(The Cube Theme) >> Voiceover: Live from Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering Google Cloud Next '17. >> Hey, welcome back here, and we're here live in Palo Alto for a special two days of coverage of Google Next 2017. I've John Furrier here in The Cube. We have reporters and analysts on the ground who are calling in, getting reaction on all the great news, and of course, Google's march to the enterprise cloud really is the big story, of course, they have their cloud they've been powering with their infrastructure and it had great presence, powering their own stuff, just like Amazon.com had Amazon webservices, Google Cloud now powering Google and others. Diane Green, new CEO, taking the reins, making things happen, we covered that news, and for an entrepreneurial perspective we have Tarun Thakur who is a co-founder and CEO Datos.io, former entrepreneur at Data Domain, been in the business, newly funded, Series A entrepreneur funded with True Ventures and Lightspeed. >> That is correct, John, thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. Tell us what you guys do first. Explain what you guys as a company are doing. >> Absolutely. I'd love to first thank you for the opportunity. It's a pleasure to be here. About Datos, I'll sort of zoom out a little bit and if you really see what's really happening out in the industry, our founding premise, me and my co-founder, Prasenjit, our founding principle is very simple. There are some transformative changes happening in the application era. I was just listening to Akash talk rom SAP, and enterprise workloads are moving to the cloud. That was our founding premise, that not only do you not have those IOT workloads, these SAS workloads, the real time analytics workloads, being born in the cloud, but you have all these traditional workloads that are moving as fast as they can to the cloud. So if you really look at that transformative change, we have a very simple founding premise: applications define the choice of the IT stack underneath it. What do we mean by that? The choice of the database, the choice of the storage, the choice of all the data management tooling around it, starting with protection, starting with governance, compliance, and so on and so forth, right? So if the application workloads are under disruption, and they're moving to the cloud, the impact it has on the IT stack underneath is phenomenal. >> So Tarun, you guys had a great write-up in the Register, Chris Miller, who is well known in the story, 'cause we all follow him, he's a great guy, and very fair, but he can be critical, too, he's very snarky. We like his columns. He called you guys the Tesla of the backup world. What does he mean by that? Does he mean it like you have all the bells and whistles of a modern thing, or is there a specific nuance to why he's calling you the Tesla of the backup world? >> No, this is excellent, John. You know, we are fortunate and we're honored. >> Electric backup? I mean, what's happening here? (laughing) I mean, what does he mean by that? What's the meaning? >> Couldn't have given us a better privilege than what he gave. Had a chance to host him in the office, small office, much smaller than what you have here, in December, and a 45 minute session became a two hour session and really he dug into why the Tesla, and essentially it goes back to, John, you had the traditional workloads running on your traditional databases, classical scale-operational databases like Oracle and SQL. Now, you're dealing with these next generation, hyperscale distributed applications. IOT real time analytic is building on that team, those are being deployed fundamentally on distributed architectures. Your Apache Cassandra, your Amazon Dynamo DB, your Google Spanner, now that we're talking in the context of Google Cloud Next, right? When you look at those distributed architectures, there's so much fundamental shift. You don't run them on shared storage, you don't have media servers anymore in the cloud- >> You have the edge. You have the edge out there. >> You have the edge computing. Given all those changes, you have to fundamentally rethink of backup, and that's essentially what we did. Just going back to Tesla, Tesla was started with a fundamentally seminal architecture. >> So you thought this from the ground up. That's essentially one point, and the other one is that it's modern in the sense of it's really taken advantage of the new architecture. >> That's absolutely right, you know, when we started, again, back in June of 2014, we really started with the end in mind, ten years, the next ten years ahead of us, and the end in mind was, "Look, it's going to be distributed architectures, "it's going to be your hyperscale applications, the webscale applications, and you need to be able to understand data and protect it and recover it and manage your data at that scale. >> Okay, so you guys are also Google partners, so you have an interesting perspective. You're on the front lines, Series A entrepreneur, you haven't cleared the runway yet. You still have to prove yourself. The game is just starting; you don't end it with the financing. That's just validation for the vision and the mission, and you've had some good press so far from Chris, now as you execute, you have a partner in Google. What's your analysis of Google, and as someone who's close to them, certainly as an entrepreneur, you're nimble, you're fast, you understand the tech, you mentioned Spanner, great horizontal scale of opportunity, but some of the enterprises might be a little slower, and they have different orientation, so help us understand what's Google doing? What's their main focus? >> I'll give you an answer in three part series. Number one, we are, again, a start-up, seriously, as you said, we have a lot ahead of us, even though we've been out here for three years, it feels like yesterday. (laughing) >> John: It's a grind. >> It is a grind, but to partner Google Cloud, one of our key marquee customers, a Fortune 100 home improvement retailer, under NDA, cannot take their name out of respect. >> John: Well the register says Home Depot. (laughing) >> Okay. >> Okay, so- >> I'll let Chris do the honor, but it's a Fortune 100 home improvement retailer, John, and their line of business, their entire e-commerce platform, the CIO down has moved their entire platform, migrated from DB2 to Google Cloud. It's not running on DB2 on Google Cloud platform, it's running all on a distributed massive scale- >> So did they sunset DB2 or did they completely- >> Tarun: Completely migrated away from DB2. >> Okay. >> It's part of the digital transformation journey Home Depot is at. They are three years in, they have two more years to go, and as part of the digital transformation journey they're on, they are now running their e-commerce website, which, think of you and I going to Thanksgiving and buying your home tools, and that application runs on a highly scalable Apache Cassandra database on Google Cloud. Now, second part, going back to large-scale enterprises, Home Depot, being how progressive they are, they understood cloud does not mean recoverability. Cloud gives me the scale, cloud gives me the economics, cloud gives me the availability, but it doesn't give me the point in time, and I need myself to be covered against that "what if" moment. We have hold-the-delta moments, we have hold-the-gitlack moments, SalesForce.com down with that human error, right? You don't want to be in that position as a Home Depot. >> You mean Amazon went down? >> Tarun: And Amazon. >> Yeah, Amazon went down. >> And if you read the analysis, the analysis was, "We're sorry guys, there was a human error. "Somebody was meant to change this directory; "he changed that directory." >> So this is a whole new game. One of the fears that the enterprises have is that in a new architecture, besides security, which is a huge issue, we'll have another segment on that shortly, but is that I want to leverage the capabilities of the partner in the cloud, because manageability, certain things, I don't want to build on my own, and so I can see you guys being a new modern piece because the data piece is so important because I'm storing at the edge, I'm not moving data around, so there's no data in motion as much as it is on premise. Is that a big part of this? >> It is, from a, I'll zoom out again, from a CIO perspective, we pitched this to about 100+ CIOs so far. From there it is truly, and I hate to use this word, but it's truly a multi-cloud world, John. They have invested in private clouds and an on-prem infrastructure that ain't going anywhere anytime soon. They are moving some of their SAP instances to a CenturyLink, MSPs, the managed service providers, but they know, as a CIO, I have my application developers and I have my lines of businesses- >> John: And they have their operations guys, too. >> Who want to go as fast as they can. I'll come back to the operations in a second because you'll be very surprised to hear this, but again from a CIO down, he wants to make his application developers to go as fast as they can, and he wants the lines of business just to go open up the next applications- >> John: Because that's top-line revenue right there. >> That's top-line revenue right there. So they want scale, they want agility, but they don't want to sacrifice that insurance piece. Going back to the IT ops and the dev-ops and the classical ops, you'll be surprised, we've been working with this team, our lead-in to the Fortune 100 home improvement retailer was a line of business, but right now it's all about their core IT team. Their IT ops team, the database admins, the database ops people, they are the ones who are really running this product day-to-day, day in and day out, and scaling it, and using it at the pace they need to. >> What's the big misconception, if you could point to, about Google, because one of the things we're trying to surface is that Amazon and Google, it's not apples to apples comparison, they're different clouds, and it is multi-cloud, I want to get you to that question today, but we can get to that in a second, what your definition of that means, but for now, what is the big misconception in your mind, people might misconstrue with Google? >> That's a great question, John, and I was hearing your previous interview with Akash, and again, I'll give you our partner-centric view; a young start-up built something disruptive for that platform. We got Amazon as the first platform. We have a good set of customers running on Amazon, and of course, this home improvement retailer took us to Google Cloud, "Hey guys, if you want to work with us, "you have to support Google Cloud." We went to Google Cloud, and the amount of pull that we got from Google Cloud folks to make it happen in less than three months was phenomenal. They didn't stop at that. They brought their solution architect team, Google Cloud, wrote a paper about Datos, their team, and posted it on their website. "How to use Datos on Google Cloud." Fascinating. Amazon has never done that. It, again, speaks to if you see all the announcements that came out yesterday, Google Cloud has been a significant- >> Well Google's partnering, Google's partnering, one of the things that came out of today's news that has been teased out is Diane Green said in the keynote, "I like partnering." She used the word, "I like partnering," meaning Google, and she has that DNA. She's from VM, where she knows the valley game, she understands ecosystems. She also likes to work on some cool stuff, which could be a double-edged sword. She's always been innovating. But Google has the tech, and she knows enterprise, so they're marching down that road. What areas would you say Google needs to sharpen up a little bit to kind of move faster on? I mean, obviously there's no critique on them; they're pedaling as fast as they can, but in the areas you think they should work on, is it security, is it the data side, what are the things that you think they've got to pedal a little faster on. >> I would definitely start with enterprising touch. I think they need to really amp up the game around enterprise. >> John: You mean the people, the process? >> The people, the processes, the onboarding, the deployment, giving them the blue templates, giving them reference architectures, giving them, hand ruling them a little bit, and I think that'll go a long ways- >> John: The basic enterprise motions. >> Yes, you need that. You're a cloud; that doesn't mean my database guy is not going to need the help of a Google Cloud admin to help me onboard. They need that wrap-up. From their point on they build phenomenal scalable services. Snap invested two billion dollars in Google Cloud. They understand- >> And Amazon got the other half, but- >> The underlying infrastructure is there. >> Yeah but this is the thing. The problem that, the problem is that there's two perspectives of what we see. One is people want to run like Google in the sense of how they're scaling, but not everyone has Google-like infrastructure, so I think Google has to kind of, they want the developers, in my mind, they get a A+ there, with open source, what they do with Kubernetes and whatnot, the operational orientation is something they've got to work on, SLAs are more important than price. >> Managing the orchestration piece, giving them the visibility, letting them come on and come off, and going back to multi-cloud, I'll tell you again, the same customer took us to a use case, which is so fascinating, John. They want on-prem backup and recovery. Remember, protection is the Trojan horse. Protection, it all starts with protection. >> It's always one of those things that's always been front and center. You saw that. It used to be kind of a throw-away thing. "Oh, what about backup? "Oh, we didn't factor in." Now it's front and center, certainly cloud is going to be impacted because data's everywhere. Data's going to be highly frictionless. Okay, question, and final question on this piece, where we talk about what you guys are doing, what does multi-cloud mean, or two questions: what is the definition of multi-cloud, and what does cloud-native mean to you? Define those terms. >> Absolutely. Those two terms are very, very close to us. So multi-cloud, I'll begin with that. I'll give you a customer use case that will hopefully ground the conversation. A multi-cloud essentially means from a customer perspective, I'm going to run on-prem infrastructure, I want to be able to recover or manage that data in the cloud, I don't want to make multiple copies, I don't want to duplicate data, I want to recover a version of that data in the cloud, why? Because I have my application developers who want to test staff. I want my DR to be in a different cloud. I do not want to put all my eggs in one basket. So again, it is truly- >> John: It's a diversity issue. >> It is, and they want multiple-use cases to be spread across clouds. Some clouds have strength in DR, some clouds, like Amazon, have strength in orchestration, and onboarding, and some cloud platforms like Google Cloud have strengths in, hey, you can bring your application developers and you don't have to worry about retail. Some of the retailers, like Gap, like Safeway, like eBay, those guys will hesitate to go to Amazon because they know Amazon, at the heart, is a retail business. >> So conflict there. Now, cloud-native. Define cloud-native. >> Cloud-native, to us, is you have Oracle running that database natively within the services of the cloud. For example, take Amazon Dynamo DB. It's a beautiful example of a cloud-native service. You don't run Dynamo DB on-prem. It was built ultimately for the cloud. Cloud Spanner, another example of cloud-native. It is built for that infrastructure, floor ground up, and has been nurtured for the last ten years for the elastic infrastructure. >> Alright, Tarun, great to have you on. Quick plug for what you guys are doing. What's next? You got the Series A, you're getting customers, you got a big customer you can't talk about, but it's in the Register article, Home Depot. What other things are you working on? What's the key priorities? Hiring? You've got some new announcements coming up I hear. Rumor mill, I won't say who they are, but you're partnering. What's the key focus? What's your key objectives? >> No, we only stay focused on building, and as you early on said, it's still early for us. We want to stay focused on getting customer acquisition, customer momentum, deploying those customers, making them happy customers, having them become referenceable customers for us, and of course, the next big focus for me personally is going to be bringing some of the people in the team, some of the people who can help me scale the company- >> John: Engineering- >> Engineering, marketing, business development, sales, go to market, so that's going to be second we're to focus, and third, and again, you'll hear the announcement coming very quickly, we're going to be partnering with some of the leading enterprise infrastructure companies, both on their enterprise traditional storage companies, and some of the leading, I'm just going to leave it at that. >> And True Ventures is the seed investor and Lightspeed on the Series A, the True company on the Series A with them. 'Cause they tend to follow, they don't leave you hanging. >> Yeah, Puneet is excellent. I love him. >> Yeah, John Callahan's company's got great stuff. And they had some great eggs, they had FitBit and they've got a lot of great stuff going on. >> Well they're excellent, excellent pro-entrepreneur people. Great to work with as well. >> High integrity, great people. Tarun, thanks for coming on and sharing the entrepreneurial perspective, the innovation perspective, certainly as a Google partner, good to have your reaction and analysis. >> Thank you, John. >> It's The Cube, bringing you all the action from Google Next here in our studio. More Google Next coverage after this short break. (The Cube Theme)