>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, you welcome back to the cubes coverage of combo go 19. We're in Colorado this year. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we have a couple of gents joining us alumni of the cube. We're gonna have a really spirited conversation. Please welcome Avinash locks from the CEO of Hedvig, one of our alumni and Don Foxer, the VP of storage solutions from combo and Ann Campbell. Oh gee, Dawn, you can say that, right? Yes, yes. So guys, just a little bit of news coming out with combo and Hedvig in the last month or so, you guys announced combo, announced they were acquiring Hedvig. We last had you on the cube of an Asha DockerCon 18 talking about had veg. And here we are, the announcement comes in September. Acquisitions already closed, lots of buzz, lots of excitement. I'll finish. Let's start with you. Why Convolt >>good question. Uh, first of all, thanks for having me. Uh, C, the way I look at it, I believe the enterprises are gravitating towards complete solutions. If you look at, uh, data management and backup Conwell's clearly the leader in that space, I don't have to say it, I think the analysts have all attested to it. We bring in a very complimentary set of tools that I think coupled together could be a complete solution for a large variety of workloads in the modern data center. And hence it makes it a ideal fit. And also the cultures from an engineering perspective, being Hedwig being a small company in Cornwall is also a small company. But you know, definitely big when compared to what we are at. Um, the cultures were more or less aligned in terms of the engineering culture, so to speak. And that makes it, uh, it made it a very natural choice. Do you know, feel comfortable going into a bigger company. So it worked out really well. >>So Don way we've seen the slides given in the keynote, they talked about the two halves of the brain, the storage management and the data management. Talked to us a little bit about of Hedwig plus con vault and how that goes together. Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you start to look at the, I mean, I guess you look at the marketplace today and you can tell that, uh, kind of the, the lines of delineation of what vendor a versus vendor B versus vendor seat is doing is completely blurred, right? And you'll see that with the attachment of secondary storage, you see that with way backup companies and are driving more towards sort of, you know, uh, the app dev space. And we really start to look at where, what Combolt's doing and, and, and I always say when we talked about the acquisition of Hedvig, it's accelerating the vision that we've had on be able to provide a really super scalable backend for where you can land information that Combalt protects, but the really interesting and cool part, but as you start to realize the tool set that it has within it, it also keeps us very relevant for the future, for where it, in the shifts with applications are going. >>Then it gives us a chance to really give that complete solution from giving the storage, taking the information as it's being created and storing it in a compliance form, storing it off to the cloud, maybe re-purposing it, reusing it into the future. So that's how this really starts to come together. You have the index in control and management, the understanding of what Combolt provides the data management and you have all the flexibility and control that the Hedvig platform provides and Miriam together just gives you that much more agility for how you can use that information, that data. I want to understand what being part of Convolt will be different for Hedvig. I think back to, I've been talking to you since the company came out of stealth. We're huge proponents of the learnings that the hyperscalers had. You came from Amazon and Facebook. Bringing that to the enterprise is great, but building something that is highly scalable versus frigging something that has repeatability and scalability through thousands of deployment, like convoluted have are two separate issues. So, you know, we'll, we'll being part of Convolt, how will that impact your business and your group? >>I think the latter is what is going to make it really exciting for us. I think we added a point where the product that we are bringing into the market or we are brought into the market, it's pretty mature and most of the customers would deploy it and use it. They've been extremely happy with the way it performs and the way it has performed over time. And I think with the combo, they have a larger footprint in the enterprise, large channel infrastructure already in place makes it a lot more easy to push the product out there into the market. And uh, we will be given and VR given complete autonomy plus you what it would it is at Viva doing. And obviously, you know, when you go into any other organization that has got to be some cross-pollination, which is also something that we will be pursuing. But these two things I think, uh, make it very exciting times for us. >>Didn't you? You mentioned the word acceleration a few minutes ago. I'm just wondering from your perspective being called on as long as you have, do you and maybe customers and partners see the Hedvig acquisition as? Sanjay was saying something that's trending on Twitter today is the hashtag new comm dolls. Yep. So it's actually interesting. At first when the acquisition was announced, there were some partners that were like, Hmm, okay, I need to think about this a little bit. And then as we kind of went through the talk track and sort of explain some of the power with the head of the platform delivers, there were a number of, there was suddenly aha. Like you could just tell the light bulb went off. I get where this is going. And then you see what we're doing from Convolt metallic as well, right? The the SAS offering. And you see how we're continuing to drive all of the innovation in that core product. I don't know if you want to call it a combo to Datto, but I do think we've entered a new era of what we're delivering back to our customers from a solutions perspective. And it's really exciting because you can talk to a customer about backup and give them the best solution in the world, but we can also start to expand and get a whole heck of a lot more strategic and help be thought leaders and some of these new spaces, >>well, some of the commentary that I was reading about the acquisition from analysts say, Hey, this is a potentially, this is going to give Combalt opened the door for a bigger presence in the surge defined space, a big market. Also elevate comm vault from a Tam perspective. Talk to us about those perspectives. As some of the analysts said, when Sanjay came onboard nine months ago, Hey combo, you really got to expand your market share and get a kick out of just cultivating the large enterprises. How do you see that? >>Yeah, sure. I mean that's the easiest place to point to the secondary storage market place, right? So the secondary to storage marketplace, it's double digits in billions of market share. And that can be anything from things like object storage. It could just be scale-out, NAS. It could be, um, it could be, you know, companies like Cohesity and others that have a platform that build out secondary storage is a whole slew of people that play in that space. Uh, it also goes back to like appliances in a whole form of other storage types that are purpose built. So the secondary storage is a fairly broad sort of brush that people paint. You know, something is not running production workloads. But the interesting thing is, and this is kind of something that when the we've talked about we see those lines of private production or primary, secondary, tertiary, that's starting to really blur out. >>Um, so that market share that is in secondary storage, that market share that attaches also to object for where your, where we're going from a even a scale out backup perspective. You know, those are I going to be target areas that we can start to give customers solutions into in a really integrated and complete way. Uh, one of the customer areas that I've heard from Convolt that I'm curious if it might be applicable for your, for your team of an option is the service providers, you know, they've sold and you talk about how many end users actually leverage Convolt technology. It's like almost an order of magnitude more when you go through the service providers and when you talk about scalability and the requirements that that seems to be like it could be a fit for a. >>Yeah, you could even think of someone who is running a private cloud in their own on premise data center as being a service provider for their own internal consumption. Grateful folks working in tunnel. I guess going to an MSB or even do a larger service providers is an extrapolation of the same thing. So it'll obviously make it a very natural fit because you know, everyone understands the cap X game. Operational efficiency is the harder problem to actually crack. And with systems like this you can actually address that very simplistically. And it also allows them to kind of scale with their growth in a very effortless fashion. So it makes an agile mix a lot of natural sense. >>And that's an interesting point cause that aligns well too with the way the Combalt software themselves also attack attaches, right? We do a much better job of running that value back to the larger enterprise or those that are seeing more of that operational efficiency challenge. So it's another reason why this is a great intersection or you know, great, great marriage of the two technologies, um, what want to speak with, I think we talked about Sanjay about he of being at puppet worked a lot with dev ops in that environment. I heard from Convolt COO that five of the 45 developers that are here doing whiteboard session come from Hedvig. So speak a little bit of that, that customer base, the developer community microservices, you know, that kind of modern >>I think we have a, a demo session. I don't know what time, but we're going to give you a comprehensive overview of how, uh, you know, kind of Kubernetes orchestrated containers works with Hedwig. I think if people are here, they're hearing me, they should definitely check it out. And, uh, if you look at some of our larger customers, they deploy us in environments where they want to have practically zero touch provisioning capability, right? Which means that you got your infrastructure ought to be completely programmable, which bitches, what the DevOps movement is all about. And uh, the comprehensive set of APIs that be exposed for control and data plane, it actually makes that pipe dream a reality. >>Let's talk a little bit about the integrations. I mentioned a minute ago. The announcement was in September, the acquisitions close and you guys have already really started to buckle down into the integration between the technologies. Can you talk to us about that? And then I'd love to get your perspective on existing had big customers, you know, what door does this open for them? >>So for an existing customers, they are very happy because they now are convinced that we have a larger footprint and we have a lot more people to help to help support them as they grow and they don't have this field anymore as to how perhaps a small startup would be able to support them. So that fear factor goes away. So they're all very relieved on that front. Second, from an integration perspective, uh, there's a lot of things that we are working on from a technological perspective that is getting deep into the roadmap. I dunno if he can talk much about it at this point, but a non-technology we're all well integrated in, we are all Commonwealth employees now Gunwale badges come while emails so well integrated at this point. >>I guess maybe from a high level perspective, what we probably can say is probably number one, we want to make sure the experiences across both products are merged. So it truly views as you know, one one true company vault and providing that experience. And that's everything from installation to support to how we communicate and manage the, the ongoing relationship with the customer. So that's one there's always work to do there. Right? And the next core piece is just how we can make the two technologies basically make, you know, the had big platform, a part of the combo data platform and make sure those two integrations are as tight as possible. And that will be a longterm path, right? Because as that becomes more integrated, there's going to be new ideas, new innovations, and she's gonna come up with a whole lot of new things that we could potentially do that will meet the needs for the customer. And I think the third piece that ties back into the dev ops conversation is we've got two really solid API stacks. So bringing those together is going to be important in the future as well. So that it really is a crisp and clean sort of programmable infrastructure for customers from how the storage is delivered all the way to how it's managed and potentially even deleted out the back end. >>Well, with how quickly we're seeing Convolt move in the last nine months, I mean this year there's so much innovation from leadership changes in sales and marketing, new GTM routes, et cetera. What can, what can combo customers expect in terms of, I know you can't divulge too much on the roadmap, but you know with faster, shorter cycles of development. >>So I'll go first. I mean I think as you look at the sort of sort of where maybe the easiest way to answers is we're staying in front of where the market is heading and we're making sure we're providing solutions that can get customers to solve those challenges when they hit them. We don't want them to have to hit those challenges, have to then struggle, fight, figure out what it is they can do while everyone in their market moves past them. We want to be there with a solution that answers some of those challenges that day. They hit them more preemptive, preemptive, absolutely more preempted to react. That's a perfect way to put it. Thank you. So that's part of what they can expect from us and we do a lot of research and working with our customers and understanding where their future needs are, where they're going. We spend a lot of time with industry experts and analysts too for what they're seeing across the globe. Obviously we can only go so far and travel and talk to so many people. So we leveraged the collective of the industry to also kind of have a pretty good gauge and I'll say we've got leaders like Amash and Sanjay that are also awesome at just kind of having a really good pulse on where the industry is going and what we should be doing as a company. >>I'm just getting pickled in so too early for me to answer how that roadmap may Michio or how customers may perceive. But I think, uh, what should be very encouraging is that we bring so many, so much more capabilities. The enterprise has always been in this mindset of procuring things with a single throat to choke and this makes it very easy for them. >>What's the question of done for you is some of the things that Sue and I have talked about with guests today is from a partner perspective, there's been a lot of positive feedback in Navarro community we talked with and think we're talking with Rick de Blasio tomorrow. Want to understand, you know, some of the new partner programs, how are his Convolt traditional channel, your VARs, but also all the way up to your. Their reaction to all of the changes and the acceleration that Cohmad is driving is particularly with respect to head veg. >>For the most part it's been incredibly positive and even though the technology partner side, it's, it's fairly positive and also it forces us to have a much closer conversation on. All right, let's continue to talk about how we're successful together in the marketplace because we understand that our customers will need more than one vendor, more than two vendors to be successful as they kind of tackle the challenges that are in front of them. So you know, we're not going to stop our innovation and partnering and technology ecosystem development because that's so important to allow the customer to have the choice. We know that we're only one of many players and so we want to give them the choice to use whatever they need. We just want to help them control and manage the data >>and help them maybe simplify their operations. And especially as you know, we don't, we don't go to any event without talking about multi-cloud. It's the world that most businesses are living in. And, and I'll say, if you're not you Willy, how can what combat is doing now, not just with Hedvig but also just with some of the structural changes and directions that you guys have made it help customers embrace multicloud actually be able to protect, recover that data and >>you know, shift, sift insights from it. Yeah, sure. Please. All right, so multi-cloud, so first it starts off in tying in the ecosystems of the different cloud players offer, right? You need to be able to sort the support their platforms. You need to be able to continue to abstract out the information, the data itself that may be tied to an application or tied to a platform and give that level of portability. It's actually something that Hedvig does a fantastic job on as well and when you start to have that level of portability, well then it becomes a heck of a lot easier to either use other platforms within that cloud or a separate cloud or something you might homegrown build yourself as. That's part of the big value prop. We're doing all of these things not to have the best infrastructure but to make it easier for customers to use that data. So that means integrating and being strong partners to cloud players. It means continuing to be a really technological leader in how you can support all the platforms and services they offer and really allow the data to rise to the top as far as the value perspective goes and that's really where we continue to drive our innovation, at least on the on the data management side. >>That's a good Commonwealth perspective. The Hedvig perspective comes from a different angle. We always look at data portability, be it multicloud or even be at hybrid via met a lot of customers who went down the hybrid pot and then had to pull back. And when you pull back, you don't want to be in a situation where you're rewriting your entire application because your data is persisted in a very different way. But providing that data portability with an abstraction that sits between the application and the underlying physical infrastructure, I think is going to be a very important solution to take. You know, view often in this mix and hence together it becomes a comprehensive solution. >>Well guys, we thank you so much for stopping by joining soon and be on the program telling us a little bit more about this exciting new venture that you guys are going in together and we look forward to hearing more about it as it unfolds and maybe getting some customers on the cube next year. Absolutely. All right. Thank you. Thanks for Sumeta, man. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from convo. Go 19.

>> Live, from San Francisco, it's theCube covering DockerCon 18, brought to you by Docker, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube, we are live at DockerCon 2018, in San Francisco, on a beautiful day. Lisa Martin with John Troyer. We're very pleased to welcome back to theCube distinguished alumni Avinash Lakshman, the CEO and founder of Hedvig. Welcome back. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So, talk to us about Hedvig, what's new, what are you guys doing, what's exciting? >> Oh, a lot of things, I mean, since the last time we spoke here, I think, some of the improvements have been made in the platform as been pretty significant, in fact we are executing on the vision we had from day one, which is to be the infrastructure for both primary and secondary storage, and I think we are delivering on that promise. And doing so pretty efficiently. >> Talk to us about the case for consolidating primary and secondary workloads on one platform. >> So, everybody understands how capics can be reduced, right, but I think the key to understanding how one can reduce their operation overhead, is going to become very important, and the key to that is to, if you look at how enterprises have evolved, there's always been a vendor they talk to for their SAM needs, a different kind of vendor for their NAS, they're all trying to figure out what their object strategy ought to be, and now there's a lot of disruption happening in the secondary market, we always felt like, what if you go to one platform, on which you can consolidate block, file, and object, and also be the backup target in most of the secondary use cases. Then, all you got to do is to train your folks, on one platform, and just use it for different workloads by changing either policy or adverse queue. Makes your operational overhead very streamlined and very efficient. >> Avinash, sometimes the infrastructure people joke about containers, and they say, well, you know the developers here, they just go, well the storage just exists, doesn't it, I just call, I do a mount point, and it just works, in the cloud, right? And so, but Hedvig is here at DockerCon. Can you talk a little bit about some of the relationship there, and some of the how you work with folks, these folks here at DockerCon, working in containers? >> See, anytime anything is simple to use, they always joke about it, but there's a lot of work that goes behind driving that simplicity. Like they say, you wanna keep things simple, because any fool can complicate things, you know? So, but I think you, people are looking to bring that cloud-like mentality into On Prem data centers, and I think, we are also delivering on that promise. >> To clarify, I was kind of making a joke. The infrastructure people always kind of, they roll their eyes, they say we do all this work, and the developers think it's so easy one it gets to them. >> No, I know, because all hard work is done for them. >> I mean, there's also a joke among the infrastructural community that, eh, it's just an app, that's how they flippantly brush off applications, so, it goes both ways, I suppose. >> Indeed. >> So, I always look at messaging on websites of guests and companies, and I liked what I saw. Finally, a cloud agnostic storage solution. What does that mean from Hedvig's perspective, and how does that give you that differentiation that you want? >> Good question, because, for that one needs to define what multi-cloud is. Everyone has their own definition for multi-cloud. Just the way of, a few years ago, everybody had their own definition of distributed systems, right, I mean, there was a large populace that believed that if a program runs on multiple computers, it's a distributed system. Not the way, we, I, would define it. It has to be multiple machines working together to make believe that there's only one machine behind the scenes, right? And similarly, one may want to set the stage for what multi-cloud is all about. Again, running, there is a popular school of thought, if I can run on Cloud A, and then run on Cloud B, I am multi-cloud, that's not my definition. The way I would like to define it is one fabric that can span multiple clouds, and give you the illusion that that's where there's a whole location transparency thing comes in. You believe everything is local, but it could be anywhere, you know, and that's where infrastructure becomes kind of invisible, and it's a single fabric that spans multiple cloud environments. >> So, that transparency, is that something that really kind of helps Hedvig define some of your key differentiation? >> In the cloud environment, definitely, yes, and here's why: When people typically build applications, if you program to services that are available in one particular cloud environment, tomorrow, you wanna run it on a different cloud environment, there is no API compatibility between different clouds. So you will have to rebuild your applications to a total different set of services, that another cloud vendor provides. At least, what we bring to the table is from a data management infrastructure layer, you could have one fabric, you can run your, you can now move your applications willy-nilly, because you will be programming against an API that we provide, and you don't have to worry about where you are running them. And that's what we enable. And that's done seamlessly today. >> Can you talk about how some of your customers are using Hedvig, and some of the customer use cases, in production? >> Yeah, I mean, there's quite a a few use cases, I think the popular ones are, for those who are in the primary kind of workload space, which are typically used when you to run, when you need fault tolerance across multiple sites. One of the more interesting use cases that we are now deploying in the UK is across multiple clouds and on premise, so it's kind of hybrid and multi-cloud built inside one fabric. And the reason they do it, is basically, not only consolidate their existing On Prem data centers, but also to get, to satisfy data governance laws for certain applications. This leads to a tone that I'm trying to drive and make popular, which is a declarative data sovereignty, which basic means, if you look at things in Europe, for different applications, there are different laws, and that's now becoming kind of common place. We live in a global economy, but the data governance laws are all local. So, people want certain applications and its data not to span certain geographic regions, right? How do you make that happen in a declarative way? And, you should be able to do that by just saying for this app, this volume, and there are some policies you assign to it, and that policy basically dictates what regions that data will live in, and we make it as simple as it possibly can get. >> Nice. So, the policies then drives where the data lives, and on Hedvig, if it needs to stay in Germany, that volume will stay there, and will never be anywhere else. >> Exactly, exactly, and you can even control that across different cloud windows, if you're running, say, for example, this particular customer, I'm not sure if I can mention the name, but so I'm going to err on the side of caution, they run across AWS, Azure, and On Premise. And for certain apps, they want the data to be spread across AWS and Azure, and for certain apps, they wanted data to be stored across On Prem and AWS. You wanna make it as simple as possible, make it declarative, and for those who are more systems savvy, if you look at how computer science has evolved over time, if you look at the late 90s, transactions were a big deal, everyone were trying to figure out how to program transactions into their system. But, over time, people designed run-times, where you can declaratively annotate section of your modules, to say whether it should be part of a transaction or not. And they made it that simple, and the run-time kind of takes care of that delivering those annotations that you declare. We wanna bring the same simplicity for data sovereignty. >> So we're at the fifth DockerCon, and this morning, Steve Singh said it was around 5,000, we've heard upwards of 6,000 attendees here, and I think you said at the first DockerCon, there was only about 300 people. I noticed when I walked out of the general session this morning, and I turned back around the room, it was packed, it was standing room only. I'm curious what your thoughts are about some of the things that Docker has announced, you know, they really talked about what they're enabling with enhancements to enterprise edition, with federated application management, what they're doing with Docker desktop, as really enabling three things: and I heard you kind of talk about one of them for sure, which was agility, choice, and security. From a security perspective, what are some of the things that Hedvig can enable your customers to achieve, because we hear that security is a huge issue. >> Security typically manifests itself in two ways: one is in today's systems, you have data spreading all over the place, so when the data's on the wire, you need to encrypt things on the wire so that nobody can sniff and steal data. There is also an aspect of security where data, which goes onto the sides on any media, needs to be secured, meaning it needs to be encrypted. Now, there's a whole school of people who believe that they've solved that problem by sticking in what is called self-encrypting drives, but that solves only part of the problem, and it's a hacky solution because we live in a world where, you know, BYOD was a big thing, and it's kind of BYOK, right? Bring your own keys, so we can encrypt using the keys that you bring to the table and get out of the way, right? So, if you want to achieve that, then you cannot just SCD's, you have to drive the encryption onto the media on which the data is going to reside, but that's part of the problem. The other part of the problem is: what happens to data when it's on the wire? So you want to be able to encrypt data on the wire, and at rest, so that takes care of one part of security. The other big issue is ransomware, right, and there are also application developers when they want to shown through their features, and they want to build fast and develop features very fast, they could end up corrupting data underneath. How do you protect against, you want to have a feature that even let's you protect your data from yourself, and those are all capabilities that one needs to think through. The way you typically would do that is have the capability of providing managed snapshots, where you can periodically keep taking snapshots of your data, so you can revert to any, it's kinda like Github for data, that's how we look at it. You know, when you look at Github, you put your source code in there, but nobody is working on the same source tree, you create different trees, and then you merge them in when you think the time is right. So, you wanna have different copies of your data, without having copies, and then be able to revert back to any pristine version you deem fit, if you make any mistakes at the application level, or if there are ransomware kind of issues. So, it's a multi-fold problem. So, you've got to look at things holistically and make sure that everything is kind of delivered natively through any infrastructure platform one is building. >> So, Avinash, you are, frankly, you've had a big impact, on cloud computing, you were one of the co-inventors of DynamoDB, at Amazon. >> Dynamo. >> Dynamo, and you were then at Facebook Cassandra, and you actually said the 10th anniversary of Cassandra. >> This is, I didn't even realize, I think it's either this month or next month. >> Nice, nice. Huge impact, right? Whole ecosystems have been built up. So, you have a sense of where the problems are. Now, Hedvig, a few years old now, you know, what are trying to do now with Hedvig, and where would you like to take it? You're in the middle of a very hot market, the data services market, this kind of secondary storage market, is super hot. So, I would just love to hear what your dreams are, where you're trying to take Hedvig, and how did you see that this was a hot place, and where are you going with it? >> Dreams are a difficult question to answer, but at least we know one thing: what we do know, is that we are onto something big, and this a problem that needs solving, and it needs solving from the ground up, and it needs solving in a very different way. I always believed that true innovation comes from people from the outside. I'm not a storage guy, I never was. But, I believe that makes me better suited to go after this problem because I don't have any of the baggage that people typically tend to have. You can't disrupt yourself, right? We believe we are onto something big, and so we are just heads down trying to deliver on that. I don't know where it could go, I'll leave it to destiny, but I think we're onto something big, and hopefully we will reap the benefits of what we are doing. >> Well, Avinash, thanks so much for coming by theCube again and sharing with us what's going on at Hedvig. It sounds like some exciting times ahead, and we wish you the best of luck. >> Thank you, really appreciate it. >> We want to thank you for watching theCube. For John Troyer, I'm Lisa Martin, and we are live from DockerCon 2018 in San Francisco. Thanks for watching, guys. (electronic music hit)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, good morning. Welcome to the cubes coverage of combo go 19 I'm Lisa Martin and it was stupid man. Hey Sue. Hey Lisa. Are you ready? I was going to ask you. Yes. Are you ready? >>I believe the statement this morning was, we're born ready. >>We are born ready? Yes. That was a big theme this morning. It's the theme of the event here at con Volvo 19 in Colorado and great parody this morning of all these old video clips of all these actors including the Lego movie stars from saying I'm ready. Even SpongeBob. That one got me, so we had a great day. Yesterday's to love some news came out Monday and Tuesdays a lots of great stuff to talk about. We had there a lot of their C level execs and let a new changes a call yesterday. Really got the vibe of, Hey, this is a new Combalt. >>It's interesting Lisa, because one of the things we've been talking about is the 20 years of pedigree that the company has. This Andre Mirchandani said yet they're doing some new items. I was talking to some of the partners in there like how come metallics like a separate brand, don't you worry about brand spread? We knew a thing about having too many brands on the program so it is the history, the experience, the lessons learned, the war chest as they said of all of the things that have gone wrong over the years and I sure know that from my time living on the vendor side is there's no compression algorithm for all the experience you've had and like, Oh we fixed something in that stays in the code as opposed to there's something brand new might need to work through things over time but metallic a separate brand but leveraging the partnerships and the go to market and the experience of Convolt overall. >>So if you want, my quick take is, you know metallic. I definitely, I think coming out of here is the thing we will be talking the most about their SAS plus model. I want to see how that plays in the marketplace. As I probed Rob, when we interviewed him, customers, when you think about SAS, it should just be, I worry about my data and I get up and running and they said they have a very fast up and running less than 15 minutes. That's great. But some of that optionality that they built in, Oh well I can bring this along or I can add this and do this. It's always worried that a wait, do I have to remember my thing? And as it changes down the road, do I have everything set up right? Those are things that we're trying to get away from when we go to a SAS or cloud model. >>And to your point, another theme of the show has been about operational simplification, not just what Combolt is doing internally to simplify their operations, but what they need to deliver to customers. Customers want simplicity rates. Do we, we talk about that at every show regardless of industry, but there is this, this line, and maybe it's blurring, >>like we talked a lot about blurred lines yesterday of too much choice versus simplification. Where's the line there? >> Yeah and a great point Lisa, so one of the items Sandra Mirchandani said yesterday in his keynote was that blurring the line between primary and secondary storage and I probed him on our interview is Convolt going into the primary storage market with Hedvig. Hedvig has got a, you know, a nice offering, strong IP, good engineering team. I think they want to make sure that customers that have bought head vigor want to keep buying Hedvig we'll do it, but it really, I think two years from now when you look back at is that core IP, how does that get baked into the solution? That's why they bought it. That's where it's going to be there. I don't think we're going to be looking two years from now and saying, Oh wow know Convolt they're going up against all the storage star Walton competing a bit gets HCI and everything. >>They have a strong partnership, so I think I got clarity on that for the most part, even though the messaging will will move over time on that, it will move over time on that. >> That's a good point that the song blurred lines kept popping into my head yesterday as we were talking about that. But one of the things that was clear was when we spoke with Rob Kalusi and about metallic, we spoke with Avinash Lakshman about Hedvig Sanjay as well as Don foster. They're already working on the technical integration of of this solutions and we even spoke with their VP of pricing. So from a customer, from a current Hedvig customer perspective, there is focus on that from Combolt's perspective. It's not just about integrating the technologies and obviously that has to be done really well, but it's also about giving customers that consistency and really for combo kind of a new era of transparency with respect to pricing. >>And another thing we talked about some of that transformation of the channel and Mercer row came on board only a couple of days officially on the job. He's helped a number of companies get ready for multicloud and absolutely we've seen that change in the channel over the last five to 10 years. Know back in his days when he was at VM world at VMware there the channel was, Oh my gosh, you know, when Amazon wins we all lose and today we understand it as much more nuance there. The channel that is successful partners with the hyperscale cloud environments, they have practices built around it. The office three 65 and Microsoft practices are an area that Convolt in their partners should be able to do well with and the metallic will tie into as well as of course AWS. The 800 pound gorilla in this space will be there. Combolt plays into that and you know, setting the channel up for that next generation with the SAS, with the software and living in a broader multicloud environment is definitely something to watch you a lot of news about the channel, not just from a leadership standpoint but also so metallic for the mid market >>really delivered exclusively through the channel but also the new initiative that they have. And we talked a little bit about this yesterday about going after and really a big focus with global systems integrators on the largest global enterprises. And when we spoke with their GTM chief of staff yesterday along with Mercer with Carmen, what they're doing, cause I said, you know, channel partners, all the channel partners that they work with work with their competitors. So you have to really deliver differentiation and it can't just be about pricing or marketing messaging goes all the way into getting those feet on the street. And that's another area in which we heard yesterday Combolt making strategic improvements on more feet on the street co-selling with partners, really pulling them deeper into enablement and trainings and to them that's one of the key differentiators that they are delivering to their partners. Yeah >>and Lisa, he, we got to speak to a number, a couple of customers we have more coming on today. It's a little bit telling that you know the average customer you talk to, they have five 10 years of experience there. They are excited about some of the new offerings, but as we've said many times metallic, the new Hedvig we want to talk to the new logos that they're going to get on board. That is something that for the partners has been an incentive. There were new incentives put in place to help capture those new logos because as we know, revenue was actually down in the last fiscal year a bit and Convolt feels that they have turned the corner, they're all ready to go. And one other note I'd like to make, the analogy I used last year is we knew a CEO was canoe CEO search was happening, a lot of things were in motion and it's almost as if you were getting the body ready for an organ transplant and you make sure that the antibodies aren't going to reject it. And in conversation with Sanjay, he was very cognizant of that. His background is dev offs and he was a CIO. We went for it, he was the CEO of puppet. So he's going to make things move even faster. And the pace of change of the last nine months is just the beginning of the change. And for the most part I'm not hearing grumbling underneath the customer seem fully on board. The employees are energized and definitely there was good energy last year, but a raise of the enthusiasm this year. >>Well Stu, first of all, you have just been on fire the last two days comparing their CEO transition to getting a body ready for a transplant. It's probably one of the best things I've heard in a long time. That was awesome. But you're right, we've heard a lot of positivity. Cultural change is incredibly difficult. You talked a minute ago about this as a 20 year old company and as we all have all experience and the industries in which we're in, you know, one of the things that's important is, is messaging that experience and talking about the things that that worked well, but also the things that didn't work well, that they've learned from that message was carried through the keynote this morning. That three customers on stage that we saw before we had to come to the side. And I, I had, my favorite was from Sonic healthcare. Matthew McCabe's coming on in shortly with us and I always appreciate, you know, I think the voice of the customer is the best brand validation that you can get. However, what's even better is a customer talking about when the technologies that they're using fail because it does happen. How are they positioned with the support and the training and the education that is giving them to make those repairs quickly to ensure business continuity and ensure disaster recovery. I think that to me that speaks volumes about the legacy, the 20 years of experience that combo has. >>Yeah, no, Lisa, you're absolutely right. There's certain products out there that we talk about uptime in 100% in this space. You, I believe the stat was about 94% success rate and we had NASA in the keynote yesterday talking about success versus partial success versus failures and Convolt really embraces that and has customers that we'll talk about that because there are times that things will happen and there are things that you need to be able to recover from ransomware. Often it is not a question of if, when it is going to be happened, at least. The other thing I want to get your comment on Jimmy chin who is the director and one of the, the cameraman of the free solo Oscar-winning free solo documentary definitely gave me a little bit of, Oh my gosh, look at some of the Heights and I was nervous just looking at some of this stuff they're doing. I like a little bit of lightweight hiking. I'm not a mountain climber, nothing like that. But he talked about when the camera goes on, there's that added pressure that goes on and it's sitting there. It's like, yeah, you know, we sit here live all day doing that. There's that, that energy to perform. But you know, we all appreciate the everybody watching and understanding that we're all human here and every time, every once in awhile a word or a mistake gets in there, but we keep going summit. Yeah, >>that's life. But also Jimmy chin, phenomenal. I think at 2018 they just won the Oscar just earlier this year for free. Solo. I have to watch that this weekend. But a couple of things that he talked about is that failure is a huge part of preparation. Couldn't agree more. What a simplified statement for somebody that not only has has skied Everest, the climbed Meru, I think they call it the shark fin of India, but what you talked about with what he documented with free solo and all of the thousands of sequences and he talked about that, Alex, I'm forgetting his last name, the guy who closed, who free soloed, El Capitan, all of these different failure scenarios that he rehearsed over and over again in case he encountered any of them, he would immediately be to remedy that situation and get himself back on track. I thought that message to me, failure is a good F-word if you use it properly. You know NASA, you mentioned yesterday and NASA was famous for coining in the 60s failure is not an option and I always say onto that cause I used to work for NASA, but it's a distinct possibility. And so what Jimmy chin shared this morning was electrified, but it also was a great understatement of what Combolt is helping their customers. We have to help you prepare for this. We can't help you prepare for all of it. As you mentioned, ransomware, it's not if but when. >>Well, right and both NASA and when the climbing is understanding where something could go wrong and therefore what the failures scenarios are. So you know rockets today you can't have a failure and by failure they mean look, if the rocket isn't going to work or something goes wrong, we need to make sure we don't have loss of life. That is something that if you look at blue origin and SpaceX that is pre eminent in there is we can't have another challenger disaster. We can't have some of these environments where we have the loss of human life. So that is number one. Some of the other ones, sometimes we know that the unknown happens or things don't go quite right. So being prepared to understand if something goes wrong, how do we recover from that? And that brings us back to the whole data protection and recovery of the environment because the best laid architecture, eventually something will happen and therefore we need to make sure that that data, the lifeblood of the company is able to be recovered and used and that the business can go forward even if some piece of infrastructure or some attack got through. >>There are, and there's inherent risk in every industry, whether you're talking about healthcare data, we talked with AstraZeneca yesterday, you know, genetics, clinical data, or you're talking about a retailer, doesn't matter. There's an inherent risks with every business and one of the most important things that I got out of the NASA talk yesterday, Jimmy Chin's talked today, some of the customers, is that preparation is key. You can't be over prepared. You really can't act fact. He said that you can't be overprepared in his line of work, but I think it applies to the inherent risks that any business has. Managing data. As we talk about Sue all the time, it's the lifeblood. It's the new oil. It is. It has to be available, accessible 24 by seven if it isn't and can't be. Businesses are massive risk in this day and age. Competitive competitors who have maybe better risk fault tolerance scenario in play. >>So that risk that they have to mitigate comes a preparation. We're going to be talking with Sandra Hamilton in just a few minutes about who leads customer success for combo. Really want to dig into the training, the support. We've heard that articulated from customers on stage that I don't wake up in the middle of the night anymore because I have this support from my trusted vendor combo and that is critical to any business staying up. Absolutely. We're going to hear from number of customers. I'm sure they're ready and we are ready for day two. We are ready. See, let's have a great day. Yeah, thanks. All right, so Sue and I will be right back with our first guest on day two of our coverage of comm Volkow for Stu. I'm Lisa Martin. We'll be right back.