>> we'LL run. Welcome to this special. Keep conversation. We're here in Mountain View, California. The pure storage headquarters here in Castro Tree, one of the many buildings they have here as they continue to grow as a public company. Our next guest is Kicks Vice President of strategy Employee number six Pure. Great to see you. Thanks for spending time. Thanks for having me. So cloud is the big wave that's coming around the future itself here. Now, people really impacted by it operationally coming to the reality that they got to actually use the cloud of benefits for many, many multiple benefits. But you guys have major bones in storage, flash arrays continuing to take take territory. So as you guys do that, what's the cloud play? How to customers who were using pure. And we've heard some good testimonials Yet a lot of happy customers. We've seen great performance, Easy to get in reliability performances. They're in the storage side on premise. Right? Okay. Now Operations says, Hey, I build faster. Cloud is certainly path there. Certainly. Good one. Your thoughts on strategy for the cloud? >> Absolutely. So look for about ten years into the journey here, a pure. And a lot of what we did in the first ten years was helped bring flash onto the scene. Um, and you know what a vision when we started the company of the All Flash Data Center and I'd like to first of all, remind people that look, we ain't there yet. If you look at the analyst numbers, about a third of the storage sold this year will be flashed two thirds disk. So we still have a long way to go in the old flash data center and a lot of work to do there. But of course, increasingly customers are wanting to move, were close to the cloud. And I think the last couple of years have almost seen a pendulum swing a little bit more back to reality. You know, when I met with CEOs to three years ago, you often heard we're going all cloud. We're going to cloud first and, you know, now there a few years into it. And they've realized that that cloud is a very powerful weapon in their in their arsenal for agility, for flexibility. But it's not necessarily cheaper on DH. So I think the swing back to really believe in in hybrid is the model of the day, and I think that I think people have realised in that journey is that the club early works best when you build a nap for the cloud natively. But what if you have a bunch of on prime maps that are in traditional architecture? How do I get in the cloud? And so one of the things we really focused on is how we can help customers take their mission critical applications and move them seamlessly to the cloud without re architecture. Because for most customers, that's really going to start. I mean, they could build some new stuff in the cloud, but the bulk of their business, if they want to move substantial portions of the cloud, they've got to figure out how to move what they've got. And we think we really had value in that. >> And the economics of the cloud is undeniable. People who are born in the cloud will testify that certainly as you guys have been successful on premise with the cloud, how do you make those economics, he seem, was as well as the operations. This seems to be the number one goal when you talk about how important that is and how hard it is, because it sounds easy just to say it. But it's actually really difficult to have seamless operations on Prime because, you know, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, they all got computing storage in the cloud and you got story. John Premise. This equation is a really important one to figure out what the importance and how hard is it to some of things that you guys are doing to solve that. >> Yeah, So I heard two things that question one around costs and one around operations on. You know, the first thing I think that has been nice to see over the last couple of years as people realizing that both the cloud and on from our cost effective in different ways, and I think a little bit about the way that I think about owning a car. Owning a car is relatively cost effective for me, and there's times and taken uber is relatively cost effective. I think they're both cheap when you look it on one metric, though, about what I pay per mile, it's way more expensive to own a car to take a number look about acquisition cost. It's way more expensive. Car, right? And so I think both of them provide value of my lives in the way that hybrid does today. But once you start to use both than the operational, part of your question comes in. How do I think about these two different worlds? And I think we believe that that storage is actually one of the areas where these two worlds are totally different on dso a couple things we've done to find a bridge together. First off on the cost side, one of the things we realised was that people that are going to run large amounts of on prime infrastructure increasingly want to do it in the cloud model. And so we introduced a new pricing model that we call the S to evergreen storage service, which will essentially allows you to subscribe to our storage even in your own data center. And so you can have an optics experience in the cloud. You gotta monoprix experience on Prem and when you buy and yes, to those licenses are transferrable so you can start on Prem, Move your stories to the cloud with pure go back and forth tons of flexibility. From the operational point of view, I think we're trying to get to the same experience as well such that you have a single storage experience for a manageability and automation point of view across both. And I think that last word of automation is key, because if you look at people who are really invested in cloud, it's all about automation. In one of the nice things I think that's made pure, so successful in on Prime Claude environments is this combination of simplicity and automation. You can't we automate what isn't simple to begin with on DH. So we started with simplicity. But as we've added rich FBI's, we're really seeing that become the dominant way that people administrated our storage. And so as we've gone to the cloud because it's the same software on both sides, literally the same integrations, the same AP calls everything works transparently across both places. >> That's a great point. We've been reporting on silicon ng on the Cube for years. Automation grave. You have to couple of manual taxes and automated, but the values and shifting and you guys in the storage business you know this data's data data is very valuable. You mentioned the car and Alice just take uber uber is an app. It's got Web services in the back end. So when you start thinking about cloud, you think you hear ap eyes You hear micro services as more and more applications going to need the data, they're going to need to have that in real time, some cases not near real time, either real time. And they're gonna need to have at the right time. So the role of data becomes important, which makes storage more important. So you automate the story, Okay, Take away that mundane tasks. Now the value shifts to making sure data is being presented properly. This is the renaissance of application development. Right now we're seeing this. How do you guys attack that market? How do you guys enable that? Mark, how do you satisfy that market? Because this is where the AP eyes could be connectors. This is where the data can be valuable. Whether it's analytic, score an app like uber. That's just, you know, slinging AP eyes together for a service that is now going to go public. Yeah, >> I think the mindset around data is one of the biggest differences between the old world in the New World. And if you think about the old world of applications. Yeah, monolithic databases that kind of privately owned their own data stores and the whole name of the game was delivering that as reliably as possible, kind of locking it down, making it super reliable. If you look at the idea of the Web scale application, the idea of an application is broken up into lots of little micro services, and those maker services somehow have to work together on data. And so what does it mean that the data level, it's not this kind of monolithic database anymore? It's got to be this open shared environment and, you know, as a result, if you look in the Web in Amazon's case, for example, the vast majority of applications are written on history object storage that's inherently shared. And so I think one of the bigger interesting challenges right now is how you get data constructs to actually go both ways. You know, if you want to take a non prime map that kind of is built around the database, you've got to figure out a way to move it to the cloud and ronit reliably on the flipside of the coin. If you want to build on Web skill tools and then be hybrid and run some of those things on Prem, well, you need an object store on prim and most people don't have that. And so you know, this whole kind of compatibility to make hybrid reality. It's forcing people on both sides of the weir to understand the other architecture er, and make sure they're compatible both ways >> and throw more complex into that equation. Is that skills, gaps? I know I know that cloud needed. But now men on premise so different skill got you guys had an announcement that's come out. So I want to ask you about your product announcement and your acquisitions. Go back to past six months. What's the most notable product announcements inequities that you guys have done? And what does that mean for pure and your customers? Yeah, >> absolutely. So I'll just kind of walk through it, So the first thing we announced was our new set of Cloud data services, and this was in essence, bringing our core software that runs on our purity. Operating environment right into the cloud. And so we call that cloud block store. And again, this is a lot of what I've been talking about, how you can take a tier one block storage application on Prem and seamlessly move it to the cloud along that same timeline. We also introduce something called P S O, which is the pure service orchestrator. And this was a tool set that we built specifically for the containers world for communities so that basically, in a container environment, our storage could be completely automated. It's been really fun watching customers use and just see how different that storage is in a container environment. You know, we look at our call home data with an R P. R. One application, and in our traditional on prime environment, the average array has about one administrative tasks per day. Make a volume. Delete something, Whatever. If you look in a container environment, that's tens of thousands, and so it's just a much more fluid environment, which there's no way a storage at Ben's going to do something ten thousand times a day they've got on, >> and that's where automation comes in. But what does that mean? the continuous station. That means the clients are using containers to be more flexible, they deploying more. What's the What's the inside of this container trend? >> You know, I think ultimately it's just a farm or fluid environment. It's totally automated, Andi. It's built on a world of share data. And so you need a shared, reliable data service that can power these containers, Um and then, you know, back to original question about about kind of product expansion. The next thing that we haven't announced last year was acquisition of a company called Story Juice, and we've subsequently brought out as a product that we call Object Engine. And this is all about a new type of data moving into the club, which is backup data and facilitating in this backup process. You know, in the past, people moved from tape back up to the space back up and, you know, we saw kind of two new inflection points here. Number one the opportunity Use flash on Prem. So the people have really fast recoveries on prep because in most environments now, space recovery just aren't fast enough, and then using low cost object storage in the cloud for retention. So the combination of flash on Prem and Object Storage in the Cloud can completely replace both disc and tape in the back of process >> case. I won the competition because you guys came in really with the vision of all Flash Data Center. You now have a cloud software that runs on Amazon and others with words. No hardware, he just the blocks are great solution. How have the competition fallen behind you guys really kind of catapulted into the lead, took share certainly from other vendors. In my public, someone predicted that pure would never make it to escape velocity. Some other pundits and other CEOs of tech company said that you guys achieve that, but their success now You guys go the next level. What is the importance of that ability you have? And what's the inability of the competition? So, you know, I like >> to joke with folks. When we started the company, I think flashes. It's an excuse, you know, We just tried to build a better storage company and we went out and I talkto many, many, many customers, and I found in general they didn't just not like their stories products they didn't like the companies that sold it to them, and so we tried to look at that overall experience. And, you know, we, of course, innovated around flash use. Consumer fresh brought the price down so I could actually afford to use it with the duplication. But we also just looked at that ownership experience. And when I talk to folks in the history, I think now we might even be better known for are evergreen approach that even for Flash. And it's been neat to watch customers now that even the earliest your customers or two or three cycles of refreshing they've seen a dramatic difference in just the storage experience that you can essentially subscribe to. A known over time through many generations of technology. Turn as opposed to that cycle of replacing a raise >> share a story of a custom that's been through that's reached fresh cycles from their first experience to what they're experienced. Now what what? Some of the experiences like any share some some insight. >> Yeah, so, you know, one of one of the first customers that really turn us on to this. That scale was a large telco provider, and they were interesting they run, you know, hundreds of here wanna raise from from competitors and you know, they do a three year cycle. But as they really like, looked at the cost of that three or cycle. They realized that it was eighteen months of usable life in those three years because it took him nine months to get the dirt on the array. And then when they knew the end was coming, it took him nine months to get the data off the array. And so parade it was cost him a million dollars just in data migration costs alone. Then you've wasted half of your life of the array, and so add that up over hundreds of raising your environment. You can quickly get the math. >> It's just it's a total cost of ownership, gets out of control, right? And >> so as we brought in Evergreen, there's just an immediate roo. I mean, it was accost equation. It was, you know, on parity with flash disk anyway. But if you look at all those operational savings, itjust is completed. And so I think what we started with Evergreen, we realised it was much more of a subscription model where people subscribe to a service with us. We updated. Refresh the hardware over time and it just keeps getting better over time. Sounds >> a lot like the cloud, right? And so we really your strategies bring common set of tools in there and read them again. That kind of service that been Kia. >> Yeah, I think you know another thing that we did from Day one was like, We're never gonna build a piece of on prime management software. So are on print. Our management experience from Day one was pure one, which is our SAS base management platform. You know, it started out as a call home application, but now is a very full featured south space management experience. And that's also served us well as you go to the cloud, because when you want to manage on permanent cloud together, we're about to do it from then the cloud itself >> tell about the application environment you mentioned earlier hybrid on multi class here. Ah, a lot of pressure and I t to get top line revenue, not just cost reduction was a good benefits you mentioned certainly gets their attention. But changing the organization's value proposition to their customers is about the experience either app driven or some other tech. This is now an imperative. It's happening very fast. Modernisation Renaissance. People call it all these things. How you guys helping that piece of the >> puzzle? Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately, for most customers, as they start toe really getting their mindset, that technology is there. Differentiation speed into Julia there, developers becomes key. And so you know, modern CEO is much less about being a cost cutting CEO today, and much more about that empower in Seo and how you can actually build the tools and bring them there for the ordination. Run faster. And a lot of that is about unlocking consumption. And so it's been it's been fun to see some of the lessons of the cloud in terms of instant consumption, agility growth actually come to the mindset of how people think about on Primus. Well, and so a lot of what we've done is tried Teo armed people on prom with those same capabilities so that they can easily deliver storage of service to their customers so folks can consume the FBI without having to call somebody to ask for storage. So things could take seconds, not weeks of procurement, right? And then now, as we bridge those models between on permanent cloud, it becomes a single spot where you can basically have that same experience to request storage wherever it may be. In the organization, >> the infrastructures code is really just, you know, pushing code not from local host or the machine, but to cloud or on prim and just kind of trickle all the way through. This is one of the focuses we're hearing in cloud native conversations, as you know, words like containers We talked briefly about you mentioned in the activities. Hi, Cooper Netease is really hot right now. Service meshes Micro services state ful Data's stateless data. These air like really hyped up areas, but a lot of traction force people take a look at it. How do you guys speak to the customers when they say, hey, kicks? We love all the pure stuff. We're on our third enter federation or anything about being a customer. I got this looming, you know, trend. I gotto understand, and either operationalize or not around. Cooper Netease service mesh these kinds of club native tools. How do you guys talk to that customer. What's the pitch? That's the value proposition. >> Yeah. I mean, I think you know, your your new Kupres environment is the last place you should consider a legacy Storage, You know, all all joking aside, we've We've been really, I think possibly impressed around how fast the adoption it started around containers in general. And Cooper, that is, You know, it started out as a developer thing. And, you know, we first saw it in our environment. When we started to build our second product up your flash blade four, five years ago, the engineering team started with honors from Day one. It was like, That's interesting. And so we started to >> see their useful. We have containers and communities worker straight, pretty nights. And >> so, you know, we just started to see that grow way also started to see it more within analytics and a I, you know, as we got into a I would area and are broader push around going after Big Gate and analytics. Those tool chains in particular, were very well set up to take advantage of containers because they're much more modern. That's much more about, you know, fluidly creating this data pipeline. And so it started in these key use cases. But I think you know, it's at a point right now where every enterprises considering it, there's certainly an opportunity in the development environment. And, you know, despite all of that, the folks who tend to use these containers, they don't think about storage. You know that if they go to the cloud and they start to build applications, they're not thinking many layers down in the organization. What the story is that supports me looks like. And so if you look at a storage team's job or never structure seems job is to provide the same experience to your container centric consumers, right? They should just be able Teo, orchestrate and build, and then stories should just happen underneath. >> I told Agree that I think that success milestone. If you could have that conversation that he had, you know you're winning what they do care about. We're hearing more of what you mentioned earlier about data pipeline data they care about because applications will be needing data. But it's a retail app or whatever. I might need to have access to multiple data, not some siloed or you know, data warehouse that might have little, you know. Hi, Leighton. See, they need data in the AP at the right moment. This has been a key discussion. Real time. I mean, this is the date. It's It's been a hard problem. Yeah. How do you guys look at that solution opportunity for your customers? I >> think one of the insights we had was that fundamentally folks needed infrastructure that cannot just run one tool or another tool, but a whole bunch of them. And, you know, you look at people building a data pipeline there, stitching together six, eight, ten tools that exist today and another twenty that don't exist tomorrow. And that flexibility is key, right? A lot of the original thought in that space was going to pick the right storage for this piece of the write stories for that piece. But as we introduced our flash blade product, we really position it as a data hub for these modern applications. And each of them requires something a little different. But the flexibility and scale of flash played was able to provide everything those applications needed. We're now seeing another opportunity in that space with Daz and the traditional architecture. You know, as we came out with envy me over fabrics within our flash ray product line. We see this is a way to really take Web scale architecture on Prem. You know, you look Quinn's within Google and Amazon and whatnot, right? They're not using hyper converge there, not using Daz disc inside of the same chassis that happens. We're on applications. They have dedicated in frustration for storage. That's simply design for dedicated servers. And they're connected with fast Internet, you know, networking on demand. And so we're basically trying to bring that same architecture to the on prime environment with nd me over fabric because they need me over fabric can make local disc feel like you know as fun. >> But this is the shift that's really going on here. This is a complete re architecture of computing and storage. Resource is >> absolutely, you know, and I think the thing that's changing it is that need for consolidation. In the early days, I might have said, Okay, I'm gonna deploy. I don't know, two hundred nodes of the Duke and all just design a server for her dupe with the right amount of discontent and put him over in those racks, and that will be like this. Then I'LL design something else for something else. Right now, people are looking for defining Iraq. They can print out, over and over and over and over again, and that rack needs to be flexible enough to deliver the right amount of storage to every application on demand over and >> over. You know, one trend I want get your reaction to a surveillance because this kind of points that value proposition functions have been very popular. It's still early days on what functions are, but is a tell sign a little bit on where this is going to your point around thinking, rethinking on Prem not in the radical wholesale business model change, but just more of operating change. I was deployed and how it works with the cloud because those two things, if working together, make server Lis very interesting. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just a further form of abstraction, ultimately from the underlying hardware. And so you know, if you think about functions on demand or that kind of thing, that's absolute, something that just needs a big shared pool of storage and not to have any persistent findings to anything you know, Bill, to get to the storage needs, do its task, right? What it needs to and get out of the way. Right? >> Well, VP of strategy. A big roll. You guys did a good job. So congratulations being the number six employees of pure. How's the journey been? You guys have gone public, Still growing. Been around for it on those ten years. You're not really small little couple anymore. So you're getting into bigger accounts growing. How's that journey been for you? >> It's so it's been an amazing right. That's why I'm still here, coming in every day, excited to come to work. I think they think that we're the proudest of is it still feels like a small company. It still feels with, like we have a much aggression and much excitement to go out for the market everyday, as we always have the oranges very, very strong. But on the flip side, it's now fun that we get to solve customer problems at a scale that we probably could have even imagined in the early days. And I would also say right now it really feels like there's this next chapter opening up. You know, the first chapter was delivering the all flashes, and we're not even done with that yet. But as we bring our software to the cloud and really poured it natively be optimized for each of the clouds. It kind of opens up. Our engineers tto be creative in different ways. >> Generational shift happening. Seeing it, you know again. Application, modernization, hybrid multi clouded. Just some key pillars. But there's so much more opportunity to go. I want your thoughts. You've had the luxury of being working under two CEOs that have been very senior veterans Scott Dietzen and Charlie. What's it like working with both of them? And what's it like with Charlie? Now it's What's the big mandate? What what's the Hill you guys are trying to climb? Share some of the vision around Charlene's? Well, >> I'd say the thing that binds both Scott and truly together in DNA is that they're fundamentally both innovators. And, you know, if you look at pure, we're never going to be the low cost leader. We're not going to be. The company tells you everything, so we have to be the company that's most innovative in the spaces we playing. And so you know, that's job number one. It pure after reliability. So let's say that you remember, too. But that's key. And I think both of both of our CEOs have shared that common DNA, which is their fundamentally product innovators. And I think that's the fun thing about working for Charlie is he's really thoughtful about how you run a company of very large scale. How you how you manage the custom relationship to never sacrifice that experience because that's been great for pure but ultimately how you also, unlike people to run faster and a big organization, >> check every John Chambers, who Charlie worked with Cisco. With the back on the day, he said, One of the key things about a CEO is picking the right wave the right time. What is that way for pure. What do you guys riding that takes advantage of? The work still got to do in the data center on the story side. What's the big wave? >> So, you know, look, the first way was flash. That was a great way to be on and before its not over. But we really see a and an enormous opportunity where cloud infrastructure mentality comes on. And, you know, we think that's going to finally be the thing that gets people out of the mindset of doing things the old way. You know, you fundamentally could take the lessons we learned over here and apply it to the other side of my hybrid cloud. Every talks about hybrid cloud and all the thought processes what happens over the cloud half of the hybrid. Well, Ian from half of the hybrid is just as important. And getting that to be truly Cloudera is a key focus of >> Arya. And then again, micro Services only helped accelerate. And you want modern story, your point to make that work absolutely kicks. Thanks for spending time in sparing the insides. I really appreciate it. It's the Cube conversation here of Pure stores. Headquarters were in the arcade room. Get the insights and share in the data with you. I'm job for your Thanks for watching this cube conversation

>> Announcer: Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> We're back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in the DEVNET Zone at Cisco Live 2018, beautiful Barcelona. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Mike Bundy who is the head of Global Strategic Alliances with Pure Storage, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> As a first time guest, give us a little bit about your background, you're relatively new to Pure, but you know this ecosystem quite well. >> Absolutely, so, relatively new with Pure. Spent 21 years at Cisco leading various technology groups in the company. Most recently from there led the Global Enterprise Data Center sales force, so a lot of background, experience around cloud, virtualization, automation in the data center space, so very excited to be at Pure. >> When you talk about Pure, here at the Cisco show, I know it's FlashStack, but give us a little bit of the kind of the breadth and the depth of the relationship there. You hear a lot of themes talked about at this show, everything from IoT, just the future of where all these technologies are going, so where is the intersections? >> Yeah, so FlashStack is a partnership that Cisco and Pure have to deliver converged infrastructure in the marketplace. What differentiates us is really our ability to derive high, high performance. You'll definitely see value as you deploy just about any database application. It drives a much more economical, valuable solution to the customer base as a result of that. And we're poised to capture new trends in the marketplace with explosion of IoT, intelligence, whether it's deep learning, neural networks, or business intelligence, with the likes of SAP or various other applications deployed on Hadoop infrastructure. >> Want to unpack some of those, because you said a lot there. Our research from Wikibon coming into 2018, data's at the center of it all. I mean, talk to Cisco, data, majorly important. Not just moving it things, but how do I get value out of the data. Start with IoT, you mentioned in there, how does a company, I think a pure storage company, how does Pure have an impact in relationship on the IoT discussion. >> Right, so, IoT in itself is driving a huge explosion in terms of the amount of data. In two years, according to IDC, it'll be 20 times the amount of capacity on the internet will be the amount of data that's created, so for us, deploying a platform that allows you to really take data and look at it as a platform and how you use it is really one of our strengths of the company. Our software set is called Pure1 and it really takes a look and helps you handle and manage that data very differently than any of the other traditional storage solutions that have been in the marketplace. But it was all built on the foundation of Flash, so you get the scale and you get the performance that Flash brings at the same time. Very, very powerful, and we're glad to see trends driven by IoT to drive that explosion for us. >> FlashStack, talk a little bit about it. What is interesting to customers these days? The trend of converged infrastructure now has gone on for over eight years. There's the buzz of hyperconverge, there's cloud is kind of front and center, why is converged infrastructure in general, and FlashStack specifically so important today? >> If you break down the market in terms of where converged infrastructure fits, it's both in the hybrid cloud and the private cloud side of things. There's still tremendous growth in the private cloud world where we see a lot of deployments there. If you look at the solution, it's very cohesive with what Cisco has, from a UCS standpoint. It's a stateless platform, it's very simple to manage, it's very scalable, you can get 10 times the rack density from a storage and compute perspective with a FlashStack than you can the competitors'. So it's really an innovative, modernized, converged infrastructure stack. As you said, CI's been around for eight years, this FlashStack's been in the marketplace about two years and has had tremendous growth in that timeframe as a result. We continue to try to drive simplification, automation, a different consumption model, how you maintain it, from a cost perspective is different, so it has a very unique value proposition compared to other CIs in the marketplace. >> One of the founders of Wikibon, David Floyer, when the Flash wave started he said to companies, it's database, database, database, there's so much opportunity to really transform both the economics as well as the business productivity. It wasn't the first-use case that happened in converged infrastructure, but definitely somewhere Pure's focus has been. Talk about what are some of the results, what did customers see when they moved to CI for business-critical applications like database. >> If you look at the timing that it takes to develop an application, a lot of that is how easy are you able to grab the data, create a usable format of that, do your development test cases, and then move it back into production. So the way that the FlashStack and the Pure Flash arrays allow you to take that data, you don't have to necessarily copy it and create replicas, it's very fast and easy and we've seen developers cut down 25-30% of the development time on an SAP database or an Oracle database, right? So it's drastically different than what they've been used to in the past. >> Mike, you lived for years on the Cisco side of the equation and now you're partners. What's it like to be a Cisco partner these days? They've got dozens of partnerships on the storage side, so how do they make Pure feel special yet understand kind of the cooperative nature of our industry. >> I think what we're trying to make sure we do here is focus on the customer outcome, right? So we are really working day-in and day-out to make sure that whatever we do drives business value to the customer. And that is what separates the partnership from others. When you take a look at that, it's given us the ability to grow the amount of resources that Cisco and Pure can contribute into the marketplace. It also has allowed us to help develop new lines of business for some of our other partners in the ecosystem. It's very competitive, as you call out, but there's still a great partnership here and Cisco's been very supportive of our growth. >> It's been a few years since I've attended a Cisco Live myself, but feels that the attendees and the focus of the show has gone through a bit of a transformation. We're sitting here in the DEVNET Zone, lots of people here coding. I walked through the World of Solutions, it's not just networking, you know, networking's a big piece. What have you seen changing over the few years? How does that impact Pure and just personally, what do you look at this ecosystem? >> Going back to what I said earlier, it's all about driving value for the outcome of the customer. What is the business challenge you're solving, what is the opportunity they're seizing and how can we develop a more agile platform that allows their software teams to really take advantage of that. So really that's what we're focused on, is what can we build horizontally that makes the platform more cloud-friendly, more automated, and then you can drive down to specific vertical value propositions within that, whether it's automotive industry, airline industry, healthcare industry, et cetera. That's really where I've seen a transition from, it's not as much about speeds and feeds of the infrastructure, it's about the higher-level outcome for the customer business. >> When it comes to Pure's business in general, and FlashStacks specifically, any differences here in the European geographies compared to the United States that you could comment on? >> Not really. I think from a Flash adoption period, the adoption rate has been higher for all Flash arrays in the United States. As you move to Europe, we're seeing an acceleration of that here. What we saw, probably about two years ago in the United States, so there's actually a ton of excitement here now, in terms of the opportunity for the FlashStack and what Flash can do for that. >> It's interesting you mention for Flash, and even for converged infrastructure, there's still a large percentage of the market that hasn't kind of dove in. >> Correct. >> Any commentary as to what's holding people back or you know, some "aha" moments that you've had customers that, those that haven't gone for the simplicity of converged or hyperconverged, that they should get on board? >> I think if you look at Flash in general, it was focused on high IOPS, input/output performance requirements initially, virtualization, virtual desktops were very big, and then your higher-performance applications now. Now that you've seen what we've been able to drive in terms of full functionality across the platform, it's not just about Flash and performance, it actually is about a storage platform now. And the economics of the entire support are making it more palatable now to move other workloads. I think you'll continue to see this expansion, I think Gartner and IDC talk about the next three to five years, you'll see a much greater greater density of applications moving onto Flash versus what it was in the past. We're actually releasing very soon and we'll be integrating into FlashStack other platforms that we have around FlashBlade, which is real focused on unstructured data. Things that wasn't necessarily rows and columns from a block storage perspective. And I think you'll see that help drive some of this disruption and transition in that space. >> Mike, as we look into 2018, what should customers look to find from the Pure and Cisco partnership? >> Absolutely. We'll continue to drive more tools with FlashStack that allow you to more easily and rapidly deploy the system itself. We will also be looking toward new-use cases that are very relevant in this space. To capture the demands of the customer, so things around business intelligence, things around artificial intelligence, we'll scale that out. And you'll also look at seeing us drive toward more scalable, foundational elements of a storage platform. So those are some of the things that you'll definitely see from us moving forward. >> All right, well Mike Bundy, really appreciate all the updates on Pure, on FlashStack, and your partnership with Cisco. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live Europe 2018 in Barcelona, I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (bright poppy music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE's Ecosystem Partner. >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain. We are live at Cisco Live 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder SiliconANGLE. My co-host Stu Miniman, analyst at WikiBon.com. Our next two guests is Siva Sivakumar, who's the Senior Director Data Center Solutions at Cisco and Lee Howard, Chief Technologist, Global Industry Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. Great partnership here to talk about the tech involved in the partnership. Obviously, in the industry, it's pretty well known that NetApp's doing really well with Cisco. Congratulations. You guys have been enabling great partner dynamics lately, but all the action's been on the intersection between a raise, better, faster, cheaper storage, but also enabling software defined stuff, value. What's the check involved in the partnership? Why is it going so well? Lee, can you start? >> I think offering choice out there is the best thing that we can do. You've got data fabric from a NetApp perspective is that super interconnected highway and as many on ramps as we can build for folks to get on that highway. The more successful you're going to be able to see. I mean, the IDC numbers speak for themselves, prolific, double digit growth. I think we were at 56% last quarter, listed together on there. That's how tight this partnership's been. Leveraging that combined portfolio has given us a very competitive offering out there in the industry. >> Siva, I want to get your thoughts because actually Cisco, we've been... Stu and I love talking about networking, in Cisco in particular because the old days, provision the network and good stuff happens. Apps get built. Things get done. But with the Cloud, you see the shift where you've got DevOps culture, you got cloud-native happening. The real enabling technologies have to be beyond the network, so you guys have been successful with a variety of other things. What's the key things that's making you guys key partners in the ecosystem? What are you guys truly enabling? Is it network programmability? What's the secret sauce from Cisco's standpoint? >> If you look at the way Data Center has evolved in the last decade or so, the way customers are consuming technology is much more at a platform level. They want things simplified. They want to, as you just said, the innovation that's happening in the above layer, in terms of the software's tech and use cases, is just tremendous. They really want the platform to become simple and that's what Cloud did to you anyways. That level of simplification, that level of optimization, but still a best of breed, it is what got us together. We have continued to build world class platforms that started one way, started mainly looking at virtualization in those place over time. In the last four or five years or so, the amount of innovations we have brought on top of a FlexPod, which is a joined solution together, has been right at the cutting edge of where technology is going and where applications are landing. That, in a very large way, has become the key for the success between the two of us. >> We had talked Brandon on here earlier and he validated our thesis and WikiBon actually had a report that came out last year, in the middle of the year, called "True Private Cloud." It was the only research analyst firm that actually got this one right, in my opinion, which validated by you guys is that... Certainly any (mumbles) would argue that everything is moving to the Cloud, tomorrow. Certainly there's some cloud migration and some stuff in the Public Cloud, no problem. But what WikiBon did is they looked at the true Private Cloud numbers, meaning that the action where the spend is and where the buyers are doing the most work both refreshing and retooling is on premises. Because they're actually changing the operating model on premises now as a way, as a way, as a sequence, to hybrid and then maybe full Multi-Cloud or full Public Cloud, whatever they want to do. So that being said, Lee, what does that mean? Because certainly, I understand what a Cloud operating model is, but I'm talking about storage and networking. >> Yeah. >> What does that look like? Is that a full transformation? How long is that going to take? Your thoughts? Comment on that. >> We're seeing, you saw on the key note this morning them referencing brand new titles and new personnel, new human capital that's coming in. I think that is, both you're enabling and your barring the factor to changing how you're consuming resources on site. Cloud architects as they're coming in to prominence enterprise architects. I think we're getting to a point where there's enough of a intuition to the software that's enabling those consumption trends to shift, that it's now a way for not just those that have the inside information, but it's something that's consumable for the masses. I think 2018, you guys hit on DevOps, highly versatile model going forward and I think Multi-Cloud is going to be the right answer. >> John: The roles are changing. >> Roles are changing and we have been seeking to be that technology provider that regardless of where you're at in that journey, you're able to leverage our portfolio to be able to do it. >> John: Does the product change? >> The product, the tenets behind the product, not so much but I think the way that it's being leveraged does end up changing. >> Siva, your thoughts on this. >> You know, if you start to think about the earlier generation of Cloud, it was mainly seen as a capacity argumentation, mainly on the IS. It really started people to think that everything is moving to Cloud, but if you look at the innovation that happens in the Cloud, the Cloud in itself is a massive ecosystem and people want to go do that. So there is a huge reason why the cloud is successful, but that's not necessarily just taking everything on. That's not the trend. What you really see is customers now starting to reach that level of maturity to say hey, there is a tremendous value in what I can do and on-prim, the data gravity and the latency and those things. >> So you agree with the "True Private Cloud" report, the on-prim action is where? >> We continue to see that from our customers, you see it as option and things like that. We absolutely see that is real as well. >> Let's go back to the data center for a second because some people look at it, and it's like oh, well CI's been happening now for gosh, almost a decade now. HCI has a lot of buzz out there. We want to hear what you're hearing from customers because first of all, what we see is there's still the majority of people, still building their own. They're taking the pieces. FlexPod is a little bit different than say hyper-converged from a single skew, but you've still got to build your own CI. Big partnership >> Absolutely. >> There's a huge revenue. HCI has both Cisco and NetApp have pieces there. Where are the customers today? Why is CI still a meaningful part of the discussion today? >> I think it all comes down to scale and how you want to be able to interface. What do you want your data center to be like today? How are you staffed and proficient at implementing a solution and where do you want that data center to go tomorrow? I think CI and HCI absolutely have a place together in the data center, but as we see RFPs fundamentally shift to reflect the new way that infrastructure's being consumed, a cookie cutter approach that you get with a lot of HCIs isn't always going to be the answer. You want to have that full modularity, that full flexibility. It's in the title, it's FlexPod. You want to be able to have that versatility to address not just the initial scoping project but with Flash and able data centers, assets are staying on the books longer and longer. Those depreciation schedules are getting stretched out. Having the versatility, not just to live in today's operating environment, but the operating environment of tomorrow, I think is what's really driving that main stay of CI. >> Siva, we heard in the key notes this morning a lot of discussion about Multi-Cloud and management. Talk about Cisco and NetApp. How do you view those together? Where do you go to market together, co-engineer, things like that? >> Absolutely. If you guys look at what we did in the FlexPod, we created what we would fundamentally call or say code platform for data center. That was the biggest success. We had a lot of work loads and news cases. But in the last two to three years, what we have both done, because individually we have portfolio products that allow a Cloud journey. Cisco is a big proponent of Multi-Cloud and the journey to Cloud and proving customer the right platform so they can pick and choose when to go to Cloud and how to go to Cloud. There are similar assets from NetApp. What we have done is we have built FlexPod solutions that builds on top of on that leverage, is the Cloud Center products, NetApp's data fabric, some of their technology that's call location within the equinox and so on and so forth. What that has allowed is FlexPod as a platform has blossomed as the Cloud has grown because we now offer the choice. That also brought more customers to realize while these guys really provide me the journey to Cloud model. That is more new solution that we are building that continues to drive that mindset from both companies. >> Stu: Lee, you want to build on that? >> Yeah, providing that operational excellence to where you're able to come in and leverage these assets, not just day zero but through the entire lifespan of that asset and that's the... Quality of life improvements is a big thing from NetApp and Cisco's perspective as we're coming together and we're planning what the future state is going to look like. It's not just hey, this is the specific drive capacity you're putting in, that's yesterday's infrastructure. Tomorrow is all about what quality of life, how much time can we give back to those end users out there? >> So I have a question for you guys both. Lee, we'll start with you. You got the storage compute and switching cause you're leaders in those areas, what's next? What's driving the partnership? You talk about how you present the partnership with Cisco to customers. What's in it for me? What's new? What's fresh? What's the deal? >> The conversation we have out there a lot of times there's perception issues that we are the old guard of technology. FlexPod's been around seven going on eight years and they say what's fresh out there? Well, we're so much more than just the infrastructure piece. It's a combined portfolio. Cisco recently announced their partnership with Google Cloud. We have our NFS Native on Azure going forward. Leveraging those better together stories and each other's Rolodex to be able to come in and truly engineer next generation solutions, that's what's getting people excited. How are you going to set me up for success tomorrow, not just how are we going to be successful today on today's technology? >> Siva, how are you guys successful with that? How do you talk about the relationship because they have a unique capabilities, been around the block for awhile in the storage business? Look at the history of NetApp. Very interesting, very engineering oriented, very customer focused. >> Lee: 25 years. >> What's your position in this? >> I think you have two companies who have a tremendous technology focus in building, but what keeps this partnership going together is easily our customers. We are not young anymore in the partnership. We have over $10 billion of install based customers. We have over 8,000 customers. Just keeping up with those customers and providing them the journey however they want to go, it absolutely becomes our, it's our prerogative to make these customers successful in wherever they want to go next. That's a big driver for how we look at innovation. We continue to provide the capabilities that allows our customers to continue their journey and at the same time, we bring our innovation to make this platform successful. >> So I'm going to put you on the spot here, both of you guys. I know Stu's got a question. I got a couple minutes left. Kubernetes has put a line in the sand and separates the two worlds of developers. App developers, really just looking as a fabric of resource, they're creative, doing cool things. Then you've got the network storage software engineering going on under the hood, it's like a car. You're now an engine. You got to work together. What are you guys doing specifically to make that work, make the engine really powerful? >> In the context of Kubernetes, we are-- >> Under the hood. What's under the hood? Kubernetes is the line there, but you got to sit with that app. You got to make the engine powerful. You guys are working together. What's the sound like for the customers? Why NetApp and Cisco together? >> If you look back at our containerization, micro services that journey, we certainly again, same logic, same model. We are building an ecosystem there. We are developing joint solution that optimizes how Kubernetes and Cisco and Google have made several announcements on how we are bringing innovation and infrastructure automation level, network scale level, that allows a massively scalable container environment of Kubernetes environment to be deployed on top of a Cisco infrastructure. NetApp's innovation around Kubernetes, around building the plug-ins for how the plug-ins interact with the storage subsystem that allows us to say if you are deploying a Kubernetes environment, if you are deploying the best of breed, you certainly need the platform that understands and scales with that. >> All right, Lee. Your differentiation for that power engine under the hood with Cisco. >> It's infrastructure is code. That's what we are together and I don't think that across the competitive landscape that they are, everybody else is really embracing it in such a fashion. It's speaking the language that these developers are wanting to do and we're marrying that up with the core tenets that made us an IT powerhouse together. >> It was the developer angle John- >> All right. (laughs) >> We've been doing so many of these together. Absolutely where we wanted to go. >> Stu and I get the-- Infrastructure is code. The great shows. We do the cloud-native, got Kubernetes, we do under the hood. This is a big journey for customers. There's a lot of fud out there and they want to know one thing. Who's going to be around in the future? Having the partnerships is really key. You guys have been very successful. I'll give you guys the final word. Each of you share what customers should expect from the relationship. Siva, we'll start with you. >> I think continued greatness, continued commitment to making customers successful with the innovation that keeps them worry much more about the above the layer, the application, the business critical elements and make the infrastructure as simple and as versatile as possible is absolutely our commitment. >> I'd boil it down to the human capital out there, the human element and that is bringing conviction to your decisions. We've both been here multiple decades together in our partnership. FlexPod's coming up on a decade. It's conviction and knowing that you can rely on the lifeblood of your business being secure with us together. >> Well, congratulations. Certainly, the developers are going to be testing the hardware under the hood and we got a DevOps culture developing all on-prim and in the Cloud hybrid. It's going to be an interesting couple years. Interesting times we live in. Lee Howard, Chief Technologist with NetApp and Siva Sivakumar, Senior Director Data Center Solutions. Here on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman. Live from Barcelona. Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More live coverage from theCUBE after this short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From the Silicon Angle Media office, in Boston, Massachusets. It's The Cube. Now here's you host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and we're coming to you from the Boston area studio here of The Cube. Excited to talk about some of my favorite topics. Talking about the culture, innovation, and really transformation in what's happening in data center. Digital transformation is on everybody's mind. Specifically happy to welcome Mike Grandinetti who is the Chief Marketing and Corporate Strategy Officer with Reduxio. Mike, thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, thank you so much for having me. Great to be out here with you today. >> Alright, so you're a local guy? >> Mike: Yeah. >> We're glad that you could join us here. Before we jump into the company tells a little about your background, what you worked on, what brought you to Reduxio. >> In a nutshell I guess my background is all about innovation. I've sort of eat, breathe and slept innovation for the last 25 years of my career. So I started off as an engineer in Silicon Valley with HP back when Bill and Dave were still around. At a time when it was America's most admired company. Was a remarkable sort of introduction to what is possible. Went back, got my MBA, did several years at McKinzie doing corporate strategy consulting. Mostly around innovation related projects. And then I moved up here to Boston to be a part of the first of what is now eight consecutive enterprise venture capital backed start ups. And I've been lucky enough that two of those went public on the NASDAQ. The prior seven have all been acquired by companies like AT&T and Oracle. And now Reduxio is my eighth start up. We're really having a great time building this business. >> Great, we're definitely going to big into some of the innovations of Redux I O. >> Yes. >> So the name kind of tells itself. We've seen a few companies with the I O at the end. We've talked so much that when we've talked about kind of 2018 data is at the center of everything. Really what is driving business. So for an audience that hasn't run across Reduxio kind of give us the why and the what. >> Yeah, and so to your point, data's driving everything. Mark Andressen famously said software's eating the world. I think if we were to update that it's data is eating the world. And so I think you and I have had this discussion off camera. Whether it's fair or not, I think it's true. And it needs to be stated that the amount of innovation that has occurred in the storage industry over the last 20 years, has been disappointing at best. The solutions that have evolved have evolved in an extremely fragmented way. They are over, way too complex. They're way too expensive. And because it's a collection of piece parts, you've got to manage multiple screens, multiple learning curves. And a lot of things fall through the cracks. So when you go and look at some of the research data from a wide range of analysts, what you hear from them is there's this extraordinary lack of confidence that even though I've spend a ton of money, invested a lot of staff time and attention to building out this infrastructure, very lacking in confidence that I'm actually going to get that data back when I need it. So it's the old adage, it's time to fix it. So this is exactly what the founders of Reduxio saw. They were looking at this evolutionary path and saying people are just making it worse. So they did what many people would condsider to be radical. They threw out the entire playbook of what storage architecture has been and they took a clean sheet of paper, design centric approach. What are the use cases? Where are we in the world with regard to technology? And how do we design and experience for storage admin or BD admin or a person in the dev center that doesn't require a PhD in storage? And so that's kind of what the premise was. >> Yeah, so many things there that there are to dig into. Absolutely. I live, I worked for one of the storage companies for a decade. Absolutely complexity is how we would describe it. And what companies are looking for today, is they need simplicity. They need to focus on the business. Turing dials and worrying about do I have enough capacity? Do I have enough performance? Do I have enough of those things, is not what drives the business. >> Mike: Exactly. >> They need to focus on their applications. The bit flip we saw in big data, and we can argue whether or not big data was hype or whatever we had there, but it was oh my gosh I'm getting all this data to oh my gosh I have all of this data and therefore I can do more things, I can find more value. >> Mike: Absolutely. >> I worry a little bit when I hear things like oh, the storage admin. >> Yeah. >> The storage admin's job before was how to I triage and kind of deal with those issues? Many solutions now you look at the wave of hyper convergence. Let's push that to a cloud architect or the virtualization layer. How do we start with a clean slate and get out of the storage business and get into the data business? >> Mike: I love it. So I'm going to bring you back ten years to one of the most remarkable product introductions that has ever been conducted on this planet. It was the introduction of the iPhone. And if you recall in those first five minutes that Steve Jobs took the stage in a way that only Steve Jobs could. He went onto tease the audience by saying that we are going to be introducing three products today. And then over the next minute or two became clear that it wasn't three products, it was one very innovative product at the time. The iPhone. What they basically did is they integrated these three previously disparate pieces of technology. Certainly the mobile phone but also a music player and an internet navigator. Behind this gorgeous revolutionary user interface. So what we've tried to do is take a page out of the Job's iPhone innovation. We're integrating. And Forrester Research has written an incredible report about this and others, IDC and others, have consistently supported it. Chris Malore from the Register has written about this at length as well. Reduxio is integrating primary and secondary storage along with built in data protection. So those previously siloed capabilities are now one. We're also, like Jobs did, when you looked at the old style smart phone, the BlackBerry and the Trio and the- ya know all of those things that had all of those keyboards, is we've created a user interface using game designers so when our customers go home at night and they log into Reduxio, their little kids will say, hey dad what game are you playing? And dad will say, I'm not playing a game. I'm actually working on Reduxio. And so what that's done for us I think is it's allowed us to be able to drop a Reduxio system into any number of use cases with someone who may not have the luxury of being deep in storage. And literally get time to value that they put production workloads on the system that day. >> It's interesting, another piece that I'll draw from your analogy is when you talk about how did Apple take all of those pieces. And it's kind of certain technologies moving along. But there's one specific technology that really helped drive that adoption. And it's Flash. >> Mike: Yes. >> And the consumer adoption of Flash ten years ago drove the wave that we've seen in enterprise storage. >> Right. >> So help connect the dots for us, because we look at- I remember a decade ago primary to secondary storage oh I'll give you a big eleven refrigerator size cabinet and you can do both. >> Mike: Right, sure. >> But I put expensive stuff here, I put cheap stuff here. I used the software to put it together. I'm assuming I can consolidate it down and I think Flash has something to do with it. >> Yeah, and so it's a multi tiered system. The array itself. It's an appliance. And obviously most of the value is in the software. There's a management platform that allows us to peer deep into the data. But everything is time stamped and indexed. So we have a global view of the data. And you can tier it, the most hot data very mission critical, business app data, goes to Flash. Secondary data can go to spinning disk or now we can archive to the cloud. Specifically any S3 target, Amazon or any S3 target. But what I think makes it very relevant is we've illuminated the notion of snapshotting. So we've built something that we call the time OS or the time operating system. And it's a time machine for your data. What happens is rather than incur that incredible burden of having to schedule snapshots, that only requires you at another incredible heroic effort to bring the data back, you have continuous data protection. I can go back at any point in time and literally with a very graphical screen point and say I want to bring data back from two seconds ago. And one of our best examples of that is we had a customer who had been attacked, has suffered from a ransomware attack. They went down for a week, they went down hard for a week. And they came and found Reduxio. They got attacked again. And the second time around they lost only two minutes of data. And the recovery time was 20 minutes. So this is what we enable you to do. By being able to give you access to wherever you're data may be, anywhere in the world, you can- we're approaching near zero RPO and RTO. >> Mike, there's been a number of companies that come and said data protection's been broken. We've been hearing that for a while. I think right down the road from us, like Tiffeo, company that looked at data management. Companies like Cohesity and Rubric, have quite a bit of buzz. Give us a little compare, contrast how Redxio looks at it verses some of those other- >> Yeah, and I'd say again, for anybody watching I think the Forrester Research Report outlines Reduxio, Cohesity and Rubric, right? And of course Cohesity and Rubric are doing an extraordinary job. They're scaling rapidly. They've got world class in Silicon Valley money in the company. They've got a world class client base. I think the primary difference is that we are bringing that third component. We're integrating primary storage along with secondary storage in data protection. Both of them are focusing just on the secondary and the data protection. We take issue architecturally with the fact that you've got to make additional copies. We take issue with the fact that the way they're approaching this actually they're in some ways exacerbating the problem because they're creating more data. But at the same time, they're also, for a given amount of capability two to three times the cost. So what we're hearing from a lot of our customers and our vars that sell both is they're walking into a lot of more, let's call them price sensitive accounts. Where they don't believe that the incremental value of what Cohesity or Rubric is offering is easily justifiable. There's going to be some pretty extreme use cases to justify a $300,000 initial investment as you go into the data center. >> Another piece, when I talk to companies today, one of the biggest challenges they have is really figuring out what their strategy is and how that fits. You talked about tiering and how the cloud fits into it, but how does Reduxio fit in that overall cloud strategy for companies today? >> Again, it's very early in our product evolution and so with version three which we announced back in late June, we allow companies to archive to the cloud. But do instantaneous recovery from the cloud. So we have two capabilities. One is called no migrate. So there's no longer a need to migrate data. So you were at the Amazon invent show and you saw the snowmobile get rolled out. And the reason that Amazon rolled that snowmobile and at first I thought it was a joke, is because it takes an incredible amount of time and effort to move data from one data center to the next. Reduxio has this no migrate capability where if I need to move data from that data center, I set that data in motion. And I don't know if you're a Trekkie or not, but you remember the teleporter? In version three we've created a teleporter. You can move that data from the cloud and although it may take a long time for that data to actually get to its target, you can start working on that app as if that data had already been migrated. When we run usability tests, and I remember one of them very specifically. And I know that you speak a little bit of Hebrew. I speak zero Hebrew. But I can remember watching one of our Israeli customers seeing this happen and this visceral reaction, like oh my god, I can't believe they did that. So we're trying to bring that end to end ease of use experience to managing and protecting your data wherever it may be. Bringing it back with almost zero RPOs, zero RTO. >> Mike, one of the questions, I've been talking to a number of CMOs lately, and just you've worked for a number of start ups. Today, digital transformations on the mind, what's the changing role of the CMO today? What have you seen the last five to ten years that's different and exciting? >> It's a great question. And I'd say that, and again, I did my first start up in 1991. So I can't begin to tell you how much high tech marketing has changed. But everything changed with social, digital and inbound marketing. It used to be that the sales team was responsible for filling the funnel. It is very clear that is an incredibly non scalable unproductive effort. And so we now are all about acquiring high quality prospects. We're a hub spot shop. We're a highly automated shop. And we are very biased toward digital and social. Is doesn't mean that we're not going to events and things like that but we feel that the way that we're going to scale this business, especially when we compete against big guys like Dell EMC and HP and others, there's no way that we can go person to person. So I'm not a very big fan of cold calling. I'm not a very big fan of going to trade shows. And collecting business cards in fish bowls and giving away tee shirts. We really believe that our customers are too busy, the know what they need when they need it. They've built a fortress around themselves. They're getting hammered. Just like I'm a CMO. And I must get 150 LinkedIn inmails and emails a day telling me about the next great lead management service. I can't even imagine what our customers are putting up with. So our job is to find relevant personas with highly relevant content at the moment that that is relevant to them. And there's many ways to do that, but this is really what we have to do with the data. >> So, Mike, at the beginning of the conversation we talked a little bit about innovation. >> Mike: Yes. >> Those of us that have been in a while, they're too many peers of mine that I think if you say the word innovation they roll their eyes. You have the great opportunity, you're working with master students around the globe, talk to us the people coming out of those programs. What does innovation mean today? What are they looking for, from a career standpoint? >> It's a great question. I think you and I could probably go for the next three hours on this subject so we'll have to be careful. >> We'll make sure to post on the website the expanded audio. >> Okay, but I mean innovation is such an overused word. And most companies really can't spell it and they can't spell it because their culture doesn't allow for it. So first and foremost, I think any innovative company or any innovative team starts with a culture that is all about trying to manage at the bleeding edge of best practices and really understand what's current. I have the blessing of being both the Chief Marketing and Corporate Strategy Officer of Reduxio and a global professor of innovation entrepreneurship at the Hult International School of Business. I teach between 1,200 and 1,500 students a year. I teach them courses in entrepreneurship, in innovation, in digital marketing. And I run hackathons on campus. We do a lot of events that give me an insight into who's passionate about innovation. And it's one thing to think innovation is interesting, because you can get a good job. It's another thing to actually have the comfort level of living in a world of ambiguity and high velocity. So a lot of it is, I'm looking for students that really want to sort of push the envelope. And they exhibit that in the classroom, they exhibit that in hackathons. They exhibit that in some of the internships that we take. They exhibit it by getting certified on HubSpot. Without me telling them to. Getting certified on Idio without me telling them to. Going to conferences. Learning. And then me learning from them. Because nobody can know everything. It's just so much new stuff going on right now. I've now got a team of 11 people and nine of them were my former students. I had a chance to observe them in action over 18 months and they're world class. And they have that innovation gene in their DNA. We're really at a point where I'm learning from them everyday. It's a very symbiotic relationship. >> Mike, for closing comments, I want to give you the opportunity, people find out more about Reduxio. What should we be looking for in 2018? >> Yeah, and so again, the one thing is will say is we are now at 200 distinct customers. We have in a very short period of time, and you know, when you sell into the data center people don't have a real sense of humor. It's pretty important that the stuff works. So the first thing I would say is we've gotten to that point now where we've got a lot of very significant customer references across websites and a lot of peer review sites. So we're now, so 2018 is building on that foundation. I think what you're going to see from us is couple of very radically innovative new projects. One a software only project. That will allow us to drive an inflection point in growth. By making available some of our core capabilities to anybody. Whether they own a Reduxio system or not. We really want to go big now. We've validated the architecture. We've got some great early indications from the market that this stuff works as advertised. Our customers are telling us we're simplifying their lives, we're making them more productive. And 2018 is about to really kick this thing into high gear. >> Stu: Mike Grandinetti, pleasure chatting with you. Thanks so much for sharing. And thank you for watching The Cube. >> Mike: Great. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCube. Covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back at VeeamON, Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Marc Crespi is here, he's the vice president of SEs at Exagrid Systems, big partner of Veeam's, big presence on the show floor here. Mark, thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So what's doing with Exagrid, we were talking off camera, kind of know you guys a little bit, you guys are right around the corner from us in Massachusetts, but give us the update in the company and what's new? >> Yeah, be happy to. So, first I'd like to thank Veeam for putting on a terrific show, and it's great to be in the beautiful city of New Orleans with you guys. So, if you look at the Exagrid business, Exagrid is a leader in disbase backup with data deduplication business. And we've been a Veeam partner for a decade now, and right from the early days when we started talking and working with Veeam, we realized that our two architectures had a natural fit. So when we talked to joint Veeam customers, whether they're new customers or existing customers, they're experiencing an exponential benefit over just using Veeam with some other disk player as result. If you look at how our business has evolved over the last decade or so, we were originally in the tape replacement business, you know, the dinosaur tape libraries that were still roaming the earth back then, and what we find now is, a lot of customers have moved on from tape, tape is a minority of the backup storage media that we see in the market today. And most of our business in fact is replacing other disk based implementations, either with or without native data deduplication, about 80% of our business now. And it's all the names you hear in the disk based backup with data deduplication market that we're replacing. We've also grown from a company that initially focused on midsized enterprise to now an enterprise class built product and company. So if you look at our average sale, our average customer size, it has grown exponentially over the past several years. And our sales force has grown over 500% just in the last two to three years itself, so we're in a high growth mode, we're experiencing a lot of success and much of our business is, a significant portion of our business is working with either existing or new Veeam customers. >> And a lot of the growth is coming from replacing existing, what's generally referred to as purpose built backup appliances, is that correct? >> That is correct, and the reason that we're seeing that phenomenon is when we sat down and created our architecture, we looked at the legacy of tape and what was wrong with tape. Well tape wasn't very mechanical, it was unreliable, but it also suffered from a vicious cycle of grow, break, replace. So, all our customer data is growing 20, 30% a year, which means your data's doubling every 2.5 to three years. And whatever you're backing up to, you're going to outgrow it. And you're going to ultimately have to replace it in its entirety. And you've got those precious IT budget dollars that you'd like to spend on other initiatives, and you're rebuying your backup storage just to tread water before you even get around to spending on the expansion. So we said that problem needs to be eliminated entirely, and the only way you can eliminate that problem, is by having a highly scalable architecture that never requires forklift upgrade. So if you look at our technology and why we're able to replace incumbent vendors, we're typically finding a frustrated customer who's been through two or three forced refreshes, either 'cause they outgrew technology or the vendor forced them to to outgrow technology by end of lifing et cetera, which we don't do, we don't end of life any of our products, and therefore they lift their head to say, well before I just spend all these dollars again, plus expansion, why don't I go back into the market and see if anyones figured out a better way to do this, and that's where we come in. We come in and show them that you can start with the footprint you need and then you can expand infinitely and we're never going to force you to buy what you already own, so, it marries up much more closely with the lifespan customer customers want for backup storage than the lifespan vendors want for back up storage. >> Marc, can you unpack that a little bit for us, I think about VM where it was an example of how we avoided having to do certain upgrades. I think of operating systems, or servers that were end of life, stick it into VM, I could grow and expand, but when I think about Gear, there's all sorts of reasons why just the exponential growth of, you know, different media types, different sizes that we need to take, that how come you can do this, while others, you know, force those upgrades. >> That's a great question, so I'd compare and contrast a little bit with virtualization, what virtualization brought to the table was, it allowed you to take a set of computing resources and make sure it was fully utilized, right, so if you had a server, you were running one application on it, maybe it was only 30% utilized, you had spare storage, you had spare compute, so what virtualization allowed you to do was add applications that were segmented, and therefore they could run without conflict and you could get that hardware fully utilized. This is a little bit different in that, if you think about what backup really is, on a nightly or weekly basis, even with some of the modern backup techniques that have come out, customers are moving large amounts of data, and it has to be within a certain window of time, because they don't want backups running during productions hours, because that can impact network performance, server performance, et cetera. The other side of the equation is when they want something back they want it back fast. So in order to achieve that, we made two architectural differences, on a scalability side, we said that the legacy storage architectures that typically, utilize a fixed amount of compute, and then expand by simply adding storage, missed the point that when you add workload to a system, but you don't add power to that system, performance at the same time, everything that system does is going to take longer. So, if I have a certain amount of data, and I have a certain amount of compute, and then I double my data, but I don't double my compute, my memory and my networking, naturally everything that system's doing going to take twice as long. So we recognized that you needed a grid based architecture, or a cluster based architecture, that said, when my data doubles, I'll double the storage, but I'm also going to double the compute, the network, the memory, et cetera, at the same time. So if I have a very short backup window day one, with an Exagrid implementation, and my data doubles, I have that very same backup window, I have the very same recovery time. I have the very same replication time, all the things that a disk based backup appliance do, grow linearly with Exagrid. >> And you're saying other architectures had to wait for intel? >> That's a great point, yes, they rely very much on the compute. Now there's implementations where Flash is being added to try and speed up processes, et cetera, which sounds like a great idea, 'cause Flash is obviously a very useful technology in the storage industry, but when you look at the pricing of backup infrastructure, Flash breaks the model for that, for backup infrastructure. It makes the products more expensive and its unnecessary if you implement things correctly. >> Because FAT Disk is still cheaper than cheap Flash, is that right? >> Spinning disk is still about a sixth to an eighth the cost of Flash. >> Now, I wonder if can go back, I want to pick your technical brain for a minute. So you mentioned tape replacement, and then, as I recall the ascendancy of we can call them purpose built backup appliances, I think it's an IDC term or whatever, but we'll use that. A big part of the value proposition was plugging directly, looking like tape, so you didn't have to rip and replace your processes, and I remember Avomar was trying to convince the market that no, you have to change your processes, and people were like, conceptually that sounds good, but its too disruptive for me, so where were you guys on that curve? Do you look like tape, are you easy to pop in or? >> Proud to say we look nothing like tape. >> Okay, so that was a head wind for you early on, right? But it's really benefited you down the road, is that fair to say? >> If it was a head wind, it was a breeze, okay, and what I mean by that is, the technology we're referring to is VTL, Virtual Type Library, and in the very early days of the market, there were some legacy environments typically Fibersand type environments, where you had to make your disk look like tape so that the customer could transition, especially larger customers where, you know, change is harder, radical change is harder to make quickly. So VTL provided a sort of bridge, or transition technology over a period of time. We're through that phase of the market. >> Dave: But it was a band aide? >> It was very much a band aide. >> But you say it was a breeze, but Data Domaine got two thirds of the market, so, I mean... >> Yeah, but it wasn't because of their VTL. >> Dave: It wasn't. >> No, that was a result of there were still some Fiber environments out there, and they decided to cover that part of the market. We looked at the percentage of the market that we thought would need that, both in the early days but more, even more forward looking, you know, everything about our architecture is quite a bit more forward looking than the people we're competing against. And we realized that the investment it would take to do that, would eventually be wasted because it would go away, and heres why, if you look at what Veeam's software does with instant VM recovery and synthetic fulls and, sureback, and virtual lab, et cetera, when you make a disk look like tape, you lock yourself into the Fred Flinstone era of backup. In other words, you can't take advantage of any of the advanced features in that software, because tape couldn't support those features. And as far as the software knows, it thinks it's talking to a tape library, so it's doing silly things like saying fast forward, rewind, eject with disk. If you think about it, you can almost do a stand up set. >> Dave: Hey, your sequential... >> You know, picking on this, right. So what we said is, that's going to go away, it's very clear with what the software folks are doing, especially Veeam, that that's going to go away. Now, I realize Veeam recently added tape capability, but the reason for that is, not because its a primary backup media, it's because for customers that have, you know, infinite retention, or seven, eight, 10 year retention... >> Dave: They need an offsite tape option. >> They need an economic option. It's not that they like it, because we actually have a lot of conversations with customers, even with that longer term retention where they at least want to explore the economics of disk, but in some instances, even though they hate it, and they grin and bare it, they go with tape just purely economically. >> Right, so early days was, hey don't change anything about your software, keep the Fred Flinstone software and all your processes associated with that, and then, of course VM Ware changed everything. >> Marc: Right, and then graduate to the modern... >> Okay, and then the other big, sort of intern scenario, they used to argue about Dedupe rates, and I presume it's the work load and the nature of the data that determines that, not necessarily the technology, but maybe not, maybe there's some nuance on. >> It's a little bit of both. So a responsible deduplication vendor's going to ask the customer a number of questions about the make up and the nature of their data, okay, however, there's also a lot of aspects to which algorithm you use that are going to drive that. So, if you don't implement a very strong aggressive deduplication algorithm, your result is going to be lower, and we find in many of the software based implementations, and some of the appliance vendors, that they took shortcuts on the algorithms itself. Either because they were compute bound or you might be running it on a standard Windows server which is not optimized to run a really strong algorithm, and therefore where, we may say at 12 weeks of retention, you can get about 20 to one, they're getting six or seven to one, and in some cases they're recommending just put straight disk behind the software, well you end up with disk sprawl, because you're keeping all of this retention but you're not reducing the data enough, so you've got disk everywhere. >> Okay, so the quality of the data reduction algorithms matter, okay, and then the other arguments used to be inline or post process, Frank Luptin used "Oh that crappy post process..." >> Marc: I don't remember when he said that. >> Yeah, and weigh in on that. >> So, we kind of agree. Not that inline is better but that parallelization is better so we actually invented a third way called Adaptive Deduplication. Which basically, what that does is, it allows the chunks of data to land into our box first, and then we begin deduplicating, and replicating and parallel, right. So, we're doing it at the same time, but we're not doing it inline. And we monitor utilization of the system and we favor the backup window, so if think our deduplication is going to slow the back window down, we throttle back a bit. If we have plenty of resources, we crank away at the deduplication and replication. So we eliminated the potential drawbacks of post process, we eliminated the potential drawbacks of inline, and the biggest drawback of inline is that, when you go to recover a system and you think about Veeam's instant VM recovery, if you boot a virtual machine, we have that virtual machine in its entirety in a high speed cache, so it's up in seconds. So I was talking to a customer of ours at our booth who recovered an exchange server recently by booting it off of a Exagrid in about five minutes, right. If you tried to do that out of a dedupe, a device that only has inline deduplicative data, you're looking at hours to maybe even a day. Now you're CEO's not going to be too happy when they can't do email for a day, so I would recommend a high speed cache. >> Marc, Exagrid's been a partner with Veeam for a lot of this journey that Veeam's been on for the last 10 years. Here at the show, they've been talking about where the next 10 years are going, everything cloud, and expanding what they're doing, as you look forward, any announcements this week or as you look forward as a partnership, where do you see things growing? >> We don't have any specific announcements this week, I would refer folks to our website, we just recently announced our 5.0 release, it includes some pretty important things. One of the things it includes is, integration with Veeam's scale out backup repository, which dramatically simplifies the use of multiple Veeam repository's with Veeam's software. We also announced an offering for AWS we think that's appropriate for some customers, not all necessarily, where we can put a virtual appliance on Amazon, and in the cloud realm, there's no question that customers are going to continue to explore the cloud model for both efficiency, operational, expense versus capital, but there's going to be multiple cloud models, for example we partnered with a company, who's here, who you may have spoken to Offsite Data Sync. So if the customer doesn't want to do Amazon for some reason, then Offsite Data Sync will offer them the very same service with Exagrid technology and an operational expense model. And they've been a very good partner of ours as well. >> And the virtual appliance in AWS how does that work? You pop it in a COLO facility or? >> No, you literally, you load it into Amazon like you would any other Amazon machine instance, and it behaves just like a second data center. So you replicate to it, and it can store all of your offsite data, and then when you need it back, you can recover it provided bandwidth is adequate. >> So, I access the instance from the AWS marketplace, or? >> No, we actually provide it directly. >> Oh, okay. >> Through reseller network. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I appreciate you by the way taking me down memory lane and sort of educating us on... >> Marc: Love talking about this stuff. >> Now, so, a lot of things we talked about are old news, to sort of set the context. Where are we today, what is the state of the market and the competitive differentiators that customers really care about? >> I think that we're at the state of the market where people are frustrated with a lot of legacy approaches, whether it's on the backup software side or the backup storage side. The licensing models are expensive, the vendors are gouging them, because they're trying to keep revenue, and they're worried about, you know, the players that are becoming the replacement players like Veeam, like Exagrid. So we're at point now where I see more activity of customers looking for alternatives to what they're running today than maybe in history of backup. You know, people always used to say, backup apps are very sticky, they're very hard to replace, well, look at what Veeam's been able to accomplish. Backup storage is very hard to replace, once it's installed. Well if you force a customer every three years to respend the money they already spent, plus more, you're creating a vent where that customers going to get frustrated and they're going to go out and look at alternatives. So I think we're at a point now where more so than ever, customers are looking for alternatives that stop the madness of backup spending, and stop the madness of backup performance degradation. >> Yeah, we had Dave Russel on yesterday and in his last magic quadrant, you probably read it, I think one of his strategic planning assumptions was 50% of the customers out there are going to replace or sunset their existing backup architecture in the next two years. I mean, that's a massive number, so, and obviously a huge opportunity for you and for Veeam. >> Yeah, I'm honored to be talking to Dave later today. >> Well Marc, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCube, it was really a pleasure. >> Thank you guys, it's been fun. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest after this short break. (techno music)