>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Actifio Data Driven 2020, brought to you by Actifio. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante, full of preview of Actifio Data Driven, and with me is Brian Reagan who is a long time cube alumni, good friend. Brian, awesome to see you thanks for coming on and help us set up Data Driven >> Dave it's always a pleasure to be here, thanks for having me. >> So this is one of our favorite events of the season, not only because it's historically been in Boston, but it's a really good intimate event, lot of customer content. Unfortunately this year, of course everything has gone virtual but tell us about that, what do you guys got planned for Data Driven this year? >> Well again we're delighted to be able to put the show on, in spite of all of the challenges of travel and face to face. As you know from years past, Data Driven has always been sort of by the customers for the customers, very much an event that is driven around understanding how customers are using data strategically, and how Actifio is helping them do that to power their businesses. This year is no different, I think what we've done is we've taken the best of the physical events, which is really facilitating fireside chats and panels of people using our technology to move the business forward with data, but also added a lot of things that frankly are impossible to do when you're strained by a physical event, which is be able to run a series of on demand technical sessions. Our technical tracks are always standing room only, so now we can offer more content, more discreet package content that can be consumed the day of the event and on for a year plus after the event. So we're excited to really sort of mix the best of both worlds virtual and the forums that have worked so well for us in the physical events. >> Well it's like I said I mean, lots of these events are sort of vendor fests, but what you do with Data Driven is you bring in the customer's voice. And I remember last year in theCUBE, we had Holly st. Clair who was with the state of Massachusetts, she was awesome. We had a guest from DraftKings, which was really, really tremendous. Of course, you see what's happening with those guys now just exploding. >> Exactly. >> But we also had a lot of fun, when of course Ash comes on, and all the Actifio folk, but we had Frank Gens on, the first and only time we've ever had him on theCUBE, he's now retired from IDC, I guess semiretired. We had Duplessie on, which was a lot of fun. So it's just a good vibe. >> Yeah, we made a conscious decision to your point not to avoid the traditional vendor fest, and bludgeoning people with PowerPoint throughout the day, and really wanted to make it spin it around, and have the customers tell their stories in their own words, and really talk about the themes that are both common, in terms of challenges, ways that they've addressed those challenges, but also dig into the real implications of when they do solve these challenges, what are the unintended consequences? It's sort of like the... In a lot of ways I think about the journey that customers went through with VMware and with the ability to spin up VMs effortlessly, was a fantastic first step, and then all of a sudden they realized they had all of these spun up Vms that were consuming resources that they didn't necessarily had thought about at the very beginning. I think that our customers as they progress through their journey with Actifio, once they realize the power of being able to access data and deliver data, no matter how big it is, in any form factor in any cloud, there's incredible power there, but there also comes with that a real need to make sure that the governance and controls and management systems are in place to properly deliver that. Particularly today when everything is distributed, everything is essentially at arms length, so that's part of the fun of these events is really being able to hear all of the ways these unique customers are, adding value, delivering value, gaining value, from the platform. >> What's it's interesting you mentioned VMs, it was like life changing when you saw your first VM get spun up and you're like, wow, this is unbelievable, and then it was so easy to spin up. and then you just save VM creep and copy creep. >> Right. >> And you're seeing some similar things now with cloud I mean example is the cloud data warehouses is so easy to spin those things up now. The CFOs are looking at the bill going Whoa, what are we doing here? >> (laughs) >> You're going to see the same thing >> Exactly. >> with containers as you begin to persist containers, you're going to have the same problem. So you guys created the category, it's always a marketing executives dreams to be able to create a category. You guys created the Copy Data Management category, and of course, you've extended that. But that was really good, it was something that you guys set forth and then all the analysts picked up on it, people now use that as a term and it kind of resonates with everybody. >> Right, right. It was bittersweet but also very satisfying to start to see other vendors come out with their own Copy Data Management offerings, and so yes the validating that in fact this is a real problem in the enterprise continues to be a real problem in the enterprise, and by using technologies that Actifio really pioneered and patented quite a bit of foundational technologies around, we're able to help customers address those copy data challenges, those spiraling costs of managing all of these duplicate, physical instances of data. And to your point, to some degree when you're on-prem in a data center and you've already bought your storage array. Okay, I'm consuming 20% more of the Ray or 100% more of the array than I really need to be, but I've already paid for the array. When it comes to cloud, those bills are adding up hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and those are real costs, and so in many ways cloud is actually highlighting the power and frankly the problem of copy data, far more than the on-prem phenomenon ever did. >> Yeah I was on the phone with a former CIO, COO now of a healthcare organization, and he was saying to me there's a dark side of CapEx to OPEX, which is now that he's a COO he's like really concerned about the income statement and the variability of those costs, and so to your point I mean it's a big issue, the convenience seems to be outweighing some of that concern but nonetheless lack of predictability is a real concern there. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And I think we see that... You mentioned data lakes, and whether you call it a data lake or you just call it a massive data instance, one of the speakers of Data Driven this year is a customer of our Century Data Systems down in Florida. And they have 120 terabyte database that actually they're using, and this is an incredible story that we're excited to have them share with the world during Data Driven. They're using it to help the federal government get better data faster on COVID treatments and the efficacy of those treatments, and so to even consider being able to rapidly access and manage 120 terabyte instance. It breaks the laws of physics frankly. But again with Copy Data Management, we have the ability to help them really extend and really enhance their business and ultimately enhance the data flows that are hopefully going to accelerate the access to a vaccine for us in North American and worldwide, quite frankly. >> That's awesome, that's awesome. Now let's talk a little bit more about Data Driven what we can expect. Of course, the last couple of years you've been the host of Data Driven. They pulled a Ricky gervais' on you >> (Laughs loudly) like get the golden gloves, he's no longer being invited to host, but I think probably for different reasons, but what are some the major themes that we can expect this year? >> Yeah, we were disappointed that we couldn't get Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. >> (laughs quietly) I think we decided that in a virtual construct, the host duties were pretty amenable. So among the many things I talked about Sentry Data Systems and we have many customers who are going to be joining us and telling their stories. And again from accelerating data analytics to accelerating DevOps initiatives, to accelerating a move to the cloud, we're going to hear all of those different use cases described. One of the things that is different this year and we're really excited. Gene Kim sort of the author and noted DevOps guru, author of The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, he's going to be joining us. We had previously intended to do a road show with Gene this year and obviously those plans got changed a bit. So really excited to have him join us, talk about his point of view around DevOps. Certainly it's a hugely important use case for us, really important for many of our customers, and actually registrant's between now and the event, which is September 15th and 16th, we'll get an eCopy an e-book copy of his Unicorn Project book. So we're eager to have people register and if they haven't already read him then I think they're going to be really pleasantly surprised to see how accessible his materials are, and yet how meaningful and how powerful they can be in terms of articulating the journeys that many of these businesses are going through. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. I'm stucked I have not read that material, but I've heard a lot about it, and when I signed up I saw that, said great I'm going to get the free book. So I'm going to check that out, >> Yeah It's obviously a very, very hot topic. Well Brian, I really appreciate you coming on, and setting up the event. What are the details? So where do I go to sign up? When is the event? What's the format? Give us the lowdown. >> It is September 15th and 16th, actifio.com will guide you through the registration process. You'll be able to create the event based on the content that you're eager to participate in. And again not only on the 15th and 16th, but then into the future, you'll be able to go back and re access or access content that you didn't have the time to do during the event window. So we're really excited to be able to offer that as an important part of the event. >> Fantastic and of course theCUBE will be there doing its normal wall to wall coverage. Of course, this time virtual, and you'll see us on social media with all the clips and all the work on Silicon Angle. So Brian great to see you and we will see you online in September. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you. Go to actifio.com, sign up register for Data Driven, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of active eo data driven 2020 Brought to you by activity. >>Hi, I'm Brian Reagan from Active Seo. And I'd like to welcome you to join us at Data Driven 2020 this year. Online as in years past, it's all about the customer from the bear voice to you talking about how they're solving their cloud Dev Ops Analytics and data protection challenges using the activity of platform and helping move their business forward this year. We're also excited to welcome Gene Kim Noted Dev Ops author in Guru on his E book. The Unicorn Project is available for free if you register today, so join us September 15th and 16th for data driven 2020. We look forward to seeing you online. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Narrator: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi everybody, This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. We've been following a company called Actifio for quite some time. Now they've really popularized the concept of copy data management. Really innovative Boston based Waltham based company. And with me Brian Regan who's the chief marketing officer and Paul Forte who's the newly minted chief revenue officer of Actifio. Guys great to see you. I wish we were face to face at your June event but this will have to do. >> You're welcome. >> Thanks Dave. >> You bet Dave. >> Yeah, so Brian you've been on theCUBE a bunch. I'm going to start with Paul if that's okay. Paul, let's talk a little bit about your background. You've done a number of stints at a variety of companies. Big companies like IBM and others as well. What attracted you to Actifio? >> Yes Dave I would say in all honesty, I've been a software guy and candidly a data specific leader for many many years. And so IT infrastructure particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for on and onwards there. And so Actifio was just smack dab in the middle of that. And so when I was looking for my next adventure I had an opportunity to meet with Ash our CEO and founder and describe and discuss kind of what Actifio was all about. And candidly, the number of connections that we had that were the same. There are a lot of OEM relationships with people that I actually worked with and for some that work for me historically. So it was almost this perfect world. And I'm a Boston guy so it is in my old backyard. And yeah it was a perfect match for what I was looking for. Which was really a small growth company that was trying to get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and could understand and articulate the value proposition. >> Well as we say in Boston, Paulie we got to get you back here. (laughs) >> I know (mumbles) so I'll pack my car. >> (laughs) Yeah. So Brian... >> For 25 years, I still got it. >> let's talk about the climate right now. I mean nobody expected this of course. And it's funny I saw Ash at an event in Boston last fall. We were talking like "Hey, what are you expecting for next year?" "Yeah a little bit of softening" but nobody expected this sort of black swan. But you guys I just got your press release. You put it out. You had a good quarter. You had a record first quarter. What's going on in the marketplace. How are you guys doing? >> Yeah, well I think that today more than ever businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis. And that data whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers, how they manage through their supply chain and frankly how they take care of their employees, is all very data centric. And so businesses that are protecting that data that are helping businesses get faster access to that data and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data. On premises, in the cloud and hybrid configuration. Those are the businesses that are really going to be top of a CIO's mind. I think RQ1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets and they are confident in Actifio as an important part of their data supply chain. >> Paul I want to come back to you. First of all I want to let people know you're an Ex-Army Ranger. So thank you for your service, that's awesome. >> You're welcome (mumbles). >> I was talking to Frank Slootman, I interviewed in the other day and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages and he says "Yeah I manage by a playbook". He's a situational manager and that's something that he learned in the military. Well it's weird. This is a situation. (Paul laughs) And that really is kind of how you're trained. And of course we've never seen anything like this but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before. So how you seeing organizations generally, Actifio specifically kind of manage through this crisis. What are some of the moves that you'are advising, recommending? Give us some insight there. >> Yeah, so it's really interesting. It's funny that you mentioned my military background. So I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day. That one of the things that they trained for in the military, is the eventuality of chaos. So when you do an exercise we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say okay you are now dead. And without that person being allowed to speak they take a knee and the (mumbles) unit has to go on. And so what happens is you learn by muscle memory like how to react in times of crisis and you know this is a classic example of leadership in crisis. And so it's just interesting. So to me you have a playbook. I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with the plan. I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson but one of my famous quotes was "Plan is good until somebody punches you in the face". (Dave laughs) >> That's the reality of what just happened to business across the globe. This is just a punch in the face. And so you've got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic. And from a leadership perspective, I think you can't lose your confidence. Right, so I've watched some of my friends and I've watched some other businesses cripple in the midst of this pandemic because they're afraid instead of looking at this. In my first commentary in our first staff meeting Brian, if I remember it was this, okay so what makes Actifio great in this environment? Not why is it not great? And so we didn't get scared. We jumped right into it. We adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter. And we took down deals. Honestly Dave we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy. It was insane, it was really fun. >> Okay, so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record quarter. It was really a broad based demand. >> Yeah, so if you dug underneath the covers you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter. We had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever. We had the largest contribution from our nano partners and our OEM partners ever. And we had the highest number ever. And so it was really a nice truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries. >> Interesting, you used the term opportunistic and I get right on. You obviously don't want to be chasing ambulances. At the same time, we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing and I'd like to get your feedback on this Brian. You're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer. You're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic. And I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency. You talked about digital initiatives, data center, transformations etc. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that, Brian. Did you do those things, how did you do those things? What kind of pace were you guys at? How did you do it remotely with everybody working from home? Give us some color on that. >> Sure, and if Ash, if he were here he would probably remind us that Actifio was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. So we have essentially been book ended by two black swans over the last decade. The lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit is as relevant today. Everything starts with cost containment and cost reduction. Hence in protection of the business and so CIOs in the midst of this shock to the system. I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital and critical initiatives and what is a "nice to have" and I'm going to hit pause on nice to have and invest entirely in the critical initiative. And the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working remotely. Getting people safe access to their systems and their applications and their data. And then ultimately it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals in the state actors. Unfortunately as we've seen in other times of crisis this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike, particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to really ensure the resiliency in their applications. So we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs, helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructural light manner. But also really emphasized the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected but you don't know when, instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is something that is incredibly valuable. >> So let's dig into cyber resiliency. So specifically what is Actifio doing for its customers from a product standpoint, capabilities, maybe it's part of the 10C announcement as well but can you give us some specifics on where you fit in. Let's take that use case, cyber resiliency? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's a stack of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency. At the lowest level, you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're infected. And so the ability to go back in time, test the recoverability of data, test the validity of the data is step one. Step two is once you found the clean point, being able to resume operations, being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase. And that's something that Actifio was founded on this notion of instant access to data. And then the third phase and this is really where our partnerships really shine is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk. You want to go back and clean that system. You want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it. And that's where our partnership with IBM for example, resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solutions which takes the Actifio platform and then wrappers in a complete manage services around it. So they can help the customer not only get their systems and applications back on their feet but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable ground. >> Okay, so that's interesting. So Paul was it kind of new adoptions? Was it increases from existing customers combination? Can you talk to that? >> Yeah, totally. So ironically to really come clean the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar to do with the metrics that we see historically. So the mix with mean our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics which candidly we were a little surprised by. We anticipated that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base. But candidly we had a really nice split which was great which meant that our value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it but also in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerate it or just continue down the path of adoption during the timeframe of COVID-19. Across industries I would say that again there were some industries I would say that pushed pause. And so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during this past period were the ones you would think of, right? So financial institutions primarily as well as some of the medical. So some of those transactions, healthcare and medical they accelerated along with financial institutions. And then I would say that we did have some industries that pushed pause. You can probably guess what some of those are. Among the majority of those were the ones that were dealing with the small and midsize businesses or consumer-facing businesses, things like retail and stuff like that. Well we typically do have a pretty nice resonance and a really nice value proposition but there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just pause. Like we're going to come back. But overall yeah the feedback was just in general. It felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal. As strange as that sounds. 'Cause I know speaking to a lot of my friends in peer companies, peer software companies, they didn't have that experience but we did pretty well. >> That's interesting, you're right. Certain industries, airlines, I'm interviewing a CIO of a major resort next week. Really interested to hear how they're dealing with this but those are obviously depressed and they've dialed everything down. But we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot, it didn't, it didn't buffer the decline in IT spending that were expected to be down maybe as much as 5% this year but it definitely offset it. What about Cloud? We're seeing elevated levels in Cloud demand. Guys have offerings there. What are you seeing in Cloud guys? >> Do you want to take it Brian? >> Yeah, I'll start and then Paul please weigh in. I think that the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the move to cloud that we've been we've been witnessing over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months. The projects that might have been on the 18 to 24 month roadmap have of all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year of our roadmap. But in terms of the wholesale everything moves to Cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate. I don't think we've seen that quite yet. I think that the world is still hybrid when it comes to Cloud. Although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the non-number one and number two Cloud providers but the rest of the hyper-scalers who are fighting for market shares because now they have an opportunity to perhaps, Google for example, a strategic partner of ours has a huge offering when it comes to enabling work from home and the remote work. So leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings, I think it gives them a wedge that the Amazon might not have for example. So it's an acceleration of interest but I think it's just a continuation of the trend that we've been seeing for years. >> Yeah, and I would add a little bit Dave. The IBM held their Think Conferences past week. I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate. They're one of our OEM partners and... >> Dave: Oh Yeah, we covered it. >> When our CEO presented his opening his opening remarks it was really about digital transformation and he really put it down to two things and said any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid Clouds or they're talking about AI and machine learning. And that's kind of it, right? And so every digital business is talking in one of those categories. And when I look to Q1 it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than as Brian talked about all of the cloud business which is some version of an acceleration. But outside of that the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity did so and those that did not just peeled back a little bit. But overall I would agree with IBM's assessment of the market that those are kind of the two hotspots and hybrid Cloud is hot and the good news is, we've got a nice value prop right in the middle of it. >> Yeah, Alvin Chris has talked about, and he has it, maybe not a thing but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call just in public statements that IBM must win the battle the architectural battle, the hybrid Cloud. And also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially, which is to mean those two things are great news for you guys, obviously Red Hat is the linchpin of that. I want to ask you guys about your conference, Data-Driven. So we were there last year it was a really great intimate event. Of course you can't have the physical events anymore. So you've pushed to September or you're going all digital? Give us the update on that Brian. >> We're eager to have theCube participate in our September event. So I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks, but also >> Dave: Awesome, love it. (Brian laughs) >> Exactly, so you can tell Frank to put that in there. So we've been participating in some of the other conferences most notably last week learning a lot and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics we're putting on the digital event. I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event one of the things that is first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on demand digital content particularly from a technology standpoint. Our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed. The digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly as many sessions as they might want. So I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content for the users of our technology. And then we're also eager to have as we've done with data driven in years past, our customers tell the story of how they're using data. And this year certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular how they use data during this incredible crisis and hopefully renewal from the crisis. >> Well one of my favorite interviews last year at your show was the guy from DraftKings. So hopefully they'll be back on and we'll have some football to talk about, well let's hope. >> Amen. >> I Want to end with just sort of this notion of we've been so tactical the last eight weeks. Right? You guys too I'm sure. Just making sure you're there for customers, making sure your employees are okay. But as we start to think about coming out of this into a Post-COVID Era and it looks like it's going to be with us for a while but we getting back to Quaseye opening. So I'm hearing hybrid is here to stay. We agree for sure. Cyber resiliency is very interesting. I think one of the things we've said is that companies may sub-optimize near term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and business resiliency in place. That's obviously something that is I think good news for you guys but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian you can bring us home. How do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the Post-COVID Era? >> Yeah, this is a really interesting topic for me. In fact I've had many discussions over the last couple of weeks with some of our investors as well as with our executive staff. And so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occured, for IT specifically at the enterprise level, it's about to go through a transformation, no different than we watched the transformation of SAS businesses when you basically replaced a cold calling sales person with an inside and inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and BDR. Because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of airplane ride or physical building to go through. And so that whole thing has been removed from the sales process. So it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that were going on, they happen to be online. However, way higher than what we can (mumbles), you coupled that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices. And I really think that those companies that embrace this new model, are going to find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way. And I do believe that the professional sales enterprise sales person of tomorrow is going to look different than it looks today. And so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and watching us learn together how we're going to buy, sell and market to each other in this post-COVID way. 'Cause the only thing I really do know it's just not going to be the way it used to be. What is it going to look like? I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet. But it's going to look different for sure. >> They're very, very thoughtful comments. And so Brian, you know our thinking is the differentiation in the war. Gets one in digital. How is that affecting your marketing and your things around that? >> We fortunately decided coming into 2020, our fiscal 21, that we were actually going to overweigh digital anyway. We felt that, it was far more effective, we were seeing far better conversion rates. We saw way better ROI in terms of very targeted additive digital campaigns or general purpose ABM type of efforts. So our strategy had essentially been set and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds into digital. So we have essentially a two pronged marketing attack, right now, which is digital creating inbounds and BDRs that are calling on those inbounds that are created digitally. And so it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events if and when they do actually back and spawn, how much we decide to actually go back into that. To some extent we've talked about this in the past Dave. The physical events and the sheer spectacle and the sheer audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through that was an unsustainable model. (laughs) And so I think this is hastening perhaps the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling customers what they need to know to help and assist their buying journey and their investigation journey into new technology. >> There in the IT world is hybrid. And I think the events world is also going to be hybrid. Intimate, they're going to live on but they're also going to have a major digital component to them. I'm very excited that there's a lot of learnings now in digital especially around events and by September, a lot of the bugs are going to be worked out. You know we've been going, feels like 24/7, but really excited to have you guys on. Thanks so much, really looking forward to working with you in September at Data-Driven. So guys thanks a lot for coming on theCUBE. >> Oh my gosh, thank you Dave. So nice to be here, Thank you. >> All right, stay safe. >> Thanks Dave, always a pleasure. You too. >> Thank you everybody, thank you. And thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] hi buddy this is Dave Volante and welcome to this cute conversation you know the we've been following a company called Activia for quite some time now they they've really popularized the concept of copy data management really innovative Boston based Waltham based company and with me Brian Regan who's the chief marketing officer and all 40 who's the newly minted chief revenue officer of actifi Oh guys great to see you I wish we were face to face that you're you're you're June event but this will have to do yeah you bet yeah so you know Brian you've been on the cube a bunch I'm gonna start with Paul if that's okay Paul you know just let's talk a little bit about your your background you've you've done a number of stance at a variety of companies you know big companies like IBM and others as well what attracted you to Activia in all honesty I've been a software guy and candidly a data specific leader for many many years and so IT infrastructure particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for fun on words there and and so Activia was just smack dab in the middle of that right and so when I was looking for my next adventure you know I had an opportunity to to meet with a shower CEO and Founder and describe and discuss kind of what activity was all about and candidly the the number of connections that we had that were the same a lot of our OEM relationships with people that I actually worked with and for and some that worked for me historically so it was almost this perfect world right and I'm a Boston guy so it was in my in my old backyard and it was just a perfect yeah it was a perfect match for what I was looking for which was really a small growth company that was trying to you know get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and understanding and articulate the value proposition well as we're saying in Boston Paulie we got to get you back here I know I pack my cock let's talk about the let's talk about the climate right now I mean nobody expected this of course I mean it's funny I was I saw ash and an event in in Boston last fall we were talking like hey what do you expected for next year yeah a little bit of softening but you know nobody expected this sort of Black Swan but you guys I just got your press release you put out you had a good you had a good quarter you had a record first quarter um what's going on in the marketplace how you guys doing yeah well I think that today more than than ever businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis and that data whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers how they manage through their supply chain and in frankly how they take care of their employees is all very data-centric and so businesses that are protecting that data that are helping businesses get faster access to that data and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data on-premises in the cloud and hybrid configuration those are the businesses that are really going to be top of a CIOs mind I think our q1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets in their confidence in ectopy Oh has an important part of their data supplied nopal I want to come back to you first of all your your other people know you're next you're next Army Ranger so thank you for your service that's awesome you know I was talking to Frank's lute man we interviewed me other day and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages and and he says the other managed by a playbook he's a situational manager and that's something that he learned in the military well this is weird this is a situation okay and that really is kind of how you're trained and and of course we've never seen anything like this but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before so how are you seeing organizations generally actifi Oh specifically going to manage through this process what are some of the moves that you're advising recommending give us some insight there yeah so I'm it's really interesting it's a it's funny that you mentioned my military background I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day that you know one of the things that they trained for in the military is the eventualities of chaos right and so when you when you do an exercise they we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say okay you're now dead and without that person being allowed to speak they take a knee and the unit has to go on and so what happens is you you learn by muscle memory like how to react in time suffice it or and you know this is a classic example of leadership and crisis and so um so it's just it's just interesting like so to me you have a playbook I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with a plan I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson but one of them one of my famous quotes was you know let you know plan is good until somebody punches you in the face that's the reality of what just happened the business across the globe is it just got punched in the face and so you got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic and from a leadership perspective I think you can't lose your confidence right so I've watched some of my friends and of what some other businesses crippled in the midst of this and I'm because they're afraid instead of instead of looking at this in my first commentary that our first staff meeting Brian if I remember it was this okay so what makes active feel great in disembark like not why is it not great right and so we didn't get scared we jumped right into it we you know we adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter and we just down here the honestly date we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy I mean so it was insane it was really fun okay so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record Porter is really a broad-based the demand yeah so if you you know if you dug underneath the covers you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter we had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever we had the largest contribution from our panel partners and our OEM partners ever and we had the highest number ever and so it was a it was really a nice truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries interesting I mean you use the term opportunistic and and I think you're right on I mean you obviously you don't want to be chasing ambulances at the same time you know we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing and I'd like to get your feedback on this Brian you you you're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer you're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic and and I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency you talked about digital initiatives you know data center transformations etc so maybe you could talk a little bit about that Brian did you do those things how did you do those things what kind of pace were you guys at how did you do it remotely with everybody working from home give us some color on that sure and you know Ashley if you were here you would probably remind us that Activia was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis so we we have essentially been bookended by two black swans over the last decade the and the lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit as as relevant today everything starts with cost containment in hospital and in protection of the business and so cio is in the midst of this shock to the system I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital critical initiatives and what is a nice to have and I'm going to pause on my step and invest entirely in the critical mission and the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working for remotely getting people safe access to their systems and their applications in their data and then ultimately it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals and state actors up unfortunately as we've seen in other times of crisis this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to to really ensure the resiliency their applications so we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructure light manner but also really emphasize the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected but you don't know when you know instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is incredibly valuable so so let's >> cyber resiliency so specifically what is aekta video doing for its customers from a product standpoint capabilities maybe it's part of the the 10 see announcement as well but but can you can you give us some specifics on where you fit in let's take that use case cyber resiliency yeah absolutely so I think there's there's a staff of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency at the lowest level you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're in fact and so the ability to go back in time test the recoverability of data test the validity of the data is step one step two is once you've found the clean point being able to resume operations being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase and that's something that Activia was founded on this notion of instant access to data and then the third phase and this is really where our partnerships really shine is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk you want to go back and clean that system you want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it and that's where our partnership with IBM freezing resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solution which takes the activity of platform and then rappers and a complete managed services around it so they can help the customer not only get their their systems and applications back on their feet but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable okay so so that's interesting so Paul Paul was it kind of new adoptions was it was it increases from existing customers kind of a combination and you talk to that yeah totally so like ironically to really come clean we are the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar through the metrics that we see historically so the mix need our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics which candidly we were a little surprised by we anticipated um that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base but candidly we had a really nice split which was great which meant that you know a value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it but also in in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerated or or just continue down the path of adoption during the time frame of Koba 19 across industries I would say that again um there was there were there were some industries I would say that pushed pause and so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during during this past period were the ones you would think of right so financial institutions primarily as well as some some of the medical so some of those transactions healthcare and medical they accelerated along with financial institutions and then I would say that that we did have some industries that push pause and you can probably guess what some of those are a majority of those were the ones that we're dealing with the small and mid-sized businesses or consumer facing businesses things like retail stuff like that where we typically do have a pretty nice residence in a really nice value proposition but there were there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just pause like we're going to come back but overall the yeah the feedback was just in general it felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal as strange as that sounds because I know speaking to a lot of my friends and gear companies your software companies they didn't have that experience but we did pretty well that's interesting I mean you're right I mean certain industries Airlines I'm interviewing a cio of major resort next week you know really interested to hear how they're you know dealing with this but those those are obviously depressed and they've dialed everything down but but we've we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot it didn't it didn't you know buffer the decline in IT spending that were expecting to be down you know maybe as much as 5% this year but it definitely offset it what about cloud we're seeing elevated levels in cloud demand guys you know have offerings there what are you seeing in cloud guys you want that yeah I'll start and then fall please please weigh in I think that'd be the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the MOOC table that we've been whipped over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months The Improv been on the you know 18 to 24 month road map have all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year but in terms of the wholesale you know everything moves to cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate I I don't think we've seen that quite yet I think the the world is still hybrid when it comes to cloud although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the the non number one or number two cloud providers but the rest of the hyper scalers who are fighting for market share because now they have an opportunity to perhaps google for example a strategic partner of ours has a you know a huge offering when it comes to enabling work home and remote work so leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings I think gives them a wedge that the you know Amazon might not have so this it's an acceleration of interest but I think it's just a continuation of the trend of seeing four years yeah and I would add a little bit if the you know IBM held their think conference this past week I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate there one of our OEM partners and oh yeah because you know when our the CEO presented his kind of opening his opening remarks it was really about digital transformation and he really he really kind of put it down to two things and said you know any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid cloud but they're talking about AI and machine learning and that's kind of it right and so every digital business is talking in one of those categories and so when I look 2q1 it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than as brian talked about all the cloud business which is some version of an acceleration but outside of that the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity didn't so and those that did not you know kind of just peeled back a little bit but overall I still I would agree with with ibm's assessment of the market that you know those are kind of the two hot spots and have a cloud is hot and the good news is we've got a nice guy operating Molloy yeah Arvind Krista talked about the the in and it has it maybe not I think but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call just in Publix Davis that IBM must win the battle the architectural battle the hybrid cloud and also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially which is submitted to me those those two things are great news for you guys obviously you know Red Hat is the linchpin of that I want to ask you guys about your your conference data-driven so we were there last year it was a great really great intimate event of course you know you hand up the physical events anymore so you've pushed to September you're going all digital would give us the update on on that program we're um we're eager to have the cube participate in our September event so I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks but awesome we love it we exactly so you can tell Frank to put that so we we've been participating in some of the other conferences I think most notably last week learning a lot and and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics for putting on a digital event I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event one of the things that is I think first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on-demand digital content particularly from a technology standpoint our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed the digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly as many sessions as they as they might so I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content or the users of our technology and then we're also eager to have as we've done with data driven in the years past our customers tell the story of how they're using data and this year certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular how they use data during this incredible you know crisis and and hopefully renewal from crisis well one of my favorite interviews last year your show is the the guys from draft King so hopefully they'll be back on it will have some football to talk about let's hope I mean I want it I want to end with just sort of this notion of you know we've been so tactical the last eight weeks right I'm you guys too I'm sure just making sure you're there for customers making sure your employees are ok but as we start to think about coming out of this you know into a post probe Adaro it looks like it's gonna be with us for a while but we're getting back the you know quasi opening so I'm hearing you know hybrid is here to stay we agree for sure cyber resiliency is very interesting I think you know one of the things we've said is that that companies may sub optimize near-term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and resilience business resiliency in place you know that's obviously something that is I think good news for you guys but but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian you can bring us home how do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the post ghovat era yeah so this is a really interesting topic for me in fact I've had many discussions over the last couple weeks with some of our investors as well as our executive staff and so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occurred for IT specifically at the enterprise level is about to go through a transformation no different than we watched the transformation of SAS businesses when you basically replace the cold-calling salesperson with an inside and you know inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and vdr because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of airplane ride or or physical building to go through and so like that that whole thing has been removed from the sales process and so it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that were going on they happen to be online however you couple that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices and and I really think that those companies that embrace this new model are gonna find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way and I do believe that the professional sales enterprise salesperson of tomorrow is gonna look at then it looks today and so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and and watching us learn together how we're gonna buy sell and market to each other in this post public way because I I'm the only thing I really do know it's just not gonna be the way it used to be what is it gonna look like I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet but it's gonna look different for sure they're very very thoughtful comments and so Brian you know our thinking is the differentiation and the war yes it gets one in digital how is that affecting you know sort of your marketing and your thing around that we we fortunately decided coming into 2020 our fiscal 21 that we were actually going to overweight digital anyway we felt that it was far more effective we were seeing far better conversion rates we saw you know way better ROI in terms of very targeted tentative digital campaigns or general-purpose ABM type of efforts so our strategy had essentially been set and and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds individually so you know we have essentially a two-pronged marketing you know attack Frank now which is you know digital creating inbounds and B DRS that are calling on those in bounds that are created digital and so it's a you know it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events if and when they do actually come back into form you know how much we decide to actually go back into that that been I think that you know to someone to some extent we've talked about this in the past II you know the physical events and the the sheer spectacle and this year you know audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through that was an unsustainable model and so I think this is this is hastening perhaps the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling telling customers what they need to know to help their an assist their buying journey in their investigation journey into a new technology I mean the IT world is hybrid and I think the events world is also going to be hybrid to me nice intimate events you know they're gonna live on but they're also gonna have a major digital component to them I'm very excited that you know we're a lot of learnings now in digital especially around events and by September the a lot of the the bugs are gonna be worked out you know we've been going to it so it feels like 24/7 but really excited to have you guys on thanks so much really looking forward to working with you in in September it's data-driven so guys thanks a lot for coming on the cube oh my gosh thank you Dave so nice it's so nice to be here thank you alright pleasure you did thank you everybody thank you and thanks for watching this is Dave Volante for the cube and we'll see you next time [Music]

>>from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue. Here's your host Still, Minutemen >>Hi and welcome to the Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back two of our Cube alumni, both from Active e o Brian Regan, the C M O of the company. And it took Rommel. Who's the vice president and general manager of Cloud? Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Happy New Year's too great to be here. >>Yeah, 2020 way we're talking about. We don't all have flying cars and some of these things, but there are a lot of exciting things and ever changing in the tech world. We're gonna talk a lot about N. C. Which, of course, is active use announcement. If I heard the sea, it's about clouds, about containers and about copy data management. With course, you know we know act as always quite well, Brian. Let's start with a company update first. Of course, you know, copy data management is where activity really created a category, but all of these new waves of technology that activity is fitting into Well, 2000 >>19 was an incredible year for us, you know, continued accelerating our growth in the market in the enterprise particularly, You know that the secular trends around hybrid and multi cloud really played well to our existing strengths. And 10 c really builds on those strengths will talk more about that. I know in a moment we also saw continued, you know, as digital transformation as as application modernization initiatives to cold. In just about every enterprise, our database capabilities really played again a cz a strength that we could capitalize on to land significant enterprise accounts, get started with them and then really start to expand overall data platform data management platform in those accounts >>s Oh, sure, before we get into the 10 see stuff specifically. But Brian, Brian teed up some of those cloud trends and how I think about data protection. Data management absolutely has changed. You know, I remember a couple years ago we said, Oh, well, you know, people are adopting all these clouds. All of these concerns still exist. You know. It doesn't go away. It's not magically Oh, I did office 3 65 I don't need to think about all the things that I thought about without. Look, when I do public cloud and build new applications. Oh, wait. You know, somebody needs to take care of that data. So bring us inside your customers. The team that's building these products and some of those big trends should >>happen. You're still so happy to be back in the Cube. So 2019 really defined. There were a lot of for enterprises really started moving. Production will look to the cloud multi cloud become a reality for active field way. We're running production workloads on seven o'clock platforms. So the key elements off being infrastructure agnostic wherein active you can do everything in all clark platforms. Basically, infrastructure neutral was a key element. On the other element was a single pane of glass. You could have an Oracle worker running on prime with the logic application running in azure and not know the difference. S o. The seamless mobility of data was the key element. That lot of our enterprises took advantage from elective standpoint on a lot of the 10 see capabilities adds onto those capabilities and you see more of these adoptions happening in 2020. So I think 10 seat eases up absolutely perfectly for that market. >>Yeah, let's talk a little bit about activities, place in the market, that differentiation there, that direct connection with the application and the partner's eyes. Real big piece of it. >>It's a huge piece and something we really not just double triple down on in 2019. Certainly for us our database capabilities, which we believe are really second to none in the industry, we continue to expand and enrich the capabilities, including ASAP Hana obviously already Oracle and sequel server D B two, as well as the linen space databases, the new and no sequel databases. We also understood, and as our customers were talking to us about their application modernization, they were moving Maur of their front and capabilities two containers, and they wanted that the data to come with it a t east temporarily on. So that was a big focus for us as well was making sure that we could bring the data whether it was into a V M, into a container into a physical server into any number of clouds in order to support that application. At that time, it was a critical part of our differentiation. For two dozen 1 19 >>I'd love just a little more on the database piece because you go to Amazon, reinvent and you know, the migrations of databases to the cloud, of course, is a major conversation. You look at Amazon, they have a whole number of their offerings as well, as if you want to use any database out there, they'll let you use it. Course Oracle might charge him or if you're doing it on the Amazon, the Amazon partner. The azure partnership with Oracle was big news in the back and 1/2 of 2019. So when you're working with their customers, you know, databases still central to you know how they run their business and one of the bigger expenses on the books, they're So you know what we look at 2020. You know, what is the landscape specifically from a database? Well, we continue >>to see and in most of our large enterprise accounts that Oracle and sequel servers continue to dominate the majority of the payload of databases. We don't see that changing, although we do see net new applications being built on new database platforms. Thio complement the oracle and sequel server back end. So we are seeing a rise of the bongos and the new and no Sequels out there. We're also seeing Maur consideration of building in the cloud, as opposed to starting on Prem and then potentially leveraging the cloud sort of post facto and in terms of the application architecture's. So our ability to support both the the legacy big iron database platforms as well as the new generation platforms, regardless of application architectural, regardless of the geometry of the application, is a big part of our differentiation >>going forward. >>All right, so let let's Wave hinted about it. But 10 c major announcement. Let's get into how that extends what we've been talking about. >>Absolutely so you know, we've made a lot of the new databases, particularly the no sequel databases, the Mongols and Hannah's first class citizens intensity, which means we understand not just the database. He also he also the ecosystem that the database lives. We all know Hannah's a fairly big database in terms of the number of machines that consumes number off, you know, applications that you use it and toe capture and actually provide value for Hannah. You need to understand where the Honda database lifts and so some of the capabilities we've added in 10 C's to kind of figure out this ecosystem, and when you migrate, you might need the ecosystem, not just the holiday. The peace because you know that is that is a key element. On the second aspect is the containers that that Brian touched on. Now we're seeing legacy data being presented into containers, and there's a bridge too quiet for that. Now. How do you present that bridge containers could be brought up, but they're lifeless unless you give them data. So the actors of bridge ready and you bring up the container using communities of whatever framework you have and be married the data into the container framework. So most organizations, you know, as they evolved from yesterday's architecture to today's architect. And they need this bridge, which helps them navigate that that my creation process and an active field being the data normalization platform is helping them live on both segments, Right? Nobody does us turn the switch off of the old one and move to the new That'll be co exist. That is the key element >>way spent a lot of time over the last couple of years hearing about cloud native architectures and that discussion of data, it is kind of something you need to kind of dig in to understand. I'm glad to hear you talking about, You know, when you talk about storage and container ization, you know where that fits today? Because originally it was only stateless. But now we know we could do state full environment here. But while container ization is, you know, growing at huge leaps and bounds, customers aren't taking their Oracle database and shoving Brian A lot of discussion about the partnerships. I think it was seven. You know, major cloud providers. That activity is there talk a little bit about the common native. The relationships with some >>of those partners? Absolutely. I mean, way made great strides from a go to market standpoint with our cloud partners this past year. Google Cloud is probably our most significant go to market partner. From a cloud standpoint, we've done a lot of joint engineering works in order to support both our existing, uh, software platform as well as our SAS control plane in the Google Cloud. We have landed many significant deals with with Google this past year on dhe. They have been as they continue to really increase their focus on enterprise accounts and both hybrid as well as public cloud sort of architectures. We are hand in glove with them as their backup in D R partner for those club >>workloads. >>Great eso We talked quite a bit about the database peace, but in general, back into the cloud archive in the cloud. What is 10 see specifically an active you, in general, enhance in those environments >>so tense he bring It brings in you know, the key elements of the recovery orchestration. So if I have to bring up, let's say, 500 machines in any club platform, how did I do it? Well, I can go and bring up one machine at a time and take two days to bring it up or with active fuels. Resiliency. Director. You can create a recovery plan and a push pardon Recovery happens, so we've seen a lot of customers adopt that, particularly customers that want to leverage the Google platform for its infrastructure capabilities. Wants an orchestration, that is, that is, that understands the applications that are coming up, so there is a significant benefit from a PR standpoint of the recovery orchestrations will be invested a lot of time and tuning the performance and understanding Google and Amazon and Azure to make sure this was built, right. The other big push we're seeing for the clock platforms ASAP, ASAP, as an enterprise has taken a mission to say, there's no more data centers. Everything is going to the cloud. So an escapee workloads are not the easiest were close to manage. And so they did the the intersection point of S A P and the cloud is very active. Field becomes really valuable because, though, did this data sets by definition or large, their complex and there were distributed. And the D artists of paramount importance because these air crown jewels So so those segments of the R orchestration forward with, you know ASAP and Hannah, which is to get our strength of databases. It's kind of their tense. He really hits, hits, hits a home run >>when we're talking to users in the discussion of multi Cloud in general, one of the challenges is Yoon hee. Different skill sets across. One of those powerful things I've heard from active use really is a normalization across any cloud or even in a cloud. Oh, wait. I was gonna stuck six up again in an archive. That means I'm never going to touch it again. Ingress and egress fees. You know, I have to figure these out or I need toe dedicated engineer to those kind of environments. So it seems that just fundamentally the architecture that you built it active eo is toe help customers really get their arms around those multi cloud >>environments? Absolutely. And I think there are two additional components that really one of which has lived with activity from the very beginning of the company, which is a p a p I. First, the cloud is very much an AP I centric type of operating model on with active fio We don't change the management system were operating model. But in fact we incorporate in eso all of this orchestration that it shook talked about can be actuated via a P I. The second piece, which we really started in 2017 with our eight Dato platform release, is the the consumption and the intelligent consumption of object with 10 see, we've continued to advance our object capabilities. In fact, we published a paper with the SG in late 2019 that talked about mounting 50 terabyte Oracle databases directly out of object with actually increased performance versus the production block >>storage behind it. >>So we have really with 10 C, actually added cashing to even further performance optimized object workloads, which speaks to both the flexibility but also the economic flexibility of being able. Thio contemplate running workloads in the cloud out of object at a lower cost platform without necessarily the compromise of performance that you would normally expect >>absolutely. And like you said, the skill set required. Do I need to put it in object to any reported in block? We can eliminate that right. Be neutralized that to say you want to leverage the cloud, give us your cost point and you can dial the cost up or down, depending on what you see for performance, and we will be the day that back and forth, so that flexibility is enormous for customers. >>That's greater if you talk to anybody that's been in the storage industry for a while, and you want to make them squirm, say the word migration s O. We know how painful it has been if you go talk to any of the triple vendors, they have so many tools and so many service is to help do that in a cloud era. It should be a little bit easier, but it sounds like that's another key piece. Intensity? >>Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, 10 See, you know, hits the home. I think with the A P. I integration. So the other element 2019 Saul, was the scale of deployment effective. You know, when you have to manage hundreds of thousands of machines across different geo's, that is a scale that comes to the data protection that you know, people. Really? You have a seat to actually build for it and and work with it and be sorry in 2019 and 10 See, incorporates a lot of that capabilities as well, making it ask Cloud needed as possible. So basically, around these applications globally. All >>right, uh, I was wondering if you might have a customer example toe really highlight the impact that NBC's having understand if you can't name them specifically, but, uh, yeah, >>well, actually, shook has already talked about 11 customer slash partner. Who is I think still the world's largest software company in the world based out of Germany. And they are powering their enterprise cloud on the data management data protection. Beneath that enterprise cloud across four different hyper scale er's using, active you on. I think they're on record in a weapon. Our earlier in December, talking about their evaluation of pretty much every technology out there on the one that could really deliver on performance at scale across clouds was activity >>on. The key element was they wanted a single platform with a single pane of glass across all platforms, and an active feel was the solution to each other. So >>and certainly I think we credit them and are the rest of our enterprise customers for pushing us to make 10 see more powerful and more a capable across any clout, you know, Ultimately, an inter enterprise is going to make a decision that they've probably already made the decision to incorporate cloud into their enterprise architecture. What we give them is the freedom and the flexibility to choose any cloud. And, by the way, any cloud today that might change tomorrow and having the ability to seamlessly migrate and or convert from cloud eight o'clock be. Is something that active powers as well? >>Yeah, just make sure we're clear as to what's happening there. It's great that you've got flexibility there when we're talking about data and data gravity. Of course, we're not talking about just lifting an entire database land, you know, ignoring the laws of physics there. But it's the flexibility of using a ll These various things, any way Talk about A S, A P, of course, needs to live across all these clouds. But when you talk about an enterprise, you know what is kind of that? That killer use case? Because we said we're not at a point where cloud is not a utility. I don't wake up in the morning and look at the sheet and say, Oh, I'm gonna, you know, use Cloud a versus cloud be s o. You know what is? You know the importance of that flexibility for us >>today. The majority of our business starts with company saying I need to deliver my data faster to my developers or my tester's, or even increasingly, my data scientists and analysts and my data sets have become so large that it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to do that with regularity. So the currency of the data is starting to suffer. That is the first use case for us and that that powering that enterprise transformational initiative around a new application or an updated application based on a historical app using those enterprise databases delivering that seamlessly quickly, regardless of how big the data is still remains our first use case. And then, increasingly, those customers air realizing that they can start to achieve the other benefits of active eo, including I can start to back that up to the cloud. Aiken actually orchestrate recoveries in the cloud. Not just bulk sort of transfer, but actually the entire application stack. And bring that up in the cloud. I can start Thio, take those those data sets and actually amount them into containers for my next generation application. So that starting point of give me my data as quickly as possible, regardless of how big it is, starts to become universal in terms of its applicability for all use cases. >>Yeah, I guess I shook. The last thing I wanna understand from you is in 2019. We saw a lot of large providers putting out their vision for how I manage in this multi cloud environment. You were at the Google Cloud event where Anthros was unveiled. I was at Microsoft ignite when as your ark was unveiled. VM wear has things like tans you out there. So this moldy cloud environment how do I manage across these disperse environments? What? What What are all those move mean to active you on how you look at things. >>And I think you know, the Tennessee release and with the core architecture that if you had in place, which was multiple already and a P I ready. So those are the two elements that are kind of building blocks that you can tie into any one of those construct you talked about. All right, so we've had we have customers, innovated us with Antos. If customers get up service now we have customers doing Vieira with us, right? So there are many, many integration platforms. The latest I saw was an Alexa app, but we were mounting an oracle database on a voice command. So So you know, there's endless possibilities as thes equal systems evolve because active feel stays behind the cowards powering the data delivering the data available if needed on the target. So that is the key element in the neighbor that we see that helps all these other platforms become super successful. >>So, Brian, it sounds very much a hell wind. The big trends that we're seeing here keep partnerships and, you know, meeting your customers where they need to >>pay. Absolutely. We continue Thio play in the enterprise market, where these thes are absolutely top of mind of every CEO and top of their agenda. Onda, we are working hand in glove with them to make sure that our platform not only anticipates their needs but delivers on their current state of needs as well. >>Brian, thank you so much. Congratulations on the 10 sea launch Cloud containers. Copy data management. Look forward to watching your customers and your continued Thanks. As always, Very much. All right, I'm still Minutemen. Lots more coverage here in 2020. Check out the cube dot net for all of it. And thank you for watching the Cube

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host Stu minimun hi this is a cute conversation from our Boston area studio I'm Stu minimun and joining for this deep dive into partnership discussions is Brian Regan the CMO of activity Oh Brian great to see you and happy 2020 great to see you used to thanks all right so we had a conversation with yourself and a shuch talking about 10c some of the activities the general momentum of ectopy oh but really want to spend a little bit of time talking about partnerships so Activia being a software company always has add a number of partnerships so you know when we talk a little bit of just the philosophy of the company and you know how important that is for you know technology partnerships as well as the go-to-market absolutely and I think we you know in 2019 we really increased our focus our investments and really our entire company alignment towards five types of partners specifically one was relatively new partnership for us which is a software partnership with IBM and their data and AI division of IBM under Arvid Krishna and Rob Thomas that we really the OEM our product to go after the test data management market opportunity and really become a data platform for a lot of their initiatives that involve Watson and and analytics as well as test data management that was a huge new partnership for us in 2019 well of course a new area of partnership because IBM I understand is probably the longest and oldest partnership that activity oh is that absolutely so the software group was probably the last group that we have partnered with in inside of the IBM corporation but we saw incredible traction throughout the year great pipeline growth from literally the beginning of the the Inc signing the the paper and have a roster of incredible logos to show for it over the last 12 months yeah it's always interesting to look if you talk about software and how a ifit's to it that was 2019 one of the things we said just you know okay what is AI are along that spectrum but you know how do these things stitch together everything to a Maya feed for the training algorithms or there are other things I can do so that sounds like you found some areas where customers are going to be working at leveraging your solution absolutely and certainly with IBM's acquisition of Red Hat and their embrace of containers and kubernetes that application modernization intersection point where we can bring data into containers is going to be a big theme for us in 2020 as well okay exciting stuff so that's on the software piece so if you have software hardware still matters into C 20 it turns out we still need to run things on servers and storage so and and switches and the like so we're fortunate to have partnered with Dell EMC as one of our focus infrastructure partners we have reference architectures for converged infrastructure using the rail and their rack designs on the VX flex OS underneath and really going after the database cloning market opportunity so bringing a essentially a data center pod architecture with Activia software running inside to power these databases of service opportunities that exist in a large enterprises alright interesting that you know EMC was not one that I would have thought would have been the first one to partnership Dell EMC with a much broader portfolio it seems a natural fit absolutely and and we were excited actually to based on client demand to also introduce the support to write to data domain so we can actually support data domain essentially we treated almost like an object target to increase the useful life and actually increase the power of data domain within these broader infrastructures that the enterprise clients have you know I had a great conversation with the shuch talking about what one of the things about 10 C is we've known for a long time that object storage is so important for the storage industry and where we want to go but customers shouldn't have to think about it it's just how we enable that and that leads up to of course cloud is big piece absolutely NC there so so where the important partnership from a cloud standpoint so certainly all of the clouds for us in our multi cloud effort are important we we support seven of the hyper scalars and and certainly you know Alibaba cloud IBM cloud Oracle cloud VMware cloud in addition to the three that people think about most but from a go-to-market standpoint we were probably the most embedded with Google cloud over the last year to 18 months again we've aligned a lot of both go to market but also engineering efforts to make sure that we're supporting Google cloud in the best way possible bringing the most compelling and differentiated offerings particularly for database workloads for backup dr and ultimately database cloning well congratulations important partnership especially when you talk about that engineering standpoint Google is not one just to make oh you know we made a handshake and it's good it really they dig in from an engineering standpoint and we know that Google makes the smartest stuff out there they'll tell you that so if you you've gone through the wringer on that that that really speaks to the architectural absolutely piece of the environment and and credit to a shook in the entire engineering organization I mean that is to your point very much an engineering first and then go to market second type of relationship and we're delighted to be in the go-to-market side of that okay go to market then is probably another way piece of absolutely so the last two types of partners that were really focused on for 2020 and we certainly got very serious in 2019 one is global systems integrators and TCS has really emerged is a really key partner for us in that landscape when we think about the enterprise accounts that we target you know a billion and up in revenue they're in every single one of them and we have several wins that we can look back on 2019 and credit their influence they are certainly helping the application modernization initiatives within all of these enterprises and partnering with active Pheo to really bring a data management and test data management capability to bear really was an important step for us in nineteen that we hope to accelerate in 2020 and then the the last piece and last but not least from a go-to-market standpoint is the chat and you know important channel partners whether it's Trace 3 particularly on the west coast whether it's data trend you know from the Midwest and East Coast these types of channel partners have really helped us you know become embedded in some of the largest accounts in in North America as well as globally and really are the the trusted adviser inside of those accounts that we want to continue to enable with compelling differentiated offerings like Tennessee yeah there were a lot of transformations going on in the channel they were all trying to figure out how they live in that multi-cloud world seems a natural fit for those that are thriving and surviving absolutely in this era that those would be the ones that you'd be working with absolutely so as a software company you know the part of our power is the ecosystem power and but we believe that by continuing to foster these multifaceted relationships they all have actually really fascinating benefits across the board the IBM relationship for example has ecosystem benefits in their channel and their systems integrators the Dell EMC relationship has you know ripple effects into their channel and their distribution points of distribution so we believe it's a very complimentary ecosystem that we're building we're excited at the possibility of an even stronger 2020 because of it awesome the one that you mentioned actually in our earlier conversation talking about active intensity si P of course a big important partner also a huge it's an important partner from a standpoint of it's maybe the most critical workload in most enterprises that use sa P and being a part of their technology stack inside of the Hana enterprise cloud is a critical capability for us but it's also an important point of distribution as they go out to their enterprise customers and are looking to become more relevant in a broader sense of data management so we're certainly excited about the work that we're doing with them we're delighted about the influence that they've had in terms of our roadmap and pushing our platform to be even more capable particularly for Hana workloads all right a lot of different pieces Brian congratulations on all that happened in 2019 and looking forward to watching the momentum in 2020 Thanks looking forward to being back all right lots more coverage from us at the cube dotnet of course will be lots of shows feel free to reach out on Twitter I'm at Stu and thank you for watching the cube

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018 brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to the live CUBE coverage. This is day three of VMworld 2018. We're live in Las Vegas this is theCUBE's special coverage. Our ninth year covering VMworld. Kicking off day three, we've got two sets. Our next guest, Brian Reagan, who's the CMO of Actifio, theCUBE alumni. Great to see you. Great company doing some great things on the marketing side. You guys taking a different approach than others. Let the product do the talking. Let the solution speak for itself. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. It's great to be back and, Dave, it's always a pleasure. It's great to be at VMworld. >> You guys, I don't want to say, a different approach, but you're here at VMworld. There's a lot of pomp and circumstance. There's a lot of big booths, a lot of glam, a lot of attention getting. You got to do that but you don't want to overspend on that. You really want to just be in the community. What's your strategy? How are you as a CMO going into a world that wants more content? They want more data. They want to get solutions built. They love the glam, but the meat and potatoes is what they want. >> Monday night we had an event at TopGolf and I was talking to a couple customers and they basically were all saying the same thing to me which was, I come to VMworld to basically collect squeezy balls for my kids. They're going back to school. I'm going to collect a lot of toys. I'm going to do the solution expo. Great, great opportunity to really breakthrough from a swag standpoint, but no one's coming here to necessarily research the company that they want to disrupt or transform their business around. What we believe for VMware and, quite frankly, just in general is this is a great place to engage with customers. They're all here. This is the IT, this is COMDEX 2018. We need to be here, but we don't necessarily need to be in a solutions exchange where it's just an arms race about swag. >> What's your relationship with VMware? How do you guys fit in the ecosystem? What's the value proposition? What is the Actifio relationship to the community? How do you guys walk that line and how do you deliver those solutions? >> Pretty much throw a rock and you'll hit a vendor out here who has a great VMware solution, right? We are no exception. Everyone does VMware. Quite frankly, it's actually really easy nowadays. There's zero differentiation. I hate to say it, but everyone does VMware the same way. There is really no disruption in this marketplace because everyone does VADP. Everyone does Snapshot. Quite frankly, what we major on and what we focus on is actually the workloads that are franchise critical to businesses, which really are databases. Yeah, they might run out of VM, but often times they run on physical machines. Let's focus on databases. If they happen to be VMware, great. You know what, we like everybody else has a great VMware solution, but it's easy. Let's focus on the hard stuff which is databases which run the business and dX is all around databases and applications that run the business. That's where we major on. That's where our value comes in. That's where our customers see the most value from Actifio. >> My take away is, five/ten years ago it was all about integration and that was a differentiation, who could get the SDK faster, >> Exactly right, yeah. >> And you say, we were, we own them and that app would be right there. Okay, fine. That's done, okay. Fast forward to 2018, what's your perspective on VMware, what they're doing, the market momentum. You mentioned databases. You see them with Amazon bringing database now on prem. A lot has changed. What's your perspective? >> I think VMware is really... You talk to any CIO, any IT leadership, VMware is a critical part of the conversation so I don't mean to, in any way, diminish the value that VMware brings to the enterprise. And actually they are enabling cloud in every enterprise today whether it's private, whether it's hybrid, whether it's I'm going to do public, but I'm going to do public in VMware in the Amazon Cloud. VMware is table stakes in terms of running mission critical applications. What we believe is the next level of integration is what's the app running in VMware, right? What is it Oracle? I'm running Oracle rack inside of VMware. I'm running SAP inside of VMware. That's the next level of integration that becomes the differentiation and, quite frankly, the value creation in a lot of these enterprises. >> How do you guys differentiate, John was talking about all the glam and all the noise, a lot of noise, tons of noise around data protection. You guys pioneered the whole copy data management space. Where are you seeing growth? Where's the momentum, maybe you can give some examples. >> 2/3 of our business is now actually leading with DevOps and cloud. The real lever there is time. People want more time back in their day and they want more time back because whether it's-- there was a great article that SearchITOperations published about Aetna where they have tens of multi-terabyte databases and, quite frankly, it breaks every piece of infrastructure that they had, but they want to be able to serve those multi-terabyte databases out to their developers within minutes, as opposed to weeks or months or however long it takes traditional operations. Let's serve that need. Let's solve the time problem and all of a sudden digital transformation becomes a reality. dX and continuous integration, continuous development is really easy when you're talking about megabyte-sized JSON files. When you talk about 100 terabyte databases, it becomes really hard. With Actifio, we solve that problem. Now, we're enabling dX at scale in these large enterprises. It's really a time problem. >> Aetna's a customer obviously. We heard a similar story from Live Nation, which is another customer, but go ahead, John, sorry. >> What's the drivers in this because this is a unique thing? Because databases, as we said on theCUBE here on our analysis, the battleground in cloud, on premise in cloud database is the crucial thing. Look at Amazon, they're going after Oracle. RDS, their relational database service, on VMware on premise. Amazon's never done that before so clearly the database is a hard nut to crack, one. Two, it's super important. It's the pacing item on all migrations, all activity. What's driving your business because you're targeting that, trying to improve ease of use, but what's the market force? Migration, developer scale? What are some of the things that are driving your business? >> Yes and yes, right? It's help me collapse my cycle time. Typically, the time to actually get a copy of data for a developer is measured in weeks or months. >> In the old way. >> In the old way. CICD is talking about a daily check-in. And daily check-in, weeks and months, it just doesn't jive. If I can actually collapse that down into, yes, no matter how big that database is, I can give it to you in a 15 minute, 30 minute SLA. >> The mismatch between data pipelining to developer need is a gap, huge problem that you solve. What about some of the consequences if that's not solved? >> What do people do to compromise the time problem? They subset. They give their developers, it's a 100 terabyte production database, they give them a terabyte or 1/2 a terabyte of actual subsetted data so they run their queries in development and they work great. Then they roll them into production, all of a sudden they break because 100 terabytes is a different animal. >> And that could be a terrible experience for the application where data has to drive all the value. So speed of data insertion into the application is the critical cloud negative and/or developer need. >> It drives quality. It drives customer satisfaction. It drives, quite frankly, in regulated industries, it drives compliance. >> I feel like the Geico commercial. Everybody knows that this is a problem. Why aren't people doing this? Is it just too hard? I mean, this is a card. What specifically do you guys have for IP? What makes it happen? What do you guys do? >> 57 patents later, we have cracked the code on how to do really application native virtualization of data and the ability to serve it up through workflows, through automation in some of the largest enterprises in the world. We are enterprise tested, battle tested. Quite frankly, the applications and data that serves the largest enterprises, that's where we shine. >> What are some of the value points you can point to anecdotally or publicly around the value your customers have gotten from having thae ability to have data addressable and almost in real-time for developers because there's got to be some new experiences or new capabilities that they're realizing. Can you share just some of things that come out of this? >> An IT leader in a major bank that you've heard of said to us after we went through the initial phase of deployment, you've just given me an extra quarter of development in every year. >> Extra quarter of time. >> Extra quarter of time. We've collapsed down and we now have five quarters of development cycles as opposed to four. That, quite frankly, if you put a dollar value on it is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. >> Developer productivity, any new cool things that have happened, top line revenue growth, any impact to applications? >> Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you think about what is the battle front now, whether it's online banking, whether it's retail, whether it's healthcare even. What is the battle front? It is your app, your phone, your mobile device. It is the ability to self-serve content, information and transactions. All of that is happening because people are transforming the way they're doing business around applications today. >> Customers are going to eat this up. You solve the holy grail problem. It's so obvious to us, but getting data in real-time, having speed and scale and relevance is super critical. How do you guys compare with the competition? Are you guys ahead? How do you guys compare versus other solutions? Are there anything like you guys? What's out in the marketplace? Share your perspective on the landscape on how you guys compare. >> You're asking a marketing guy how we compare to the competition. >> Of course you're going to say you blow them away? >> Of course, I have this very convenient chart that shows us being the leader compared to everybody. The reality is 3,000 customers, 37 countries, nine years in the marketplace. We have been there and done that at scale in the enterprise. Five of the top global 20 financial institutions. Four of the 10 energy companies in the world. Four of the 10 top retail organizations in the world. We have done it for the largest companies in the world and we continue to deliver value at scale in the enterprise. >> You said before hundreds of millions of value. That sounds like a lot and people might go, oh, but how do you do that? Your cloud and your devops which is all about agility and speed, if you take a net present value, a discounted cash flow, a break even or whatever curve you draw, and I think I heard three months, right? You compress that by a quarter and then look at the numbers, that's the value. >> Huge. >> So if it's $200 million in revenue, do the math. If it's $10 in revenue, okay, it's not going to be as much, but the companies that you're talking about, the industries, talking about big, big projects and a lot of revenue associated with them. You talked about cloud and devops, how is your business model cloud and devops? Can you talk about that in terms of the way we do business, customer to Actifio? >> Increasingly, cloud has been for us a place where all of these use cases are executed. As a result, the business model has been BYO. I'm going to buy a license from Actifio. I'm going to bring it to Amazon, Azure, Google, what have you. More and more we're seeing a mixture of marketplace transactions plus the traditional cloud marketplace. You mentioned Live Nation. They are in many ways way ahead of the curve in terms of just going wholesale. I'm out of the data center business. I'm all in on cloud and I'm just going to buy everything through the marketplace. Increasingly, we're seeing marketplace transactions becoming a relevant part of our business. The fact that we've integrated with the top six public cloud providers and increasingly we're going to expand out to Huawei and Alicloud and more, it's not just a destination to connect a use case. It is becoming a platform to conduct transactions as well. >> And a really important channel. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Brian, great to hear from you. Congratulations on your success. Love the business model. We've been saying on theCUBE, so many years, data's at the center and the time to get the data from any database or a database into the application speed is critical. That makes great value so thanks for doing that. Appreciate it. >> Thank you guys. Always a pleasure to be here. >> Check out Actifio. Of course, we're bringing the data to you in real-time here on theCUBE at VMworld. We're live in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. (upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome back to the CUBE here at IBM Think 2018. We're at the Mandalay Bay at the CUBE Studios where IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier, your host. Our next guest, Brian Reagan, Chief Marketing Officer, Actifio, and Mike Errity, VP North America, IBM Resiliency Services, guys welcome to the CUBE, Brian, good to see you. (mumbles) >> Good to see you John, yes. >> Great stuff here at IBM Think, big show, six in one. Six shows brought down to one. A lot of customers here, but the message, you're starting to see a clear line of sight, for customers seeing the innovation formula. Cloud Multi-Cloud Services, On-Prem through private Cloud as Oogie Mound reported, but really A.I. and Blockchain are infrastructure powering data. Data's at the center of the value proposition. You guys are partnering with IBM. What's the story here, what's the relationship? >> Well, yeah, I mean you nailed it John. I mean, data is really at the center of everything, right? I mean we're in, we're in the midst of a massive digital transformation on like anything we've seen in I.T. for 30 years. And, you know, every business is a data business. Whether they know it or not. And with that comes great rewards, but it also brings a lot of risks as well, and you know, we've been a strong partner of IBM's for as long as Actifio's been in business. We're a data company, or about managing data. And now, I think with this rising tide of data threats, you know, partnering with the world's leader in resiliency just makes all the sense in the world. >> (mumbles) Betting your business on data was a good call, don't you think? (loud laughter) >> I think so, yes, absolutely. >> Hey, with Watson and AM Mike, you guys are pioneering, obviously, and we've seen this evolve from the R&D and the, and the modern infrastructure of the systems level, infrastructure is code. But the real applications out there have to drive a lot of money opportunities, success for your clients, security's the biggest risk. It's a lot of industries out there for profit around security, the threats are endless. >> Mike: Yeah. >> There's new threats everyday. >> Mike: Yeah. >> This is hard business, data's the key. What's your reaction and vision around the current state of security? >> What I done in our, our decades of experience working with clients has proven that, at, at the start of a resiliency initiative, it starts with the data element. We've had the opportunity to work with thousands of clients. Everyday, we're helping them test their ability to be able to recover from some unplanned event. Something that could cause them damage. And, and that experience has been evolving over the past, I would say 18 months. We're on warp speed to help clients achieve literally an always on environment, and it starts with data. >> John: Yeah. >> The, the, the point about data that I think is important is that clients recognize that if there's any damage at all to their data repository, it will cause them severe damage, so protecting it and making sure that it's recoverable to a point in time, is what we're working with everyday. >> I'd like you to talk about for a minute, resiliency services, because security's broad, but everyone thinks, command center, killing the bad guys, offense, defense, blue teams, red teams. There's a, the trend of I.T.s, securities kind of moving into the direct line to the sea sweet. >> Mike: Yeah. >> 'Cause it's so important, the risk management alone, on securities, so you're seeing that trend. What do you guys do? What is resilience service? Take a minute to explain specifically what that is, in context of security. >> That is what's so exciting about being here at Think, because we're, we have a total interconnection between our security assets and our security domain, and our resiliency team, and so resiliency's about resuming business operations to the point before you had the event. Being back to that normal state of affairs. Resiliency for us has been about helping clients create a plan after assessing the risk, and designing and implementing that plan to, to return to a point in time where there know that they're safe, that their applications are back up and running. And what we're finding in the security domain, which is the reason why cyber resiliency includes security, networking, and the resiliency methodologies of getting back to normal. >> John: Yeah. >> Is that you have to combine all three of those categories. >> John: Yeah. >> To create a solution to return to that normal state at a safe point in time. >> Talk about the importance of the proactive front-end work that's involved, I mean, back up in recovery in the old tradition, oh yeah, it's at the end of the, probably just throws it back up at it, and then people have been bitten in the butt on that. They've gotten really impacted. How much work is involved? What is the playbook on the front-end to prepare? And give me an example where what's the consequences? >> Mike: Oh well the, >> Of not doing it? >> You used the right term, it is a playbook, and it's one that needs to be well scripted and well tested. The work on the upfront is to design the right solution. Technologically, to ensure that you have a, a solution that moves data from a place that could be harmed to a safe point, and create the environment, create the solution, and then figure out the right team and the right skill and the right investment to constantly test it, test it so that you have the ability, and that's the work that we're doing with Actifio. Actifio has the expertise to help us create the right copy-data management solution to enable a snap-snap-snap-snap copy to be able to then travel back in time to be able to find that right, clean point in the event of a cyber incident that has pervasively impacted a data center environment. >> What's the role of Actifio as an ingredient in that plan? Are they in the insurance policy? Are they in the front end? When are they invoked, and with, where, where are they in the process? >> Well they're the, I mean to be, to use a, an analogy that I'm comfortable with, we, we trust Actifio to provide us the brains of the solution, to be able to move the data constantly. Move it to a point where we can then create a service to be able to, as I said, go back in time, and Brian, you might want to comment on that a little more. >> Brian, talk about the relation to IBM in that context, because you know, covering IBM for so many years, you know, they're the big, the big ship, right? They move at, at a pace, with a huge customer base, you know, how do you guys integrate in? What are you guys providing? >> Brian: Sure. >> And what's the value proposition that you guys are fighting IBM? >> Well I mean the, the you know, because we've been partnering with IBM for so long, I mean literally since the inception of the company, we have a very common user-base, right? We, we serve the mid and large enterprise in global enterprises worldwide. We have, you know, 3000 customers from Actifio and, and almost all of them are IBM accounts as well. One of the things that, you know, just to kind of piggyback on, on, on Mike's discussion, you know one of the, and, and to speak specifically to a customer base, you know, global financials right now are not only worried about cyber threats to production, but increasingly they're worried about cyber-threats to their backup sets. And in fact, there is regulations, you know FISMA regulations in North America that talk about, you need air-gap protection between, you know, one backup set and another, because they're under attack now. So literally these threats have started to creep beyond just the normal production data sets. Actifio, plus, you know, resiliency services equals, you know, a technology that can provide that air-gap, provide the immutability, provide all the, you know, the insurance protection of the data, and provide the, the wear with all the knowledge to really get that playbook to resume business operations as fast as possible. >> You guys need to stay on top of the big trends too, because Blockchain's right around the corner. >> Brian: Yeah. >> That's immutable, that could be an opportunity. >> Brian: Absolutely. >> Thoughts on Blockchain? >> Blockchain is, you know, it is a fascinating technology. Apart from Discripto, right? (laughs) And, and what a better, we talk about, you know, every business is digital, literally Blockchain is turning every business into a digital business. And it is the next generation in terms of securing closed contracts, and securing really immutability and, and reference ability of data. I think it has a huge play with IBM obviously. Around GDPR and privacy. So, we, you know, we see that as absolutely the next frontier. >> Well there's a lot of these supply, IBM's been in the supply chain business for years, running technology for companies. And that's always been kind of the big monolithic systems, mainframe minis, lands, you know, CRM systems, ARPs, whatever you want to call it. Now you have agile cloud coming in. You got the plan, a resiliency plan. While there's a lot of business reconstruction going on at the business model level. >> Mike: That's right. >> So, are clients like banging their head against the wall? What's some of the conversations, like with the clients? So, I mean they got to be proactive. At the same time, they got a lot of stuff on their plate. >> Well they, we're sort of humbled by the role that we're in right now, because for years, we've been working with so many clients, to help them build programs, we, we've got ourselves into a very, you know, into a comfort zone of helping them recover from the environment you're talking about, just standard, legacy, data center recovery. We can accomplish the recovery time in, in minutes, nearly instantly, with no, no data loss. But suddenly, the humbling point is, our phone's ringing off the hook, asking, apply those same methodologies to the, to the risks that I'm seeing as my business is being digitized. And help me evolve, and to us it's all about orchestrating a recovery, creating a softer, defined solution to enable data that's recovered and systems that are automated. >> From quality partners, and you're happy with Actifio? >> Oh absolutely, yeah. >> It's like changing an airplane engine out 30,000 feet. You just, what you just talked about. I'm like, that sounds so hard. I got my business moving so fast, I'm modernizing, and I got to do all this work. >> And the devil's in the details, and whenever we're engaging with Actifio, they have the architects to assist us with those details. >> What about regulatory concerns? Obviously, that's come up a lot. We know GDPR's out there, that be we don't want to beat that dead horse, but you know, when you get into things like Cripto, Blockchain, regions of, of data centers where its cloud is deployed, you got regulatories, it's going to be a constant issue. >> Brian: Absolutely. >> Your thoughts on that? >> It is a constant issue, and part of the challenge with regulations, is they're very ambiguously worded. So, the interpretation of regulations is as challenging as actually delivering solutions to, to meet them. I think that it really does come down to, and in most regulations, good hygiene is protect the data, make sure that there is, you know, increasingly air-gaps around the sensitive data, both production as well as non-production, and make sure that you can resume business operations, you know, where and when you need to, and having the flexibility to do that on Prem, in the IBM cloud, you know, that's, that's what IBM does. >> And, and if I can just add a point to that Brian, the, the driver of the conversations that we're seeing are, is, is predominantly in a compliance area, so businesses are concerned, enterprises are concerned about, am I compliant, am I audit-worthy? And can I prove that not so much at time of recovery, but really a time of test. Can I go prove to the market place that I'm ready? >> No more lip service. >> Mike: None at all. >> You've got an actual plan. >> And, and, and, >> Not just for your own reasons, there's actually filings. >> And have documented proof of it. >> Yeah, IBM Actifio, all about the resiliency in global economy, you got Blockchain, you got A.I. At the heart of it is data. You don't have a plan, you better get one. (mumbles) Congratulations on your relationship. >> Oh thank you. >> John Furrier here inside the CUBE. IBM Think 2018, CUBE studios will be back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, and welcome to a special presentation of CUBE Conversations here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program, it's been a little while, Brian Reagan who's the chief marketing officer at a local company, Actifio, we've been watching since the early days. Brian, so good to see you. >> Great to see you, Stu, thanks for having me in. >> All right, so Brian, you know, it comes as no surprise to you because you've worked on it in this industry for many years, but we've looked at our predictions at a Wikibon community. No matter which one of these big mega trends we're talking about, whether you're talking about machine learning, IOT, cloud, you know, data sits at the center of it and really is super critical. There's the old tried and true, "Data is the new oil," but bring us up to speed. You know, Actifio is a company that people probably started out as, you know, it's in this weird storage ecosystem today, but I think data's also at the center of your business. >> Absolutely, I mean, if you think just really simply about any business in the world, they have customers, they have partners, they have products, they have employees, all that's data and the problem with data these days is it just keeps getting big and when it's big it's slow. It's slow to use for application development, it's slow to use for insights and analytics. It's just slow to use if you want to move to the cloud. You know, Actifio has really been in business for nearly nine years now to help virtualize that data, make it more portable, make it easier to use for all those reasons to help drive those business, and that is our value proposition. You're right, we sort of started in that, "Are you a storage company?" We're storage agnostic and today we're cloud agnostic, it's about the data. >> Stu: Yeah, I mean, it's really... You're a software company, correct? >> We're a software company. >> So, you hit on a key thing that I've looked at for a while, is everybody is talking about how do I as a company, how do I become more agile, how to move faster. You know, CI-CD is kind of table stakes these days for so many companies. How does Actifio help companies prevent that storage from being an anchor weighing them down and slowing them down? >> Sure, sure, I mean, CI-CD is great and you can move at speed, as long as you're talking about very lightweight elements of an application, JSON files, the XML, all those lightweight application elements, you know, LOGIC. But when it comes to that big database sitting behind the scenes that's actually powering that application, that's the gravitational pull that slows CI-CD down. Typically that, we've seen it take 80% plus of the software development lifecycle just to stand up to those environments, so people make compromises, they subset it, they do all the crazy things to try and avoid the storage or infrastructure tax when it comes to setting up those environments. We can help bypass that, again, it's virtual data, so now we can start to port it, we can move it, we can parallelize it and we can get it ready for these developers through our automation and orchestration in minutes, as opposed to hours or days in many cases for the service levels. >> All right, so Brian, you mentioned developers there. Definitely kind of the infrastructure world has been like, "Oh, gosh, how do we do it "through the developers, how do we fit "in this whole world," you know, DevOps and like, infrastructure. A lot of times it's been oil and water. What are you hearing from your customers, how does that play into what they're doing? >> Yeah, I mean, developers for us are the consumers, right, they are the end users of that data and the infrastructure team or the operations or DBA teams are really the providers of that data and they have to stand it up. They have to stand up the infrastructure, they have to stand up the data, they have to do all the rolls, log rolls and the like, data prep, and so if we can help them really collapse that time to access the data, because it's always in its native format, prep the data so it's ready for use, and then parallelize it so that way we can actually do multiple test streams or multiple development streams or we can, you know, do those more agile scrum projects and get more done in a given calendar quarter. Now all of a sudden those consumers are happier because they're getting the data in its full state, more of it, more rapidly than they ever have, and the operations teams are happy because they don't have to buy more storage to do it, they can actually go on and do other projects instead of have to sit there and manually get data set for developers. >> One of the challenges we hear from customers these days is where they develop it and how they do that versus production, very different. A lot of times some things that we've been doing in my data center, some are in the public cloud, how does the whole where it lives fit into your environment. I know Actifio, you just had a big announcement around some of your cloud pieces. >> Sure, we just released our eighth major release of our software since our founding, and it was really probably, from an engineering time standpoint, the largest release since our first one and it was very cloud centric. Our starting point as a company was really to try and be infrastructure agnostic. Wherever you wanted to put your data from a storage or compute standpoint, we wanted to give you that freedom to do so. Now it's just as relevant in the cloud. You should be able to choose the cloud for the given workload or the given data payload. You know, don't have to get frozen into one or locked into one. Let you choose and then also, once you've chosen, giving you the freedom to actually port from cloud to cloud if need be because you might choose, whether it's economic arbitrage or whether it's just different paths, capabilities in different clouds suitable for different workloads. We want to give you that freedom. >> All right, but you know, public cloud, come on, it's supposed to be easy. They've got, you know, so many features. What's the gap, if I'm deploying, you know, choose your favorite public cloud whether AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle IBM, et cetera... >> Sure. >> What's the piece that Actifio delivers that's still needed by customers that's not kind of native? >> It just comes back to that data. Boy, it's always the data, it's always the can that gets kicked down the road because again, those lightweight elements of applications are so easy to move, and then we just get stuck with this big gravitational pull of data. And you know, the fallacy or the popular myth about public cloud is it's going to be easier and it's going to be cheaper, and it can be both and it can be both particularly when you can get the data in there and it's in a suitable state to actually use for these development analytics, all these different workload characteristics that, while it's stuck in non native format in its very large state, it's unusable in those clouds. >> Yeah, Brian, you meet with a lot of customers, you've been doing a lot of traveling recently. >> Brian: Yes. >> Any specific stories you can tell or kind of aggregate, what are they struggling with with cloud, what's working well with them. >> Yeah. >> Of course, how you're fitting into that. >> Yeah, you know, there's sort of three camps that I've seen over the last several weeks particularly. There's the camp that, whether it's regulatory pressures or just internal policy, they're not going to move but they still want to change their operating model to a cloud model, and so they're implementing and instrumenting their internal environments, their prior cloud to operate just like an Amazon or Azure or Google, but all behind the firewall. And they still need all of that capability for the data automation, they want their data on demand for those applications, they want self service, they want infrastructure as code, and they want to take advantage of Actifio to help power that internal cloud. That's camp one, and that's still a pretty hefty camp. Camp two is, you know, I would call more traditional companies who are not born in the cloud but have embraced the cloud and really want a fast on ramp to get their data into one or more public clouds so they can get out of the data center business, and they're using Actifio really as an on ramp first, but then once it gets into the cloud they're using the native data management capabilities that they can take advantage of in the public cloud so they can keep their agility moving at the speed of their VMs, at the speed of their lightweight components. And then the third camp, which has really been interesting to watch, is the born in the cloud guys, and really starting to realize that the native capabilities of these public clouds are very powerful, but they don't really take the place of traditional backup for example. There is no backup software native inside of AWS, an EBS snapshot is a great snapshot, it's not a backup though. You can't really use it as a time machine, and when you go region to region you do fulls, and so it becomes very heavy and very costly. So, Actifio can really play a role for even those native, born in the cloud applications to provide the enterprise class data management but in a public cloud. >> Brian, you know, bring us up to speed, kind of how do you characterize your customers, how many customers to do you have, how much of them are kind of the new class versus, "I've got my data center," kind of sitting on these things. >> Yep, well, since our founding we've really focused on that upper mid market and enterprise customer. We just crossed over the 3,000 customer mark at the end of the last quarter. We operate in 37 countries today, and I would say they run the gamut from the Fortune 50s to that sort of Fortune 10,000s, but they all have very common characteristics, you know. As you would expect, we thrive in environments where data is growing and growing fast, we thrive where data is regulated or under some sort of internal or external pressure around management, and we really thrive in environments and industries that are truly embracing this digital transformation. They know that, like you said, that data is the new oil, data is their best currency today, and in fact, CryptoData is currency, and so they're truly embracing that and they want to move faster and they want to move faster with the data that they have today. Whether they choose to do that on premise or in the cloud or in the cloud at some point in the time, they want the freedom to make that choice when it's right for their business. >> All right, Brian, personal question for you. You brought up digital transformations and today you're wearing a CMO hat. You've had a number of different roles, C-suite roles in the past, what is the changing role of of the CMO today, especially with that landscape of digital transformation? >> Right, yeah, it's fascinating to watch just the change of what my budget line items are aligned around. You know, I probably spend as much on software and other licensed models, SAS models, to support my business, to support my digital and inbound marketing efforts, to support my analytics efforts around what's working, what's not. How do I tune the best marketing mix to really cater to the changing role of a consumer of content, and then all of the contents indication and content marketing. So, you know, I... To some degree, I think part of the changing nature of a CMO is they have to be very technology... Or I should say technology aware, focused on the business outcomes but understanding how technology can play a role to really affect those business outcomes. In my case, whether that's increasing the exposure of the company, whether that's increasing the lead flow to our sales organization, whether that's making our different routes to market more optimized and enabled for higher velocity of sales. All of those things can be technology enabled today, so you have to be much more conscious about... It's almost like a CIO junior role inside of an enterprise. >> Yeah, really interesting, right. We've debated for years where will the IT budget be driven from, sounds like you've got an impact on that. I love the discussion you talked about, you know, kind of how technology's helping to transform businesses. Do you have any customer examples, customers that are just doing some cool stuff with technology that could kind of be useful? >> So, I'm going to use a company that would probably be the last industry you would expect me to bring up, but I think they're a fascinating use case. So, Waste Industries, they're in the trash disposal business, and the CIO has corrected me on numerous occasions, "It's okay to "say the word 'trash,'" and so we were talking. They used Actifio first to help them solve, you know, very classic, modernize my DR strategy, part of the business, but then they started to realize that the power of using that data for other purposes, to accelerate analytics, because it turns out in the trash disposal business they actually instrument a lot of things. They instrument their trucks, they instrument with sensors their canisters, they do route optimizations based on data that they're getting from all of these devices, so as this CIO is fond of saying, they're not in the internet things, they're in the internet of trash, and so they're using data to help them be a much more innovative and frankly optimized organization today, and then as they start to think about where the future of their business goes... Now that they're starting to become a data company they can start to really comprehend what does it look like with autonomous vehicles in trash disposal, what does it look like in terms of using different types of vehicles to do routes. Maybe even an Airbnb type of model or an Uber model where maybe it's not even just our people doing the routes, but it's other organizations so we can start to sell data, too, to help them become a greater part of our organization. Fascinating, you know, probably the company on the surface that you'd think would probably not be a data company at all, but I think it personifies where we are as an industry today. Every company is a data company and the companies that win in the market are the companies that truly embrace being a data company and taking advantage of that. >> Yeah, definitely not one I first would be thinking of. (laughs) All right, but last question I have for you, we're heading into 2018. >> Brian: Yes. >> What should we be looking for, you know, the brain of Actifio, people that are watching, what do we expect next year? >> So, I think, you know, very exciting year for us. As I mentioned, we just released this major software update. The customer adoption already has been tremendous. We see really the embracing the cloud, whether it's behind the firewall or embracing the public cloud, multi-cloud being a big theme for us. You know, I think that we have... A Gartner analyst said to me a few weeks back, he said, "You know, you've been around, "you're disruptive still, though, but you're proven, "and being disruptive and proven "is a really powerful thing," and so we feel like we've got a great punching weight in terms of market presence. We have amazing customers in every industry. We see this, you know, 2018 as a really great year to continue our scaling, continue to be a very profitable and growing organization, and really helping to meet the needs of some of these incredibly interesting use cases around data in the business. >> Wait, profitable and growing, you must be an east coast company. (laughs) >> Brian: That's right. >> All right, well, Waltham, Massachusetts. Appreciate having you on. >> Brian: Thank you, Stu. >> Especially a startup right down the road here from our east coast studios. Always good talking up and look forward to talking to you more next year. >> Next time. >> And thank you so much for watching us. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all of our interviews, all of our upcoming events, and hit us up if you have any questions. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techy music playing)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Welcome to theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the shows to help extract the signal from the noise, and we are really excited. Oracle OpenWorld's coming up and we have an exclusive here on theCUBE, first time, welcoming Larry to the program. Wait. This is not the Larry I was expecting. Who do we have here? I know, sitting over there, Brian Reagan, CMO of Actifio. Brian, great to see you, >> Stu. >> I feel like I have a differently Larry than I was expecting. >> Stu, it's always a pleasure to be here, and I mean this is a big day. Obviously we take, you know, databases very seriously. We take Oracle OpenWorld very seriously. It's an important show for us, and we're excited to bring Larry the Bear back for the second year in a row at Oracle OpenWorld. Many might know him as the Database Beast, and so, he's excited to be here. What other Larry were you expecting, just out of curiosity? >> Well, we're talking about Oracle and database at the center. There's a certain Larry that most people expect. I was in Oracle OpenWorld once and Larry didn't show up because he was at the boat show. The boat race. But- - >> Larry the Bear is a big boat fan, too, but that's actually one of the reasons why we're excited to be out there. The other Larry I think that you might be referring to, the other Larry is how they refer to him out there too, is really Larry the Bear's hero, and if you think about a database beast, someone who's really dedicated their lives to databases, they really wanna meet the one and only King of Databases. And so, you know, he wants to live his dream next week, and meet the one and only Larry, his namesake, and really bond. >> Well, he, you know, having been to that show a few times, they are ecstatic to talk about databases. You've just got, you know, non-stop DBAs geeking out, digging into the weeds, and, you know, database, we've said many times on theCUBE, is the stickiest of applications in the environment, but, you know, there's a lot of money spent on this and a lot of manpower, so, you know, taming that environment is definitely a huge challenge for enterprises. >> Absolutely. We think the same, and in fact, Larry believes that databases- - The only thing stickier is probably like a big vat of honey. So, this is a bear who was- - Have you seen The Revenant, Stu? >> I'm familiar with it, and it has me a little bit worried. >> Yeah, that really was Larry a couple years ago. I mean, it was just, you know, he was untamed. He was going out of control like many databases in a lot of enterprises, until he discovered Actifio, and really discovered what could become of giving him back time in the day to hunt for salmon or pick berries, or whatever it is that bears do in their free time when they're not dealing with large databases. I mean, that's what Actifio brought to him, and he really wants to share that next week out at Oracle OpenWorld. >> Okay, and tell me, you said Larry got to know Actifio, where did Larry come from? >> So, Larry's originally from Chicago. >> Big Bears fan. >> And Cubs, go Cubs. >> He's relocated to Boston now that he's joined Actifio, and he's really taken with the Bruins. I think he's excited for this season, but Larry has been really in the enterprise for his entire life, and has probably grappled with some of the biggest databases you've seen. Again, this is the database beast. Yeah, it used to be bad. >> Alright, Larry, anything else we should know about your background and what has you so excited about the show? >> Yeah, no, that's a good point. So, among the many things that Larry is eager to do next week, is to find out from others, you know, just what type of database beast they have in their data center. And in fact, he invites people to our booth number 3105, to come and share their experiences. In fact, for those who mention theCUBE and his appearance on the cube, we've got a special giveaway for them. But we're eager to- - We and Larry are eager to hear what people are dealing with out there in the database community and understand how Actifio can really help them solve their biggest Oracle challenges. >> Great. Any final things we should know about, Larry, before we send it? >> Obviously, I mean this is a- - You know, Larry is smarter than the average bear, Stu, and that's one of the reasons why he joined Actifio. He comes from a long line of IT centric bears. I mean, obviously, his cousin Smokey in the D.R. Arena. Yoga- - Yogi, rather. So it's, you know, very long bear history. He's excited about Oracle OpenWorld. He couldn't be more excited about being on theCUBE. He's been talking about it for weeks, and we're just excited that you were able to fit him in. >> Alright, well Larry, I hope your dream comes true and that you get to meet the other Larry at the show. Brian, always a pleasure to catch up with you. >> You too, Stu. >> Once again, thank you for joining us here on theCUBE. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our coverage and see us, and some of the interesting guests we get on throughout the industry. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)