>> Announcer: From the Silicon ANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this Cube conversation, eliminating barriers to enterprise multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is all the rage, all the buzz, it appears to be here and now David Chang is here, he's the Senior Vice President of Products and Co-Founder of Actifio and AppIQ, welcome back to The Cube, good to see you again. >> It's a pleasure to be here, thank you very much. >> You are very welcome, so eight years ago, you guys started this journey, the cloud was kind of new a little experimental, maybe put some stuff in the cloud and see what happens and then boom, all of a sudden it is become mainstream, your thoughts. >> Yeah it's been quite of a journey, I think when we initially started, we were focused around, all about making enterprise as efficient as possible, right. In the old traditional enterprise IT model, that resulted in net savings in terms of reduction to hardware, software, and so on and so forth. But in the cloud, now you're in a completely brand new category in terms of you're being charged on a per use basis. So all the technology we build out over the years just has a direct correlation to this new model of consumption that the cloud is enabling everybody to do. >> So if you think about when you started, platforms were really all mostly on prim, the definition of those platforms has really changed, it's sort of shifted from whether it's a server manufacturer or a storage type or maybe a networking type to the big cloud players, Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure, Oracle's got a cloud, IBM's got a cloud, you see the China clouds emerge. How were you able, well first of all is that sort of an accurate view? That you guys had this sort of platform agnostic approach to your business and that platform has shifted. >> No that's absolutely true, I think we kind of walked into this by accident, because of some of the architectural advantages we kind of built into our infrastructure from the beginning. But, over the last eight years or so, our customer initially asked us how could we, Actifio, help them to enable them to go from a traditional IT to a private cloud type implementation. So we had a lot of traction in terms of the MSP's and private cloud implementations and that's where I would say four, five years ago, even now I would say we had a lot of traction and a lot of customers that came to Actifio for us to help them in that endeavor. But within the last four or five years we definitely see an acceleration of extending that infrastructure as a service platform from on-premise traditional IT to private cloud infrastructure now into the public cloud. So all the capability we kind of built, really applied very nicely to this new platform agnostic model regardless of where you want to go. >> Can we dig into that capability a little bit? What is it about your architecture, kind of your secret sauce, that makes you multi-lingual and maybe in this case, allows you to go from a world that is largely on prim, or managed hosted services, to one that's massive public cloud scale? >> If you think about it, the only thing that's constant as you move your application from IT, to private cloud, to public cloud, is the application, right. So from the beginning we had this very tight application focus, everything we do is from an application perspective. That really enabled us to play nicely, in terms of these platform shifts, from these one location to another, and fundamentally decouple the application and its data from the infrastructure. So now this normalization of this infrastructure really enabled our customer to make that switch very easily. >> So talk more about that, how do you do that, is it software code, is it architecture, give us some understanding. >> I think it's the approach that we take in terms of supporting of a lot of these data management and copy data functions. And it's really looking at the application data set as the entity that we want to focus on. And focusing on enabling the application as the entity that we add value. So what I mean by that is, if you look at a traditional Oracle database, say if you want to move that from a traditional, let's say an AIX type of environment into a Linux environment for your private infrastructure, so we really fundamentally decouple that application and enable you to very quickly migrate that information from that AIX infrastructure into a Linux environment. Then once that's done, our capability in terms, it's all software if you really, really enable us to kind of have a very efficient incremental tap to that database, and then move that information incrementally into the cloud. And once you're into the cloud, you can now make multiple virtual copies if you will, all consuming sort of the same amount of resources. So you have a drastic reduction in the capacity needed to do that. >> So it's your ability to essentially jailbreak the data from the siloed infrastructure, is that right? >> That's right, and I think four, five years ago we realized that cloud, the public cloud would be an infrastructure that we need to support in depth. So the engineering group has been looking at, for an application consumed cloud natively you have to understand a lot of new technology and new terminologies and new capability. Things like object storage, for example, is not something that a traditional application can consume readily, if you will, without going back and rewriting a lot of those applications. With Actifio, we enable our customers to not having to go back and retro-fit and rewrite these applications but be able to consume these new cloud technologies natively, so they can reap the value immediately versus having to go back and retro-fit their applications. >> One of the practitioners that we had on, of course very recently, Jake Burns was saying that even in AWS, the block storage really isn't kind of enterprise ready, friendly. I want to ask you a question about, if you think about the on-prim, you know block storage players that you guys eight years ago understood that you had to be compatible with, I'll use that term. Whether it was EMC, or Netapp, or IBM, or HP or whatever it was, were those block storage sort of interfaces, the entries and the exits all very similar and is it harder in the cloud or is it actually easier in the cloud, 'cause it's all sort of the API driven economy? I wonder if you could give us some insight there? >> I would say the foundation layer is much easier on the cloud. So as Jake was mentioning before, you don't have to order the hardware, hardware gets here, so the agility of this picture improves drastically when you move to the cloud. However, some of the cons of that, is a lot of the advanced features that you used to get on premise with these enterprise infrastructures, are no longer available on the public infrastructure. So in many ways, many of our customers, as they move into the cloud, a lot of the IT operational staff have to deal with a reduction in terms of capabilities or availability or time it takes to make that data, in terms of cloning and so on and so forth. So that's sort of, I think the challenges many of our customer are facing and that's where Actifio can help you with. >> Can we talk about this notion of rewriting apps, because in IT, if you have to rewrite the app, you got to freeze the code, if you freeze the code then you're enduring all this risk, you know if you have to freeze the code for N number of months, that's N number of months you can't keep up with your competition. So am I correct that your customers are not having to rewrite their apps, because of your ability to isolate sort of the data model? >> That's right >> And maybe you could talk about that a little bit and what impact it's had on your customer base. >> Yeah as you know, in the cloud, the economic is per use, and in the cloud the type of capacity you have to deal with tend to be in multiple categories, you have the EBS of the world which is relatively expensive compared with the object storage. So if you take just lift and ship, you enterprise the application model into the cloud where a lot, I would say most of your application data, is stored EBS, then you're not really fully utilizing the economics of the cloud. So how do you make effective use, in terms of minimizing the elastic block service on Amazon, versus the object storage capability that you have available. That is I think a difficult topic for a lot of the traditional enterprise applications doing the lift and ship, where you have to essentially go back and rewrite those applications to take advantage of the cloud native capability for you to really drive that availability and cost to the new level that you were expecting. >> So I've been in this storage business a long time, and I'm somewhat embarrassed to ask this question, but I have an architect here, a technologist, I'll ask you. When you think about block storage in the cloud, an EBS in particular, that was not Amazon's first announcement, did they announce that because they realized that they need to accommodate, you know block storage, to get more people from the enterprise or is there something specific about block storage that is here to stay forever? Another way of asking that is, can we run these applications on object storage? Is that the direction, thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I think it's going to be a hybrid model, right. So what Actifio really enables our customer to do, is not really running your production on object storage, but a lot of the secondary sort of data cloning, data analytics, and DR type of use case, you can shift, I would say, reduce your usage of EBS block storage to object storage. So we think that's the low hanging fruit that enable our customer to move to the cloud faster, cheaper, and with better capabilities. I think longer term as our customers start to develop applications that's native to the cloud, it's probably more efficient for you to consume some of these cloud native capability directly, but we're talking about a lot of time and resources that not all organizations will be able to afford to a high percentage of their applications moving to-- >> So new applications might be rewritten to take advantage of object storage and what about things like performance or latency and recovery et cetera, do you see the block storage world being able to get there? To actually compete effectively with, or the object to compete effectively with block or is that? >> We believe so, because if you look at object storage it's now proven over the last, I would say six, seven years, it's the most scalable storage that's available to the industry period, right. That scalability also enable you to reduce any hot spots that you may have from a performance perspective. So what Actifio's engineering group has done, is really leverage that capability, the ability for you to fully utilize the full bandwidth of that entire object storage, and having multi-parallel streams of access into that. So the way we look at object storage, it's just another access protocol, if you think about it, you have block storage, you have iSCSI, Fibre Channel, you have NFS access protocols. Object is simply another protocol that enables you to have persistent storage. And what Actifio has done is really leverage the performance and scalability characteristic of this object storage to have our customers, in terms of realizing value from day one. >> Is it true to your DNA, you don't really care whatever the customer chooses you're going to support it? If the whole world goes object, great no problem. If the world stays mixed. >> I think for the foreseeable future, it's going to be a mix environment, but as Jake was mentioning before, it's all about optimization in terms of capability and cost. And object storage is a key piece of that equation we can really enable you to kind of tweak that knob to exactly what you're looking for. >> When customers make a move to the cloud, it's a migration, any migration is risky, how does Actifio generally, and your product specifically, reduce that risk? >> I think it's all about keeping it simple, right, so the ability for you to kind of lift and ship your applications without having to go back to rewrite, that's a huge value proposition, or a huge reduction in terms of risk that you can achieve in your environment. The ability for us, for Actifio to tap your into your enterprise IT existing production environment without a lot of sort of dangerous or latency effect, is a huge value we can bring to the table as well. Because Actifio from day one, is designed to be very efficient in terms of tapping your applications data while it's running, while it's in production, right. So the ability for us to incrementally do that and move that information into the cloud effectively for you to do that migration process, can drastically reduce your risk if you will. >> Let's talk about cost a little bit. We heard a lot from Jake about cost, in theory anyway, you guys can help optimize, not in theory, in actuality, you can help me get rid of stuff I always say. Talk about the optimization angle, how have your customers taken advantage of that, we heard from Jake, you have some other favorite examples you can maybe share with us David? >> Yeah so I think one of the key things, instead of doing, for example, if on a traditional IT perspective you want to keep data for a long time, you typically employ deduplication technology, right. Dedup technology typically works really well if you own the entire asset and you have sort of big servers, big number of cores, big memories, and so on and so forth. When you actually do a lift and ship of that technology, into the cloud environment, all of a sudden your price tag, in terms of what you charge on a monthly basis goes through the roof, because now every CPU cycle and every IO you generate to do that deduplication, now becomes very expensive, you're essentially charged on a per use basis into the cloud. So what Actifio has done, is really enable our customers to eliminate a lot of the cost in terms in doing that, in doing a lift and ship into the cloud, by enabling you to use leverage object storage directly without having to employ these expensive deduplication technology there as well, so that's one example. >> I want to talk about digital transformation a little bit, it's the buzzword, we go to a lot of conferences and every time you hear, oh digital transformation, Uber, Airbnb, you know blah, blah, blah. We tend to have these detailed storage discussions and product discussions, and it seems like it's really far away, but I want to run something by you and see if you can respond. Digital means data, right, if it's not data it's not digital, you guys are in the data business, we'd observe that the big digital players, the big internet players, their data driven, your conference upcoming, we're going to talk about that, it's called data driven, what does that mean? It means that data is at the heart of your enterprise and humans, human expertise is sort of surrounds that, but it's foundational is the data, most companies in the enterprise, human expertise is at the center and data's in silos and bolted on all over the place. You guys in a big way are a silo buster, you allow me to have sort of a comprehensive view of my virtual data store. Are you seeing that in your customer base, can you help enterprises who are scared to death that they're going to get disrupted, cross that digital divide and close the gap with the disrupters? >> Absolutely, so Actifio does not do AI for example, but what we really do is unlock the data you already have in your environment so it's absolutely free to be, so you can run analytics, you can run analytics on demand whether it's on your primary IT infrastructure, in a private data center, or in a public cloud. So by, if you think about it some of the biggest challenge our customer have in terms of going digital, is how do I fundamentally uncouple or decouple my data from the infrastructure that I'm running, right. Once I have that detachment of that data from my underlying infrastructure, now I'm free to move that information to anywhere I want, in terms of make use of that information, or to run analytics, to actually run a lot of the advanced algorithms that you could monetize that information for your business. So that acceleration or the agility we provide and the reduction of the number of copies for all these use cases, is at the center of what we can do for you for that use case. >> Or even move code, bring code to that data wherever it lives, because I may not want to move petabyte of data around, is that right? >> That's right. >> Okay, so data driven, so you can't be data driven unless you put data at the core of your enterprise, that's part of what you guys do. The conference is June 5th and 6th, it's called Data Driven, it's at the Fontainebleau in Miami. We did a Cube gig there a couple years ago, it was fantastic. Tell us about the event and what people can expect. >> We're very excited about the event, it's a really an industry wide event, we have many customers or many partners within the community coming in and sharing with the entire sort of industry around some of the best practices in terms of monetization of the data you already have, some of the best practices in terms of making the data self-service, some of the best practice in terms of leveraging sort of the best economics in terms of the private or public cloud to make effective use of that information. So we're very excited and like to see everyone there in June. >> Great David thanks so much for coming back in The Cube, really a pleasure, congratulations on all the success and good luck in June. >> Thank you very much, pleasure to be here. >> Thanks for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante, from our East Coast studios, we'll see you next time.