>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. It's the live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We got two sets. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Adam Rasner, who is Vice-President of Technology Operation of AutoNation. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. >> Yeah thanks for having me. >> So you guys are a customer of all this virtualization stuff. What's going on in your company? Tell us what's happening at AutoNation. What are you guys at now with IT operations? Where you guys going? How you guys building into the Cloud? What's the strategy? >> Sure, so AutoNation is exploding. We have 280 new car dealerships. We have 80 collision centers. We just launched our own precision parts line. We're also looking at other technologies to automate the car buying experience. So we want to make like an Amazon-like car buying experience online, so that requires a lot new technology and digitalization. >> Yeah, talk a little bit about that. 'Cause I know, I've looked at cars in the last couple of years and now you know, I do so much of it online. I feel like I could do the whole experience from my phone if I wanted. So how much are you a technology company? And how much of that's cloud? And what are those dynamics that you've been going through the last couple of years? >> Yeah I think the millennials this day, they're willing to go online and do the whole car buying experience end-to-end, from the buying of the car to the financing of the car all online. And we can roll a flat-bed up to their house, and deliver a car, and they sign on an iPad, and they're good to go. And I think that's where things are going. So to do all that requires a lot of technology on the back-end. So we have a lot of on-prem infrastructure. I'd say we're still 90% on-prem, 10% in an Azure, AWS infrastructure. But that's going to change in time as a lot of these new applications are written. >> As you guys are doing the digital transformation, and it sounds like there's a lot of action going on, new things happening, you're in the app business. You got to build apps for user experience. So you've got to make the infrastructure work for you, and make it be failover, fall-tolerant, all that good stuff, recovery, how do you look at that? How do you run at the speed you need to run at? What are some of they key things you guys have to do to keep on that treadmill, but yet not drop the ball in delivering apps to the users that drive the business? >> I think there's a few things. I think one is, we have to be able to keep the lights on with our existing infrastructure, our existing apps while we build these next generation of applications. We have to be able to scale up as needed and scale down, be able to support some of the new mobile platforms that we're going to be working on. So there's a lot of work going on and DR is a big part of this too. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Because data is at the core here. So, can you tell us that role of data, and then you say data protection. How is that changing, what was it like before you went through this transformation? Then we'll of course get into what you're using. >> Sure, so we actually, were using an old Microsoft data protection manager product and just didn't scale the way we needed to, we were having some performance issues. And so, data protection, while not very sexy, it's something you have to do. It's table stakes in IT. It doesn't innovate, it doesn't make me sell more cars, it doesn't help the business sell more cars, but it's something we have to do. So we looked out there at what I call the legacy players and also the nextgen players and went through a full proof of concept with several of them. >> All right, and what were you looking for? What was kind of the key objective you said? Data protection doesn't make you money, or didn't make you money. We've talked to some customers, that's like, wait, might do some cool snapshotting, I can leverage that data, I can do some more things with my developers, and everything. So what was the goal of this transformation and then what was the criteria that you went through to make a decision? >> Yeah, so the data protection was the initial piece and we just needed a rock solid backup and recovery solution. And we started off with just a simple, hey, we wanted an integrated hardware software solution, we wanted something that could scale infinitely, we wanted a predictive cost model. And so a lot of those older legacy players don't play well in that space, they're expensive to support, eventually you hit a wall on hardware limitations and you have to use forklift upgrades. So we wanted something that was a little bit more nimble and then down the road, as we got into it, once the backup and recovery piece was kind of under control we started using our new solution for other things and secondary storage which was an added bonus. >> So you haven't mentioned, what is the solution that you chose and what were the key things that led to that? >> Yeah, so after going through several POCs with you know, NetBackup, Rubric and Cohesity, we ultimately chose Cohesity for performance, cost, ease of implementation, ease of the user interface, ease of management. >> And what was the comparison, on the floor here you see Rubric and Cohesity next in the huge booths. What's the difference between those two? >> Yeah, so we actually put them side by side in our data center, full blown POCs, and there was some performance differences, there were some technical challenges that we had with some of the other products. And ultimately the team, our engineering team felt most comfortable with Cohesity after spending six or eight months in a really in-depth POC. >> Big bake-off. I love the bake-offs. It's the only way to have the answer like that. So when you look at the solutions, are you guys mostly interested in the software side of the business that they had? What was they key piece of it? >> I think we're interested in the whole thing. I had been at other places where we had done the NetBackup and data domain story and you know, you're having a problem at three o'clock in the morning and you got the finger pointing, is it a software issue, is it a hardware issue? We wanted the one throat to choke kind of solution, and so, you know, that was a requirement right off the bat. Whatever we chose was going to be an integrated hardware software platform. >> Adam, walk us through from the deployment to the day two action. How did it go? What surprised you? What, you know, thrilled you? You know, what challenges did you have? >> Yeah, we've been a customer for- I think we were very early customer, probably almost about two years now. So, there's a lot we didn't know. There was a lot of things in the product that actually weren't fully mature when we first started the POC. And so we went through a full, a full blown bake-off, and one of the things we noticed it was much easier to implement, we didn't require any professional services to get it up and running and the technical support we were super impressed with. So I think, you know, the team, after going through the motions, really felt like this was the product for us. And again, really mainly around backup and recovery, but ultimately decided that we were going to use it for other things too. >> Adam, I was walking through the hallways yesterday, Stu and I were both checking out the booths. And I hear a lot of conversations and it comes up around the Cohesity, Rubric, all these different cloud solutions. Some are rinsed and repeat old models that just have, you know, not mostly those guys are, but the customers are concerned about I don't want the old way, I want the new way, I want to be cloud native, I want to work with cloud, One choke to throw, I need software, I need to have agility, and I need to have auto, you know, healing, all this kind of stuff. How do you sort through that? I know you've been through the POC but your peers that are out here at VMworld, they're squinting through the noise going okay, I got to really dig in here. What's your advice to those guys and gals? >> I think it's really challenging for the people that are, you know, neck deep in some of these other legacy products because it's a little bit hard to move. You know, it's costly, it's expensive, and it's a significant effort. I was in a rare position where I was able to start net new, and so that made it a little bit easier. But I think you start with a slow migration, start setting up your new infrastructure on a nextgen platform and then slowly migrate off. These next, these legacy players are very expensive, and they don't scale very well. That's probably one of our biggest challenges. >> One of the things you said, you started with a couple of use cases but you're now doing a bunch more. Talk about that, what more, what are the new things you're doing and what's the road map look forward at AutoNation? >> Sure. So we had a, a lot of apps, that we're probably not needing. Tier one, NetApp, all SSD, high performance SAN. I call it my Cadillac of storage, you know. It's our highest performance applications and we were having some apps that the hardware was starting to, you know, just go bad. And so the only place I could put it was either on my NetApp, or I didn't have any place else. So the story changed over time. Cohesity became not only our backup and recovery data protection appliance, we started landing some of our tier two storage on Cohesity. So moving things that we would normally put on NetApp, putting it on Cohesity for 40 percent of the cost and it's a win-win. >> All right, so, Adam, I couldn't help noticing you've got the Drive Pink pin on. >> Yes. >> So, maybe tell our audience a little bit about the, you know, AutoNation Drive Pink initiative and you know, do you have relationships with the suppliers here? Pat Gelsinger this morning talked about you know, we need to be as a technology community more doing good. It's foundational to what we're doing. >> Autonation, it's one of our core charities is cancer awareness. I think we've donated almost 30 million dollars. Every car that you buy, we try to put the Drive Pink license plate. And I think not only for business, I think in IT we also have to have a lens to some of these charities and some of these things that need our help. >> Issue driven businesses are doing well now, people expect that. Not just for profit, but the people involved. >> Yeah. >> Anyone can work anywhere these days, talent, it's also good. I mean, it's one of those things. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> All right, so, takeaway from this show, so far, your impression as a practitioner in the IT footprint space, looking at a cloud on the horizon, we just had Andy Bechtolsheim just on, been part of the early days. Cloud's coming fast, networking's got to get better, you got to, you know, seeing what solutions, integrating well together. How do you make sense of all this content coming out of VMworld? >> Yeah, I think what I get out of this and kind of AWS, all of these conferences, is that everything we buy has to be extendable to the cloud. You know, we still have a lot of on-premise infrastructure but everything we implement has to be cloudable, it has to be able to be used in our future use cases. >> I would love, we're talking a lot here in the keynote this morning it's like, right, this move, we know it's going to take time and Amazon's doing some things, VMware's doing some things, how's the industry doing, how do you see the progression, what would you like to see them do more better if we come back in a year, if I kind of give you that magic wand? >> Yeah. You know, I always leave a lot of these conferences and I feel like I'm behind the eight ball, in our cloud migration, but, companies like us that have a lot of legacy apps, they're slow to move. And so, I leave the conference, I feel like I'm behind the eight ball, but I get back and I talk to my peers and many of them are in the same situation I am. They're still maturing, but I think, yes, I think the net new generation apps that we're going to build are going to be in the cloud because the capabilities to autoscale and so I think that anything we buy, anything we implement we have to have a lens to that going forward. >> Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE, we really appreciate, sounds like you're happy with Cohesity? >> They've done a great job, we're really happy customers. >> How long was that bake-off by the way, that you ran that? >> We did it about six months. >> That's pretty good and long. >> Yeah, we actually had some, again we were very early to the game so there were features in the product that we needed that they didn't have yet and our agreement was we'll proceed after you can meet these requirements and they did. >> Yeah. And Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy on the stage, one of the things Andy Jassy, who's been on theCUBE talks about all the time is listening to customers. Sounds like they're listening to you guys. >> Absolutely, absolutely. You have to, it's such a competitive environment now. You know, if you can't meet the customer's minimal requirements, there's somebody else that can. >> You got to be cloud compatible. AutoNation breaking it down here, here at Vmworld bringing the practitioner perspective, the customer perspective, all of these suppliers try to bring cloud and on-premises together. It's theCUBE bringing you all the action here at Vmworld 2018. I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's eco system partners. >> Welcome back, this is VMworld 2018, you're watching theCUBE. With Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman and we've got a nice presence here front of the VM village, right next to the solutions expo we're over the three days. We've got about 95 guests and 75 interviews. Happen to welcome back to the program Lynn Lucas is the CMO of Cohesity. People are commenting a little bit about our presence here but, I don't know, I think Cohesity has a little bit of a bigger footprint and a few more people have been talking about you there so. First of all, welcome back to the program. >> Well thanks very much for having us again. We've been so excited to be here at VMworld. So obviously of course, customers are the core of our business and yeah, we thought we'd make a little bit of noise the first night. >> Yeah, a little bit. The booth is hopping, people are lining up. You usually have some games you're doing. I know I'd seen it at Cisco Live. Maybe give people just a little taste of what Cohesity's doing at the show. >> Well sure, so you know, we do have a great amazing marketing team here and they've got some cool games going on in the booth but what it's really about is bringing folks in and talking about how we can help them with their, consolidating their data silos and so we've also got eight demo stations in there, live theater presentations, Adam Rasner, who was here on the program earlier. >> From AutoNations, yeah. >> From AutoNations, CIO is speaking again today and what we're here to do is really talk to customers about how we can help them really modernize their data center and move into a hybrid cloud world. >> Yeah, it's always interesting, at VMworld there's you know, customers, I want to spend a bunch of time understanding how to use even more the things that I've got. But then there's also the new stuff. So Cohesity, you have a mix of that. New product announcement Helios, maybe bring us through what customers are really digging into and bring us up to speed on Helios. >> Yeah absolutely, thank you for mentioning that. Well, there's a broader trend which of course you guys have been covering which is data fueling business, but data's fragmented. It's in all these silos. Cohesity's been addressing that for the last several years with Cohesity Data Platform, Hyper converged secondary storage. Helios now adds to that offering and provides a single global unified view of all your secondary data and applications. It's a sass space service but it's not just a dashboard or a monitoring. It is active management which is really going to bring about great efficiencies for the IT organization. >> I was speaking to your CEO, I think it was yesterday we had a briefing and he walked me through some of that and I actually spoke with your customer AutoNation last week as well and they gave me an update on things. And it became quite clear to me that I'd missed something I misunderstood about Cohesity that it wasn't just about data protection. That's just sort of the first thing that you do. And AutoNation mentioned this as well, that they'd started using Cohesity for data protection but then they realized that, well actually I could use this for secondary data storage and they'd already had the platform, they bought it a couple of years ago. And these additional features just arrive on the platform. So is Helios also one of these features that just gets added to something that you've already made an investment in? >> So thanks for kind of calling out those use cases. So Helios is actually available as a freemium offer right now and it's intended for customers that have multiple sites whether those sites be you know LA, Tokyo, Dubai. But also in the Cloud because Cohesity offers capabilities if you're in Adjure, if you're in AWS, and now Google Cloud as well. So our new freemium edition of Helios is going to give that global view, that ability for IT to at a glance see how all of their secondary data and apps are working, do they have any capacity needs coming up, and the ability to role out automated policies globally. And so this is where we hear a lot of interest from IT because infrastructure really frankly has been so primitive right. When you think about it most of it architected in the last century. And they spend so much time just trying to keep thing up to date and keep the complexity down. And Helios offers a single way to manage all of that. And there's a lot more coming in Helios overtime because it's got machine learning capability built into it so I think you're going to see just the beginning right now and a long list of things that'll be coming out over time that will really help IT advance their operational efficiency. >> Yeah Lynn, definitely, Multi cloud is one of the top things we've been seeing at this show and it's been short. The VMworld's position, their partnership with AWS and some of the other providers. Help us understand how Cohesity lives in this multi cloud world, the things like the VMC and all those, how do those tie together? >> Yeah and great questions. So you know, customers, you said, they're in a multi cloud world and what most organizations are understanding is that two things, one, they've got to choose the cloud for the right set of workloads, right. It's not a fantasy. It can be more expensive if it's not thought about in terms of the use cases that they're looking for. Obvious;y has a mass advantage in terms of elastic scalability, compute power. And the other thing I think that now is becoming more to the forefront is that the cloud is created for IT just has many silos. And if you're a multi cloud organization which most are, well now you've got silos of different types between the two clouds. So Cohesity is creating with Helios, a single operating model across any environment whether that be Cloud, Core or Edge. And that is really what we aim to do is create that invisible kind of layer so that IT can focus more on helping the business. You know, I was talking to a prospect here just a couple of days ago and because we're so today instant gratification oriented the CEO just says, hey, I need that file, or I need this deleted maybe because of GDPR. And the IT teams are obviously struggling with how is this happening when I have such complex infrastructure Silos. Helios is the first step in helping to solve that. >> Yeah, Lynn, I'm wondering, do you know, there's so many players that want to be that platform across the multi cloud. VMware put their case forward is to how they do this. You know Microsoft has pretty good positioning when we talk about hybrid Cloud. Can you speak to how Cohesity can be across these environments, partnerships, alliances, eco system, help put this together because no single company can do it all? >> Totally agree with you. I mean I don't think any vendor today could operate on their own. It is an eco system. So first and foremost, VMware is our partner. And the Cloud providers are our partners along with many other companies that are here, Nutanix, Pure. We operate in the secondary world, right. The secondary realm first and foremost and that's the 80 percent of the enterprise data and infrastructure that hasn't had a lot of innovation. You pointed out, it started with data protection. There's a been a lot of pain points there, but it extends to file, to test dev to analytics and we really provide that complement to VMware for customers that are looking for a way to modernize their data center where Cohesity can back up, instantly restore VM's in the case of a disaster. Also move them up to the Cloud for test dev, then spin them back when they're ready to come back into production. So we're a real complement to the primary environment. >> I wanted to get into that a little bit Lynn. So one of the things when I'm talking to vendors and particularly with customers, they sometimes take a solution to remove some pain points. But then once they've actually got something in place there's all of these new possibilities that opens up for them and particularly around the silo aspect. Could you maybe give us an example of a customer who's been able to realize a new opportunity once they use Cohesity to remove some of that siloing and now they can build things on this platform that they've purchased? >> Yeah and so great questions. So one of our customers, you talked about AutoNation, but let me bring up another one. Manhattan Associates, large organization, software organization, also started with Cohesity with data protection and then realized, we can use the same platform for consolidating file services. It allowed them to instead of adding Opex in the form of additional teams to manage their very massively growing environment to reinvest those teams in actually a new model for the business which is to bring out more capability for the business in a faster time than they would of otherwise. So a lot of what we talk about is the operational simplicity that we bring. For every business, what they invest that in or reinvest those resources is going to be different but it enables them in that case to do more in their core business which is serving their manufacturing supply chain customers in a more efficient way. >> And that's quite important I think for IT teams to be able to join with the business and to show that they're actually providing new value rather than being seen as just a cost center which we hear that from IT teams al the time. They're quite sick of being, well you're just a cost, you're not involved in strategic decisions that are important to the business. So having a platform something like this, means that you can be part of those conversations. You can get a seat at the table and be involved in creating new value for the business. >> Yeah absolutely, I mean the analyst community's been talking about this for a long time. I know right, that most of IT unfortunately has been investing, I think it's 80 percent, maybe 80 percent plus, and just keeping everything running and the business gets so frustrated and creates shadow IT. Another customer of ours, so Verizon Subsidiary, XO Communications, another example where instead of having to I believe, invest in seven more folks just to manage their data protection and their file storages, once they were able to invest in Cohesity because of the simplicity of not having so many vendors, not having the complexity of managing silos of infrastructure, they took that same budget and were able to invest it in doing more for their government clients. >> Lynn, wonder if you could give is some of the company updates? Number of customers, you know, we talked a little bit about the product but just kind of step it back at a corporate level. >> Yeah, so the solution's really resonating. We had the good fortune to put out some news about our physical year. We grew 300 percent year over year in revenue which is I think fantastic growth for any company. We're certainly super pleased that the confidence our customers have in us. We saw a 76 percent growth in new customers Q4 over Q3 and this is primarily folks that I think are seeing the benefit of moving to a modern, scale out platform for data protection. As you mentioned, there are others now starting to discover file services. We feel that we haven't even tapped that. And these are, we've mentioned some customers, but others like Hyatt, US Air force. So there are some very large enterprise and government customers that have seen the benefits in the secondary world of adopting the new scale out hyper converged platform. >> That's great. Last thing, we were talking about multi Cloud. I think you had some news you wanted to share about where else we might be seeing Cohesity in theCUBE. >> That's right and so let's break the news here. So we are super pleased to have theCUBE at Microsoft Ignite in the Cohesity booth. We are very excited about that opportunity. Microsoft and as you're obviously being a very strong partners with Cohesity. We do a lot of work with them. And we're excited to bring theCUBE to the Microsoft customer set and your global audience watching worldwide in about a months time I think. >> Yeah Lynn, absolutely. We really appreciate the partnership. And for those who don't know, we love to cover all the shows. We do over 110 shows. Microsoft shows have been on the top of our list and we've talked with Microsoft, we have lots of guests on the program from Microsoft. We've had Fonti Adele on, we've have Brad Anderson on. But it, through the partnership with Cohesity we're there, we're going to have lots of editorial guests from Microsoft, from the ecosystem, our independent coverage. But we have Cohesity as our host. So thanks again. >> Happy to have you guys there and make the opportunity. Microsoft obviously a massive player in the IT ecosystem and it's important that you guys cover what's going on at that show. >> Okay, great and so of course you can always check out at the Cohesity website all the places they're being. To find where we'll be, check out theCUBE.net. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. Always great to catch up with you Lynn Lucas. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> And we'll be back with lots more. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)