnerabilities are reduced. >> Scott, last question I have for you. You talk about making data scientists more efficient and the like, what are you seeing organizationally, have teams come together or are they planning together, who has the enablement to be able to leverage some of the more modern technologies out there? >> Well, that's a great question. And it varies. I think the organizations that we see that have the most impact are the ones that are most open to bringing their data science as close to the business as possible. The ones that are integrating their data organizations, either the CDO organization or wherever that may set it. Even if you don't have a CDO, that data organization and who owned those data scientists, and folding them and integrating them into the business so that they're an integral part of it, rather than a standalone organization. I think the ones that sort of weave them into the fabric of the business are the ones that get the most benefit and we've seen have the most success thus far. >> Well, Scott, absolutely. We know how important data is and getting full value out of those data scientists, critical initiative for customers. Thanks so much for joining us. Great to get the updates. >> Oh, thank you for having me. Greatly appreciated. >> Stay tuned for more coverage from Activio Data Driven 2020. I'm Stuart Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Actifio data driven 2020 brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. This is the cubes coverage of Actifio data driven, happy to welcome to the program, the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer David Chang with Actifio. Thanks so much for joining us. Great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Great to be here, Stu, thank you. >> All right, so the big theme of the event is the next normal, of course, we've been talking about transformation of data for many years, but the global pandemic has put a real emphasis on some of the transformations that customers are going through and alluding to that next normal because definitely things have changed a bit. What, give us if you could kind of a high level, you know what you've been seeing, you've been there since the start for Actifio. So, you know, what is that next normal for customers? >> Yeah, absolutely, so I would say over the span of the last two years, we've seen definitely a accelerated ramp into the Clouds. But I think this whole pandemic has really accelerated. I mean, this really telltale sign came in, we actually, prior to the pandemic hit, we closed a large European customer. And within a span of two weeks, they were saying, you know, "I can't get access to my data center for all the important work that I have to do." And with Actifio like to move everything into the Cloud. So within the span of three weeks, we were able to move a lot of their critical workloads with them. So I think that gave us the telltale sign that this thing is really truly accelerating. >> Yeah, it absolutely there's that acceleration. It's tough to move data, though. It's not like we can just say, "Okay, hey, you know, we've got petabytes, you know, that the laws of physics still are in place." And also with that move to Cloud, you know, backup and recovery, you know, disaster recovery, you know, still critically important so and any learnings that you've had this year or things where you've had to, you know, help out customers, as they say, "We need to move fast, but we also need to stay secure. And we need to make sure that our data is safe." >> Absolutely, so I think there's a major difference between the lift and shift model in terms of your way at your application infrastructure, and then the actual foundation, building block you're using those pieces are very difficult to lift and shift, because Cloud fundamentally present different set of building blocks. A great example here is that object storage, you know, it's the most scalable and lowest cost storage available in the public sort of Cloud hyperscaler infrastructure. And without that, trying to move to the Cloud would be very difficult indeed, trying to make the infrastructure match. >> So let's dig in and talk a little bit about how Cloud really transforms storage, you know, back in the storage industry, we've talked for a long time that you know, object was the future and that's, what Cloud was built on. So you've got large scalability, you've got some great cost efficiencies. You know, what does that mean for the Actifio solutions and your customer? >> Yeah, I think from the very beginning, I would say recall this conversation three or four years ago, when we were looking at what are some of the next generation architecture we want to build the Actifio technology on? It was very clearly that object storage needs to be front and center in everything we do. It's not a it's a maybe a little known fact. But Amazon AWS service initially started with the S3 architecture and that was the very first service they brought live within the AWS sort of product portfolio. So it is as fundamental to the Cloud as you know, EC2 more so than containers and so on and so forth. And the fact that you have this almost linear scalability horizontally to exabytes of storage and the fact that you can essentially leverage all the performance you need to get out the object storage that's all built into the environment. Those are some of the critical pieces and obviously, the low cost, you know, compared with SSD or spinning drives on the on the EC2 environment, those are all some of the critical elements on why object storage is so critical in this whole Cloud migration, if you will. >> Yeah, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the application sort of things because of course, the architecture matters, but it's really the the outcomes, it's the reason we have infrastructures for the applications and of course one of the most mission critical applications. We've talked about data, it's those databases. We've seen a lot of transformation in the database world. Most customers I talked to now, it's not their one central source of truth. They now have many databases, especially in the Cloud we've seen that kind of Cambrian explosion of options out there. What does that meant for your customers? You know, take us inside, you know, that most important database world. >> Yeah, I think any customer with their interest to go into the Cloud or minimize the on premise environment anyway, the very first thing they think about is what are I most critical application I need to move right? Database are typically it. You know, there are companies that has a lot of, I would say, projects around migrating some of the traditional databases into NoSQL, or even hosted services like RDS. But I would say the vast majority of the database population that's in fact, that's essentially in production today are some of the traditional databases. So that tend to be also tend to be the most difficult problem in terms of trying to migrate the workload to the Cloud or DR or business continuity into the Cloud. >> So David, how about you know what is new from Actifio now? What should customers be looking at when we talk about the storage capabilities? >> So I would say the first thing is that Actifio allow our customers to kind of maintain the legacy databases they use. And by using Actifio, we normalize the entire Cloud infrastructures. So you can get all the same RPOs and RTOs that you're used to on premise into the Cloud. And through the adoption or of object storage down deep into their foundation blocks of our architecture, now, you can have sort of the best of both world. You can have this on demand capability or using from the public Clouds. You are, you know, getting capability as you need them. But also you can leverage sort of object storage without changing your application architecture, to get that performance and get to the sort of the cost point that you need to make that entire business viable. I think relatively recently, we did ESG sort of project that really validated that you can get 95 to 97% of the performance of SSD, but rather on object storage. And from a cost saving perspective, that cost say that cost actually went down by 88%. So it is indeed the best of both worlds, if you will. >> Yeah, you know, maybe explain that more a little bit more, if you could, yeah. Because, right, you want that scalability, you want high performance, but, you know, there's always been those architectural trade offs. So what is it that Actifio does, you're talking about the object storage that pairing with the Cloud capabilities? Help us understand, you know, what is differentiated about that solution? >> Yeah, absolutely, so I think in some ways, object storage has been getting a bad rap in terms of people's perception of slow performance and so on, so forth. But I think the real reason is because other vendors aren't using it incorrectly if you will. A lot of things we've seen in the past has, like legacy backup vendors taking sort of a looking at object storage as they tape replacement. With all object storage system, there is a fundamental limit on a per object performance you can get out the entire object infrastructure. But really the secret sauce Actifio came up with is to design an infrastructure that natively translate block or file storage that for example, Oracle SQL consumes, and then taking that data, sort of, if you will, from the application perspective, and divided into hundreds of thousands if not millions of objects and that can be spread across the entire object storage infrastructure. And this is how we get you get the performance if you will. That's very very similar if not almost identical to SSD even on object storage. >> Yeah, I saw a blog post on the Actifio site making a comparison to the SnowFlake database, of course, you know, super hot company lots of adoption in their Cloud service, help us understand a little bit, you know that that comparison that your team is making? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think it's a very interesting insight. I think both Actifio and SnowFlake probably independently arrived at the same conclusion about four or five years ago, that object storage is the foundation building block. And this is how you scale massive infrastructure at a cost that's effective for our business models, right? So I think, in many ways, if you look at how SnowFlakes works is they leverage this almost infinite scalability of object storage to consume sort of this data lake to store this data lake, and therefore they can effectively offer that basic service to your customer at a very low cost point. And then when they actually decide, the customer decide to use that information, this is where the business model works and they actually did start charging the customer. So that foundation building block of object storage on, you know, in terms of the fundamental building block for the SnowFlake service, I would argue is also the reasons why they're so popular today. >> Yeah, and David, you know, we've seen, you know, quite a change in the landscape since the early days of Actifio, it's interesting to hear you talk about those analogies with some of those, you know, Cloud native solutions. Give us a little bit of inside, you're the Chief Product officer. You know, what's the biggest change you'd say of Actifio today versus, you know, maybe how, when people first heard of their copy data management, you know, technology? >> Yeah, I would say I think we were kind of fortunate that when we started the company, the fundamental premise of being very efficient, very scalable, and instant reuse is a sort of fundamental premise of our product and architecture that has held true through technology evolution, you know, three or four different waves in the last, I would say 10 years. So I think what's currently the biggest difference between I would say, now versus Actifio five years ago, is that everything with everything we do, we're thinking Cloud first. This is how, you know, essentially, the Actifio platform has evolved into this normalization platform for enterprise customer to achieve the same RPOs and RTO the same applications and be able to using the some of the same building blocks across both their you know, hybrid infrastructure and also public Cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, absolutely, that hybrid discussion has really dominated a lot of discussion the last couple of years. A challenge for, you know, the engineering teams is architecting into those environments. It's not just once you've got Amazon, you've got Azure, you've got Google, you've got others out there. What do you say? It doesn't feel like we have a standardization. And there's specific work that you need to do. But your ultimate customer, they want to be able to do it the same way no matter where they are. Give us a little bit of what you know, what you're seeing is some of the challenges and how Actifio is facing that. >> Yeah, I think there are fundamentally two ways to go to the Cloud. I think one is to entirely consume a log or higher log of functionality that Amazon Google and Azure has, right? That mean that does mean rewriting your application from scratch to take advantage of that. I think some of the benefit there is you have some very low entry cost and you don't have to worry about operationally how to keep that going. But I think more commonly, what we're seeing customer enterprise customer do is to taking their existing stack, rewriting portions of this and kind of build it on EC2 you know, and a container environment. And those are sort of I think, more of the more popular choices that people are making in terms of making the move to the Cloud at least from my enterprise customer perspective. And that is an area that Actifio could really help, by again, normalizing what they're familiar with on premise to the Cloud and we can provide the same service level and provide really this level of flexibility for you to shift workloads back and forth to make that work for your business case. >> Yeah, I'm curious, I remember back you talked about Actifio five years ago, and some of the early days it was like, "Well, you know, the traditional storage companies might not like Actifio because at the end of the day, they're going to sell less capacity. And that's really how they price things." Feels like the Cloud providers, think about it very different, you don't really think as much about, you know, "I don't buy capacity, I have scalability, I build out my applications in a certain way." Do you see that Cloud model taking over any other comparisons you'd make kind of the Cloud world versus the data center world? >> Yeah, I think it really I think that really the switches is very, very telling, right? It's very, I would say in some ways surprised a lot of people at the pace and and that it has happened. But I think it is, that pace is pretty solid at this point. I mean, we are seeing broad adoption of sort of that strategy all over the world, and it's only accelerating. >> All right, final question I have let's bring it on home that next normal, what do you want customers to have as their takeaway from this year's data driven event? >> I think they are, I think the probably the most important thing we want to communicate to our customer and potential prospect is that you can have the best of both world, right? It's not a one or two or other decision you have to make, you could be in the Cloud and enjoy a lot of the same benefits and saw a lot of the same service level that you're used to, but taken advantage of that, you know, there is a separate, very large company running world class operations for you in the Cloud. The elasticity of that capability is very important as well. But with Actifio without having to rewrite your application per se, you can have advantage if you will to of the new world, still maintaining the presence of the old and you can manage both environment in the same way. >> David Chang, thank you so much for the updates. Great to catch up with you and thanks for having us at the event. >> Thank you, Stu for having me. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Actifio Data Driven 2020. Brought to you by Actifio. >> We're back, This is theCUBE's coverage, our ongoing coverage of Actifio's Data Driven, of course we've gone virtual this year. Ash Ashutosh is here, he's the founder, president, and CEO of Actifio. Ash, great to see you again. >> Likewise, Dave, always, always good to see you. >> We were at a little meetup, you and I, in Boston, I always enjoy our conversations. Little did we know that a few months later, we'd only be talking at this type of distance, and of course, it's sad, I mean, Data Driven is one of our favorite events, it's intimate, it's customer content-driven. The theme this year is, you call it the next normal. Some people call it the new abnormal. The next normal, what's that all about? >> I think it's pretty fascinating to see, when we walked in in March, all of us were shocked by the effect of this pandemic. And for a while, we all scrambled around, trying to figure out, how do you react to this one? And everybody reacted very differently, but most people had this tendency to think that this is going to be a pretty brutal environment with lots of unknown variables, and it is important for us to try to figure out how to get our hands around this. By the time we came around about six weeks into that, almost all of us have figured out, this is not something you fight against, this is not something you wait for it to go away, but this is one that you figure out how to live it, and you figure out how to work around it. And that, we believe, is the next normal. It's not about trying to create a new abnormal, it's not about creating a new normal, but it's truly one that basically says "There is a path forward, there's a way to create this next normal," and you just figure out how to live with the environment we have, and phenomenal outcomes of companies that have done remarkably well, as a result of these actions, Actifio being one of them. >> It's quite amazing, isn't it, I mean, I've talked to a lot of tech companies, CEOs, and their customers, and it's almost like, the first reaction was of course they cared about their employees and their broader families. Number one, number two was, many companies, as you know, saw a tailwind, and initially didn't want to be seen as ambulance chasing, and then of course the entrepreneurial spirit kicked in, and they said, "Okay, hey, "we can only control what we can control." And tech companies in particular have just done exceedingly well. I mean, I don't think anybody really predicted that early on. >> Yeah. I think at the heart we are all human beings and the first reaction was to take care of, four constituencies, right? One, take care of your family, take care of your community, take care of your employees, take care of your customers. And that was the hardest part. The first four to six weeks was to figure out how do you do each of those four. Once you figured that part out, or you figured out ways to get around to making sure you can take care of those, you really found the next normal. You really started figuring out how to continue to innovate, continue to support each of those four constituencies, and people have done different things. I know it's amazing how CUBE continues to operate. As far as a user is concerned, they're all watching remote. Yes, we don't have the wonderful desk and we all get to chat and look in the eye. But the content, the message is as powerful as what it was a few months ago. So I'm sure this is how we're all going to figure out how to make through. There's a new next normal. >> Yeah, and digital transformation kind of went from push to pull, I mean every conference you'd go to, they'd say, "Well, look at Uber, look at Airbnb," and they put up the examples. "You have to do this too." And then all of a sudden the industry dragged you along. So I'm curious as to how, and I guess the other point there is digital means data. We've said that many, many times, if you didn't have a digital strategy during the height of the lockdown, you couldn't transact business and still many restaurants are still trying to figure this out, but so how did it affect you and your customers? >> Yeah, it's really interesting. And we spend a lot of time with several of our customers who are managing some of the largest IT organizations. And we talk about a very interesting phenomenon that happened somewhere beginning of this year, about 20 years ago, we used to worry about this thing called the digital divide. Those who have access to the network and internet, and those who don't. And now there is this data divide, the divide between organizations that know how to leverage, exploit, and absolutely accelerate the business using data, and those who don't. And I think we're seeing this effect show very clearly among organizations that are able to come back and address some of this stuff. And it's fascinating. Yes, we all have the examples of the likes of people who are doing delivery. People who are doing E-tailing, but there are so many little things, you're seeing organizations, and just the other day, we had a video from Sentry Data Systems, which is helping accelerate COVID-19 research because you're able to get copies of the data faster, they're able to get access to data, to their researchers much, much faster, sometimes from several days to a few minutes. It's that level of effect, it's not just down to some subtle, you know, you almost think of it as nice to have, but it's must have life threatening stuff, essential stuff, or just addressing today, I was reading a wonderful article about this supercomputer and that's doing analysis of COVID-19, and how it's figured out most of these symptoms, then able to figure it out by just crunching a ton of data. And almost every one of those symptoms the supercomputer has predicted, has been accurate. It's about data, right? It is absolutely about data, and which is why I think this is a phenomenal time for companies to absolutely go change, make this transformation about data acceleration, data leverage, data exploitation. And there's a ton of it all around us. >> Yeah, and part of that digital transformation, the mandate is to really put data at the core. I mean, we've certainly seen this with the top market cap companies. They've got data at the core, and now, as I say, it's become a mandate. And you know, there's been several things that we've clearly noticed. I mean, you saw the work from home required laptops and, you know, end point security and things of that, VDI made a comeback, and certainly cloud was there, but I've been struck by the reality of multi-cloud. I was kind of a multi-cloud skeptic early on. I said many times, I thought it was more of a symptom than it was a strategy, but that's completely flipped. Recently in our ETR surveys, we saw multicloud popping up all over the place. I wonder what you're seeing when you talk to your customers and other CIOs. >> Yeah. So fascinating. No, we released our first cloud product sometime around 2018, end of 2018. >> Dave: GO, right? >> Yeah, Actifio GO, OnVault, which is a phenomenal way to completely change the way you think about using object storage in the cloud. For over two years, we saw about 20% of our business, by the beginning of this year, 20% of our business was built on leveraging the cloud. Since March, so that was the end of our, almost the end of the Q1, to now, we're just in the middle of Q3. In six months, we added 12 more percent of the business. Literally we did it in six months, what we did not do before for 18 months before that, significantly more than what we did for a year and a half before that. And there are really three reasons, and you see this over and over again, we have a large customer we closed in January. Ironically we were deploying out of UK, a very large marketing organization, got everything deployed. They were running their backup and DR in a separate data center. And they had a practical problem of not being able to access the second site, literally in the middle of deployment, we steer that customer to GCP, or Google Cloud, because there was simply no way for them to continue protecting the data, being able to develop new applications with that data, they simply had no access. So there was, this was the number one reason, the inability for an organization to physically access or put their employees at risk, and have portal for the cloud be the infrastructure. That's number one. So that first of all drove the reason for the cloud. And then there's a second reason. There are practical reasons on why some cloud platforms are good at one workload. The other ones are not so good at some of the workloads. And so if I'm an organization that has, that spans everything, I've got a power PC, an X86 machine, a VM, I've got container platforms, I got Oracle, I got SAP. There is no single cloud platform that supports all my workload as efficiently, it's available in all the regions I want. So inevitably I have to go adopt different cloud platforms. So that's the second practical reason. And then there's a strategic reason. No vendor, no customer, wants to be locked into any one cloud platform. At least two, you're going to go pay, more likely three. So those are the reasons. And then interestingly enough, we were on a panel with us global CIOs. And in addition to just the usual cloud providers that we all know and love inside the US, across the world, in Europe, in Asia, there's a rise of regional cloud providers. So you take all these factors, right? You've got absolute physical necessity. You got practical constraints of what can the cloud provider support, the strategic reasons of why, either because, I don't want to be locked into a cloud provider, or because there's a rise of, you know, data nationalism that's going on, that people want to keep their data within the country bounds. All of these reasons are the foundations of why multicloud is almost becoming a de facto. It's impossible for a decent size organization to assume they would just depend on one cloud anymore. >> The other big trend we're seeing, I wonder if you could comment, is this notion of the data life cycle, of the data pipeline. It's a very complex situation for a lot of organizations. Their data is siloed. We hear that a lot. They have data scientists, data engineers, developers, data quality engineers, just a lot of different constituencies and lines of business, and it's kind of a mess. And so what they're trying to do is bring that together. So they've done that, data scientists complain, they spend all their time wrangling data, but ultimately the ones that are succeeding to putting data at the core as we've just been discussing, are seeing amazing outcomes, by being able to have a single version of the truth, have confidence in that data, create self-serve for their lines of business and actually reduce the end to end cycle times that's driving your major monetization, whether that's cost cutting or revenue. And I'm curious as to what you're seeing, you guys do a lot of work, heavy work in DevOps and hardcore database. Those are key components of that data life cycle. What are you seeing in that regard regarding that data pipeline? >> Yeah, that's a phenomenal point. If you really want to go back and exploit data within an organization, if you really want to be a data driven organization, the very first thing you have to do is break down the silos. Ironically, every organization has all the data required to make the decisions they want to. They just can't either get to it, or it's so hard to break the silos that it's just not worth trying to make it happen. And 10 years ago, we set out on this mission, rather than keep these individual silos of data, why don't we flip it open and make it into a pipeline which looks like a data cloud, where essentially anybody who's consuming it has access to it based on the governance rules, based on the security rules that the operations people have set. And based on the kind of format they want to see data, not everybody may want to see the data in a database format. Maybe you want the database format converted to a CSB format before you run analytics. And this idea of making data the new infrastructure, this idea of having the operations people provide this new layer container. It's finally come to roost. I mean, it's fascinating. I was looking at the numbers last quarter. We just finished up Q2. Now 45% of our customer base uses Actifio for, or reuses the backup data for things that accelerate the business, things that make the business move faster, more productive, or even survive. That was the mission. That was what we set out to do 10 years ago. You know, we were talking to an analyst this morning and now there's this question of, you know, "Hey, looks like there's a theme of backup data being reused." We said, "Yeah, that's kind of what we've been saying for 10 years." Backup cannot be an insurance, backup cannot be a destination. It has to be something that you can use as an asset. And that I think is finally coming to the point where you can use backup as a single source of truth, only if you designed it right from the beginning for that purpose, you cannot just, there are lots of ways to fake it, make it, try to pretend like you're doing it, but that was the true purpose of making data the new infrastructure, making it a cloud, making it something that is truly an asset. And it's fascinating to see our businesses. You take any of our large accounts, and the way they've gone about transforming, not just basic backup and DR. Yes, we are the world's fastest backup and most scalable DR solution. That's a starting point. But to be able to use that to develop applications eight, 10 times faster, to run analytics 100 X faster? The more data you have, the more people who use data you have, the better this return becomes. >> You know, that is interesting to hear you talk about that, because that has been the Holy Grail of backup was to go beyond insurance to actually create business value. And you're actually seeing some underlying trends, we talked about that data pipeline, and one of the areas that is the most interesting is in database, which was so boring for so many years, and you're seeing new workloads emerge. They take the data warehouse beyond, you know, reporting, never really lived up to its promise of 360 degree view. You mentioned analytics, that's really starting to happen. And it's all about data. You know, John Furrier used to say that data is the new development kit. You call it the new infrastructure and it's sort of the same type of theme. So maybe some of the trends you're seeing in database, I'd love to talk about that for a little bit, and then pick your brains on some other tech like object storage is another one that we've really seen take off. >> Yeah, so I think our journey with object storage began in 2016, 2017, as we started to adopt cloud platform in response to the user requirements, we did more like most companies have done and unfortunately continue to do, we take the on-prem product and then just move it onto the cloud. And one of the things we saw was there was a fundamental difference of how the design points of a cloud engineering is all about, what the design it for. Object storage is one of those primitives, the fundamental storage primitives that the cloud providers actually produced, that nobody really exploited. It was used as a graveyard for data. It's a replacement for the place where data goes to die. And then we look at it really closely and say, "Well, this is actually a massively scalable, very low cost storage, but it has some problems." It has an interface that you cannot use with traditional servers. It has some issues around, you know, not being able to read, modify, write the data, so it feels like you're consuming a lot of storage. So we went on to solve those problems. It took us a good two years to come back with something called OnVault, that fundamentally treats object storage like this massively scalable high performing disk. Except for just ridiculous low cost and optimize the capacity. So this thing called OnVault, as we patent it, has really become the foundation of how everything in cloud works without using CPU. Today there is simply nothing at a lower TCO, that actually, if you want to do basic backup, the more importantly use that to do this massive analytics. Now you're talking about data warehouse, data lakes, right? Because now there's something called data lakehouse. All of these are still silos. All of these are people trying to take some data from somewhere, put it into another new construct and have it be controlled by somebody else. This is autosync, it's just, you just move the silos from someplace to another place, and sort of creating a pipeline. If you want to really create a pipeline, object storage has been an integral part of that pipeline, not a separate bucket by itself. And that's what we did. And same thing with databases. You know, most business, most of the critical business runs on databases, and the ability to find a way to leverage those and move them around, leverage in terms of whichever format the database is accessed, whichever location it's accessed, doesn't matter how big it is. Lots of work has gone into trying to figure that one out. And we had some very, very good partners in some of our largest customers who helped take the journey with us. Pretty much all of the global 2000 accounts you see across the board, were an integral part of our process. >> You know, you mentioned the word journey and it triggered a thought, your discussion with Ravi, the CIO of Seagate, who's a customer of yours. And what he said, I liked what he said, he, of course he used the term journey, we all do. But he said, "You know what? I kind of don't like that term because I want to inject a sense of urgency," essentially what he was saying, "I want speed." You know, journey's like, "Okay, kids get in the car, we're going to drive across country. We're going to make some stops." And so while there's a journey, he also was really trying to push the organization hard. And he talked about culture as some of the most difficult things. Like many CIOs said, "No, the technology is almost the easy part. It's true when it works." >> That's true. >> I thought that was a great discussion that you had. What were your, some of your takeaways? >> I think Ravi's a very astute IT executive who's been around the block for so long. And one of the fascinating things, when I asked him this question about, "Hey, what's the biggest challenge, we've just gone through this a couple of times, what is the biggest challenge?" Taking an organization as venerable, as well known as Seagate is, I mean, this is a data company. This is at the heart of half the world's data is on Seagate stuff. How do you take this old company that's been around for long, in the middle of Silicon Valley, and make it into a fast growing transformation company that's responding to the newer challenges? And I thought he was going to come back with, "Well, you know, I got to go through these pieces, I pick this technology that technology," and surely that's exactly what I expected he would end up with. He goes "It has nothing to do with technology." In this day and age, when you can have an Elon Musk can send a car to Mars, there's not many technologies that we can't really solve. Maybe COVID-19 is the next frontier we got to go solve. But frankly, he hit upon the one thing that matters to every company. It is the fundamental culture to create a bias to action. It's a fundamental culture where you have to come back and have a deliverable that moves the ball forward every day, every month, every quarter, as opposed to have this series of, like you said, a journey that says, and we all know this, right? People talk about, "Oh, we're going to do this in phase one, we're going to do this in phase two and do this in phase three," nothing ever happens in phase three. Nobody gets around to phase three. So I think he did a great job of saying, "I fundamentally had to go change the culture." That was my biggest takeaway. And this, I've heard this so many times, the most effective IT execs who've made the transformation, it actually shows in the people that they have. It's not the technology, it's the people. And his history is replete with organizations that have done remarkably well, not by leveraging the heck out of the technology, but truly by leveraging the change in the people's mindset. And of course that mindset leverages technology where appropriate, but Ravi is a insightful person, always such a delight to talk to him, it's a delight for him to have chosen us as a foundational technology for him to go pull his data warehouses and completely transform how he's doing manufacturing across the globe. >> Yeah, I want to add some color to what you just said, because some key takeaways from what you just said, Ash, is, you know, you're right. When you look back at the history of the computer industry, there used to be very well known processes, but the technology was the big mystery and the big risk. And you think about with COVID, were it not for technology, we didn't know what was coming. We were inventing new processes literally every day, every week, every month. And so technology was pretty well understood, and enabled that. And when you think, when we talked earlier about putting data at the core, it was interesting to hear Ravi. He basically said, "Yeah, we had a big data team in the US, a big data team in Europe." We actually organized around silos. And so you guys played a role, you were very respectful about, you know, touting Actifio with him. You did ask him, you know, what role you play, but it was interesting to hear him talk about how he had to address that both culturally and of course, there's technology underneath to enable that unification of data, that silo busting, if you will. And you guys played a role in that. >> Yeah, well, I always enjoy conversation with the folks who have taken a problem, identified what needs to be done, and then just get it done. And that's more fascinating than, yeah, of course Actifio plays a small part in a lot of things, and we're proud to have played a small part in his big initiative. And that's true of the thousands of customers we talk about, but it's such a fascinating story to have leaders who come back and make this transformation happen and to understand how they went about making those decisions, how they identified where the problem was. These are so hard when we all see them in our own lives. We see there's a problem, but sometimes it takes a while to try to understand how do you identify them and what do you have to do? And more importantly, actually do it. And so whenever I get an opportunity with people like Ravi, I think understanding that, and if there's a way to help, we always make sure that we play our own small part and we're privileged to be a part of those kinds of journeys. >> I think what's interesting about Actifio and the company that you created is essentially that we're talking about the democratization of data, that whole data pipeline, that discussion that we had, the self service of that data to the lines of business, and, you know, you guys clearly play a role there. The multicloud discussion fits into that. I mean these are all trends that are tailwinds for companies that can help sort of flatten the data globe, if you will. Your final thoughts, Ash? >> Yeah, you said something that is so much at the heart of every IT exec that we are talking to. If data truly is the fundamental asset that I finally end up with as an organization, then democratization of data, where I do not lock this into another silo, another platform, another cloud, another application, has to be part of my foundation design. And therefore my ability to use each of these cloud platform for the services they provide while I am able to move the data to where I need it to be, that is so critical. So you almost start to think about the one position an organization now has. And we talked about this with a group of CIOs. There might be some pretty soon, not too far off, but if data is truly an asset, I might actually have a data market, just like you have a stock market, where I can start to sell my data, imagine a COVID-19, there's so many organizations that have so much data, and many of them have contributed to this research because this is an existential issue, but you can see this turning into a next level. So yes, we have got activists help move the data to one level higher where it's become a foundational construct for an organization. The next part is, can I actually turn this into an asset where I actually monetize some of this stuff? And it will be not too long when you and I could talk about how there's this new exchange and what's the rate of data for this company versus that company, and there'll be future trading options, who knows, it's going to be very interesting. >> Well, I think you're right on, this notion of a data marketplace is coming and it's not that far away. Well, Ash, it's always great to talk to you. I hope next year at Data Driven, we can be face to face, but I mean, look, this has been, we've dealt with it. It's actually created opportunities for us to kind of reinvent ourselves. So congratulations on the success that you've had and thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> No, thank you for hosting us and always a big fan of theCUBE. You guys, we've engaged with you since the early days, and it is fascinating to see how this company has grown. And it's probably many people don't even know how much you've grown behind the scenes and all the technologies and culture that you've created yourself. So it's hopefully one day we'll switch the table and then I'd be on the other side and ask you about transformation, digital transformation of CUBE itself. >> I'd love to do that, and thanks again, and thank you everybody for watching our continuous coverage of Actifio Data Driven. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. >> Ash: Thank you, Dave. (calm music)

from around the globe it's thecube with digital coverage of actifio data driven 2020 brought to you by actifio hi and welcome to the cube's coverage of actifio data driven 2020 i'm stu miniman my co-host for this event is dave vellante but joining me to help kick off this discussion is david floyer he is the co-founder and chief technology officer of wikibon of course the research arm of siliconangle media which includes also thecube david great to see you thanks so much for joining us great to see you stu all right so we we've got a really nice lineup of course last year dave and i were in boston with the actifio team they had a really good lineup uh you know analysts thought leaders and of course lots of users you know love to talk to those users uh you and i are quite familiar with actifio uh really the company that that created copy data management as a category and a solution out there so why don't we start there david you know what what's the importance of copy data management you know here in 2020 you know many years after uh when actifio had created it well this year has really uh amplified the importance of copy data management and being able to manage across different locations across different clouds manage the copies manage the the reuse of data in different places um the the the covert has really emphasized the importance for example of putting just backup onto a cloud because it's on many occasions it's not going to be possible to get into your own data centers or if you're sharing a data center so uh automation and uh use of clouds multiple clouds has really driven uh i've become of a supreme importance uh since covert had started and and that's how it's going to be from here on in that's not going to change yeah david absolutely i mean we said for many years when you you know adopt cloud you know i still need to think about my data protection i need to think about security uh those aren't just covered uh because i have you know lovely object storage or it you know spreads things out amongst the different cloud regions um and even this year's you brought up covid uh we've been having so many conversations with with companies uh in many cases they're accelerating or new groups are diving in and therefore we need to make sure that they take the proper control precautions so you know my my disaster recover me my backup is so important uh maybe flush out a little bit for us if you would you know cloud we've been looking at uh that you know hybrid and multi-cloud architectures how people should be building it and of course data the critical component uh that we look at there what what should people be looking at well absolutely if you're going to have a multi-cloud strategy you uh you have to there are several things which are really important you have to be able to operate across each cloud natively in the cloud it's not it's not good enough to uh just be an appendage if you like um so and equally important is that you have to make sure that you're taking advantage of the characteristics of the cloud in particular object storage backup has always gone to object storage but object storage itself is not that fantastic if you're trying to just recover something from a from a lot of different objects unless you put an architecture around that unless you make it such that you can uh take all the workloads and be able to address them in the cloud itself and uh in in particular what's very interesting is there are two fundamental philosophies of moving to the cloud one of which is that you migrate everything you you convert all of your databases to a database that's operating in the cloud that you go to um and the other one is to say well that type of lift and shift is not good enough what you want to be able to do is be able to use the same databases the same applications that you're using at the moment avoid that enormous expensive cost of moving everything and then be able to operate on those databases using the cloud principles the cloud object store and have the same level of performance yeah absolutely david i know i'm looking forward to uh you know dave's got uh you know ash the ceo of actifio uh on today tomorrow uh i'll be talking to david chang who's the co-founder uh also onto the product there to really understand you know how is activio building an architecture that meets what you were just talking about uh and david you know things i i've heard you talking about for many years you know uh migrations obviously are something that anybody in it dreads uh i i used to say in the storage world uh it you know upgrade came with that four-letter word it was migration because you you had to do that and you know databases of critical importance um one of the other uh discussions i have is with ibm and ibm has had a long partnership with activio um but they're also they're they're getting involved with that data usage so maybe if you could expound a little bit you know how is it just you know the early days copy data management i looked at it it was a you know financial savings it was okay hey we've got way too many copies out there how can we enable them to be used better and not have you know just lots and lots of big capacity that the the storage vendors uh as it was you know hard disk and then flash converting there so you know how are we actually unlocking the value of data in today's world well there are two aspects of that one of which is you want the the original data wherever possible you uh you you want to have be able to access that data as quickly as possible so if you have for example a system of record and you want to be able to access that system of record uh it may be one day you want to be able to bring it right to one day before the day before not have a week waiting for it coffee management is essential to be able to access that data and the same data for everybody and know that and know from a compliance point of view you have the right data so that's the first stage but then from a development point of view you want to have the flexibility of using real-time data whenever you can so you want to be able to access any data you want from anywhere and know that it's the correct data and and move your business processes from asynchronous business processes to as synchronous as you can and you can only do that with automation through uh real-time data management yeah uh absolutely david and it's even it's even more pertinent right now as everyone is you know the discussion is you know work from home is becoming work from anywhere uh so it's it's not just oh hey i can get into the data warehouse uh and know that i have uh you know a low latency connection when i'm sitting in the corporate uh internet now you know developers uh typically are dispersed people need to be able to access it um talk a little bit about uh the data pipeline the discussion we've been hearing from uh you know the cdo events that we've gone to as well as discussions you know how does you know actifio in the industry as a whole streamline that data pipeline that you started talking about yeah that that's absolutely essential uh you you you have to have processes and procedures that identify the data where it's going to go uh and and have essentially a data plane managed data plane which is taking it from where it need where it is to where it needs to go sharing the metadata across that fabric um those are the ways that you build a consistent data pipeline where people know what the provenance of that data is and the less copies that you have and the more single copies of that data a a a copy of record a single version of the truth then the less complicated the systems become and even more the the systems between the systems the the human interaction that's required to to manage that data goes down so it and it makes development so much easier so a data pipeline is absolutely essential and it's part of that data plane and it's part of the overall architecture that has to be there we've lived in silos for so long and getting out of silos is not it's not easy at all and uh you've got to have the right tools to be able to do that yeah uh the the keynote speaker uh that actifio has for the event is gene kim somebody we've had on the cube a few times and excited to have him back on at this event uh what i thought was really interesting david i read his first book uh his first fiction book i should say he's also written many non-fiction books uh the phoenix project was really the go-to book to kind of understand devops i've i've recommended so many friends uh people in the industry his new one the unicorn project is really about software development but what i found really interesting because i i didn't get to read it earlier this year because there was just no travel but made sure i did read it ahead of this event and the lesson that it called out to me was you know moving faster using these modern tools you know breaking through silos was all well and good but the the real turning point for the company was enabling that use of data and as you said that real time not looking historically but be able to react fast so you know not giving away the secrets of the book there but uh you know a retail organization that could trial things could update in real time what the inventory was and having everybody in the company get access to that so the product people the marketing people uh the field people all accessing that single source of truth and that being fed throughout the organization really invigorated and drove uh the the ability for a company to react and move fast which really is the the clarion call for business today so david yeah you know any any final word from you as to you know we've we've been beating that drum for years that you know data data data um is is critically important whether you're taking that specific example if you can take that all of that data and then start updating the pricing according to that data you've suddenly made repricing a dynamic event uh one that's going to respond to the customer and they their characteristics uh good or bad and the availability of those uh availability and the uh and the the pipeline of products if you understand all of that then suddenly your ability to increase revenue by being able to reprice more quickly uh automatically become an amazingly uh effective in terms of revenue increase yeah absolutely i i feel like uh i remember back in the early days of hadoop it was you know how can i make an ad better to increase increase click rate but the promise of unlocking data today is to really understand and customize for that environment so some of it is we can maximize profitability there will be certain clients um which are willing to pay for more premium products and others uh that you need to have that value option but when you understand the data you understand the customer you understand the need for the portfolio of solutions you have data can just be that key enabler all right well hey david floyer thank you so much for helping us kick off our coverage here i want to tell everybody make sure to you know tune in for the rest of it uh dave vellante and myself going through the interviews of course on demand with actifio as well as i'm sorry live with actifio as well as on demand on thecube.net as always for david floyer dave vellante i'm stu miniman thank you for joining us for activio data driven and thank you for watching thecube [Music] you

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCube, with digital coverage, of Actifio data-driven 2020, brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCube coverage of Actifio Data-driven 2020. Really excited to, dig into a fun topic. I have a Cube alumni with us he is a DevOps author, and researcher Gene Kim. Unicorn Project is the most recent, Gene, great to see you, thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, great to see you again, here at the Actifio conference, this is all fantastic. >> Yeah, so your new book, it was much awaited out there, you know, Unicorn's always discussed out there, but you know, the Phoenix Project, as I said, is really this seminal, book when people say, What is that DevOps thing and how do I do it? So, why don't you give us a little bit as to The Unicorn Project, why is it important? Why we're excited to dig into this and, we'll, we'll tie it into the discussion we're having here for the next normal, at Actifio. >> For sure, yeah, in fact, yeah. As you might have heard in the keynote address, you know, the what, what vexed me, after the Phoenix project came out in 2013 is that there is still looming problems that still remain, seven years after the Phoenix project was written. And, you know, these problems I think are very important, around you and what does it really take to enable developers to truly be productive, instead of being locked in a tundra of technical debt. Two is, you know, how do we unlock truly the power of data so that we can help everyone make better decisions, whether it's a developer, or anyone, within the business units and the organizations that we serve. And then three is like, what are really the behaviors that we need from leadership to make these amazing transformations possible? And so The Unicorn Project really is, the fifth project retold, but instead of through the eyes of Ops leadership, is told through the eyes, of a phenomenal developer. And so it was amazing to revisit the, the Phoenix project universe, I in the same timeline, but told from a different point of view. And it was such a fun project to work on, just because, you know, to relive the story, and just expose all these other problems, not happening, not on the side, but from, the development and data side. >> Yeah. They've always these characters in there that, I know I personally, and many people I talked to can, you know, really associate with, there was a return of certain characters, quite prominent, like Brent, you know, don't be the bottleneck in your system. It's great, if you're a fighter firefighter, and can solve everything, but if everything has to come through you, you know, Pedro is always going off, he's getting no sleep and, you know, you'd just get stressed out. You talked a bit more, about the organization and there are the five ideals in the book. So maybe if you can, you know, strongly recommend, of course, anybody at ending active you, got a copy of the books they'll be able to read the whole thing, but, you know, give us the bumper sticker on some of those key learnings. >> Yeah, for sure, yeah. So the five ideals represents five ideas, I think are just very important, for everyone, the organization, serves, especially leadership. The first ideal is locality and simplicity. In other words, when you need to get something done, we should be able to get it done within our team, without having to do a lot of communication coordination, with people outside of our team. The worst, the most horrible feeling is that in order, to do a small little thing, you actually have, to have a, coordinated action that spans 15 teams, right. And that's why you can't get anything done, right? And so that's so much the hallmark of large complex organizations. The second ideal is that what I think the outcomes are, which is focused flow and joy, you know, I've not just now started to for the first time in 20 years, self identify, not as an ops person, but as a developer. And, I really now understand, why we got into technology in the first place. This so that we can solve the business problem at hand unencumbered by minute share. And that allows for a sense of focus flow and even joy. And I love how Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describe it. He said, flow is a state that we feel when we love our work, so much that we lose track of time, and maybe even sense of self. And so I think we all in technology understand, you know, that that is how it is on the best of days and how terrible it is, you know, when we don't have that sense of flow. Third ideal is improvement of daily work, being even more important than daily work itself. The notion is greatness is never free, we must create it and must prioritize it, for the psychological safety. And the fifth is customer focus. So those are all the things I think are so important, for modern leaders, because it really defines the future of work. >> Yeah, we love that flow and it happens otherwise we're stuck, in that waiting place as you quoted Dr. Csi. So one of my favorite books there, there also. So Gene, for this audience here, there was, you know, yes, CICD is wonderful and I need to be able to move and ship fast, but the real transformational power, for that organization was unlocking the value of data, which is, I think something that everybody here can. So maybe to talk a little bit about that you know, we, there there's, we've almost talked too much, you know, data is the new oil and things like that, but it's that, you know, that allowing everybody to tap in and leverage, you know, real time what's happening there were just at the early parts of the industry being able to unlock that future. >> Oh yeah, I love that phrase. Data is new oil, especially since oil, you know, the last 50 years, the standard Port 500 was dominated by, you know, resource extraction oil company and so forth. And now that is no longer true, it's dominated by the tech giants. And, Columbia there was a Columbia journalism review article that said, data's not only the new oil, is really the new soil. And for me, you know, my area of passion for the last seven years has been studying the DevOps enterprise community where, we're taking all the learnings that were really pioneered by the tech giants, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and seeing how they're being adopted by the largest, most complex organizations on the planet, the best known brands across every industry vertical. And it's so true that, you know, where the real learning gets exploited right, is through data. I realized, this is how we get to know our customers better. This is how we understand their wants and needs. This is how we test, and make offers to them to see if they like it or not to see if they value it or not. And, and so for me, one of the best examples, of this was, the target transformation and Adidas how it was just an amazing example of, to what links they went to, to liberate developers from, being shackled by ancient systems of records, data warehouses, and truly enabled developers to get access to the data they need modify it, even delete information, all without having to be dependent on, you know, integration teams that were essentially holding them hostage for six to nine months. And, these programs really enable some of the most strategic programs at their organizations, you know, enabling hundreds of projects over the years. So, I think that is really, just showing to what extent, the value that is created by unlocking data for individuals. And sorry Stu, one more thing that I'm just always dazzled by my friend, Chris Berg. He told me that, somewhere between a third and a half of all company employees use data in their daily work. They either use data or manipulate data as part of the daily work, which, you know, that, population is actually larger than the number of developers in an organization. So it just shows you how big this problem is, and how much value we can create by addressing this problem. >> Well, it's interesting if it's only a third, we still have work to do. What we've been saying for years is, you know, when you talk about digital transformation, the thing that separates those that have transformed and those that haven't is data needs to be at the core. I just can't be doing things the way I was or doing things off intuition, you know, being data-driven, I'm sure you know, the same Gene, if you're not, if you don't have data, you know, you're just some other person with an opinion. >> Yeah, yeah. That's it this is a great point. And in Risto Siilasmaa's amazing book, Transforming Nokia, I mean, he was, he said exactly that. And he said something that was even more astonishing. He said, there's not only at the core, but data also has to be at the edges. You know, he was describing at Amazon, anyone can do an experiment @booking.com. Anyone can do an experiment to see, if they can create value for the customer. They don't need approvals from, committees or their manager. This is something that is really truly part of everyone's daily work. And so, to me, that was a huge aha moment that says, you know, to what degree, you know. Our cultures need to change so that we can not only, use data, but also create learnings and create new data, you know, that the rest of the organization can learn from as well. >> Yeah. One of the other things I definitely, you know, felt in your book, you synthesize so much of the learnings that you've had over the years from like the DevOps enterprise summit. The question I have for you is, you know, you hear some of these, you know, great stories, but the question is, our companies, are they moving fast enough? Have they transformed the entire business or have they taken, you know, we've got one slice of the business that is kind of modernized and we're going to get to the other 30 pieces along the way, but you know, there's wholesale change, you know, 2020 has had such a big impact. What's your thoughts on, you know, how we are doing in the enterprise on pace of change these days? >> That's a great question. I mean, I think some people, when they ask me, you know, how far are we into kind of total adoption of DevOps? It's a newer better way of working. And I would say probably somewhere between 5 and 7%, right, and the math I would take them through is, you know, there are about 20 million developers on the planet of which at best, I think, a million of them are working in a DevOps type way. But yet now that's only growing. I think it was an amazing presentation at DevOps surprise summit in London that was virtual from nationwide building society, the largest organization of its kind. It's a large financially mutually owned organization for housing in the UK. And, they touched about how, you know, post COVID post lockdown suddenly they found themselves able to do them reckless things that would have normally taken four years, in four weeks. And I think that's what almost every organization is learning these days is, when survival is at stake, you know, we can throw the rules out of the window, right. And do things in a way that are safe and responsible, but, you know, create satisfy the business urgent needs, like, you know, provisioning tens of thousand people to work from home safely. You know, I think the shows, I think it's such a powerful proof point of what technology can do when it is unleashed from, you know, perhaps unnecessarily burdensome rules and process. And I think the other point I would make Stu is that, what has been so rewarding is the population of these technology leaders presenting at DevOps enterprise, they're all being promoted, they're all being, being given new responsibilities because they, are demonstrating that they have the best longterm interest of the organization at heart. And, they're being given even more responsibilities because, to make a bigger impact through the organization. So I'm incredibly optimistic about the direction we're heading and even the pace we're going at. >> Well, Gene definitely 2020 has put a real highlight on how fast things have changed, not just work from home, but, but the homeschooling, you know, telehealth, there are so many things out there where there was no choice, but to move forward. So the, the second presentation you participated in was talking about that next normal. So give us a little bit of, you know, what does that mean? You know, what, what we should be looking at going forward? >> Yeah, it was great to catch up with my friend Paul Forte, who I've known for many, many years, and now, now a VP of sales at the Actifio and yeah, I think it is amazing that academic Dr. Colada Perez, she said, you know, in every turning point, you know, where, there's such a the stage for decades of economic prosperity usually comes, by something exactly like what we're going through now, a huge economic recession or depression, following a period of intense re regulations there's new, technology that's unlocking, you know, new ways of working. And she pointed exactly to what's happening in the Covid pandemic in terms of, how much, the way we're working is being revolutionized, not by choice, but out of necessity. And, you know, as she said, you know, we're now learning to what degree we can actually do our daily work without getting on airplanes or, you know, meeting people in person. So, I'm a hue, I have so many friends in the travel industry, right. I think we all want normalcy to return, but I think we are learning, you know, potentially, you know, there are more efficient ways to do things, that don't require a day of travel for a couple hour meeting and day to return, right. So, yeah, I think this is being demonstrated. I think this will unlock a whole bunch of ways of interacting that will create efficiency. So I don't think we're going, as you suggested, right. There will be a new normal, but the new normal is not going to be the same as your old normal. And I think it will be, in general for the better. >> So, Gene, you, you've gone to gotten to see some of the transformation happening in the organizations when it comes to developers, you know, the, the DevOps enterprise summit, the, the state of DevOps, you know. I think five years ago, we knew how important developers were, but there was such a gap between, well, the developers are kind of in the corner, they don't pay for anything. They're not tied to the enterprise. And today it feels like we have a more cohesive story that there, there is that if you put in The Unicorn Project, it's, you know, business and IT, you know. IT, and the developers can actually drive that change and the survival of the business. So, you know, are we there yet success or net developers now have a seat at the table? Or, you know, what do you see on that, that we still need to do? >> Yeah, I think we're still, I mean, I think we're getting there, we're closer than ever. And as my friend, Chris O'Malley the CEO of the famously resurgent mainframe vendor Compuware said, you know, it is, everyone is aware that you can't do any major initiatives these days without some investment in technology, right? In fact, you can't invest in anything without technology. So I think that is now better understood than ever. And, yeah, just the digital, it's a whole digital disruption, I think is really, no one needs to be convinced that if we organize large complex organizations, don't change, they're at a risk of, you know, being decimated by the organizations that can change using an exploiting technology, you know, to their benefit and to the other person's detriment. So, and that primarily comes through software and who creates software developers. So I, by the way, I love the Stripe it was a CFO for Stripe who said, the largest, constraint for them is, and their peers is not access to capital, it is access development talent. I think when you have CFOs talking like that, right. It does says it's suggested something really has changed in the economic environment that we all compete in. >> So, I mentioned that on the research side, one of the things I've loved reading over the years is that, fundamental discussion that, going faster does not mean, that I am sacrificing security, or, you know, the product itself, you know, in the last couple of years, it's, you know, what separates those really high performing companies, and, you know, just kind of the middle of the ground. So, what, what, what advice would you give out there, to make sure that I'm moving my company more along to those high performing methods. >> Yeah, but just to resonate with that, I was interviewing a friend of mine, Mike Nygaard, long time friend of mine, and we were talking on and we were recalling the first time we both heard the famous 2009 presentation doing 10 deploys a day, every day at flicker, by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond. And we were both incredulous, right there? We thought it was irresponsible reckless, and maybe even immoral what they were doing, because, you know, I think most organizations were doing three a year, and that was very problematic. How could one do 10 deploys a day. And I think, what we now know, with the size of evidence, especially through the state of DevOps research, is that, you know, for six years, 35,000 plus respondents, the only way that you can be reliable, and secure, is to do smaller deployments more frequently, right? It makes you, be able to respond quicker in the marketplace, allows you to have better stability and reliability in the operational environment, allows you to be more secure. It allows you to be able to, you know, increase market share, increase productivity, and, you know, have happier employees. So, you know, at this point, I think the research is so decisive, that, you know, we can, as a whole book accelerate, that really makes the case for that, that this is something that I now have moral certainty or even absolute certainty oh, right. It's, you know, self evident to me, and it, I think we should have confidence that that really is true. >> Wonderful work, Gene, thanks so much for giving us the update. I really appreciate it, some really good sessions here in Actifio, as well as the book. Thanks so much, great to talk to you. >> Stu is always a pleasure to see you again, and thank you so much. >> Alright, that's our coverage from Actifio Data-driven, be sure to check out thecube.net for all of the, on demand content, as well as, as I said, if you were part of the show, definitely recommend reading Gene's book, The Unicorn Project. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching the cube. (soft upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCUBE with digital coverage of Actifio Data Driven 2020. Brought to you by Actifio. >> Hi, my name is Gene Kim and I am looking forward to the amazing Actifio Data Summit. Everyone who applies... Three, two, one. Hi, my name is Gene Kim. I'm going to smile one more time. Three, two, one. Hi, my name is Gene Kim. I'm looking forward to the Actifio Data Summit, where we're going to learn all about the power of data, everyone who registers between now and then will receive a copy of my book, "The Unicorn Project." I look forward to seeing you there, thank you. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Actifio Data Driven 2020, brought to you by Actifio. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante, full of preview of Actifio Data Driven, and with me is Brian Reagan who is a long time cube alumni, good friend. Brian, awesome to see you thanks for coming on and help us set up Data Driven >> Dave it's always a pleasure to be here, thanks for having me. >> So this is one of our favorite events of the season, not only because it's historically been in Boston, but it's a really good intimate event, lot of customer content. Unfortunately this year, of course everything has gone virtual but tell us about that, what do you guys got planned for Data Driven this year? >> Well again we're delighted to be able to put the show on, in spite of all of the challenges of travel and face to face. As you know from years past, Data Driven has always been sort of by the customers for the customers, very much an event that is driven around understanding how customers are using data strategically, and how Actifio is helping them do that to power their businesses. This year is no different, I think what we've done is we've taken the best of the physical events, which is really facilitating fireside chats and panels of people using our technology to move the business forward with data, but also added a lot of things that frankly are impossible to do when you're strained by a physical event, which is be able to run a series of on demand technical sessions. Our technical tracks are always standing room only, so now we can offer more content, more discreet package content that can be consumed the day of the event and on for a year plus after the event. So we're excited to really sort of mix the best of both worlds virtual and the forums that have worked so well for us in the physical events. >> Well it's like I said I mean, lots of these events are sort of vendor fests, but what you do with Data Driven is you bring in the customer's voice. And I remember last year in theCUBE, we had Holly st. Clair who was with the state of Massachusetts, she was awesome. We had a guest from DraftKings, which was really, really tremendous. Of course, you see what's happening with those guys now just exploding. >> Exactly. >> But we also had a lot of fun, when of course Ash comes on, and all the Actifio folk, but we had Frank Gens on, the first and only time we've ever had him on theCUBE, he's now retired from IDC, I guess semiretired. We had Duplessie on, which was a lot of fun. So it's just a good vibe. >> Yeah, we made a conscious decision to your point not to avoid the traditional vendor fest, and bludgeoning people with PowerPoint throughout the day, and really wanted to make it spin it around, and have the customers tell their stories in their own words, and really talk about the themes that are both common, in terms of challenges, ways that they've addressed those challenges, but also dig into the real implications of when they do solve these challenges, what are the unintended consequences? It's sort of like the... In a lot of ways I think about the journey that customers went through with VMware and with the ability to spin up VMs effortlessly, was a fantastic first step, and then all of a sudden they realized they had all of these spun up Vms that were consuming resources that they didn't necessarily had thought about at the very beginning. I think that our customers as they progress through their journey with Actifio, once they realize the power of being able to access data and deliver data, no matter how big it is, in any form factor in any cloud, there's incredible power there, but there also comes with that a real need to make sure that the governance and controls and management systems are in place to properly deliver that. Particularly today when everything is distributed, everything is essentially at arms length, so that's part of the fun of these events is really being able to hear all of the ways these unique customers are, adding value, delivering value, gaining value, from the platform. >> What's it's interesting you mentioned VMs, it was like life changing when you saw your first VM get spun up and you're like, wow, this is unbelievable, and then it was so easy to spin up. and then you just save VM creep and copy creep. >> Right. >> And you're seeing some similar things now with cloud I mean example is the cloud data warehouses is so easy to spin those things up now. The CFOs are looking at the bill going Whoa, what are we doing here? >> (laughs) >> You're going to see the same thing >> Exactly. >> with containers as you begin to persist containers, you're going to have the same problem. So you guys created the category, it's always a marketing executives dreams to be able to create a category. You guys created the Copy Data Management category, and of course, you've extended that. But that was really good, it was something that you guys set forth and then all the analysts picked up on it, people now use that as a term and it kind of resonates with everybody. >> Right, right. It was bittersweet but also very satisfying to start to see other vendors come out with their own Copy Data Management offerings, and so yes the validating that in fact this is a real problem in the enterprise continues to be a real problem in the enterprise, and by using technologies that Actifio really pioneered and patented quite a bit of foundational technologies around, we're able to help customers address those copy data challenges, those spiraling costs of managing all of these duplicate, physical instances of data. And to your point, to some degree when you're on-prem in a data center and you've already bought your storage array. Okay, I'm consuming 20% more of the Ray or 100% more of the array than I really need to be, but I've already paid for the array. When it comes to cloud, those bills are adding up hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and those are real costs, and so in many ways cloud is actually highlighting the power and frankly the problem of copy data, far more than the on-prem phenomenon ever did. >> Yeah I was on the phone with a former CIO, COO now of a healthcare organization, and he was saying to me there's a dark side of CapEx to OPEX, which is now that he's a COO he's like really concerned about the income statement and the variability of those costs, and so to your point I mean it's a big issue, the convenience seems to be outweighing some of that concern but nonetheless lack of predictability is a real concern there. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And I think we see that... You mentioned data lakes, and whether you call it a data lake or you just call it a massive data instance, one of the speakers of Data Driven this year is a customer of our Century Data Systems down in Florida. And they have 120 terabyte database that actually they're using, and this is an incredible story that we're excited to have them share with the world during Data Driven. They're using it to help the federal government get better data faster on COVID treatments and the efficacy of those treatments, and so to even consider being able to rapidly access and manage 120 terabyte instance. It breaks the laws of physics frankly. But again with Copy Data Management, we have the ability to help them really extend and really enhance their business and ultimately enhance the data flows that are hopefully going to accelerate the access to a vaccine for us in North American and worldwide, quite frankly. >> That's awesome, that's awesome. Now let's talk a little bit more about Data Driven what we can expect. Of course, the last couple of years you've been the host of Data Driven. They pulled a Ricky gervais' on you >> (Laughs loudly) like get the golden gloves, he's no longer being invited to host, but I think probably for different reasons, but what are some the major themes that we can expect this year? >> Yeah, we were disappointed that we couldn't get Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. >> (laughs quietly) I think we decided that in a virtual construct, the host duties were pretty amenable. So among the many things I talked about Sentry Data Systems and we have many customers who are going to be joining us and telling their stories. And again from accelerating data analytics to accelerating DevOps initiatives, to accelerating a move to the cloud, we're going to hear all of those different use cases described. One of the things that is different this year and we're really excited. Gene Kim sort of the author and noted DevOps guru, author of The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, he's going to be joining us. We had previously intended to do a road show with Gene this year and obviously those plans got changed a bit. So really excited to have him join us, talk about his point of view around DevOps. Certainly it's a hugely important use case for us, really important for many of our customers, and actually registrant's between now and the event, which is September 15th and 16th, we'll get an eCopy an e-book copy of his Unicorn Project book. So we're eager to have people register and if they haven't already read him then I think they're going to be really pleasantly surprised to see how accessible his materials are, and yet how meaningful and how powerful they can be in terms of articulating the journeys that many of these businesses are going through. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. I'm stucked I have not read that material, but I've heard a lot about it, and when I signed up I saw that, said great I'm going to get the free book. So I'm going to check that out, >> Yeah It's obviously a very, very hot topic. Well Brian, I really appreciate you coming on, and setting up the event. What are the details? So where do I go to sign up? When is the event? What's the format? Give us the lowdown. >> It is September 15th and 16th, actifio.com will guide you through the registration process. You'll be able to create the event based on the content that you're eager to participate in. And again not only on the 15th and 16th, but then into the future, you'll be able to go back and re access or access content that you didn't have the time to do during the event window. So we're really excited to be able to offer that as an important part of the event. >> Fantastic and of course theCUBE will be there doing its normal wall to wall coverage. Of course, this time virtual, and you'll see us on social media with all the clips and all the work on Silicon Angle. So Brian great to see you and we will see you online in September. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you. Go to actifio.com, sign up register for Data Driven, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of active EO data driven 2020 brought to you by activity. >>However, this is Dave Volante for the Cube and appear to really tell you how excited we are about active CIOs. Data driven. We're partnering with active again this year. Of course, the conference has gone virtual. Data driven is a great event. It's a very customer oriented event. Active CEO is a company that deals with some really gnarly data problems at scale. They started in the space of copy data Management and have extended into Dev Ops and Analytics and Cloud. And so the Cube will be there. It's September 15th and 16th, 16th goto active geo dot com. Sign up. There's a free e book on Dev Ops. It's always a great program. We'll see you there. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of active eo data driven 2020 Brought to you by activity. >>Hi, I'm Brian Reagan from Active Seo. And I'd like to welcome you to join us at Data Driven 2020 this year. Online as in years past, it's all about the customer from the bear voice to you talking about how they're solving their cloud Dev Ops Analytics and data protection challenges using the activity of platform and helping move their business forward this year. We're also excited to welcome Gene Kim Noted Dev Ops author in Guru on his E book. The Unicorn Project is available for free if you register today, so join us September 15th and 16th for data driven 2020. We look forward to seeing you online. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> From Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering Actifio 2019 Data Driven. (upbeat techno music) Brought to you by Actifio. >> Hello everyone and welcome to Boston and theCUBE's special coverage of Actifio Data Driven 19. I'm Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. We've got a special guest, John Furrier is in the house from from Palo Alto. Guys, theCUBE we love to go out on the ground, you know, we go deep. We're here at this data theme, right? We were there in the early days, John, you called me up and say, "Get your butt here, we're going to cover the first of Doop World". And since then things have moved quite fast. Everybody thought, you know, Hadoop Big Data was going to take over the world. Nobody even uses that term anymore, right? It's kind of, now it's AI, and machine intelligence, and block chain, and everything else. So what do you think is happening? Did the early Big Data days fail? You know, Frank Genus this morning called it The experimentation phase. >> I mean, I don't really think Frank has a good handle on what's going on in my opinion, cause I think it's not an experimentation, it's real. That was a wave that was essentially the beginning of, not an experimentation, of realization and reality that data, unstructured data in particular was real and relevant. Hadoop looked good off the tee, mill the fairway as we say, but the thing about the Hadoop ecosystem is that validated big data. Every financial institution jumped on it. Everyone who knew anything about data or had data issues or had a lot of data, knew the value. It's just that the apparatus to build via Hadoop was too expensive. In comes Cloud computing at scale, so, as Cloud was accelerating, you look at the Amazon Web Services Revenue Chart you can almost see the D mark where the inflection point is on the hockey stick of Amazon's revenue numbers. And that is the point in time where Hadoop was on the declining of failure. Hortonworks sold the Cloudera. Cloudera's earnings are at an all-time low. A lot of speculation of their entire strategy, and their venture back company went public, but bet the ranch to be the next data warehouse. That wasn't the business model. The data business was a completely new industry, completely being re-transformed, and, far from experimentation, it is real and definitely growing like a weed, but changing because of the underpinning infrastructure dynamics of Cloud Native, Microservices, and that's only going to get highly accelerated and the people who talk about context of industry like Frank, are going to be off. Their predictions will be off because they don't really see the new picture clear enough, in my opinion, >> So, >> I think he's off. >> So it's not so much of a structural change like it was when we went from, you know, mainframes to PCs, it's more of a sort of flow, evolution into this new area which is being driven, powered by new technologies, we talk about block chain machine intelligence and other things. >> Well, I mean, the make up of companies that were building quote, "Big Data Solutions", were trying to build an apparatus or mechanisms to solve big data problems, but none of them actually had the big data problem. None of them were full of data. None of them had a lot of data. The ones that had problems were the financial institutions, the credit card companies, the people who were doing a lot of large scale, um, with Google, Facebook, and some of the hyperscalers. They were actually dealing with the data tsunami themselves, so the practitioners ended up driving it. You guys at Wikibomb, we pointed this out on theCUBE many times, that the value was going to come from the practitioners not the suppliers of so called technology. So, you know, the Clouderas of the world who thought Hadoop would be relevant and growing as a technology were right on one side, on the other side of the coin was the Cloud decimation of that sector. The Cloud computer just completely blew away that Hadoop market because you didn't have to hire a PhD, you didn't have to hire specialty skills to stand up Hadoop clusters. You could actually throw it in the Cloud and get agile quickly, and get value out of data very very quickly. That has been real, it has not been an experiment. There's been new case studies, new companies born, new brands, so it's not an experiment, it is reality, and it's only going to get more real every day. >> And I add of course now you've got, you mentioned Cloudera and Hortenworks, you also got Matt Bar reeling Stu. Let's talk about Actifio. So they coined the term Copy Data Management, they created the category, of course they do a lot of backup, I mean, everybody in this space does a lot of backup. And then you saw the Silicon Valley companies come in. Particularly Cohesity and Rubric, you know, to a lesser extent he got some other guys like Zerto and Durva, but it was really those two companies, Cohesity and Rubric, they raised more money in their D round than Actifio has since inception. But yet Actifio keeps, you know, plodding along, growing, you know, word is they're profitable, you know, they're not like this really sectioned very East Coast versus kind of West Coast mentality. What's your take on what's going on? >> Yeah, so, Dave right, you look at the early days of Actifio and you say great, Copy Data Management, I have all these copies of data, how do I reduce my cost, get greater utilization than I have and leverage the data? I love the title of the show here, Data Driven. You know, we know at the center of digital transformation if you can't become data driven, like the CMO Brian Regan got up on stage talk about that industrialization of data. How am I going along that journey being this, I collected data versus now, you know, data, you know, is the reason that I make decisions, how I make decisions, I get smarter. The Cloud of course is a huge enabler of this, there's all these services that I can instantly access to be able to get greater insight, and move along with that environment, and if you look underneath all of these backup companies, it's really how I can change that data into business value and drive my business, the metadata underneath and all those pieces, not just the wonky storage and technical solutions that make things better, and I get a faster ROI. It's that data at the core of what we do and how do I get that as a business to accelerate. Because we know IT needs to be able to respond back to the business and data needs to be that rocket fuel. >> Is it the case of data haves and data have-nots? I mean, Amazon has data >> I mean, you're right-- >> and Facebook has data. >> We're talking about Actifio, you brought that up, okay, on this segment, on the inside segment, which is cool, they're here at the event, but they have a good opportunity but they also, they got some challenges. I mean, the thing about Actifio is, to my earlier point, which side of the wave are they on? Are they out too much out front with virtualization and Amazon, the Cloud will take them away, or are they riding the Cloud wave, making that an enabler? And I think what really I like about Actifio is because they have a lot of virtualization capabilities, the question is can they scale that Stu, to containers and microservices, because, the real opportunity in this market, in my opinion, is going to build on the virtualization trend, and make container aware, microservices capabilities because if they don't, then that would be a tell sign. Now either way it's a hot M&A market right now, so I think being in the market, horse on the track as you say. You look at the tableau sales force deal monster numbers we are in clearly a hot IPO market and a major roll up market on the M&A side. I think clearly there's two types of companies, old and new, and that is really what people are looking at, are they part of the old guard, are they the new guard. So, you know, this to me is going to be a tell sign of what they do next, can they make the data driven value proposition, you articulated Stu, actually a reality It's going to come from the technology underneath. >> Well I think it's a really interesting point you're making because, Stu as you probably know, that Amazon announced the Amazon backup service right, and you talked about the backup guys and they're like, "Ah yeah it's backup, but it really doesn't do recovery, it's really not that robust". It's part of me says, "Uh oh"... >> Watch out. >> You better move fast", because Amazon has stated, "Hey if you don't move fast we're going to just keep gobbling", and you've seen Amazon do this. What are your thoughts on that? Can these specialists, can they survive, John's talking about M&A. Can the market support all these guys along with the big, you know, traditional guys like Veritas, and Dell EMC, and IBM and Combol? >> Right, well so Actifio started very much in the data center. They were before this Could wave really took off. It's really only in the last year that they've been sassifying their product. So the question is, does that underlying IP, which wasn't tied to hardware, but, you know, sat at really more of, you know, reminded us of that storage virtualization battles that we talked about for years, Dave, but now they are going in the Cloud. They've got all the partnerships in the Cloud, but they are competing against those new vendors that you talked about like Cohesity and Rubric out there, and there's big money chasing this environment. So, you know, I want to talk to the customers here and find out, you know, where they are using them, and especially some of those first customers using this--. >> Well they clearly need a Cloud play cause that's clearly where the action is. But if you look at what's going on with Amazon, Azure, and Google you see a lot of on premises, Stu, because that's where the customers are. So just because the customers are currently not migrating their existing workloads to the Cloud doesn't mean it's not going to happen. So I think there's an opportunity for any company like Actifio, who may or may not be on the curve on the tech side, one little misfire on a tech bet could cripple the company and also make the company. There's a lot of high risk, reward ratio. How they handle containers. How they build on virtualizations. Virtualization going to to be part of the future with Cloud. These are the kind of the dynamics that are going to be in play, and they got some time on their hands because the on premises growth is because the clients are trying to figure out what to do and they're not going to be migrating, lifting, and shifting workloads all off to the Cloud. New will be Cloud based, but enterprises have proven why we are in multi-Cloud and hybrid-Cloud conversation, that... The enterprise on premises is not going away anytime soon. >> I want to ask you guys, John you specifically, about this sort of new Silicon Valley growth model and how companies are achieving escape velocity. When you and I made our first trip to Barcelona, I was having dinner with David Scott who was the CEO of 3PAR and he said to me, When I came to 3PAR the board said, "Hey we're willing to invest 30 million dollars in this company". And David Scott said to them, "I need way more, I need 80 million dollars". Today 80 million dollars is nothing. You saw, you know, Pure Storage hit escape velocity, was just throwing money, and growing at the problem. You're seeing Cohesity-- >> Well you can debate that. I mean, If you have to build a rocket ship, hit critical mass and you want to fund that, you're going to to need an enterprise. However, there's arguments on the south side that you can actually get fly wheel effect going early with less capital. So again, that's 3PAR-- >> But so that's my point. >> Well so that's 3PAR, that was 2009. >> So, yeah that was early days so that's ancient history. But software is generally supposed to be a capital efficient market, yet these companies are raising many hundreds and hundreds of millions, you know, half a billion dollar raises and they are putting it largely in promotion. Is that the new model, is that sustainable, in your view? >> Well I think you're conflating capital market dynamics with viable companies to invest in. I think there's a robust seed in series A market but the series A market and Silicon Valley is you know, 15 to 25 million, it used to be 3 to 5. So the dynamics are changing on funding. There's just not enough companies, horses on the track, to deploy capital at tranches of 30, 50, 80 million. So the capital markets are clearly going to have the money available so it's a market for the startups and the broke companies. That's separate from actually winning. So you've got slacks going public this weeks, you have other companies who have built business on a sass fly wheel, and then everything else is gravy in terms of the go to market, they got a couple hundred million. I think slack got close to a billion dollars in cash that they've raised. So they're flooded with cash, they'll never spend it all. So there are some companies that can achieve success like that. Others have to buy market share, they got to push and build out a sales force, and it's going to be a function of the role of customer, customization, specialism, and whatnot. But with AI machine leaning there's more efficiencies coming in so I think the modern company can do more with less. >> What do you think of the ride sharing on IPOs, Uber and Lift, do you abol? Do you like 'em or do you think it's just, they're losing too money and can't sustain it? >> I was thinking about that this morning after looking at the article in the Wall Street Journal in our coverage on Silicon angle. You look at Zoom communications, I like models that actually can take a simple concept and an existing mature market and disrupt it by being Cloud efficient and completely sass and data driven. That is an example of success. That to me, Zoom Communications and Zscaler, another company that we talk to, these are companies that were built with a specific value proposition that made the product and they were targeting mature markets with leaders in it. Video conferencing, Webex, Citrix, Zoom came out of nowhere, optimized on simple value proposition, used Cloud scale and data, and crushed it. Uber, Lift, little bit different issue. They're losing money but I would bet on the long term that that is going to be the used case for how people will have transportation. I think that's the long game and I think that without regulatory kind of pressure, without, there's regulatory issues that's really the big risk. But I believe that Uber and Lift absolutely will be long brands and just like Facebook was early on, although they threw off a lot of cash, those guys are building for penetration, and that's where the funding matters. Penetration is critical. Now they're the standard, and people really don't take taxis anymore, but they're really using the ride sharing. And you get the scooters, you get the bikes, they're all sequencing into these adjacent markets which drains more cash but builds the brand, builds the footprint. >> Well that's what I want to ask you. So people compare the early Uber, Lift, Taxi, Ride sharing to Amazon selling books, but there's all these other adjacencies. You have a thought on this? >> Well, just, you know, right, Uber Eats is a huge opportunity for that environment and autonomous vehicles everybody talks about, but it's still quite a ways out. So there are a lot of different- >> Scooters are the same, we're in San Diego, there are 8 gazillion scooters. >> San Diego had fun, you know, going around on their electronic scooters, boy, talk about the gig economy, they pay people at the night, to like go pay by the recharge you do on that, what is the future of work, >> Yeah, that's a great point. >> and how can we have that-- >> Uber going to look a lot like Amazon. You subsidize the front end retail side of the business, but look at the data that they throw up. Uber's data that they're gathering on, not only customer behavior, but just mapping services, 3-D mapping is going to be huge, so you've got these cars that are essentially bots on the road, providing massive mapping and traffic analysis. So you're going to start to see data driven, like Actifio slogan here, be a big part of all design decisions and value proposition from any company out there. And if they're not data driven I think they're going to be toast. >> Probably could because there's that data and that machine learning underneath, that can optimize, you know, where the people are, how I use the system, such a huge wave that we're watching. >> How about one last topic which is heavily data driven, it's Facebook. Facebook is obviously a data driven company, the Facebook crypto play, I love it, I love Facebook. I'm a bull on Facebook, I think it's been beat up. I think, two billion users is hard to replicate, but what's your thoughts on their crypto play? >> Well it's kind of a middle finger to the United States of America but it's a great catalyst for the international market because crypto needed a whale to come in and bring all those users in. Bad timing, in my mind, for Facebook, because given all the anti-trust and regulatory conversations, what better way to show your threat to the world order when you say we're going to run a banking system with a collection of international companies. I think the US is going to look at this and say, "Oh my God! They can't even be trusted to handle personal information and we're going to now let them run a banking system? Run monetary, basically World Bank equivalent infrastructure?" No frickin way! I think this is going to to be a major road to home. I think Facebook has to really make this an ecosystem play if they want to make it work, that's their telegraphic move they're saying, "Hey we want to do for the community but we got our own wallet and we got our own network". But they bring a lot to the table so it's going to be a really interesting dynamic to see the coalescing around Facebook because they could make the market. Look what Instagram did to Snapchat. They literally killed the company, took all their users. That is what's going to happen in the digital money economy when Facebook brings billions of users user experience with money. What happened with Snapchat with Instagram is going to happen to the World Bank if this continues. >> Where do you stand on the government breaking up big tech? >> So Dave, you know, you look in these companies, it's not easy to pull those apart. I don't think our government understands how most of big tech works. You know, take Amazon and AWS, that's one company underneath it. You know, Facebook, Microsoft. You know, Microsoft went through all these issues. Question Dave, we've had lots of debates on Twitter you know, are they breaking the law, are they not doing trust? I have some trust issues with Facebook myself, but most of the big companies up there I don't think the anti-trust kicks in, I don't think it makes sense to pull them apart. >> Stu, the Facebook story and the YouTube story are simply this, they have been hiding under the platform rules, of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and they are an editing platform so you can't sue them. Okay, once they become a publisher they could be sued. Just like CNN, Fox News, and everybody else. And we're publishers. So they've been hiding behind the platform. That gig is up. They're going to have to address are you a platform or are you a publisher? You're making editing decisions around what users can see with software, you are essentially editing the feed, that is a publisher role, with that becomes responsibility, and then obviously regulartory. >> Well Facebook is conflicted right now. They're trying to figure out which side of the fence to go on. >> No no no! They want one side! The platform side! They're make billions of dollars! >> Yeah but so they're making decisions about you know, which content to show and whether they monetize it. And when it's controversial content, they'll turn down the ads a little bit but they won't completely eliminate it sometimes. >> So, Dave, the only thing that the partisans in politics seem to agree on though is that big tech has too much power. You know, What's your take on that? >> Well so I think that if they are breaking the law then they should be moderated. But I don't think the answer is to go hard after Elizabeth Warren. Hard after them and break them up. I think you got to start with okay, because you break these companies up what's going to happen is they're going to be worth more, it's going to be AT&T all over again. >> While you guys were at Sysco Live, we covered this at Amazon Web Service and Public Sector Summit. The real issue in government, Stu, is there's too much tech for bad on the PR side, and there's not enough tech for good. Tech is not bad, tech is good. There's not enough promotion around the apps around there. There's real venture funds being created to promote tech for good. That's going to where the tide will turn. When does the tech industry start doing good stuff, not bad stuff. >> All right we've got to wrap. John, thanks for sitting in. Thank you for watching. Be right back, we're here at Actifio Data Driven 2019. From Boston this is theCUBE, be right back. (upbeat techno music)

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering Activia 2019 data-driven to you by Activia welcome to Boston everybody this is Dave Volante and I'm here with stupid man finally still in our hometown you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we're covering actifi Oh data-driven hashtag data-driven 19 activity it was a company that is focus started focused on copy data management they sort of popularized the term the I the concept the idea of data virtualization there's big data digital transformation all the buzz it's kind of been a tailwind for the company and we followed them quite closely over the years poly st. Claire is here she's the CEO of the state of Massachusetts that's chief of ditch and chief data officer Holly thanks for coming on the Q thanks for having me so it's kind of rare that somebody shares the title of chief digital officer of chief data officer I think it's rare right now I think that would change you think it will change I think those two roles will come together I just think data fuels our digital world and it both creates the content and also monitors how we're doing and it's just inevitably I think either they're gonna be joined at the hip or it's gonna be the same person that's interesting I always thought the chief data officer sort of emerged from this wonky back-office role data quality of this careful the word walking okay well yeah let's talk about that but the chief digital officer is kind of the mover the shaker has a little marketing genius but but okay so you see those two roles coming together that maybe makes sense because why because there's there some tension in a lot of organizations between those two roles well I think the challenge with the way that sometimes people think about data is they think about it's only a technical process data is actually very creative and you also have to tell a story in order to be good with it it's the same thing as marketing but it's just a little bit of a different hue a different type of audience a different type of pace there's a technical component to the data work but I'm looking at my organization that I'm surrounded by additional technical folks CTO CSO privacy officer CIO so we have a lot of supports that might take away some of those roles are scrunched in under the data officer or the digital so I used to turn wonky before it kind of triggered you a little bit but but you're a modeler you're a data scientist your development programmer right no but I know enough to I know enough to read code and get in trouble okay so you can direct coders and you have data scientists working for you yeah right so you've got that entire organization underneath you and your your mission is blank fill in the blank so our mission is to use the best information technology to ensure that every users experience with the Commonwealth is fast easy and wicked awesome awesome Holly our team just got back from a very large public sector event down in DC and digging into you know how our agency is doing with you know cloud force initiatives how are they doing the city environments you were state of Massachusetts and you know rolled out that that first chief data if you keep dipped officer gets a little bit of insight inside how Massachusetts doing with these latest waves of innovation uh well you know we have our legacy systems and as our opportunities come up to improve those systems our reinvest in them we are taking a step forward to cloud we're not so dogmatic that it's cloud only but it's definitely cloud when it's appropriate I do think we'll always have some on-prem services but really when it's possible whether it's a staff service off-the-shelf or it's a cloud environment to make sense than we are moving to that in your keynote this morning you you talked about something called data minimalism yeah and wonder if you could explain that for audience because for the longest time it's been well you want to hoard all the data you want to get all the data and you know what do you do with it how do you manage you right right I mean data's only as good as your ability to use it and I often find that we're ingesting all this data and we don't really know what to do with it or really rather our business leaders and decision-makers can't quite figure out how to connect that to the mission or to act properly interrogate the data to get the information they want and so this idea is an idea that's sort of coming a little bit out of Europe and or some of the other trends we see around some cyber security and hacking worlds and the idea is this actually came from fjords Digital Trends for 2019 is data minimalism the idea is that you strongly connect your business objectives to the data collection program that you have you don't just collect data until you're sure that it supports your objectives so you know one of the things that I also talked about in the keynote was not just data minimalism but doing a try test iterate approach we often collect data hoping to see that we can create a change I think we need to prove that we can create the change before we do a widespread scalable data collection program because often we collect data and you still can't see what you're doing has an effect within the data the signals too strong or too too weak or you're asking the wrong question of the data or it's the wrong plectra collection of the technique and that's largely driven from a sort of privacy a privacy privacy the reality of how costly sometimes the kennedys but you know storage of data is cheap but the actual reality of moving it and saving it and knowing where it is and accessing it later that takes time and energy of your of your actual people so I think it's just important for us to think carefully about a resource in government we have a little less resources sometimes in the private sector so we're very strategic on what we do and so I think we need to really think about the data we use if the pendulum swings remember back to the days of you know 2006 the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure said okay you got to keep electronic records for whatever seven years of depending on industry and people said okay let's get rid of it as soon as we can data was viewed as a liability and then of course all the big data height we've talked about a little bit in your in your speech everybody said I could collect everything throw it into a data Lake and we all know those became data swamps so do you feel like the pendulum is swinging and there's maybe a little balance are we reaching an equilibrium is it going to be a you know hard shift back to data as a liability what are your thoughts well I think isn't with any trend there's always a little bit of a pendulum swing as we're learning it's with it with the equilibrium is equilibrium is I think that's a great word I think the piece that I neglected to mention is the relationship to the consumer trust you know for us in government we have to have the trust of our constituents we do have a higher bar than public sector in terms of handling data in a way that's respectful of individuals privacy and their security of their data and so I think to the extent that we are able to lend transparency and show the utility and the data we're using and that will gain the trust of our users or customers but if we continue to do things behind the scenes and not be overt about it I think then that can cause more problems I think we face is organizations to ask ourselves is having more data worth the sort of vulnerability introduces and the possible liability of trust of our of our customers when you betray to test over your customers it's really hard to replace that and so you know to a certain extent I think we should be more deliberate about our data and earn the trust of our customers okay how how does Massachusetts look at the boundary of data between the public sector and the private sector I've talked to you know some states where you know we're helping business off parking by giving you know new mobile apps access to that information you talked a little bit about health care you know I've done interviews with the massive macleod initiative here locally how do you look at that balance of sharing I think it is a real balance you know I don't think we do very much of it yet and we certainly don't share data that were not allowed to by law and we have very strict laws here in Massachusetts the stricter at the ten most states and so I think it's very strategic when we do share data we are looking for opportunities when we can when I talk about demand driven data I look forward to opening the conversation a little bit to ask people what data are they looking for to ask businesses and different institutions we have throughout the Commonwealth what data would help you do your job better and grow our economy and our jobs and I think that's a conversation we need to have over time to figure out what the right balances someday it'll be easier for us to share than others and some will never be able to share the first data scientist I've ever met is somebody I interviewed the amazing Hilary Mason and she said something that I want to circle back to something you said in your talk if she said the hardest part of my job or one of the hardest parts is people come to me with data and and it's the most valuable thing I can do is show them which questions to ask and you have talked about well what's a lot of times you don't know what questions to ask until you look at the data or vice versa what comes first the chicken or the egg what's your experience pin well I do think we need to be driven by the business objectives and goals it doesn't mean there's not an iterative process in there somewhere but you know data wonks we can we can just throw data all day long and still might not give you the answer there forward but I think it's really important for us to be driven by the business and I think executives don't know how to ask the questions of the data they don't know how to interrogate it or honestly more realistically we don't have a date of actually answers the question they want to know so we often have to use proxies for that information but I do think if there's an iterative after you get to a starting point so I do think knowing what the business question is first I know you gotta go but I want to ask your last question bring it back to the state where both Massachusetts residents and your services it sounds like you're picking off some some good wins with a through the fast ROI I mean you mentioned you know driver's license renewals etc how about procurement has procurement been a challenge from the state standpoint you are you looking at sort of the digital process and how to streamline procurement that is a conversation that the secretary what is currently in and I think it's a good one I don't think we have any any solutions yet but I think we have a lot of the issues that were struggling with but we're not alone all public sectors struggling with this type of procurement question so we're working on it all right last question there's quick thoughts on you know what you've seen here I know you're in and out but data-driven yeah it's a great theme it's a really exciting agenda there's people for all these different organizations and approaches to data-driven you know from movie executives and casting to era it's just really exciting to see the program it's Nate Claire thanks so much I'm coming on the queue thank you great to meet you okay keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break well the cube is here at data-driven day one special coverage we'll be right back

>> from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering active eo 2019. Data driven you by activity. >> Welcome back to Boston. Everybody watching the Cube, the leader and on the ground tech coverage. My name is David Locke. They still minimus here. John Barrier is also in the house. We're covering the active FIO data driven 19 event. Second year for this conference. It's all about data. It's all about being data driven. Charlie Quanis here. He's the director of data and a I offering management and IBM. Charlie, thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Happy to be here. Thank you. >> So active Theo has had a long history with IBM. Effect with company got started at a time the marketplace took a virtual ization product and allowed them to be be first really and then get heavily into the data virtualization. They since evolved that you guys are doing a lot of partnerships together. We're going to get into that, But talk about your role with an IBM and you know, what is this data and a I offering management thing? >> He absolutely eso data and a I is our business unit within IBN Overall Corporation, our focus and our mission is really about helping our customers drive better business outcomes through data. Leveraging data in the contacts and the pursuit of analytics and artificial intelligence are augmented intelligence. >> So >> a portion of the business that I'm part of his unified governance and integration and you think about data and I as a whole, you could think about it in the context of the latter day. I often times when we talk about data and I we talk about the foundational principles and capabilities that are required to help companies and our customers progress on their journey. They II and it really is about the information architecture that we help them build. That information architectures essentially a foundational prerequisite around that journey to a i. R. Analytics and those layers of the latter day I r. Collecting the data and making sure you haven't easily accessible to the individual's need it organizing the data. That's where the unified governance in Immigration folio comes into play. Building trusted business ready data, high quality with governance around that making shorts available to be used later, thie analyzed layer in terms of leveraging the data for analytics and die and then infuse across the organization, leveraging those models across the organization. So within that context of data and I, we partnered with Active Theo at the end of 2018. >> So before we get into that, I have started dropped. You know, probably Rob Thomas is, and I want a double click on what you just said. Rob Thomas is is famous for saying There is no way I without a training, no, no artificial intelligence without information architecture so sounds good. You talk about governance. That's obviously part of it. But what does that mean? No A without a. >> So it is really about the fundamental prerequisites to be able to have the underlying infrastructure around the data assets that you have. A fundamental tenet is that data is one of your tremendous assets. Any enterprise may have a lot of time, and effort has been spent investing and man hours invested into collecting the data, making sure it's available. But at the same time, it hasn't been freed up to be. A ploy used for downstream purpose is whether it's operational use cases or analytical cases, and the information architecture is really about How do you frame your data strategy so that you have that data available to use and to drive business outcomes later. And those business outcomes, maybe results of insights that are driven out of the way the data but they got could also be part of the data pipeline that goes into feeding things like application development or test data management. And that's one of the areas that were working with that feeling. >> So the information architecture's a framework that you guys essentially publish and communicate to your clients. It doesn't require that you have IBM products plugged in, but of course, you can certainly plug in. IBM products are. If you're smart enough to develop information architect here presumably, and you got to show where your products fit. You're gonna sell more stuff, but it's not a prerequisite. I confuse other tooling if I wanted to go there. The framework is a good >> prerequisite, the products and self of course, now right. But the framework is a good foundational. Construct around how you can think about it so that you can progress along that journey, >> right? You started talking about active fio. You're relationship there. See that created the Info sphere Virtual data pipeline, right? Why did you developed that product or we'll get into it? >> Sure, it's all part of our overall unified covers and integration portfolio. Like I said, that's that organized layer of the latter day I that I was referring to. And it's all about making sure you have clear visibility and knowing what they had assets that you have. So we always talk about in terms of no trust in use. No, the data assets you have. Make sure you understand the data quality in the classification around that data that you have trust the data, understand the lineage, understand how it's been Touch Haussmann, transformed building catalog around that data and then use and make sure it's usable to downstream applications of down street individuals. And the virtual data pipeline offering really helps us on that last category around using and making use of the data, the assets that you have putting it into directly into the hands of the users of that data. So whether they be data scientist and data engineers or application developers and testers. So the virtual data pipeline and the capabilities based on activity sky virtual appliance really help build a snapshot data provide the self service user interface to be able to get into the hands of application developers and testers or data engineers and data scientist. >> And why is that important? Is it because they're actually using the same O. R. O R. Substantially similar data sets across their their their their work stream. Maybe you could explain that it's important >> because the speed at which the applications are being built insights are being driven is requiring that there is a lot more agility and ability to self service into the data that you need. Traditional challenges that we see is you think about preparing to build an application or preparing to build an aye aye model, building it, deploy it and managing it the majority of the time. 80% of the time. Todd spilled front, preparing the data talking, trying to figure out what data you need asking for and waiting for two weeks to two months to try to get access to that data getting. And they're realizing, Oh, I got the wrong data. I need to supplement that. I need to do another iteration of the model going back to try to get more data on. That's you have the area that application developers and data scientists don't necessarily want to be spending their >> time on. >> And so >> we're trying to shrink >> that timeframe. And how do we shrink? That is by providing business users our line of business users, data scientist application developers with the individuals that are actually using the data to provide their own access to it, right To be able to get that snapshot that point in time, access to that point of production data to be able to then infuse it into their development process. They're testing process or the analytic development process >> is we're we're do traditional tooling were just traditional tooling fit in this sort of new world because you remember what the Duke came out. It was like, Oh, that enterprise data warehouses dead. And then you ask customers like What's one of the most important things you're doing in your big data? Play blind and they'd say, Oh, yeah, we need R w. So I could now collect more data for lower costs keep her longer low stuff. But the traditional btw was still critical, but well, you were just describing, you know, building a cube. You guys own Cognos Obviously, that's one of the biggest acquisitions that I'm being made here is a critical component. Um, you talk about data quality, integration, those things. It's all the puzzle fits together in this larger mosaic and help us understand that. Sure >> and well, One of the fundamental things to understand is you have to know what you have right, and the data catalogue is a critical component of that data strategy. Understanding where your enterprise assets sit, they could be structured information that may be a instruction information city and file repositories or e mails, for example. But understanding what you have, understanding how it's been touched, how it's been used, understanding the requirements and limitations around that data understanding. Who are the owners of that data? So building that catalog view of your overall enterprise assets fundamental starting point from a governess standpoint. And then from there, you can allow access to individuals that are interested in understanding and leveraging that date assets that you may have in one pool here challenges data exists across enterprise everywhere. Right silos that may have rose in one particular department that then gets murdered in with another department, and then you have two organization that may not even know what the other individual has. So the challenge is to try to break down those silos, get clarity of the visibility around what assets so that individuals condemned leverage that data for whatever uses they may have, whether it be development or testing or analytics. >> So if I could generalize the problem, Yeah, too much data, not enough value. And I'll talk about value in terms of things that you guys do that I'm inferring. Risk reduction. Correct uh, speed to insights. Andan. Ultimately, lowering costs are increasing revenue. That's kind of what it's all >> the way to talk about business outcomes in terms of increase revenue, decrease costs or reduce risk, right in terms of governance, those air the three things that you want to unlock for your customers and you don't think about governance and creating new revenue streams. We generally don't think about in terms of reducing costs, but you do think about it oftentimes in terms of reducing your risk profile and compliance. But the ability to actually know your data built trust and then use that data really does open up different opportunities to actually build new application new systems of engagement uses a record new applications around analytics and a I that will unlock those different ways that we can market to customers. Cell two customers engage our own employees. >> Yes. So the initial entry into the organism the budget, if you will, is around that risk reduction. Right? Can you stand that? I got all this data and I need to make sure that I'm managing a corner on the edicts of my organization. But you actually seeing we play skeptic, you're really seeing value beyond that risk reduction. I mean, it's been nirvana in the compliance and governance world, not just compliance and governance and, you know, avoiding fees and right getting slapped on the wrist or even something worse? Sure, but we can actually, through the state Equality Initiative and integration, etcetera, etcetera Dr. Other value. You actually seeing that? >> Yes. We are actually, particularly last year with the whole onslaught of GDP are in the European Union, and the implications of GDP are here in the U. S. Or other parts of the world. Really was a pervasive topic on a lot of what we were talking about was specifically that compliance make sure you stay on the right side of the regulation, but the same time investing in that data architecture, information, architecture, investing in the governance programme actually allowed our customers to understand the different components that are touching the individual. Because it's all about individual rights and individual privacy. It's understanding what they're buying, understanding what information we're collecting on them, understanding what permissions and consent that we have, the leverage their information really allowed. Our customers actually delivered that information and for a different purpose. Outside of the whole compliance mindset is compliance is a difficult nut to crack. There's requirements around it, but at the same time, they're our best effort requirements around that as well. So the driver for us is not necessarily just about compliance, But it's about what more can you do with that govern data that you already have? Because you have to meet those compliance department anyway, to be able to flip the script and talk about business value, business impact revenue, and that's everything. >> Now you So you're only about what, six months in correct this part of the partnership? All right, so it's early days, but how's it going and what can we expect going forward? >> Don't. Great. We have a terrific partner partnership with Octavio, Like tippy a virtual Or the IBM virtual data pipeline offering is part of our broader portfolio within unified governance and fits nicely to build out some of the test data management capability that we've already had. Optimal portfolio is part of our capability. Said it's really been focused around test data management building synthetic data, orchestrating test data management as well. And the virtual data pipeline offering actually is a nice compliment to that to build out our the robust portfolio now. >> All right, Charlie. Well, hey, thanks very much for coming in the house. The event >> has been terrific. It's been terrific. It's It's amazing to be surrounded by so many people that are excited about data. We don't get that everywhere. >> They were always excited about, Right, Charlie? Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Keep it right there, buddy. We're back with our next guest. A Valon Day, John. Furry and student Amanda in the house. You're watching the cube Active eo active Fio data driven. 2019. Right back

>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Covering Actifio 2019 Data Driven. Brought to you by Actifio. >> Here we are in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Stu Miniman, this is theCUBE at the special, at Data Driven '19, Actifio's user event. Happy to bring on a CUBE alum who's a partner of Actifio, Phil Buckellew, who's General Manager of IBM Cloud Object Storage. Phil, thanks for coming back. >> Great, great to be here Stu. >> All right, so object storage. Why don't you give us first just kind of an encapsulation of kind of the state of your business today. >> Sure, object storage is really an extremely important business for the industry today because really it's a new way accessing data, it's been around obviously for a decade or so but really, it's increasingly important because it's a way to cost-effectively store a lot of data, to really to be able to get access to that data in new and exciting ways, and with the growth in the volume of data, of particularly unstructured data, like 103 zettabytes by 2023 I think I heard from the IDC guys, that really kind of shows how important being able to handle that volume of data really is. >> So Phil, I go back, think about 12 years ago, all the technologists in this space were like, "The future of storage is object," and I was working at one of the big storage companies and I'm like, "Well we've been doing block and file," and there was this big gap out there, and kind of quietly object's taken over the world because underneath a lot of the cloud services there, object's there, so IBM made a big acquisition in this space. Talk about, you know, customers that I talk to it's not like they come out and say, "Oh jeez, I'm buying object storage, "I'm thinking about object storage." They've got use cases and services that they're using that happen to have object underneath. Is that what you hear from your users? >> Yeah, there's a couple of different buying groups that exist in the object storage market today. The historic market is really super large volumes. I mean, we're unique in that IBM acquired the Cleversafe company back in 2015 and that technology is technology we've expanded upon and it really, it's great because it can go to exabyte scale and beyond and that's really important for certain use cases. So some customers that have high volumes of videos and other unstructured data, that is really a super good fit for those clients. Additionally, clients that really have the need for highly resilient, because the other thing that's important the way that we built our object storage is to be able to have a lot of resiliency, to be able to run across multiple data centers, to be able to use erasure coding to ensure the data's protected, that's really a large part of the value, and because you can do that at scale without having downtime when you upgrade, those are really a lot of core benefits of object storage. >> Right, that resiliency is kind of built into the way we do it and that was something that was just kind of a mind shift as opposed to, okay I've got to have this enterprise mindset with an HA configuration and everything with N plus whatever version of it. Object's going to give you some of that built-in. The other thing I always found really interesting is storing data is okay, there's some value there, but how do I gain leverage out of the data? And there's the metadata underneath that helps. You talk about video, you talk about all these kinds there. If I don't understand what I've got and how I'd leverage it, it's not nearly as valuable for me, and that's something, you know really that one of the key topics of this show is, how do I become data driven, is the show, and that I have to believe is something critically important to your customers. >> Absolutely, and really object storage is the foundation for modern cloud-native data lakes, if you will, because it's cost-effective enough you can drop any kind of storage in there and then you can really get value from those assets wherever you are, and wherever you're accessing the data. We've taken the same technology that was the exabyte scale on-premise technology, and we've put it in the IBM public cloud, and so that really allows us to be able to deliver against all kinds of use cases with the data sets that clients want, and there's a lot of great innovation that's happening especially on the cloud side. We've got the ability to query that data, any kind of rectangular data with standard ANSI SQL statements, and that just really allows clients to unlock the potential of those data sets, so really good innovation going on in that space to unlock the value of the data that you put inside of object storage. >> All right, Phil let's make the connection. Actifio's here, IBM OEM's the solution. So, talk about the partnership and what customers are looking for when they're looking at their IPs. Sure, so, quite a ways prior to the partnership our object storage team partnered up with the Actifio team at a large financial services customer that recognized the growth in the volume of the data that they had, that had some unique use cases like cyber resiliency. They get attacked with ransomware attacks, they needed to have a standard way to have those data sets and those databases running in a resilient way against object storage that can still be mounted and used, effectively immediately, in case of ransomware attacks, and so that plus a lot of other traditional backup use cases is what drew the IBM Cloud Object Storage team and the Actifio team together. Successful deployments at large customers are really where we got our traction. And with that we also really began to notice the uptick in clients that wanted to use, they wanted to do test data management, they wanted, they needed to be able to have DevOps team that needed to spin up a replica of this database or that database very fast, and, you know, what we found was the combination of the Actifio product, which we've OEM'd as IBM Virtual Data Pipeline, allows us to run those virtual databases extremely cost-effectively backed by object storage, versus needing to make full replicas on really expensive block storage that takes a long time. >> Well yeah, we'd actually done research on this a number of years ago. Copies are great, but how do I leverage that right? From the developer team it's, I want to have something that mirrors what I have in production, not just some test data, so the more I can replicate that, the better. Phil, please, go ahead. >> There's some really important parts of that whole story, of being able to get that data flow right, to be able to go do point-in-time recoveries of those databases so that the data is accurate, but also being able to mask out that PII or sensitive information, credit card data or others that you really shouldn't be exposing to your testers and DevOps people. Being able to have the kind of-- (Phil laughs) >> Yeah, yeah, shouldn't because, you know, there's laws and lawsuits and security and all these things we have. >> Good, good, absolutely. >> So, Phil, we're talking a lot about data, you've actually got some new data to share with us, a recent survey that was done, should we share some of your data with us? >> Yeah, we did some, we did a, the ESG guys actually worked with us to build out a piece of research that looked at what would it cost to take a 50 terabyte Oracle 12c database and effectively spin up five copies the way you traditionally would so that different test teams can hammer away against that data set. And we compared that to running the VDP offering with our Cloud Object Storage solution. You know, distances apart, we had one where the source database is in Dallas and the destination database is in Washington, D.C. over a 10 gigabyte link, and we were able to show that you could set up five replicas of the database in like 90 minutes, compared with the two weeks that it would take to do full replication, because you were going against object storage, which runs about 2.3 cents per gigabyte per month, versus block storage fully loaded, which runs about 58 cents per gigabyte per month. The economics would blow away. And the fact that you could even do queries, because object storage is interesting. Yes, if you're using, if you have microsecond response times for small queries you got to run some of that content on block storage, but for traditional queries, we look at, like, really big queries that would run against 600 rows, and we were half the time that you would need on traditional block storage. So, for those DevOps use cases where you're doing that test in development you can have mass data, five different copies, and you can actually point back in time because really, the Actifio technology is really super in that it can go do point-in-time, it was able to store the right kind of data so the developers can get the most recent current copies of the data. All in, it was like 80% less than what you would have paid doing it the traditional way. >> Okay, so Phil, you started talking a little bit about some of the cloud pieces, you know, Actifio in the last year launched their first SaaS offering Actifio GO. How much of these solutions are for the cloud versus on-premises these days? >> Absolutely, so one of the benefits of using a virtual data approach is being able to leverage cloud economics 'cause a lot of clients they want to do, you know, they want to be able to do the test in dev which has ups and downs and peaks and valleys when you need to use those resources, the cloud is really an ideal way to do those types of workloads. And so, the integration work that we've done with the Actifio team around VDP allows you to replicate or have virtual copies of those databases in the cloud where you want to do your testing, or we can do it in traditional on-prem object storage environments. Really, whatever makes most sense for the client is where we can stand up those environments. >> The other thing I wonder if you could expand on a little bit more, you talked about, like, cloud-native deployment and what's happening there. How does that tie into this discussion? >> Well, obviously modern architectures and ways of Agile, ways of building things, cloud-native with microservices, those are all extremely important, but you've got to be able to access the data, and it's that core data that no matter how much you do with putting Kubernetes around all of your existing applications you've still got to be able to access that core data, often systems record data, which is sitting on these standard databases of record, and so being able to have the VDP technology, be able to replicate those, stand those up like in our public cloud right next to all of our Kubernetes service and all the other technologies, it gives you the kind of full stack that you need to go do that dev in test, or run production workloads if you prefer from a public cloud environment, without having all of the burdens of running the data centers and maintaining things on your own. >> Okay, so Phil, everybody here for this two day event are going to get a nice, you know, jolt of where Actifio fits. You know, lots of orange here at the show. Give us the final word of what does it mean with orange and blue coming together. >> Well absolutely, we think this is going to be great for our clients. We've got, you know, tons of interested clients in this space because they see the value of being able to take what Actifio's done, to be able to virtualize that data, combine it with some of the technologies we've got for object storage or even block storage, to be able to serve up those environments in a super cost-effective way, all underlined by one of our core values at IBM, which is really trust and being responsible. And so, we often say that there's no AI, which all of this data leads up to, without information architecture and that's really where we specialize, is providing that governance, all the masking, all of the things that you need to feel confident that the data you've got is in the right hands, being used the right way, to be able to give you maximum advantage for your business, so we're super excited about the partnership. >> Phil, definitely a theme we heard at IBM Think, there is no AI without the IA, so, Phil Buckellew, thanks so much for joining us, sharing all the updates on what IBM is doing here with Actifio. >> Great, great to be here. >> All right, and we'll be back with more coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts at Actifio Data Driven 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (futuristic music)

>> from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering active eo 2019. Data driven you by activity. >> Welcome back to Boston. Everybody watching the Cube, the leader and on the ground tech coverage money was David wanted here with my co host. A student of John for is also in the house. This is active FiOS data driven 19 conference. They're second year, John. Her stick is here is the co founder and CEO of on shape John. Thanks for coming in the Cube. Great to have you great to be here. So love the cofounder. I always ask your father. Why did you start the company? Well, we found it on shape because >> we saw an opportunity to improve how every product on Earth gets developed. Let people who develop products do it faster, B'more, innovative, and do it through a new generation software platform based in the cloud. That's our vision for on shape, That's why. Okay, >> so that's great. You start with the widened. The what is just new generation software capabilities to build the great products visualized actually create >> way took the power of cloud web and mobile and used it to re implement a lot of the classic tools for product development. Three d cad Data management Workflow Bill of Materials. He's may not mean anything to you, but they mean a lot to product developers, and we believe by by moving in the cloud by rethinking them for the cloud we can give people capabilities they've never had before. >> John, bring us in tight a little bit. So you know, I think I've heard a lot the last few years. It's like, Well, I could just do everything a simulation computer simulation. We can have all these models. They could make their three D printings changing the way I build prototypes. So what's kind of state of the state and in your fields? So >> the state of the Art R field is to model product in three dimensions in the computer before you build it for lots of reasons. For simulation for three D printing, you have to have a CAD model to do it, to see how it'll look, how parts fit together, how much it will cost. Really, every product today is built twice. First, it's built in the computer in three dimensions, is a digital model, then it's built in the real world, and what we're trying to do is make those three D modeling and data management collaboration tools to take them to a whole nother level to turbo charge it, if you will, so that teams can can work together even if they're distribute around the world. They work faster. They don't have to pay a tax to install and Karen feed for these systems. You're very complicated, a whole bunch of other benefits. So we talk about the cloud model >> you're talking about a sass model, a subscription model of different customer experience, all of the above, all of the above. Yeah, it's definitely a sass model we do on Ly SAS Way >> hosted and, uh, Amazon. Eight of us were all in with Amazon. It's a it's a subscription model, and we provide a much better, much more modern, better, more productive experience for the user CIA disrupting the traditional >> cad business. Is that Is that right? I mean more than cat cat Plus because there's no such thing as a cad company anymore. We're essentially disrupting the systems that we built because I've been in this business 30 38 years now. I've been doing this. I feel like I'm about half done. Really, really talking about >> your career. Way to start out. Well, I grew up in Chicago. I went to M I t and majored in mechanical engineering and knew howto program computers. And I go to get an internship in 1981 and they say computers, mechanical injury. You need to work on CAD. And I haven't stopped since, you know, because Because we're not done, you know, still still working here. You would >> have me, right? You can't let your weight go dynamic way before we get off on the M I t. Thing you were part of, you know, quite well known group. And Emmet tell us a little bit >> about what you're talking about. The American society of Mechanical Engineer >> has may I was actually an officer and and as any I know your great great events, but the number 21 comes to >> mind you're talking about the MIT blackjack team? Yes, I was, ah, player on the MIT blackjack team, and it's the team featured in movies, TV shows and all that. Yeah, very exciting thing to be doing while I was working at the cath lab is a grad student, you know, doing pursuing my legitimate career. There is also also, uh, playing blackjack. Okay, so you got to add some color to that. So where is the goal of the M I T. Blackjack team? What did you guys do? The goal of the M I t blackjack team was honestly, to make money using legal means of skill to Teo obtain an edge playing blackjack. And that's what we did using. Guess what? The theme of data which ties into this data driven conference and what active Eo is doing. I wish we had some of the data tools of today. I wish we had those 30 years ago. We could have We could have done even more, but it really was to win money through skill. Okay, so So you you weren't wired. Is that right? I mean, it was all sort of No, at the time, you could not use a computer in the casino. Legally, it was illegal to use a computer, so we didn't use it. We use the computer to train ourselves to analyze data. To give a systems is very common. But in the casino itself, we were just operating with good old, you know, good. This computer. Okay. And this computer would what you would you would you would count cards you would try to predict using your yeah, count cards and predict in card. Very good observation there. Card counting is really essentially prediction. In a sense, it's knowing when the remaining cards to be dealt are favorable to the player. That's the goal card counting and other systems we used. We had some proprietary systems to that were very, very not very well known. But it was all about knowing when you had an edge and when you did betting a lot of money and when you didn't betting less double doubling down on high probability situations, so on, So did that proceed Or did that catalyze like, you know, four decks, eight decks, 12 12 decks or if they were already multiple decks. So I don't think we drove them to have more decks. But we did our team. Really. Some of the systems are team Pioneer did drive some changes in the game, which are somewhat subtle. I could get into it, you know, I don't know how much time we have that they were minor changes that our team drove. The multiple decks were already are already well established. By the time my team came up, how did you guys do you know it was your record? I like to say we won millions of dollars during the time I was associated with the team and pretty pretty consistently won. We didn't win every day or every weekend, but we'd run a project for, say, six months at a time. We called it a bank kind of like a fund, if you will, into no six months periods we never lost. We always won something, sometimes quite a bit, where it was part of your data model understanding of certain casinos where there's certain casinos that were more friendly to your methodology. Yes, certain casinos have either differences in rules or, more commonly, differences in what I just call conditions like, for instance, obviously there's a lot of people betting a lot of money. It's easier to blend in, and that's a good thing for us. It could be there there. Their aggressiveness about trying to find card counters right would vary from casino to casino, those kinds of factors and occasionally minor rule variations to help us out. So you're very welcome at because he knows is that well, I once that welcome, I've actually been been Bardet many facilities tell us about that. Well, you get, you get barred, you get usually quite politely asked toe leave by some big guy, sometimes a big person, but sometimes just just honestly, people who like you will just come over and say, Hey, John, we'd rather you not play blackjack here, you know that. You know, we only played in very upstanding professional kind of facilities, but still, the message was clear. You know, you're not welcome here in Las Vegas. They're allowed to bar you from the premises with no reason given in Las Vegas. It's just the law there in Atlantic City. That was not the law. But in Vegas they could bar you and just say you're not welcome. If you come back, we'll arrest you for trespassing. Yeah, And you really think you said everything you did was legal? You know, we kind of gaming the system, I guess through, you know, displaying well probabilities and playing well. But this interesting soothe casinos. Khun, rig the system, right? They could never lose, but the >> players has ever get a bet against the House. >> How did >> you did you at all apply that experience? Your affinity to data to you know, Let's fast forward to where you are now, so I think I learned a lot of lessons playing blackjack that apply to my career and design software tools. It's solid works my old company and now death. So System, who acquired solid words and nowt on shape I learned about data and rigor, could be very powerful tools to win. I learned that even when everyone you know will tell you you can't win, you still can win. You know that a lot of people told me Black Jack would never work. A lot of people told me solid works. We never worked. A lot of people told me on shape would be impossible to build. And you know, you learn that you can win even when other people tell you, Can't you learn that in the long run is a long time? People usually think of what you know, Black Jack. You have to play thousands of hands to really see the edge come out. So I've learned that in business sometimes. You know, sometimes you'll see something happened. You just say, Just stay the course. Everything's gonna work out, right? I've seen that happen. >> Well, they say in business oftentimes, if people tell you it's impossible, you're probably looking at a >> good thing to work on. Yeah. So what's made it? What? What? What was made it ostensibly impossible. How did you overcome that challenge? You mean, >> uh, on >> shape? Come on, Shake. A lot of people thought that that using cloud based tools to build all the product development tools people need would be impossible. Our software tools in product development were modeling three D objects to the precision of the real world. You know that a laptop computer, a wristwatch, a chair, it has to be perfect. It's an incredibly hard problem. We work with large amounts of data. We work with really complex mathematics, huge computing loads, huge graphic loads, interactive response times. All these things add up to people feeling Oh, well, that would never be possible in the cloud. But we believe the opposite is true. We believe we're going to show the world. And in the future, people say, you know We don't understand how you do it without the cloud because there's so much computing require. >> Yeah, right. It seems you know where we're heavy in the cloud space. And if you were talking about this 10 years ago, I could understand some skepticism in 10 2019. All of those things that you mentioned, if I could spin it up, I could do it faster. I can get the resources I need when I needed a good economics. But that's what the clouds built for, as opposed to having to build out. You know, all of these resource is yourself. So what >> was the what was the big technical challenge? Was it was it? Was it latent? See, was it was tooling. So performance is one of the big technical challenges, As you'd imagine, You know, we deliver with on shape we deliver a full set of tools, including CAD formal release management with work flow. If that makes sense to you. Building materials, configurations, industrial grade used by professional companies, thousands of companies around the world. We do that all in a Web browser on any Mac Windows machine. Chromebook Lennox's computer iPad. I look atyou. I mean, we're using. We run on all these devices where the on ly tools in our industry that will run on all these devices and we do that kind of magic. There's nothing install. I could go and run on shape right here in your browser. You don't need a 40 pound laptop, so no, you don't need a 40 pound laptop you don't need. You don't need to install anything. It runs like the way we took our inspiration from tools like I Work Day and Sales Force and Zen Desk and Nets. Sweet. It's just we have to do three D graphics and heavy duty released management. All these complexities that they didn't necessarily have to do. The other thing that was hard was not only a technical challenge like that, but way had to rethink how workflow would happen, how the tools could be better. We didn't just take the old tools and throw him up in a cloud window, we said, How could we make a better way of doing workflow, release management and collaboration than it's ever been done before? So we had to rethink the user experience in the paradigms of the systems. Well, you know, a lot of talk about the edge and if it's relevant for your business. But there's a lot of concerns about the cloud being able to support the edge. But just listening to you, John, it's It's like, Well, everybody says it's impossible. Maybe it's not impossible, but maybe you can solve the speed of light problem. Any thoughts on that? Well, I think all cloud solutions use edge to some degree. Like if you look at any of the systems. I just mentioned sales for us workday, Google Maps. They're using these devices. I mean, it's it's important that you have a good client device. You have better experience. They don't just do everything in the cloud. They say There, there. To me, they're like a carefully orchestrated symphony that says We'll do these things in the core of the cloud, these things near the engineer, the user, and then these things will do right in the client device. So when you're moving around your Google map or when you're looking this big report and sales force you're using the client to this is what are we have some amazing people on her team, like R. We have the fellow who was CTO of Blade Logic. Robbie Ready. And he explains these concepts to make John Russo from Hey came to us from Verizon. These are people who know about big systems, and they helped me understand how we would distribute these workloads. So there's there's no such thing is something that runs completely in the cloud. It has to send something down. So, uh, talk aboutthe company where you're at, you guys have done several raises. You've got thousands of customers. You maybe want to add a couple of zeros to that over time is what's the aspirations? Yeah, correct. We have 1000. The good news is we have thousands of customer cos designing everything you could imagine. Some things never would everything from drones two. We have a company doing nuclear counter terrorism equipment. Amazing stuff. Way have people doing special purpose electric vehicles. We have toys way, have furniture, everything you'd imagined. So that's very gratifying. You us. But thousands of companies is still a small part of the world. This is a $10,000,000,000 a year market with $100,000,000,000 in market cap and literally millions of users. So we have great aspirations to grow our number of users and to grow our tool set capability. So let's talk to him for a second. So $10,000,000,000 current tam are there. Jason sees emerging with all these things, like three D printing and machine intelligence, that that actually could significantly increase the tam when you break out your binoculars or even your telescope. Yes, there are. Jason sees their increasing the tam through. Like you say, new areas drive us So So obviously someone is doing more additive manufacturing. More generative design. They're goingto have more use for tools like ours. Cos the other thing that I observed, if I can add one, it's my own observations. I think design is becoming a greater component of GDP, if you will, like if you look at how much goods in the world are driven by design value versus a decade or two or when I was a child, you know, I just see this is incredible amount, like products are distinguished by design more and more, and so I think that we'll see growth also through through the growth in design as an element of GDP on >> Jonah. I love that observation actually felt like, you know, my tradition. Engineering education. Yeah, didn't get much. A lot of design thing. It wasn't until I was in industry for years. That had a lot of exposure to that. And it's something that we've seen huge explosion last 10 years. And if you talk about automation versus people, it's like the people that designed that creativity is what's going to drive into the >> absolutely, You know, we just surveyed almost 1000 professionals product development leaders. Honestly, I think we haven't published our results yet, So you're getting it. We're about to publish it online, and we found that top of mind is designed process improvements over any particular technology. Be a machine learning, You know, the machine learning is a school for the product development. How did it manufacturers a tool to develop new products, but ultimately they have to have a great process to be competitive in today's very competitive markets. Well, you've seen the effect of the impact that Apple has had on DH sort of awakening people to know the value of grace. Desire absolutely have to go back to the Sony Walkman. You know what happened when I first saw one, right? That's very interesting design. And then, you know, Dark Ages compared to today, you know, I hate to say it. Not a shot at Sony with Sony Wass was the apple? Yeah, era. And what happened? Did they drop the ball on manufacturing? Was it cost to shoot? No. They lost the design leadership poll position. They lost that ability to create a world in pox. Now it's apple. And it's not just apple. You've got Tesla who has lit up the world with exciting design. You've got Dyson. You know, you've got a lot of companies that air saying, you know, it's all about designing those cos it's not that they're cheaper products, certainly rethinking things, pushing. Yeah, the way you feel when you use these products, the senses. So >> that's what the brand experience is becoming. All right. All right, John, thanks >> so much for coming on. The Cuban sharing your experiences with our audience. Well, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure, really? Our pleasure. All right, Keep right. Everybody stupid demand. A volonte, John Furry. We've been back active, eo active data driven 19 from Boston. You're watching the Cube. Thanks

>> from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering active eo 2019. Data driven to you by activity. >> Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Boston. This is the Cube, the leader, and on the ground tech coverage. My name is David. Want a stupid woman. And John for you have been here. Uh, all day we've been plowing through some great interviews. This is active FiOS data driven 19 conference, the second conference. They've had this kind of about 500 people here in Boston. Shaheen peruses here. He's the chief technical officer and chief information security officer at data endure Cuba. LEM, good to see you. Thanks very much for coming back on. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome. So, um, let's talk about backup. Gave a talk today. What is your backup done for you lately? Essentially. You know, so interesting question, right? You look at the data. A lot of customers air rethinking their backup. We sort of saw this with the ascendancy of virtual ization. We're seeing again with cloud and digital transformation. What's that? What was the theme of your talk? What was the catalyst behind the thoughts there? >> I really walk through the concept that storage has continued to evolve so aggressively and so fast with Moore's law and everything else and what has really proliferated. Part of that is that our data keeps growing and growing fast, and a very big contributor of that is copy data management. So we take a backup of something, but we don't ever use that backup. We restore it, and now we have a second copy of production so that development could do work in it. Then we restore it somewhere else so that analytics can happen against that. Then we restored another place, and pretty soon you have 45456 ten 10 20 copies of the exact same data and that proliferation keeps growing and growing. And it's time to think about backup differently. And almost all traditional backup players have not changed the way they operate have not changed the way they deal with backups. They continue to do it the same way, and their programs were written to go to tape versus to Cloud or to do copy data management >> properly. So it's That's a color today, if you would, sir, you said to do it the same way it was meant to go to take meeting. What? It's just a designed to be essentially a serial process. Exactly designed. Maybe maybe recovery is sort of a hope. We never have to recover kind of kind of thought, and that's it. Back up and no other additional value >> and file it somewhere. So just in case something, it's an insurance policy. >> So how should be done >> so before I get into how it should be done, One of the other attributes that makes backup a challenge with traditional players is they convert the data into their proprietary format, so you can't use the data unless you rehydrate it and put it back into its native format. Then you can start doing analytics or a I, or whatever you wanna do against that. So what activity was done differently, which is what I feel is that how you should do it is they keep the data in native format, and then when you need to access that copy of that data, they create a virtual copy of that data. So you're not taking a penny dis space, but its performance, because the underlying this subsystem that you assigned to active fio is have whatever performance, you want to assign it. So now you can spend up 10 copies of the same server without ever taking up 10 copies of storage and give the give all of your constituents that development team, the analytics team, whatever teams the ability to access it in real time. >> Why did the traditional vendors do it that way? Because they want to reduce it to save cost is they wanna optimize on on performance or they want to have control. From a catalog standpoint, Wise >> said, the popular if you go back to tape tape, was really slow. And it was a serial right, like you were saying earlier. And so you had to write software that would know how to take advantage of that slow speed and not make any mistakes and then be able to recover from it. So they were converting it to a format that was easier to write, easier to read. But that format doesn't play anymore in today's world, however, they haven't really adopted their king technologies to today's world and what I 50 0 did differently when they came out 10 years ago, they said. We need to reshape this whole backup landscape on DH. They created this copy data management space and all other backup players. Air tryingto ad copy data management to compete. But active Theo isn't a backup solution. It's a copy data management solution and backup is a nice artifact. >> Okay, so you deliver services on top of this and other technologies, right? Maybe talk a little bit more about your business and what you're going to market >> way help companies that our whole go to market is around this concept of digital resilient. So the ability to survive and thrive in the middle of an attack and whether that be Mother Nature or that be a cyber attack, or that your system's crashing on you and the in order to do that, let's just pick security. Let's parts that for a second. If you have a ransomware attack, for example, you can have the best controls. However, if a foothold gets into your environment and encrypts your data, your only choices recovery. And if you can't recover, you have to pay the ransom to get the encryption back way had a customer who had challenges on their their backups were on the virtual ization platform, which got encrypted and they weren't able to recover. So their only option was to pay ransom ware and, uh, fair to say they weren't the customer until after that happened. But the But the reality is that solutions like after Theo in by nature of the way they act, the way they store the data off promises in cloud or the way they store it s so that it's not easily it's immutable. It makes it a lot easier for a organization to leverage it and be able to recover quickly from it and have offsite copies or multiple data center copies. So that's the That's the challenge. I would say that a solution like activity of >> Psalms, where our customers I've got to take a little change for second and ask you CTO and a C. So I was taking a little security knowledge servant, test your security knowledge, and I actually did really well. I was like, 90% on. But what I got wrong was, you know, if you get hit with ransom where it said you should should pay it, and I said, Well, yeah, I guess so. They said, Nah, you're wrong, like, well, how else would I get my data back? If that's the way you know, I could avoid it if I were. I work with numbers like yours, but should people pay the ransom? >> So the odds of getting an encryption key that allows you to recover your data are minimal there. What usually happens is they don't want to get caught, so they don't want to send you the encryption key. They get the money and run because the more interactions they have with you, the more opportunity for somebody to trail them and figure out how >> to. So you shouldn't pay. You shouldn't, because your chances of infant testable that you're going to get your data back. >> The only way to pay in this customer they happen to have cyber insurance. And so their actual out of pocket expense was a fraction of the ransom. But not all cyber insurance covers all ransomware scenario. So it's They're not all kind of like, so it's a really it's a really complex question. Actually, I was >> wondering if you could do a smart contract. Yeah. Wait. What? >> You get the keys >> and you could be right. Yeah, on, then, then that's the challenge. right. It's leased like who's Who's way >> got to do it at the same time. But yeah, it's it's typically my recommendation is don't pay, but ideally, if you have, if you don't have a backup, then you really don't have an option. >> So part of your your job is obviously information security, which is the fast moving. I mean, that market is exploding. It feels like it's a big do over, You know that's going on. Um, you know, we all know the narrative. It's you know, there is no perimeter. All the money has been spent, you know, sort of hardening, you know, the perimeter building that moat. But now the queen leaves the castle so the whole paradigm changes. So how are you addressing that for your customers? >> So a couple ways Number one, the endpoint is the perimeter now, So the device that's sitting in front of here is an example is where you have to to treat the security, you need to monitor the activity of the behavior that's happening on that device. And if there's something that moves away from baseline, so if you're capturing a baseline of how you operate, what you do day today, and if all of a sudden you start encrypting your files and you never did before, the flag should go off. And those flags need to be able to get back to a central location, which is the business we operate. We offer a sock is a service. We deployed tools on the end points. We collect data from the perimeter, the firewalls around hers, the switches So we see the health of the network. But then we also monitor the end point to make sure if something's happening at that end point, we want to know we want to stop it before it spreads to anywhere else. >> It is a manage service. So another question around, you know, this is the buzz words of multi Cloud. It's a hot space, but it looks legit. I mean, multi cloud, I've always said, is the son of almost a symptom of multi vendor right versus a strategy. But increasingly, people are saying, Okay, we need a strategy. There's horses for courses, certain clouds or better for certain things, and that's where we're going. We're going, maybe rain in the shadow it in the line of business, or at least support them. So we need a strategy. Their So what? Your thoughts on multi cloud. How are you participating in that space? Is there any role for active fio? There >> absolutely is active fio supports all of before the major clouds out there. So they support a WS czar, G, C, P and IBM. And having that strategy allows a customer who's leveraging activity to protect their data to be able to spin up workloads in any of those clouds. And, for example, GP is known for better. Aye, Aye. And analytics. So spin up a copy of your data in G C. P. Do your analytics and then shut it down. Um uh, a czar is known integrate better with any Microsoft platform so spent up your Microsoft workloads and his whore and used them for whatever purposes, whether it's analytics or other and shut him down. Andi, each cloud does have its attributes and benefits that are better >> universes just good. Yeah, well, >> they have a lead, right? They've done a lot of application ecosystem, right? And then IBM, with Watson is kind of taking a lead in the Aye aye space. So, really, it's you as a company. As a architect cloud architect, you need to decide what cloud has the benefits you need and the ability to move between them with a technology like Octavio is pretty key >> thoughts on, uh, security. The cloud In the early days that was a real blocker. You know, people were concerned about security of Cloud, and today it's almost becoming an advantage. Do you buy that? >> So sort of. I've been I've been a c T O N C So for the last 15 years, and early clouds start ups and number one objection I always got was security in the cloud. You can't put your data there. The reality is, the cloud is no different than another data center. It's You can't abdicate your responsibility to secure your infrastructure just because it's in somebody else's data center, it's You still have to do what you would do. Apply your security policies, apply your security controls and manages if it's another one of your polos, for example, and that's where people forget. They think just because it's somewhere else I'm protected. The only benefit that the cloud gives us from a security perspective is the physical security. So nobody can get into that data center because they have great security controls. But that doesn't mean electronically people can't get it. That you're still you. You haven't really gained anything by going to cloud other than reliability and availability. >> Yeah, your point about endpoint security before a bad user behavior is going to trump great security every single time. Exactly. Okay, final thoughts on this event, your business, your partnership, the marketplace take us home. >> I think I think is a great event. Lots of great topics are covered some great partnerships. Way heard some great information about analytics from IBM. I think that active FiOS uniquely positioned where you can take that one, back up your data and then be able to use it in so many different facets of your business rather than, like I said, creating the copies and exploding your data growth. And so because of that, you're seeing the partnership in the ecosystem coming together. The other attributes that makes it powerful is that they've got the AP integration. Anything you could do in the user interface, you can do the FBI, so that allows third party companies to come in and do integrations. That extend the capability and leverage that data even better on DH. So I think this event is good to help show people some of those capabilities and how some of those integration >> support that's here. It's all about creating incremental value with data as opposed to just below one out copies. So great. Appreciate it. Should you? Thanks very much for coming on the Q. Thank you. Good to see you again. Good to see you. All right. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You watching the Cube from data driven 19.

>> from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering active eo 2019. Data driven you by activity. >> Welcome back to Boston, Everybody. Money >> belong here with my co host, a student of John >> Kerry's. Also here today You watching the Cuban leader and on the ground tech coverage. This is day one of active fio 19 data driven content Conference hashtag data driven 19 red cara minuses. Here is the senior vice president of fantasy Sports A draftkings Greg. Thanks for coming on. What a cool title. >> Yeah, it's It's, you know, I was joking with my wife. Anytime you could be working fantasy sports, it's a great place to be. Everybody's a little bit jealous. >> So the formula is easy, right? Offer big giant prizes and everybody comes And that's all there is suing. Anybody can come >> in. I just have the dream job right now. >> So hugely competitive market. You guys, you become the >> leader. We were in the radio. Check out your websites. I mean, take us through the draft kings and your ascendancy. How you got here? >> So, you know, company started in 2012 initially around sort of the major big American sports on DH. Then really a CZ. We started scale that we saw there was a huge consumer interest in the product players that would come on. We're very, very, very sticky. Um, and we've just been kind of, you know, pushing, pushing on growing that using these. So the initial founders are three former analyst. So come on. It's always been sort of a very analytically driven company. So they looked at what we were dealing with, and it was we had L TVs that were way higher than our cracks. So let's keep marketing and growing and growing and growing and finding out ways to offer a better product. So, over 2015 we did a major marketing blitz, blew up the company Absolutely huge. Um, and since then we've been just constantly innovating, adding new sports, adding new features on DH, adding ways toe on the product. And then even more recently, just about a year ago, we expanded also into online sports betting over New Jersey has that's become a legal product across the U. S. So it's been a great time to be at the company a lot of fun. >> What what was your first sport was like Amazon started in books and then, you know, scaled out what was your first sport. So it's actually the first sport was >> baseball because of the time that they actually launched. So is the middle of April. Sporting calendar is a little bit thin. Right then, so is it was baseball to start, and then once football season started, that's really when things take on >> 2015 is when you started the marketing blitz and I remember just here in the ads and it was just intense, like a while. This company's going for it. So you sort of took >> all the chips I went >> all in and it worked. Yeah, I mean, it's part of the, you know, the lifeblood of the company. It's We're a company that ends up being taking risks, but we take calculated risks. So at any given point, you sort of say, like, Hey, what is the what is the range of outcomes over here? We're not playing for second place. We want to be a market leader, so you have to take risks in order, be a market leader. So let's take calculated risks. Let's make sure we're not being insane, but you know we did the math. We figured out what? This is A This is a worthwhile shot. We pushed him for it. Andi really took off from their love to bet on >> sure things. Yeah, well, Greg, we know the people that play the fantasy for it feel that data is what differentiates whether they're going to live in, you know, winner lose. Talk to us a little bit about the data journey inside your business And how that helped differentiate draftkings in the market. Yes. So we think Death draftkings >> is one of the most analytically based companies in the, you know, definitely in the market, but also into sort of like General Cos right now we use our analytics platform to inform pretty much everything we dio on. Go to your point. You're joking. You know, it seems like fantasy sports is easy throughout some giant prizes there, and everything will take care of itself. You know, running a fantasy sports car company. If you throw out a contest that's too big, you lose a ton of money. There's a lot of asymmetric risk in the business where if we're right, we make a little bit more. But if we're wrong. We lose a ton very, very, very fast. So our ability to be very, very sound analytically is what allows us to sort of pushed the envelope and grow, grow, grow but not, you know, lose our heads along the way. You know, some of the fun of that is really, you know, when we first ran, I think one of the most game changing contest we ran was actually back in October of 2014. It was the very first millionaire maker contest I could still remember. It was Week five of the 2020 14 NFL season where we said, Hey, this it's crazy. We need crazy things that happen in order for it to work. But if we're on a $20 contest to enter with $1,000,000 top prize and 2,000,000 of total prizes, it could go viral, go absolutely crazy. And if it loses, here's how it'll losing. Here's how much will hurt us. It's a worthwhile risk. Let's go for it. So that sort of energy of, you know, doing discipline analysis and constantly sort of them. Taking the risk on the back of it is what allowed us to build >> up the brand value that you would have got out of that was sort of worth that risk in part anyway. And you wouldn't have to hurt presumably. >> Exactly. We knew our downside. As long as you know your downside, you're normally in a pretty good spot to take those risks. >> So where do you >> see this All going mean? So the company has grown. You're at this kind of critical mass now, Like we said, highly competitive, you know, knock down. You know, if you take your eye off the ball. So how do you guys keep this going? >> So we have a huge challenge ahead of us over the next couple of years, as sports betting becomes legal across the US, we need to make sure that we are one of the top competitors in that market. Sports betting in the US, we expect to be an absolutely enormous market. It will probably be significantly larger than the fantasy sports market in terms of absolute revenue and even, you know, on order of magnitude more competitive. So we need to be executing each step along the way a CZ markets open up. We need to be able to get into getting two market very, very fast. And that means our tech team needs to be working feverishly to make sure that we can hit the requirements that each legislator and each regulator puts on market entry in their state. We didn't mean making sure we're constantly figuring out what are the product elements that are absolutely critical for our for our users. Is it Maura around the live betting experiences that around the different markets that you offer? It's around pricing. And how do we find these things, these different lovers and told them to make sure that we're putting out a great product for users. And if we do that and throw a great product after users were pretty sure we can make you want >> to be one stop shopping presumably, right? I mean, all sports, right? But But then you've got these niche sports betting. I mean eggs, invest. Example. I could think of this horse racing. You know where it is alive. It's gonna video. It's got commentators on the ground that you know the business really well. Is >> that Is that the strategy to go sort of horizontal and so be a one stop shop or you >> gonna sort of pick your spots? What is the day to tell you? >> You know, I think we're constantly talking about it. One of the things that allowed our fantasy sports business to grow so fast was going a little bit more horizontal. So we offered Gulf in Mass at a time period when the primary competitors and the space vandal did not. On DH, we built that product into one of our largest sports. It's, you know, right up there with MLB in terms of the actual size that that comes in a Z have gone also horizontal, we pulled in other places, like NASCAR. Mm, a great sports that people are interested in. It gets more users into our platform. And honestly, if uses are interested in a product, we don't want them to have to go elsewhere. We want to be able to have the offerings that any sort of, you know, critical mass type environment is going toe is gonna have >> Well, it's that experience, right? Well, I like to shop in Amazon. You do, too, because I >> trusted. And it's the same user experience. So, Greg, one of things >> I'm hearing from you is something that everybody tries for, but it's really challenging that speed. How do you react that fast and move the company into new markets and new offerings and keep innovating? You know, culturally technology wise, you know, How does Draftkings do that? You know, I think a za company, you know, from really every single person that we recruit in higher We've been actually execution Aly disciplined throughout the company's history. It's It's something that our founders did a great job of instilling in the culture right at the gates. I mean, we've tried to foster all the way along the way, which is all the best strategies of the world. They're going to fail if you can't execute well and every single person down the company knows that. And we try to, you know, enable each person to be as autonomous as possible in their ability to execute their their portion of the business that allows us to move really, really, really fast. You know, we disseminate that responsibility quickly, and each leader and sort of each person knows what they have to do to execute. There's a high degree of accountability behind that, you know, I'd like to say there's some. There's some magic recipe that's, um, secret sauce, but it's a lot of just great people doing great work everyday. Well, Greg, you know it's any your competitors that they look at, You know, Boston's been been doing pretty well in Draftkings era, you know, for the last few years. ES o Boston's been a great market for us. We've expanded Conover here on DH. The sports teams have been fantastic, although the Bruins it was a little bit sad about Game seven over there, but it happens. >> So his m o be the flagship news that no, I wouldn't say >> that MLB was first, primarily just of the time of the year when we launched. NFL is always going to go, are not always going to be, but for the for the foreseeable future is the dominant US sport on will remain the dominant US for >> no reason. I mean, kids there watch MLB anymore. Maybe the maybe the playoffs and the games. It was a game. I think I'm some Father's day was like almost five hours long, you know, gets called. You can come in and out. But you know what some of the trends. You see soccer. Is that growing NFL? Obviously huge. Do you see so niche sports like lax coming on. >> So, uh, you know, starting point NFL has been huge. We actually launched a new product Ah, little over a year ago called Showdown, which allowed you start to do fantasy for a single game as opposed to the combination of games that's taken off fantastically because that's tapping into more of the I'm going to sit down and watch this game, and I would love to have a fantasy team on that on this game. That's really expanded the audience like that. That >> was genius because, look, if you're >> out of the running, it doesn't matter because I'm weak. On top of that N b A and NHL on fire. The embassy put out a great product is an actual sport league. You know, the Finals were great. You hate to see the injuries, but it was a great final. Siri's very competitive. The NHL Finals has been very, very competitive. Golf is growing phenomenally as a sport, way farm or interesting golf than I ever anticipated when I first started with the company and it's one of the most exciting things. When the Masters comes each year, every screen has turned to it and we see a huge player. Player number is kind of coming into that one. Beyond that, you know NASCAR. What's been interesting? NASCAR's been having a tough couple years, but the Truck series for us? We launched it this year and the trucks have been great. I don't know if you've watched NASCAR Trucks. They're wildly entertaining. Uh, you know, Emma, you got the big fighter. So every sport sort of has its moments. It's a matter of like picking those moments and figuring out how to make >> the most of them. Do you see boxing at all making a comeback? >> So we have thought about how to get boxing into a into a fantasy. We don't have it at the moment. We're putting a lot of thought into it, so we are actually seeing through. We've seen, you know, we've been in the M M A space and we've seen the growth out from there where that sports doing great and you look at places like Bela Tor. The Professional Fighters league is other leagues, and then boxing is the next step. There's a lot of interest there. I don't think they have the right products yet to be able to kind of engage with that extra way. So that's one of things we're working on. Also, you need a marquee fighter. You always need a marquee fighter. Kind of helped bring in the interest over on that side. So, um, be interesting to see with Taki on sort of the downside of his career. At this point on DH, Mayweather hasn't been fighting much. Will be interesting to see. Who's that next meeting with Adam. But >> I grew up in an era >> of Marquis fighters. What? They would fight, you know, they literally fight 6 70 times a year, you know, and you had used huge names on DSO, and then mm comes along and he's really hurt, >> but it feels like it's tryingto so to resuscitate. Yeah. I mean, I think these things could >> be a little bit cyclical. Like you get one Marquis fighter out there like so my wife, this Filipino. So I'm a huge backing out fan now way watch every fight. Even when we were living in remote locations that forces watching at weird hours. He's a type of athlete that could bring popularity of the sport. So if there was a major U. S. Fighter that gains that degree of sort of, you know that that degree of fame people will be into it, I think >> Do do do your analytics sort of have a probe into the activity at the at the fan level at the sports level, not just the fantasy level or the betting level? Is that a sort of ah ah predictor for you? Yet we >> see a lot of correlations between how many people play our sport are fantasy game, and how many people actually follow the underlying sport. Way can also see trends in terms of If I'm from Boston, I probably pick more patriots in my fantasy lineups than, uh, normal on DH. You can actually see that as people play different sports that you know, the number one Q. Be drafted in in Boston is almost always gonna be Tom Brady. And once you leave that you start seeing Aaron Rodgers pop up. Let's really, really fast. So you see these little micro trends where it's like you are still a sports fan of your local team in your local environment, but it manifest itself in the fantasy. >> So what you think that is? Do you think it's fan affinity >> or do you think it's just the sort of lack of knowledge out inside? You're sort of a circle of trust. >> I think it's probably a combination. I mean, I could say is, you know, following the Celtics in the mid to thousands, I knew the depth of the Celtics pension, how they would use their rotation better than anybody else, Probably better than anybody else in the coaches would probably disagree. But it's like I knew that James Posey was a huge value play on Saturday nights. I knew. I kind of with I feel the Eddie House nights. Uh, so, you know, on your local team, you probably know those players at the not the top top echelon All Stars, but the guy's right beneath. You know them a little bit better and probably more comfortable using >> what's your favorite sport. >> So my favorite sport, from a fantasy perspective, is I play all the basket. I play all football, played basketball just during play offs, and I played baseball. But baseball I'm strictly a fantasy player. I don't really follow the sport to play. I'm just playing fantasy. Okay, >> That's great. So, what do you think? The conference. Here. >> You have you Have you had any timeto interact? I know you were swamped after coming off the stage. >> You know, it looks like a great turnout over here. There's a lot of enthusiasm amongst them from people. I was a little bit late to the late to show up this morning, so I got a bit Swanson eager to go and be able to catch up a bit more. >> Okay, Well, Greg, thanks so much for coming on. The Cuba's great to have your every pleasure meeting you. >> All right, people. Right there. Still, when I >> was back with our next guest, John for it is also in the house. You wanted The Cube from active field data driven 19. Right back

>> from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering active eo 2019. Data driven you by activity. >> Hi. We're right outside of the Boston Haba. You're watching >> the cube on stew Minimum in. And this is active Geo data driven. 2019 due date. Two days digging into, You >> know, the role of data inside Cos on, you know, in an ever changing world, happy to welcome to the program of first time guests are China Oven countrymen who's a research manager at I. D. C. Coming to us from across the pond in London. Thanks so much for joining us. Pleasure. So tell us a little bit. I d c. We know. Well, you know, the market landscapes, you know, watching what's happening. Thie said it 77 Zita bites that was put up in the keynote. Came came from I D. C. Tells you you're focused. >> Yeah, so I'm part of the data protection and storage research team, But I have, ah, European focus. I covered the Western European markets where data protection is almost off a neurotic interest to us. So a lot of our investment is actually made on the context of data protection. And how do I become data driven without compromising on security and sovereignty and data locality. So that's something that I look at. I'm also part of our broader multi cloud infrastructure team on also develops practice. I'm looking at all these modern new trends from data perspective as well. So it's kind of nice being >> keeping you busy, huh? Yeah. So about a year ago, every show that I went to there would be a big clock up on the Kino stage counting down until gpr went way actually said on the Q. Many times it's like we'll know when GPR starts with lawsuits. Sister and I feel like it was a couple of days, if not a couple of weeks before some of the big tech firms got sued for this. So here we are 2019. It's been, you know, been a while now since since since this launch. How important is GDP are you know what? How is that impacting customers and kind of ripple effect? Because, you know, here in the States, we're seeing some laws in California and beyond that are following that. But they pushed back from the Oh, hey, we're just gonna have all the data in the world and we'll store it somewhere sure will protect it and keep it secure. But but But >> yeah, yeah, so it's suggestive. Here is a game changer and it's interesting you said this big clock ticking and everybody has been talking about it. So when the European Commission >> announced repairs >> coming, organizations had about two years to actually prepare for it. But there were a lot of naysayers, and they thought, This is not gonna happen. The regulators don't have enough resources to actually go after all of these data breaches, and it's just too complicated. Not everyone's going complaints just not gonna happen. But then they realised that the regulators we're sticking to it on towards the end. Towards the last six months in the race to GDP, and there was this helter skelter running. Their organizations were trying to just do some Die Ryan patch of exercise to have that minimum viable compliance. So there they wanted to make sure that they don't go out of business. They don't have any major data breaches when Jean Pierre comes a difference that that was the story of 2018 although they have so much time to react they didn't on towards the end. They started doing a lot of these patch up work to make sure they had that minimum by the compliance. But over time, what we're seeing is that a lot off a stewed organizations are actually using GDP are as to create that competitive differentiations. If you look at companies like Barclays, they have been so much on top of that game on DH. They include that in their marketing strategies and the corporate social responsibility to say that, Hey, you know our business is important to us, but your privacy and your data is much more valuable to us, and that kind of instantly helps them build that trust. So they have big GDP, our compliance into their operations so much and so well that they can actually sell those kind of GPR consultancy services because they're so good at it. And that's what we are seeing is happening 2019 on DH. Probably the next 12 to 18 months will be about scaling on operational izing GDP are moving from that minimum viable compliance. >> Its interest weighed a conversation with Holly St Clair, whose state of Massachusetts and in our keynote this morning she talked about that data minimalist. I only want as much data as I know what I'm going to do. How I'm goingto leverage it, you know, kind of that pendulum swing back from the I'm goingto poured all the data and think about it later. It is that Did you see that is a trend with, you know, is that just governments is that, you know, you seeing that throughout industries and your >> interesting. So there was seven gpr came into existence. There were a lot of these workshops that were happening for on for organizations and how to become GDP. And there was this Danish public sector organization where one of the employees went to do that workshop was all charged up, and he came back to his employer and said, Hey, can you forget me on it Took that organization about 14 employees and three months to forget one person. So that's the amount of data they were holding in. And they were not dilating on all the processes were manual which took them so long to actually forget one person on. So if you don't cleanse a pure data act now meeting with all these right to be forgotten, Andi, all these specific clauses within GPR is going to be too difficult. And it's going to just eat up your business >> tryingto connecting the dots here. One of the one of the big stumbling blocks is if you look at data protection. If I've got backup, if I've got archive, I mean, if I've taken a snapshot of something and stuck that under a mountain in a giant tape and they say forget about me Oh, my gosh, Do I have to go retrieve that? I need to manage that? The cost could be quite onerous. Help! Help us connect the dots as to what that means to actually, you know, what are the ramifications of this regulation? >> Yeah, So I think so. Judy PR is a beast. It's a dragon off regulations. It's important to dice it to understand what the initial requirements are on one was the first step is to get visibility and classified the data as to what is personal data. You don't want to apply policies to all the data because I might be some garbage in there, so you need to get visibility on A says and classified data on what is personal data. Once you know what data is personal, what do you want to retain? That's when you start applying policies too. Ensure that they are safe and they're anonymous. Pseudonym ized. If you want to do analytics at a later stage on DH, then you think about how you meet. Individual close is so see there's a jeep airframe, but you start by classifying data. Then you apply specific policies to ensure you protect on back up the personal data on. Then you go about meeting the specific requirements. >> What else can you tell us about kind of European markets? You know, I I know when I look at the the cloud space, governance is something very specific to, and I need to make sure my data doesn't leave the borders and like what other trends in you know issues when you hear >> it from Jenny Peered forced a lot ofthe existential threat to a lot of companies. Like, say, hyper scale. Er's SAS men does so they were the first ones to actually become completely compliant to understand their regulations, have European data data hubs, and to have those data centres like I think At that time, Microsoft had this good good collaboration with T systems to have a local data center not controlled by Microsoft, but by somebody who is just a German organizations. You cannot have data locality more than that, right? So they were trying different innovative ways to build confidence among enterprises to make sure that cloud adoption continues on what was interesting. That came out from a research was that way thought, Gee, DPR means people's confidence and cloud is going to plunge. People's confidence in public cloud is going to pledge. That didn't happen. 42% of organizations were still going ahead with their cloud strategies as is, but it's just that they were going to be a lot more cautious. And they want to make sure that the applications and data that they were putting in the cloud was something that they had complete visibility in tow on that didn't have too much of personal data and even if it had, they had complete control over. So they had a different strategy off approaching public cloud, but it didn't slow them down. But over time they realised that to get that control ofthe idea and to get that control of data. They need to have that multiple multi cloud strategy because Cloud had to become a two way street. They need to have an exit strategy. A swell. So they tried to make sure that they adopted multiple cloud technologies and have the data interoperability. Ahs Well, because data management was one of their key key. Top of my prayer. >> Okay, last question I had for you. We're here at the active you event. What? What do you hear from your customers about Octavio? Any research that you have relevant, what >> they're doing, it's going interesting. So copy data management. That's how active you started, right? They created a market for themselves in this competition, a management and be classified copy data management within replication Market on replication is quite a slow market, but this copy data management is big issue, and it's one of the fastest growing market. So So So they started off from a good base, but they created a market for themselves and people started noticing them, and now they have kind of grown further and grown beyond and tried to cover the entire data management space. Andi, I think what's interesting and what's going to be interesting is how they keep up the momentum in building that infrastructure, ecosystem and platform ecosystem. Because companies are moving from protecting data centers to protecting centers of data on if they can help organizations protect multiple centers of data through a unified pane of glass, I have a platform approach to data management. Then they can help organizations become data drivers, which gives them the competitive advantage. So if they can keep up that momentum there going great guns, >> Thank you so much for joining us in Cheshire, sharing the data that you have in the customer viewpoints from Europe. So we'll be back with more coverage here from Active EO data driven 2019 in Boston. Mess fuses on stew Minimum. Thanks for watching the Q. Thank you.

>> From Boston, (upbeat music) Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering Actifio 2019, Data Driven. Brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back to Boston everybody. You're watching the Cube, the leader in on the ground tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. John Furrier is also in the house. This is Actifio's Data Driven conference, the second year that they've done this conference, #DataDriven19. Ash Ashutosh is here. He's the founder and CEO of Actifio, a good friend to the Cube, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Likewise Dave. Always good to see you. >> Yeah, so second year. You chose Boston, that's great. Last year was Miami at the very swanky Fontainebleau Hotel. >> Yup. >> It's a great location. >> Yup. >> Right in the harbor here. So you've got a nice crowd, and you guys focus on the substance, you know. Not a lot of Actifio marketing stuff coming out, as you market through substantive content. Explain that theory. >> Yeah. Well, I think from inception, there's a very fundamental culture the company has had is about driving customer success, and that is the number one and probably the only one that we drive by. And if you truly are focused on customer success, when you bring a whole bunch of customers together, having more customers talk about their success, so that they help and share with other customers who are looking for some of these initiatives, almost becomes natural. People become tired of seeing and sometimes even participating in our own user conferences, where you would bring a whole bunch of very enthusiastic users, lock the doors, and start talking about your vision, and start talking about your roadmap, your new line, your new partnership. One, we believe we should be doing that throughout the year with our customers. Two, we felt it was a lot better if the customer actually talked about how it mattered to them versus how it mattered to us as Actifio. So that was the theme for why Data Driven, in general, and even before that, you used to have some colleague cloud summit as you were transitioning into use of hybrid cloud in 2016. Across the board, I think this is one theme you'll hear from Actifio and the users who are here is we pay a very, very close attention to what users want, and we give them a forum to explain that to share with other users across the world. >> Well, it sounds like a great way to build a company, you know, focus on the customer and the customer success. Sounds simple, it's not. It's very challenging, and you've been a successful entrepreneur. When I've asked you in the past and David, you know, kind of why you started the company, you focused on a problem, and you guys created the category of copy data management, which is a problem. We had copies everywhere, copy creep, and you felt as though, okay, we can help people not only organize that but maybe even get more out of their data. >> Yeah. >> And so, and that has evolved, and obviously on that journey, people wanted to use you for backup. I mean, that's the big problem. >> Yeah. >> And so you created the category. You kind of monetized the backup space and tried to change the way people thought about that, and then all of a sudden, all this VC money sort of flowing into the whole space. >> Yup. >> From your standpoint, what's going on in the marketplace? Why is it so hot today? >> Yeah. Well I think, as you'll see at this conference, there is absolutely no doubt about how data is a strategic asset, and you'll see the more reason acquisitions of Tableau, of Looker, or even Qualtrics, where the use of data, which is what actually users see, has become one of the killer apps for anybody who is running a cloud. Your own business here, right. It's a use of data, and that's the first app that's out there, that's happening across the board. But right behind that, there's an entire ecosystem about supplying that data to these applications that becomes really important. And we figured this out almost nine years ago. We figured out that for an enterprise, having data available as a strategic asset, wherever, whenever they need, and whoever, as long as it complies with the operations requirements. Instantly is absolutely what we should provide. Now in order to do that, the first place to make it available for users was to capture it. And the best place to start was backup, and we always treated copied data, journey begins with capturing data, and backup happens with the best use case, one that you already spend money on. And that's how we always treated backup as a starting point for the journey. We have over 3,600 enterprise users who range from some of the largest financial services, energy, retail, airline industries, service providers, and the focus has been on companies that are at least $500 millions of (mumbles) more normally for a billion or more who really view data as a strategic asset in their digital transformation. And almost 78 percent of our business now comes from people, they are (mumbles) applications faster. So a small person did almost 20 percent now is coming from people using Actifio data for running machine only analytics faster. And almost 100 percent of them obviously collect the data from backup. That's how we view the market. We view it as application, analytics, machine learning, DevOps, down, and infrastructure happens to be a place where you start. It's not lost on anybody in the market that data is important. It's not lost on investors who see this as an opportunity to pursue in a different way. And so you have different approaches being taken, one that starts with more infrastructure, (mumbles) has provided infrastructure to keep all this (mumbles). And we've always focused on the one thing that really matters to the customer, which is applications, and one that matters to every other application that's using this application, which is the data for this application the point in time. So you see a lot of backup-centric appliances. You see a lot of consolidation appliances. So it's a bottom-up approach. It's a great approach for people who want to buy another single-purpose storage. We fundamentally believe you're not going to be a lot on the storage system. We think this, there's a lot of companies who do a phenomenal job, and we're better off being suppliers of a multi-cloud data management, multi-cloud copy data management, and to leverage all this infrastructure. >> No box. >> Completely no box. In fact, that is the reason why we think 2016, when we saw the emergence of cloud in our user community, it took us two years, but we have the world's best multi-cloud, just copy data and data management. The largest software company, enterprise software company in the world uses Actifio today to manage their SaaS offerings in four different public-wide platforms. We couldn't do that if you had a box. You could not. I mean-- >> Because it wouldn't scale. >> Well, firstly, you can't take your box and go into a cloud. They already have infrastructure. >> Right. >> You can't bring the scale out stuff, because they already have scale out. You can't take your scale out and put in another scale out. And if you start from bottom up, you're fundamentally providing infrastructure on top of an infrastructure that's already provided as a service. What you really needed to do was to allow the applications to come back and use any infrastructure that is most relevant for their workload, for their use case, and most importantly, for that particular time. It's really important, especially if data is persistent. It stays there for 20, 30, forever. And the opportunity for me to come back and leverage infrastructure there just happens to be the right one. That's what we try to describe. >> We always say at the Cube that the difference between a business and a digital business is how the business uses data, how it leverages data. >> Yeah, yeah absolutely. >> So that's been a real tailwind for you. You guys have been on the, you know, data virtualization, it was part of that. You know, it seems to me that one of the challenges that incumbents have is their data is locked inside. Frank James talked about it today, and sort of his maturity model. Actually no, it was Brian Regan, >> Yup. >> talking about the extension maturity model. >> Yup. >> Through the early stages, it's siloed. And it's not easy to go, you know, from that siloed data that's built maybe around a modeling plant or a bank, you know, to sort of this virtualized vision. So that's something that you guys caught early on. Clearly, digital transformation has been a tailwind for you guys, but how are your customers capitalizing on your solutions to transform themselves into a data driven company? >> Yeah, well the first thing you're seeing is, as I mentioned 2016. In 2016, 100 percent of our use cases were people who wanted a backup NDR solution that was a 100x faster and 50 percent or 90 percent cheaper and manage large sets of data. From 2016 into now, we have a massive shift of almost, between 56 percent on DevOps, another 20 percent on machine (mumbles). Think about it, you have a bunch of customers, large enterprises, whose number one focus is now around how to use data, and these are people who are consumers of data, not custodians of data, who are our previous customers. The best part is as you saw their own evolution of DevOps, the merge of the consumers and custodians managing as an agile system, that's exactly what's happening in our customer base. These are people who maybe have a role of a chief data officer, whose job is to supply data but also make sure it complies with governance rules. So there's a big shift of how data is now the new infrastructure. Data is now the one that I have to provide and enable access to wherever I need. And that does require a very, very different approach then build a box, you know, build something that centralizes all this silos into one place. When you build a box, fundamentally, you create another silo, 'cause you just broke in the whole idea about I need something that just drops down that is more global as a single lane space versus you know a box that is providing a single lane space and somehow, I'm going to assume that nobody else exists in the world. >> Yeah. I want to come back to sort of building a company and your philosophy there. A couple of questions I have for you. So you mentioned cloud and how you embraced cloud early on. You know, Amazon announces a backup service. You know, we talk to the backup vendors, and they say, yeah, but it's recovery, it's wonky, it's, you know, it's really not that robust. But it's Amazon, and you know, if you don't move fast, you know Amazon's going to gobble you up. You saw with the (mumbles), you know. It was down to cloud era, and (mumbles) reeling, it's like, that was going to take over the world. How do you think about that, maybe not in terms of competition, but in terms of staying ahead, of getting, you know, Uber'd by Amazon? >> Yeah. >> Thoughts on that. >> I think, number one, as Amazon and every other cloud provider has proven, and one that started nine years ago, enterprise cloud is hybrid. It's hybrid not just on frame and cloud, but it's also on frame and multi-cloud. Number one. Two, it's about applications. It is not about infrastructure. It is not about providing a single function that ties to a single platform. I as a customer, and we have several of those, I want to be able to manage my enterprise applications exactly the same way whatever cloud platform I choose to have, and that opens up a very different engineering, marketing, sales challenges, and most importantly, keeping the focus on the user. Now if I'm Amazon, I have a focus on my platform, not exactly the 50 other platforms you want to support. >> Right. >> And that's what we focus on. We focus on the 50 other platforms you want to support at the moment. Second, you know, there's this whole notion of a stacked fallacy. You might have heard of this paradigm where it's a lot easier for people on top of the stack to come down. It's a lot harder to go from bottom up. So if you're Amazon, and you're trying to drive infrastructure as a service, it takes a little while to go up the stack. It's a lot easier for somebody like us to come down from the stack, which is why we also announced Actifio GO, our SaaS offering. >> Right. >> That today, our version runs in Amazon, providing a much more robust, much more multi-cloud, much more heterogenous, and much more enterprise class and enterprise grade solution. And we also announced one for Actifio GO for TCV for IBM cloud. >> Yeah. >> And that's how our customers want it. >> And it's a much more facile experience for the customers. It seems to me that it makes sense what you're saying is you're happy to build on top of Amazon's infrastructure. For them, you know, frankly, people always say, oh, is Amazon going to get into apps? To me, yeah, maybe some day. They don't have to. Give developers tools to build apps seems to me. Last question I have is just the philosophy of building a company. You know, you've raised I think $200 million since inception. That's a lot of money. Software's a capital efficient business, but it fails in comparison to some of what the west coast companies have done. You know, you guys, you know, I'm from Massachusetts, where maybe more conservative. You are very deliberately building a company. How do you think about, you know, the craziness in the west coast. I call it craziness, but it obviously works. You (mumbles) storage, you know, they hit escape velocity, TSX had a very successful IPO. >> Yeah. >> You're kind of slow and steady. Your philosophy there, explain that. >> Yeah, I think a couple of things. One, it was about creating a sustaining company that was growing responsibly. And two, it's also the speed of how much our customers in the market can absorb a paradigm like what we are trying to drive. And most importantly, the class of customer you're focused on. These are, like I said, $1 billion plus in revenue and above. >> Yeah. >> Sales process for them is longer, which is actually where the money goes. The money isn't on software development. It's about supporting these customers on their initiatives. Any of these customers are somewhere about eight years with us and continue to expand. Some of the largest financial institutions have started with about $500,000 and almost $20 million with us. So that journey of making the customer successful costs money, but it builds long-standing customer whose foundation is built on Actifio. We are the data provider for these customers. We are not a widgit who throws something in there and calls you in three years when your maintenance is up. That is not the business we're building. So I don't think it's about east coast, west coast as much as it's about what we deliver requires being at the customer's side, working with them for years, as they go through the transformation, and I don't think we can do that by supporting 10,000 users at the same time. Maybe we can support 1,000, 2,000. And that's just the product and the market is going now. >> True to your mission, close to the customers, you know, clear differentiation at the app levels, I'm going to just say top down. You guys didn't talk about it, but you know, database affinity, some of the unique things you have going on there. Ash, it's great to see you. Congratulations on all your success, and you'll keep it going. Really appreciate it. Have a good day. >> All right, you're welcome. >> Thank you again. Welcome again for Data Driven 19. >> All right. It's great to be here. Actifio Data Driven 19, day one, the Cube, from Boston. We'll be right back right after this short break. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)