(upbeat techno music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to this special Cube conversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, co-host of the Cube. And we've got two great guests. Prashant Jagganathan, Technical Director of Global Alliances at Catalogic, and Vaughn Stewart, Cube alumni, good friend of the Cube, Vice-President of Technology at Pure Storage. Guys, welcome to this Cube Conversation. Good to see you. >> John, it's great to be here. Nice to see you, mate. >> So, you're on the road. You guys are a growing startup. You guys are doing great. Congratulations. >> Prashant: Thank you. >> So you guys, Catalogic, we've been covering you guys. And you guys came busting out. Still, in my opinion, not well known, but well known. You're the most unknown well-known company because you have a really awesome solution. Pure Storage, you guys are known. You just went public, earnings, again, another successful quarter. Congratulations to the team there. Again, everyone's like, "Pure Storage!" You guys continue to demystify the marketplace with performance, congratulations. Why, what's going on? >> Thanks! Again, we've just announced our quarterly earnings. Another great quarter. We've accomplished 3350 customers, 25% of those are in the Fortune 500. Over 25% of our revenue comes from cloud service providers, be it SaaS, PaaS, you know, hosted private cloud. Really the key of our success has been not the performance of Flash, which I think a lot of folks assume, it's been about reinventing the operational model through simplicity. We'd like to talk about being effortless, efficient, and evergreen. That's kind of our tagline to help customers put their data to work. >> There's certainly a cloud transformation going on, and I want to get your guys thoughts. Because one of the things that our team at Wikibon, our editorial team at SiliconANGLE are focused on, is really three major pillars we're seeing that are powering a whole new set of applications. Cloud-native, whatever you want to call them, that is, obviously cloud computing, which is a combination of on premises, hybrid, and then public. Big data, which is now AI, machine learning, and then IOT. Those are like really the underpinnings that's transforming the data center. And this is causing a lot of opportunity for app developers on top. And you're seeing all the key software markets just completely being disrupted and transforming. So I got to ask you guys, what does this mean to your relationship? Because you guys have a partnership. So how does that fit into that industry trend. Can you talk about the partnership that you two guys have together? >> Prashant: Sure. I'll let you go first. >> So we first started engaging, almost a year ago. >> Prashant: Right. >> You know, there was a lot of relationships based out of the Valley from previous relationships, or I should say employment -- >> John: It's a small industry, the storage industry. >> Yeah, we all know each other. >> And, so at that time, even more than your current opening statements, Catalogic was really flying under the radar, right? A powerful set of tools, how to bring in a copy-data management and data protection scheme into a heterogeneous storage infrastructure. And, they've kind of bridged this gap between, I'm software enabled, software defined, giving you a control plane. Leveraging all of the offload and acceleration capabilities within the hardware infrastructure. And at the end of the day what we were able to identify is this fills a huge gap within the market. Whether customers are looking to convert their virtual infrastructure into a private cloud, meaning it can be self-service, right, by the end users, or consumerized, if you will. They can better accelerate their development teams. And develop a more DevOps centric model, that lets these teams start to work in a more agile infrastructure. And ultimately start to embrace better hybrid storage technologies by making data protection just a native element within their onprem, and extending it into the cloud. >> Prashant, what are some of the use cases, because this really highlights the demand for faster solutions, not necessarily buying the new tool or something else. People got to use what they got. >> Yeah exactly. First to start with the integration rate. So we are a very synergistic relation. Catalogic is an orchestration engine. So it leverages in place existing infrastructure, to automate certain operations. So these operations include, answering your question on use cases, include DevOps, include TestDev automation, and also data protection and disaster recovery management. So it makes it use-case driven, and also for different industries, where they're looking for a centralized, a heterogeneous automation tool that can perform a lot of operations, but not reinventing it, so we don't need to move it to another appliance to deliver these use cases, but leverage the services that the storage, and the hardware already provides. >> TestDev is obviously low hanging fruit. That's kind of been around for a while. We've heard a lot of the top cloud guys say that. We're hearing, as we go out through a variety of the events, real practitioners and end users putting production workloads into the cloud, and really bringing the hybrid architecture in there, which impacts the storage and the preexisting. Outside of test and dev, I hear a lot about mission critical. Are you guys seeing that? Is that a use case? And then, how do the people who are your customers deal with that pressure. Okay, move some mission critical workloads. Make them work. What happens? >> Right, mission critical applications are what's actually driving. They are actually driving the purchasing point of the product itself. So, applications like if you take Oracle, or SQL Database, they are running on high performance storage on Flash. And, what these developers and app owners are looking for is, I have my production data but I need to access that data. They cannot touch production. So they end up using a copy of data, which is driven by backup tools. They backup the data to some tape or some disk appliance, and they perform a full restore operation, which is slower and doesn't give them data access right away. So, with Catalogic what we are trying to do is leverage these production databases, and then quickly spin them up for these mission critical applications. They get a data protection locally on the storage. And these copies can be spun up instantly from an end user for self service. They are looking for quick access to data, which sometimes the storage administrators cannot give them right away. But we provide the tools, and the necessary components to give users access to the data. >> Let me add some color to this, because I agree with what you said. I think when you look at what's occurring within midsize businesses and enterprises, which is really where we sell to. At Pure Storage we don't go into the small market. There is this macro desire from organizations to get their private cloud finalized. This transition from virtual to private cloud. Because the end-state of private cloud is then to optimize IT resources, and start to move your people into areas of future investment. Meaning focus more on IOT. A lot more on the analytics. Whether it be ML or AI. And so when you take a step back and say, okay they'll come from macro and let's talk about our two products. We make an all Flash array. What was interesting about the introduction of our Flash array when we first brought it to market was, it didn't start in tier two or tier three. It started mission critical tier one. In which you're in that space, and you're dealing with some applications powered by an Oracle suite, or on top of SQL Server for example. There are a lot of steps that have to be taken to protect that data. I've got to call the application. I've got to coordinate with the hypervisor layer, the storage. And if I'm now going to start to automate this to bring a cloud-like experience to my end users, I've got to deal with compliance, operations, and security concerns. I should say regulatory, concerns. >> Think of all the personas involved in this. >> Which means, it may be a retention policy. It may be a release the resources. It may be measuring the resource constraints. It may require data masking. All of these elements that are above the storage layer, and above our great performance and cloning engine. Catalogic manages for us. And they've got geocentricity to it. Is it onprem, what country is it in? Is it off in the cloud? These are the elements when you say, I want to make a private cloud a cloud. It's where the hypervisor vendors have kind of left us looking for more. >> John: So that's a gap. So that's the gap you're talking about, if I get your thoughts on that, because Wikibon just put out a survey just last month, that through 2026, the true private cloud, they call it true private cloud, is going to be 237 billion dollars. That speaks to the data center migration to cloud, where you've got true private cloud, which is essentially data center that has cloud-like features for DevOps, and hybrid cloud. But, this mission critical question comes back to it. Because, as VP of technology, you know. We've talked about storage in the past. Databases in isolation are easy to deal with, but when you're dealing with production databases, this is a nightmare. No one wants to fool with them. So talk about how hard this is, because most people don't get how complicated it is to wrangle production databases to get something into production, in a true private cloud. >> So, like you said, production database, nobody wants to touch it, because that's driving business, and anything to do with business, the developers don't want to touch it, the QA. >> They call it NoOps. No, don't touch it. >> Prashant: Don't touch it. Exactly. >> And they also want self-service too. They want no operational people involved as well. >> And that is part of the problem as well. Every time you're, the whole DevOps moment is you trying to combine the developers and talk to the Ops people. But the true DevOps is, the Ops is not involved. Just developer wants some access to it, they get it right away. The Ops people don't usually want to give access to developers for the production environment. Part of the reason because developers want to do a lot of different things with it. They want to do batch testing. They might want to run queries against it, run analytics against it. Use it for big data consumption. And if you do this against production database, not only are you degrading the performance of it, even if it's on Flash, you're performing operations that you don't normally perform on a production database. Which is why they need access to it in a self-contained environment. Not directly on the production. >> And one of the values that the private cloud can differentiate itself on today versus public cloud offerings, is in the public cloud, there isn't an ability to make instant copies of production data. You've got to be making backups that come out of one storage silo across the interconnects to another silo, and then when you want to clone, it's got to copy out of that silo. So from an agility, a time to perspective, the clouds not there on that construct yet. It's all based on software copies. In the model that Catalogic enables, whether its Pure Storage or other storage partners that are within their portfolio of support, we get to leverage these engines that are very mature and robust within the enterprise class storage arrays today, to deliver this agility and speed. And we find customers being very creative in how they're leveraging these technologies. I was sharing before we sat down. We have a customer that, they've taken their legacy environment, which is storing all these customer records and information in a relational database, and now they're leveraging it to say, let's make multiple copies of this database and run queries and parallel across multiple cloned instances. Because they don't have the staff that knows how to adopt a dupe ecosystem today. >> Alright, so let me see if I can put this together. Because, the things I like to look at externally to what you guys are doing, and some trends that I can point to. Pure, your growth on terms of number, is in the green. Competition's down. So you're obviously in a modernization kind of wave. People are buying your stuff and they're moving it in. But also seeing on the data protection side, in the cloud you're seeing new startups emerging. I look around, there's a lot of startups reinventing data protection, and backup and recovery for cloud. So the pressure that the customers have is, I want the best of what I've been doing, but yet I got to move to the cloud really quick. IT modernization, consumers. Whatever you want to call it, it's happening. How do you guys work together to make that happen? Because, I still got to get this new environment, but I got to make the production protection work. There's no four walls anymore. Am I getting this right? >> Yeah, that is correct. So, customers are moving to the cloud there. The notion of hybrid cloud exists in some fashion as in, they are running most of their mission critical applications on production and on faster performing arrays. But they are still moving their workloads into the cloud. So they have a mix of both. With a true data protection, you have to cover both these scenarios. The hybrid cloud model, where you're taking care of data protection both on premises and also into the cloud. So with the cloud migration, now it becomes more important to understand and catalog the entire environment, to identify what's out there. Are they protected? And are my users getting the right access to the right data? So that's where Catalogic comes into the picture, where it can provide a single global view into things, of identifying these are your mission critical applications right there on premises, and here's the data in the cloud. And, not only drive data protection natively in the cloud, but I also give cloud people access to data that's on premises. >> So you guys have a good fit with Pure that way, because they're >> Prashant: Exactly. >> hitting the large enterprises, and then emerging modern enterprises, but to store Flash. You guys kind of give some extensibility through that integration >> Right. >> So I got to ask you the tough question. Data masking and security. Huge issues right now. Security in particular. There's no perimeter in the cloud. You guys know all about this on the storage side. Onprem is pretty well known, but still there's no perimeter even on premise. How are you guys dealing with security in your relationships? >> That's a great question. It's actually easier for me. That wasn't a tough one. >> John: Damn, I wanted it to be a hard question. >> That wasn't a tough one. So data obfuscation, or data masking, is a main ask for mission critical applications. So, especially when you're talking about DevOps giving access to data. You don't want to give access to production data that contains information like credit card info, social security number, blood group of your firstborn. Kind of information that you want to keep private. So, Catalogic integrates with some of the data masking, or obfuscation tools out there. So, that's a great value add to the storage as well. So, from a storage layer you don't really know what's the content of the data. Whereas Catalogic provides that information, where it can take the database information, and apply masking against it. And, when we manage these snapshots, we provide role-based access control against it. So an end user, we'll give them access to them. For admins to do basic recovery they can perform against the entire database. Whereas a developer who needs access to a subset of the data will only get access or see the data that we allow them to see. >> Okay, hard question, then I'll try to bring another one to you. Self-service as nirvana. IT operations moving into higher value, cloud-native, developer. How do you guys see the progress of full self-service. Scalable, horizontally scalable data. Are you there now? Where does that fit, that picture of full self-service? No operations guys involved. >> So, no operations guys involved is still. >> John: See I stumped you. >> Right. So, it's still in a runner because it combines a couple of things. So one, if you want to give access to data, it has to be instant. And it doesn't have to be script driven. It has to be either click of a button, or leverage the existing tools that they have. And the other is, how much can you give access? So in the sense that, I have 15 developers. And, 15 developers are all asking for the same data, and you need to have a performing storage that should be able to handle these multiple stream requests. >> And I think you're speaking very eloquently about the technology, but I think you're understating the whole nature of enabling the private cloud and having it be self-service. There is a point in time when you first take that first 30 to 60 minutes to setup Catalogic and to register into the authentication realms, and the virtualization environment, and the storage array. Okay sure, that's overhead. Then you're going to spend some time with your team, as the operations side of the house, defining your infrastructure policies. And you're probably going to go reach to talk to, again this is DevOps. I'm going to go talk to the development teams, and go talk to the regulatory folks. What are the requirements? Because does this data have to stay in country? What countries is is visible for? >> There's some legwork up front. >> What has to be masked based on what groups? And you setup these role-based policies. Once that's in place, that's no different than ... Now you have a service catalog. And you're showing up, and you're like, "Hey I'm John." "You guys know I'm part of the Oracle team." >> And so the developers can have full access to that data. They can program with it. >> Vaughn: They get to catalog and the API set >> Prashant: So what we ... Exactly, so what we create is templates. And these templates can be customized to a developer. So I have a financial services team, that needs access to the financial service data. So we'll create templates that'll include policies like, hey, this is the storage provision for it. This is the data, the mass data which contains the financials. And, we'll give that template to the financial services team. >> And just for the audience, because I think we all grok this, but I want to make sure the audience gets this. The difference between what we're talking about, and just saying well, "Hey I can clone" "a database virtual machine today" "by my hypervisor." Sure. But that's a manual process by the virtualization team. Which is disconnected from the application team. >> There needs to be an email. A meeting gets setup. People have to weigh in. >> But there's no data masking. There's no role-based access posse. There's no termination of the resource policy. So, we're sitting again and back in, sure virtualization gave us agility, but we're still manual and trying to track it. This gives us not just a catalog of services. It's all audited. Now we can go back and see who accessed what data at what time. Cloud. >> Awesome. Vaughn I want to ask you the final question, because I want to talk about kind of of a futuristic industry view. AI is the hype right now. Augmented intelligence I call it. But, soon artificial intelligence. We're seeing self-driving cars out there. Will there be self-driving storage? I don't mean literally driving around, but I mean, talking about auto provision. We're talking about the ability to just plug something in, having machine learning and AI, these kinds of things. Are you guys working on things like that in R&D? I would imagine a world where ultimately you plug the storage in. Magic happens. People are programming with it. It's programmable. Where are we on this? What's the vision? >> So you got to watch out. This is a trick question, right? Rule number one from your Comms team, don't make news. So, I would say is, again, going back to our pillars, in the foundation for Pure. How do we help customers put their data to work? We make it effortless, efficient, and evergreen. And under that effortless piece, the big notion with Purists is there's no knobs to turn. And so the secret sauce is that I can give you Flash performance at disk economics. And guess what? You're virtualization admin can be a storage expert. Can hit six nine's availability without ever reading a manual. So this is the foundation of what we've built with Flash Array. We've now rolled out Flash Blade. And, let's just say with our partnership >> Are you being a good, you're being a good spokesperson right now, by not trying, trying to go to the script. Prashant we'll go to you, because we know everyone's working on automation. So that's not a secret. The question though is specific. I don't want to get you in trouble, but the point is, people are looking for real automation where there's some intelligence. That's the trend. You guys are kind of at the beginning stages of your relationship >> Prashant: Correct. >> that are doing that now at some level. When's that next level, what's it look like. >> The heart of automation is building that catalog. And there goes in the name of our company Catalogic. I don't want to give any future details away, but yeah, that's where everybody's going. They're all looking for a chatbot, or an Alexa-like project. >> Well storage is a service is what people say. Tesla is a car, it's not really a car anymore. It's a service. >> Prashant: It's a service, right. >> Powered by software. Storage you can almost imagine some product coming out that's very service and connected oriented. >> Well look, I wasn't trying to dodge your question but, >> I know. >> at the end of the day, everybody wants to automate their data center. I think you were taking it a step further saying, "Okay look, I see frameworks here" "of what we're talking about between Pure and Catalogic." What comes next? We've got a lot of folks that we know in this valley that are working for a number of startups trying to say hey, how do I bring AI into the data center? I think it's going to be more prevalent over the next four or five years, so let's see how it develops. >> Okay, so where does the partnership go next? We'll kind of end it on that. And you guys have a great partnership, and thanks for coming in and sharing the data. But Prashant and Vaughn, where does this go next? What happens next? Good integration, what's the next step? >> I think customers who are looking at this today, the easiest place to start is to say I want to automate Oracle and/or SQL, or I want to bring, and look at reinventing my backup space. I don't want to buy an appliance. I want data protection to be part of my ecosystem and cloud-connected. Where does it go from here? I think we'll see probably an expansion in terms of our partnership. So we've got a new product called Flash Blade that we want to look at, >> Prashant: You want to look at as well. >> work at working on together. We've got us some other work that we can't announce at this point in time. But if you come to Accelerate, which is our user conference in June, you'll hear about some of the new capabilities we're going to bring to market, and that we are working on within that ecosystem together as well. >> Yeah, and for us it goes back to the mission critical databases. So we are expanding our portfolio, and adding more databases, and expanding existing databases. >> John: Expanding the catalog. Microservices oriented, that kind of thing? >> Exactly, and supporting other ... >> Key industry applications, based on vertical. >> Right, and tighter integration with existing storage arrays as well as the new ones. >> Cloud is about the data, right? The data is where the action is. That's the action. >> And we are looking at how to extend into the cloud as well. >> Alright, Catalogic and Pure here on inside the CubeConversation. Prashant, Vaughn, thanks for spending the time. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching this CubeConversation.

(music) >> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pure Accelerate 2017. We're here at Pure70 in San Francisco. I'm Dave Vallente with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're switching things up a little bit. Scott Dietzen is still on stage wrapping up the Keynotes. We're about a half hour late. Buses were running late today, so we're going to adjust a little bit. Vik Nagjee is here. He's the CTO of healthcare for Pure Storage and he's with Sathya Sankaran, who is with Catalogic. Gents, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Good to see you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So Vik, let's start with you. Healthcare, your title, interesting. I don't think I've, well, very rarely do you see a storage company, especially one that's slightly under a billion dollars, with healthcare in somebody's title. What's that all about? You guys obviously, strategy and healthcare and lifesciences, data driven industry, you guys are all about the data these days, but how'd you come to this and tell us about what's going on in the healthcare world. >> Absolutely, you're absolutely correct. Coming from healthcare IT over several years it's been slow comings in terms of infrastrucure companies in and of themselves saying, "Hey, let's get really serious about healthcare as a vertical," and bringing in people who are subject matter experts and have done healthcare for a very long period of time. I think the realization was an inflection point in terms of saying, "We've actually as an industry spent so much money on digitizing healthcare that we've actually gotten to a point where we need to start seeing some returns on that." The way to accomplish that is by putting data to work, right? So there's this wonderful hashtag on Twitter, if you go check it out, hashtag put data to work. And I love it. Basically, it's about saying, "We have all this data. It's growing." As soon as you try to fit a curve to it, the curve changes because it's kind of growing unbounded. The beauty is we want it to, because in that data lies better patient care and outcomes and in that data, once you actually understand and start to harness it, lies better financial success for the organization. That's what we're about here at Pure. >> Okay, and from Catalogic's perspective, Sathya, what's your angle here? What's the partnership all about? What do you guys bring to the table? >> Talking about data, snapshots are like gym memberships, right? You put data to work. Snapshots are like, everybody has access to one but very few actually use that, right? So we want to put the data to work. We want to put your copies to work and snapshots are the best way to take a copy of your production dataset and spin it up for PC environments, training environments, release, testing, development. All of these work can actually be done outside through snapshots of datasets that are sitting on Pure Storage. >> But, just to be clear, you guys are the catalog for the snapshots. It's your snapshots actually, right? >> Absolutely, and that's one key differentiator here in terms of the partnership that we have. It's all within the same data plane. All of he data is absolutely captured, stored, snapshoted and managed through Pure, right? Catalogic provides to us a very, very great catalog integration to say, "Okay, how do I actually deal with this data and what do I do with it?" And plus some more that we'll talk about here in a second. >> Okay, let's come back to the healthcare, if we can for a second Stu. >> Stu: Yeah. >> Because the healthcare, it's all about electronic medical records, meaningful use, HIPA compliance, you know, on and on and on. A lot of really not fun stuff but really important things, Obamacare, etc. Are we, sort of, primarily focused there, Vik, or are we starting to see this notion of data value coming to healthcare? >> Absolutely, we're starting to see notion of data value coming to healthcare. The way that I like to describe it is that over the past 30 something years, we have built an amazing library, or repository, for healthcare data. This is data that we're just putting in, right? When you go back to the hospital, or the doctor, they pull the data back out, they look at it for a few seconds, and they come and see you for a 15 minute visit, right? You've been waiting for 2 and a half hours at this point, right, so not great patient experience. We're trying to change that as well. >> Surfing the web. >> Vik: Right, right. >> See what's wrong with it (laughing). >> Exactly, right? But what we're finding now is that there lies so much meaning in data in terms of actionable intelligence, not only to provide you better care and to take care of you, but to also treat populations and say, "Okay let's, as a general population, make people healthier." Yes, we're learning from sensors in cars. We're learning from the internet of things all over the place and data, just in general, is central now to healthcare. Everybody has taken data now and finally put it on the pedestal that it deserves to be on and they're understanding that data matters in healthcare. All data matters. >> Sathya, I wonder if you could bring us inside some of these customers. I remember when object storage first rolled out. It was like healthcare, oh great. We're going to have metadata. We're going to be able to use this. It felt like it was, "Oh, well, we check the box on compliance and put some stuff places," but we hadn't really been transforming the way data got used for healthcare. What are you seeing in your customer base? Any stories you can tell us? >> A couple of things to point out is all of these have electronic health card systems, right? They actually sit on a lot of different databases. There's SQL, there's Oracle. There's also an intersystem cache database. Epic is one of the largest EHR environments and it runs on intersystems cache. What we've done at this point is to kind of treat the cache database as a first-grade citizen. You know Oracle and SQL have always been treated that way by all the other data management companies. We are elevating cache database, which is a huge player in the healthcare market and delivering options to snapshots of applications as well, not just on premise, but also allow the first lady to go into the cloud. You just saw Dietzen announce that you can actually now do snapshots and offload them to cloud as well. With us, you have the ability to orchestrate those snapshots and clear up consistent snapshots and have them hold on premise and on cloud as well. So we act as the orchestration layer for all these snapshots and application Pure already provides. Some people may use clips today, but owning Pure is like owning a family-owned car and having four bald tires with strips. We add the ability to actually create and manage all your datasets. As it changes, we keep up with it and run those orchestration for you. >> I'd like to add on thing there actually, and Sathya hit one some really great points. From the business standpoint, what we're seeing, what I'm personally seeing as an evolution over time, is that given the fact that everybody realizes that data's important, right? What they're doing is bringing data back in to centralize control within these IT organizations at healthcare organizations. Typically, it's very siloed and departmental. It's coming back in, so the CIO is really getting a purview over, and their arms around, all of the data. Now, this brings up additional challenges, right? You have X number of copies for your environments. You're copy data management is very important in healthcare. As we're growing the data and it's just going crazy, we can't also have multiple copies and just keep going crazy, right? There used to be a time, and I can speak personally about Epic, because I used to work at Epic for many years, right? At Epic, there used to be a time where we would basically come up with configuration in terms of trying to figure out how much storage you need for, not just for capacity, but for performance purposes. We'd end up with some ungodly number of copies, right, just to make sure you actually had your environments and also the performance. With data reduction technology, especially what we have at Pure here from a data reduction standpoint for digital application and compression along with the copy data management pieces, you're able to say, "Okay, I can bring some semblance to this entire house, right?" The last part is, in terms of security, right, cyber security, with all rants aware and everything else that's going on, you really want to have, in healthcare, peace of mind to say that not only do you have air gapped copies that you can actually bring back that are relevant, but you've gone through on a regular basis and proven organically that you can do this and you can do this within your SLAs and your SLOs. >> It also seems important to me that you can share many more copies, virtual copies, of data out of a single flash instance-- >> Absolutely. >> Yup, yup. >> And then catalogic obviously helps you manage that. Can you guys talk about the specific solution that you're sort of developing or partnering with others, database partners or whomever, for healthcare? >> Yeah, so I can start out and then you can take it from there, right Sathya? I think the way that we looked at this was to say, "Okay, what's the day in a life, right? What's the day in a life of storage and system administrators at these large healthcare organizations that actually touch data, be they snapshots, or backups, or clones, or integrity checks, or restoration tests, or what have you, right? Also, understanding the environment strategy that folks like Epic, and Allstrips, and Metattack, and Sherner, and whoever else used, right? Basically saying, "Okay, how can we take all of these things and apply a standard common framework to build the automation and orchestration and cataloging associated with it, plus the auditing associated with it, and provide that as a all in framework for our healthcare organizations to take advantage of, minimizing a significant amount of human intervention and interaction, which as we know, has issues. We run into these problems all the time. You hear from customers horror stories once a month across the country somewhere the other customer has an administrator who, with great intentions, has actually gone the wrong way and restored a snapshot of production from yesterday back on production instead of-- >> Whoops happens really fast. >> Whoops happens, right? >> And fast (laughing). >> That's all we can say, right, whoops. That's sort of our goal in terms of saying, "How can we actually take the burden away so that they can keep the main thing, the main thing. Focus on innovations and focus on partnering with your organization to help them accomplish their goals. So, Sathya? >> Yeah, and the other piece to it, we talked about ransomware. In healthcare space, what happened in Europe and UK was a huge thing. A lot of the other solutions that deliver copy data management use an appliance storage, right, so they want to actually move all your data set onto an appliance and want it off of there. What we deliver is basically in place copy data management. Basically the data sits on your storage, sits on the first-grade storage that you bought and using, and with the ability to drive back to a snapshot point in time, we can actually immediately come up and run. So this is, again, going back to the formula one analogy, right, you could run a spare tire, which is what all the appliances deliver. You have a problem, you could run a spare tire for a while, but at some point, you have to take a downtime and go back to it. With us, it's a formula one pit stop. You have a ready copy that is perfectly good, available for you to replace any time you get it down. We deliver the control and the orchestration layer and we give you the ability to go back to your old production state at any point and fairly quickly, and we allow you to exercise your data by creating testing environments for your developers. We met the systems team yesterday at Accelerate. They told us some of their UK customers are creating 40 copies of non-production datasets from their production datasets for their app dev purposes. >> I'd like to add on one thing there, it's very interesting about the InterSystems piece. I also worked at InterSystems for several years and have a really great relationship with them. One of the applications that they have is something that we're working on very closely with them, is InterSystems HealthShare, right? The unique challenge around HealthShare is that you have an environment that has multiple database instances that are loosely affiliated, but they still have logical consistency across them. The Holy Grail there, or the key there, is in terms of being able to provide copy data management and application consistency across these instances. That's kind of the work that we're doing together. >> Yeah, and at that point, the storage becomes your common compute layer, to some extent, right? Because if you want to take a snapshot across 40 different systems that are all in different volumes and storage, the only way you can take an app consistent snapshot is to take a consistency group, or PR calls it production groups. We have to be able to define that and take snapshots from the storage layer. >> That fundamentally changing the data access paradigm, really. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming to The Cube and sharing your story in healthcare and best of luck. Really appreciate it. >> Vik: Thank you. >> Sathya: Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> Vik: Thanks, Dave. >> Sathya: Thank, too. >> All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is Pure Accelerate. This is The Cube. (music)

live from the mandalay bay convention center in las vegas it's the cues covering vmworld 2016 rock you buy vmware and its ecosystem sponsors and welcome back here on the cube to continue our coverage to vmworld from mandalay bay along with peter burrows i'm john woloson it's a pleasure to welcome two fellows are know all about being on the cube one of them very recently Kim Barth is back with a CEO and co-founder of catalyzing software came good to see you oh it's great to see you and Eric Herzog I mean the Hawaiian shirt we know is is your signature moment it was finally a vice president probably marketing and management at IBM but you're an original cubist you said that I think the first year that the cube happened I was on with Dave eons ago must have been either 2010 or 2011 the first cube ever we got to make you like an emeritus member of the Alumni Association something and let it be careful when we say say cubist let's be very clear about it right now I've got to mix words here yeah kubera all right so if you would let's take a look at talk about your relationship Kenta logic at IBM I know you have a long-standing partnership you might call that that's evolving and getting a little bit stronger and Ken if you would maybe paint that picture a little bit oh look I mean these guys are just fantastic to work with we've been working with IBM for a couple of years now we're excited because we're going to continue to move the relationship forward and we've got some exciting new announcements about supporting even more of their storage coming out later this year what we're really excited about is the way that they've jumped in and they have a complete line of flash products and as you know from our conversation the other day flash is just taking the market absolutely by storm particular around the primary applications so what we've done at IBM is dramatic extend our portfolio this year we've been a market leader for years in all flash and we see flashes ubiquity cross all primary data sets so whether that be the high-performance databases VMware environments are virtualized environments cloud configurations big data linux doesn't matter what the workload is and we have all sorts of price points all sorted from performance yo flash does have different performance characteristics depending on how you configure it now you use it substantially now of course any flash configuration abstention faster than a traditional storage array or any hybrid array 10x to as much as a hundred x in real-world application spaces so we've expanded it down from our high end into very cost effective energy products as low as nineteen thousand dollars street price not lit not right there at the point of attack end-user raid five configuration for nineteen thousand we have big data analytics all flash configurations we have mainframe in the upper end of the Linux community of what's left of the UNIX world that's still out there that few Solaris and AIX business we have a lot of products of that space again all going flash and it doesn't matter what the workload is virtualized workloads database workloads virtual server workloads virtual desktop workloads cloud workloads new world databases Splunk spark Bongo Hadoop Cassandra all of those types of workloads now can be all flash and we have the right workloads with the right solution at the rice price point and you pick the right price point right solution you need for the right workload an application and when it seems to me that you talk about performance obviously key factor their speed you know off the charts but cost is the one that once that's been solved as you said is that the big nighter is that's what's going to like the what you're seeing is flash is essentially at the same price as disk was so there's a number of storage efficiency technologies on the primary side which is a we do cattle onic edges efficiency technologies on the copy side because so much copies of data are made not only for disaster protection but for test and dev snapshotting that's n used for backup so they track all that to get efficiency on the secondary side of the equation we do things like real time compression you block level d do we have all kinds of technologies dying to cut the cost of flash and so when you factor that in flash is way less expensive actually then disc and when you look at how it impacts your data center so for example if you were running certain workloads we have a real world public reference to run their work blood which is database work look took 80 servers because the storage was so slow so you over provision your servers because of what's called storage latency that customer just swapped out the storage for flash and went from 80 physical servers to 10 to the exact same workload so the impact of flash is not just performance oriented it's actually very cost oriented not just what does it cost per gigabyte for the storage but if you can take out 70 servers you just cut not only the capex on his server farm right all the operational expenditures around it and then what cat logic does people make copies of the primary data sets and they make everything efficient on the copy cider if you will the secondary side of storage and so they complement each other what we do on primary what they do on secondary so let's talk about that a little bit so if you think about it there no productivity is a function of the amount of work that you can do divided by the amount of cost or resources consumed to form that word so flash has significant benefits as you just said that cause side but when we start talking about a lot more copies that can be made available to developers or decision-makers in a lot of different forms now we're accelerating the speed by which that digital assets get created and we're improving productivity not just through efficiency and the cost but accelerating the value that I t's able to deliver through the business that's exactly right you're hitting the nail on the head because as Eric over here said it saves capex and opex with just slash but if you had a copy data management product particularly one like ours that has it's really a combination a copy data management we have a workflow engine and we have full access to rest api's that the customer can begin to tailor it to their environment and solve a lot of pain points like around test dev database copies snap copies things like that you know they did some studies IDC actually did some studies earlier this year we're at any given time a customer would have 50 copies of different data floating around the neighborhood 50 snaps and the reason this is a complex issue is because you have many different storage types taking many different stamps you have applications snaps and so if you think about it this all starts by organizing the snaps putting them in a searchable database if you will then offering a workflow engine where you can automate the process even make it self service right and at the end of the day what can happen is they can move delete so they really kind of you have control over your environment but what they can do is they can begin to really save huge money so with flash you're going to have good kept at x + op X but if you put our ECX product in which is what a lot of our customers call copy data management on steroids you can see geometric savings of that op X and capex but you're also accelerate development time absolutely official with all about efficiencies you all those things are absolutely improved absolutely right and then if you start having like we have arrested a series of rest api's you can begin to really tailor it to that customers environment so if you're doing again I go back to the test dev example and test dev we can tie that directly into things like puppets chef bluemix right these are all development tools that make it totally efficient for the software developer right that's just one use case will we go ahead no so Eric as I new introduces more of these products arguments in the storage business for a long time forever yeah ain't that about me and respects IBM created the whole concept of storage administration whatever was 30 years ago now but as IBM does this is storage increasingly being elevated as customers see their data volumes going up and the need to track where this data is who's using it the number of copies in place how is that impacting the way IBM thinks about the concept of an overall system well we look at it from the application space it's all about the applications workloads and use cases and customers want to optimize the business value of that data so as it's growing exponentially you'd be able to access that data quickly and most importantly it needs to be always there so everyone talks about speech BCC speed for flash it's not just about speed of flash your Flash ray needs to be reliable available and serviceable just like our driver ray had to be and so you're looking at different characteristics and performance different characteristics and price different characteristics in the rats capability the reliability available in serviceability and you tie that to what you need for your workloads we've had the highest in oracle database in a company let's say that company is all oracle so you need something like our flash systems a 9000 or flash system 900 but if you've got the oracle database that tracks their asset management which would mean things like chairs tables and whiteboards that's not high performance that could go on our store wise 50 30 f which is way more cost effective and it's incredibly fast compared to our driver e but not as fast as our flash systems so it's very important a that you have the performance but be if you don't have the reliability doesn't matter how fast you are if the thing fails then your cloud goes down your virtual environment goes down your VMware doesn't work you can't access that Oracle or there sa p or that Hadoop and so it's really about how to optimize those workloads those applications and those use cases and storage is the rock-solid foundation underneath that allows you to do that absolutely and when you're going into world that's all about cloud which means real-time access and self service and the self-service suspect by the way it means that you don't always have a store gentlemen accessing it so if the thing fails and the guy's a VMware admin or a developer in Oracle or in any other environment he doesn't know what to do so you can't have the storage fee land in cognitive workloads and big data analytics workloads where you're running petabytes and petabytes and petabytes of information as fast as you possibly can you're trying to make business decisions or rail times you need the speed so what if it's super fast and then it fails so to put it on a black trading you know database for black trading for example or some of financial applications if it's really fast and then it fails that didn't help it hurts you so it's all about how to manage those workloads applications use cases natural for performance which everyone knows flash is but all that reliability available in the serviceability and then they manage a cat logic on the back side all the copies that people create which is it which is critical to make sure that those get managed appropriately and you don't have you really need 50 copies but you don't want 150 it is completely and efficient on the storage side and then developer doesn't know what to use so you just made it worse for yourself so you just introduce raise an interesting point related to data governance so I know that obviously cata logic has some ideas about how data governance is likely evolved partly in response to the need to manage multiple San apples understand where they are talk to us a little bit about how data governance which is fundamentally about how a business brings policy roles responsibilities to assets as data becomes more of an asset house governance changing oh I think governance is huge because dated you know data is exploding and particularly you start moving you have numbers of copies like Eric was saying how do you track that how do you know where it is how do you you know if you're in a compliance based business you could be in a lot of trouble so you've got to make sure you can audit and know where it goes and again one of the ways to do that is to keep it under control and not have so many copies floating around in his example you might make 10 to 15 copies of that database why do that if you only need one right that's one of our big advantages that we have versus some of our competitors we do what's called in place copy data management which means we we simply leverage Eric's great storage out there so a lot of our competitors will actually put a copy of that they'll make a copy on Eric storage move it to their storage and then you've kind of exacerbated the problem a little bit right what's like hoarding right exactly right but I and I mean kind of the Peters pointing some what you're saying is is that because we can we do right and so we make all these copies and it's exactly not need you know fifth down but but because I can and it's cheaper and storage is going down like cleaning out that closet we all have that closet at the house that we just keep putting stuff in and one of these days we think we're going to clean it out and the thing just grows and grows and they have to buy another house to get another closet so again how does this all this curb that behavior and that allow me to monitor through some governance policy when somebody is going over the line and we bring it back of the line and and we get a little more regular restrictive act again because of our workflow engine that we have in the product you can set thresholds you can automate the process so is example when a you know when a DBA or somebody gets a copy of the database you can put a time limit on when it's going to wipe it out they're going to stay in sync across the board so again you're not replicating this thing time and time again they're getting timely data when they need it and then it can automatically be removed but if I mean time one of the biggest problems within an IT organization is making available making data available to the disparate groups that need it solutely administrative costs of I need data well we'll get around to giving you that second to sorry in September right being able to do this much faster and utilize flaps technologies to facilitate that process has an impact on cost has an impact on the benefits which increases productivity has an impact of governance but also is an impact on the healthy friendly relations between IT and the business yes well what's happening is you're undergoing a revolution in the data center cloud obviously it's started with virtualization now it's extending to the cloud now you have a line of business that's more involved in IT than it's ever been before so the last thing you want is to worry about your storage or you just want it to be the foundation okay I'm from Silicon Valley we have earthquakes buildings really fall down on earthquakes if they have a bad foundation if you have a rock-solid foundation your cloud your cognitive your database workloads will always be fine you want to make sure that as you're doing that you're doing a cost effectively so both high performance that you need but high performance has a whole bunch of different price points at high performance because the entire world's got high performance other thing from an IT perspective and a business on a perspective flash storage is actually the evolution the revolutions the rest of the data center right I'm old enough where when I took my first computer class of University of California not a punch card then it all went tape anyone's seen a 1985 Schwarzenegger spy movie it's all tape then you see a 1995 Schwarzenegger spy movie and it's all hard drive arrays now it's all flash arrays so it's just an evolution from a storage perspective and it coincides with a revolution in the data center of cloud cognitive big data analytics real-time evaluation of data sets and so flash is coming at the fur and perfect time as you have this revolutionary confluence in the data center in the cloud and the web application workload yusuke space the fact that flash is only at evolution is actually great because you don't have to worry about it it's just an evolution of storage and allows you to take advantage of the revolution in your gayness enter your application or workload space that's the way the flash brings is is it's not a revolution it helps the revolution it does because as Eric was saying it you want to modernize your data center is what you're out to do and if you splash is a good step towards that and then if you had a copy data management tool like our product ECX on top of it it gives you the flexibility to move to the cloud move move it move data up to the cloud and back right it allows you to start offering self-service to your people so it doesn't take you know weeks or days to get that copy of the data they can start doing it themselves so it's a step in the right direction as he said from an evolution to the revolution of the data center yeah I'll bet out there somewhere right now there are a couple Millennials watching say did you already said about punch cards what a punch good oh no that's all it's all about date at the right place at the right time for the right people and you guys are a great example of getting that job done and thanks for being with us and sharing your story and we wish you continued success that's right I'd like to say one thing with you it is finished real quick if anybody out there has SVC or if they have in the flash from IBM please come see us we've got a great product that will greatly increase the capex it's cattle ajik software or can bart thank you gentlemen for being with us here on the cube we continue our coverage from vmworld after this thank you

live from the mandalay bay convention center in las vegas it's the cues covering vmworld 2016 rock you by vmware and its ecosystem sponsors it's legal yeah everything's legal welcome inside walls here on the cube as we continue our coverage here at vmworld once again we're back or what is going to be an exciting three days here in Mandalay Bay and i'm joined by my partner in crime you might say mark farley the producer Vulcan cast a host of Vulcan cast and tell us about Vulcan kestrel quick mark well you've seen comedy in cars you've seen singing in cars with carpool karaoke this is discussions about technology and cars it's tech talk and cars I see it on you can see it on Vulcan cast calm what a novel name for a website I'm pretty you figure good all day coming up with that one didn't you yeah but it's cool you know what it's like to look for a name absolutely benefit but it's a neat neat concept Tech Talk comes the cars you're kind of like the the james corbett of tech there you go except we don't sing about it I'm more like the Jerry Seinfeld maybe that's the next time we're joined by a couple of guests who are they become partners to more or less here in the business and solutely with Vaughn Stewart who is the enterprise architect and chief evangelist I love that by the way of on a pure storage and that evangelist looked up you do have it you getting the whole thing today and kimbark is a CEO of cata logic software and gentlemen ulcers thank you for being here we appreciate that so if you would start off by telling us a little bit about your individual companies you know what you do and then the marriage you to have partnered up here for the past four months came together pretty quickly and what that's all about and if you would bomb what you go first sure so pure storage is recognized widely as being the number one independent all-flash storage vendor we've been recognized for three years as being the leader in gartner's solid-state array Magic Quadrant we've really allowed flash to be consumed by the masses by making it more affordable than traditional disk based storage arrays and deliver all the promise of of the performance of flash kent and in a nutshell cattle objects software's that spin out three years ago from the syncsort company and what we've got about twenty nine patents we're working hard what we did is we evolved our technology to this whole copy data management space which is very exciting and when you marry copy data management to flash technology you drive some really serious effects and catback savings for customers so it's kind of a peanut butter and chocolate on here right was together really really does right so let's talk about your relationship then this has only been four months in the making you've known each other for a long time but you put together your business venture here very quickly what brought it together so fast and how did it make that kind of sense that boom it just happened almost overnight like that to start going on with the Kent listen we were lucky enough that these guys actually found us that a trade show it was a mug event Vav mug event in Austin Texas they found some for a show they have been absolutely brilliant to work with in the business that we're in we're what's called in place copy data management and why that's important is because we get to pick our partners and it's a lot easier to build a technology if you have a partner that cooperates and these guys have been so cooperative that's what made this thing tick they saw a gap that we could fill they were kind enough they sent us a box up to work with the team culturally has been aligned I mean we we've kind of do things all up and down the stack the same way pricing I think we're very similar channel driven we're similar the way we we look at at working together is very similar say just been brilliant and that's kind of what it is it's a neat at the end of the date and to try to squeeze the effects and capex savings out for customers that's kind of the do yeah and we're also seeing a lot of requests from our from our customer base we have a large number of joint customers as well as customers that were interested in purchasing the other technology but we're waiting for a point of integration and so as we're seeing this shift in the the mid market and the enterprise to a more DevOps centric model more of infrastructure teams converging their their server and their compute management or application owners into owning the entire stack there was this this need for taking the data management constructs that we had and allowing an end-to-end ecosystem enable meant so that dev teams could just you know at the push of a button and refresh their data sets move they move their development efforts forward and get rid of all the old legacy time centric based provisioning models yeah I mean I mean CDM has kind of become you know one of these hot buzzwords right all of a sudden as as our data storage just become more capable and has become cheaper we tend to hoard more stuff right now listen we're hanging on things a lot longer so what is the gap exactly you're talking about that you're filling and what's the need that you're addressing specifically then you have all this data at your disposal and and and I guess with Flash movie great question John so what what happens is when you first of all let's talk about what's driving the flash analogy right why why flash is so popular right now everybody that we've talked to is either moving to flash or thinking about moving to flash simply for their primary applications you know those are things like databases virtualization filers you know SharePoint right and as you start to move you get you get really good benefits around effects from using your flash because the speed and the performance particularly with what they do they've got some compression stuff that's unbelievable and then what we do is we overlay that so if you take CDM which was your question if you look at CDM what CDM does copy data management it allows you to deal with all of these copies in the in the world today you've got so many of the vendors that are taking different snapshots at different times and you end up at any given time I think IDC did a study what was it like 50 50 versions of an email that you've got floating around is any given time floating in your organization right so what Vaughn was referring to let's take one example in a test dev environment right we could drive home on that which they do a lot more than that but if you take the test stab and let's say you're a developer and you have an Oracle database that you really want to test the latest data right now without flash without CDM what happens is you make a copy of that database you move it to the developers and getting that copy if you're a developer getting that copy away from the internal IT infrastructure department can take you hours can take days go ahead we've we've got customers whose current copy data management process is it is is fulfilled by either a full-time employee or a staff that runs around doing arm and restores or restores from tape and development teams have to try to anticipate weeks in advance when a new copy of the data that model has been the the de facto standard in the industry for a decade or more and in what you're seeing from from all conversations around DevOps is agility it's time to how can I no increase the rate at which we innovate part of it is by bringing agility into your development process and so so this is a real nice pairing of technologies the performance capabilities within a flash a flash array allows you to scale a large number of instances the instant ability to clone the data set gives you gives you the agility but it's just an engine I still have to take care of the rest of the stack I got a role based access which users get to see which data do I need a datum ask the data or do they get direct access are they having a virtual copy or a physical right and best part can I make it a portal or can I make it right into their native workflow so they never hit the storage team or even the infrastructure team so let's talk about how customers are going to use this right pure has been a big leader not just in flash but and also digital efficiency capacity efficiency and you've had to be that right from the get-go people are saying well how am I going to be able to get the cost you know the effect of costs down of this flash well you have dee doop and you have compression and now you're adding this application layer or higher layer if you will another layer of the stack towards you know data density do you think this is going to have you done run the numbers on what kind of percentage or anything like that that customers will see absolutely kind of kind of absolute ken so I'm actually doing in the solution booth I think 430 tomorrow's solution a the vmworld booth we've got a customer six flags theme park operator that doing this test dev case we saved ninety percent affects efficiency for these guys so there's some really solid number again 90 90 90 / such a big number what's a huge number but it's what is what Vaughn was trying to say if you start marrying the workflow if you take their ability to make the storage and the moving the data more efficient and you'll ever their tool and then you overlay it with our api's we have rest api is that you can tie into a customer environment and then we've got to work flow this workflow engine that we call full stack automation the customer can start automating a lot of the stuff that they're trying to do and it's a home run yeah let's be let's be get a little bit in greater depth here but not too deep yeah these capabilities have existed in market for a long time yeah but the customers had to assemble and build their own scriptures in a fool's the phone and again we're not talking just copying of the data yeah we're giving you an efficiency in the copy data engine with it running on the flash array right what cata logic is doing is giving you a single interface either via portal or API for the entire orc for the orchestration of the entire stack the test Network the virtual machines the physical servers the volume managers all the way down to the copy of the data absolutely so I'm going to dive even deeper bond what kind of skill set be careful what did I get wet what kind of skill set does a customer need to have to take advantage of this solution so that's that's a beautiful question because it goes back to the synergy between our two companies right we're known for being able to set up storage in under an hour that requires no administrative skill set right nothing to tune much like very much like an iphone right kind of out of the box there's no manual right cata logics in the same boat you download an ova you're up and running in 30 minutes you're connected to the pure array in four at 40 minutes yeah you're connected ad and 50 and you're running you're off to the races right we don't have any boxes no appliance versus our competitors out there right we don't have any agents to install no appliances it's just it's the perfect match simplistic and we're running and through api's right we're getting we're getting consistent application consistent copies of the data sets right and we're orchestrating through the built in infrastructures that that already exists whether we're looking at vSphere or the rest of the ecosystem so say a customer does their own development and they've got they've got people that know how to use api's program for api's will they be able to will they be any faster be able to do more with it or does it really not what it does this gets back to the effects issue right so so with our REST API they can tie it in and we've already got a lot of things that are tied in like some of the development tools out there chef puppet bluemix from IBM I mean these are all things that we we can kind of work with to complete the environment and allowed them to lever is amazing platform does that answer your question I think yeah so what about the market for this right it a happy data management took a while to take off right it's one of those things in data management has always been a tough thing and it takes a while for customers to sort of get a what what I'm going to say a group think and the critical mass of people thinking about it it looks like you've had some help in the last year with other vendors getting in well and popularizing it you know EMC has theirs and commvault I think is doing something in my response is talking about it now you know 18 months ago those of what he did but what started it mark and this is and that's a great question is what I was alluding to earlier once flash comes on the scene and particularly flash vendors that can do what they do that have got a huge cat-back saving or opik savings for the customer then you can start working in their workflow in their processes and saving them even more money so it actually is copy data management with flash storage can becomes almost to have to have versus and the other things that we were doing a year ago it was a nice to have what i call a nice to have right because if you start looking at how to save yourself money from an effects perspective you might as well look at how to go all the way and sometimes you can triple to 10 times your savings geometrically by adding see the right CDM what i call enhance CDM what our customers sometimes say is they call us a CDM on steroids copy data management on steroids that's energy is a big thing if you've looked at the industry historically what you've seen as storage vendors put out their own homogeneous right automation walls right point bond and then you've seen a number of heterogeneous vendors to play their tools but they don't want to have any correlation with any hardware vendor right right and so and so as a storage provider right and customers are looking to say well look I don't wanna get locked in a particular storage provider and right so that's one aspect as a storage vendor we're sitting there saying we'd like to have greater integration your ecosystem so we can bubble up our value cattle logics kind of hit that sweet spot and said we're going to be heterogeneous we're going to be multi-platform and we're going to leverage leverage the channel right hundred percent channel driven and we're going to leverage the API and the data management ecosystem the storage vendors so they've kind of got a perfect storm going on in terms of a technology and market momentum if you like ok so let's talk about how the solution is going to be delivered you sell it do you sell it do you sell into pure accounts you talked about channel we're getting we're going to meet in the channel okay we're also talking about doing some more creative things possibly up for right now it's a meet in the channel we think there's enough enough good networking the teams are in touch with each other you know the value proposition proves itself right if somebody when's it going to be available in another month or so so there are demonstrations available both in the cat illogic and in the pure storage booth here at vmworld I so we would we would encourage those who are interested in seeing the power of this this solution to stop by either booth at any time we're going to speaking sessions in each others as well this week absolutely up and we are currently targeting for somewhere between mid to end-september for a ga release right and I need to say one other thing going back to this the reason this works is because these guys have but one care and they are customer driven right they don't have an ego they are driving to the customer and fulfill the needs because as he said it's sometimes hard for a heterogeneous vendor that controls a lot to be welcomed as much as we've been welcomed with this group it's because they know they want to drive it through the customer get the best solution in the world of the customer so on the customer side you've talked about the perfect storm of services and products who's the perfect customer who's the optimal customer something like this that I i think the low-hanging fruit is any development team that has as some requirement where they are taking copies of their current data set and are developing off of that platform I think that's the low-hanging fruit I think at a more macro level any organization that says they have a DevOps initiative and particularly they want to turn key DevOps platform to be riding with and launch launch ahead versus a try to acquire talent to build their own this is rate rate within your wheelhouse good deal no brainer and if people aren't looking at that right now you know they're not they're not in this century right because everybody's moving to flash for the primary all the projections are going forward to going off the charts in terms of the growth of flash of what's gonna happen at any what's changed with flash right where four years ago sure had to kind of get over the hurdle of the price berry for flat right we did that with industry-leading data reduction that's still two x better than the rest of the industry but as flash prices keep coming down not what you're seeing as a pivot around around value is around making multiple data sets I mean if you get into a depth use case and I'm making ten copies of a data footprint that's already reduced by x 5x and you're getting to a price point that you just you can't you can't meet with with this because you couldn't drive enough performance either death actually that's not possible yeah well before I let you go I want to tell you it's just disappointing to us that you're not more enthusiastic so and super a little it's really impressed today we had a long night life maybe tomorrow things will pick up but congratulations on the business venture and wish you the best of luck down the road thanks for being well thank you thank you guys for having us on really enjoyed it appreciate it thank huh thank you back with more from vmworld right after this here on the cube

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Commvault Future Ready 2020 brought to you by Commvault. >> Hi and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman and I'm joined by David Vellante here. Of course, we just had the keynote for Commvault Future Ready, Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO. Dave, he's been there a little bit over a year. We've been watching the transformation of Commvault as they are trying to go much deeper in the cloud. Of course, the space, data protection overall, backup and recovery, been a super hot one. Especially, if you talk about everybody accelerating what they're doing with the cloud, Dave, from an end user standpoint, as well as for Commvault. So why don't we start with the company first, as I said, the move to subscription, the move to cloud, a lot of change needed, and that's one of the reasons they brought Sanjay into the company. Of course, he'd been at Puppet before that, he was the CIO of EMC before that. So Dave, tell us your thoughts lately on Commvault. >> Okay, so Commvault, obviously Stu, has been around for a long, long time, and it's kind of a diversified player in the data protection space. I've always felt like they've had a more diversified sort of vision and portfolio. Sanjay took over, what was it February last year, right? So he kind of came in and inherited a company in transition. And transitioning from what has largely been a legacy sort of on-prem, perpetual software licensed business to now one that's transferring into a subscription based model, obviously a large maintenance base. I think about 60% of their revenues comes from services, and most of that is maintenance, okay? So he's inherited that, and then they're going into a subscription model. So that's going to hit the income statement, and then boom COVID hits. So Sanjay is getting it all from all sides, but Commvault is a 670, roughly, million dollar company on a trailing 12 month basis. And the market cap's in the 1.7, 1.8 range, so they trade at about 2.7 times revenue. So that's much better than a hardware company, but it should be better than that as a software company. So the challenge that he has is, okay, how do we get the company growing again? How do we transition to that subscription based model? The good news on Commvault is their balance sheet is tremendous. I mean, they have no debt, no debt. I mean, several hundred million dollars in cash, over 300 million and zero debt, which kind of interesting to me, Stu. Because many companies during this COVID pandemic have tapped the credit markets, Commvault has chosen not to. Maybe they should right now with such low interest rates, and maybe that can help get the growth engine going. But I think they're very conservative in that standpoint and obviously very proud of their balance sheet, but with the likes of Cohesity and Rubrik, and I know we're going to talk about that pouring money into the market, trying to attack them, and we'll talk more about their position relative to those guys, you might like to see 'em raise a little bit of money or take on some debt and really go after some of those opportunities that you referred to upfront, it is a hot market. >> Yeah, well, Dave, you talk about some of the newer entrants raised just insane amounts of money when you talk about that space. Not only Cohesity and Rubrik, but also talked about Veem. Of course, we've watched Veem go from a change in ownership and how much money they have. And from a revenue standpoint, Veem actually might be bigger than Commvault at this point, I believe, right? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean, they're billion dollar bookings, they say. I mean, I believe it, but they're a privately held company. Commvault, we can tell actually what their numbers are. Guaranteed Cohesity and Rubrik are losing money. So their cost of acquiring a customer is huge. Commvault is, let's face it, it's servicing its install base, and it's mining that. And that's why it's, it's cashflow positive. I mean, it's a very healthy company financially. The challenge that, again, Sanjay has is how do you get growth? They're a company, as I said earlier, in transition. Let me share with you, if I may, some data from our friends at ETR. What we're showing here is the fundamental methodology of ETR, which is that net score, Stu. We talk about that all the time, ETR is, as I say, our data partner, Enterprise Technology Research. Every quarter, they go out and they say, "Based for each company and their various segments, "are you adopting new?" That's the lime green, that's the 2%. "Are you increasing spending?" That's the 30%, and this is from the July survey so this is relative to the first half. "Are you flat?" You can see that fat middle 56%, and then you can see decrease is 7% and that's in the pink, and then 5% replacing. So good news here is more people are spending more, more customers spending more, than are spending less. Net score's the red subtracted from the green, so it comes out at roughly 20%, which is that's certainly not terrible. It's a legacy company that's been around a long time. So you would see a company that's a newbie, that's hot. We'd always talked about UI path automation anywhere, Snowflake, they're in the 70% range, but they're much, much smaller companies but they're growing very, very rapidly. So this is respectable and very common for a company that has been around as long as Commvault. >> Yeah, thanks so much for sharing that data, Dave. Of course, as you said, huge customer base, they've been around for awhile. I remember when we first did Commvault GO two years ago, very excited, very engaged user base. There was a good strategy discussion and an understanding for what Commvault needed to do to get to the cloud, but there was an understanding that they couldn't keep doing with the same team what had brought them to the place before. You always say, Dave, what got you to where you were isn't going to get you to where you need to go. Talk a little bit about the keynote. Last year at Commvault there were a couple of big pieces. Number one, is they really had their first SaaS offering with Metallic. And what the momentum has been on Metallic is, first of all, they made a big partnership announcement with Microsoft ahead of this event. Multi-year, Metallic has a few different solutions. One of them, of course, is to work on Office 365, so when we go to SaaS and we go to the cloud, we understand that data protection isn't something that just comes inherently. Some people thought, "Oh hey, I did it "in my own data center, but once I go to the cloud, well, "I'm sure it just takes care of things "like data protection and security." The answer is I still need to think about it, and the ecosystem has helped filling that gap. So Metallic was the first step and what we saw, Dave, really looks like a holistic refresh of the product line. Commvault back in recovery, Commvault disaster recovery, Commvault complete data protection, all aligning themselves to be more to what you were talking about, going to that full ratable model, and the other piece was Hedvig. So Hedvig software company, helping them to be in more cloud-native environments. And they launched a Hedvig X, so it's the full integration of that solution. Less than a year from the acquisition to fully integrating it and making it an offering that's ready for what they're doing. >> Is that they're cloud play? Actually Hedvig is sort of in that space, right? As with cloud you think subscription, but also Commvault is basically putting its stack in the cloud, right? And taking advantage of cloud services, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Metallic, specifically is built for the cloud. >> So let's talk a little bit about cloud, I have some other data here. And the cloud, if you pull up that next slide, the cloud has been eating away at on-prem vendors. We know it's been growing at 2000, 3000 basis points higher than the on-prem business. But what this slide shows is that same net score methodology that we talked about before, but it's filtering, you can see in the left hand side here, it's filtering on AWS, Google and Microsoft. So there's 585, AWS, Google and Microsoft customers in the ETR dataset. There's like about 1200 in the overall survey this quarter. And this shows the over time the net score of Commvault in those accounts, so you can see, as I was saying, go back to 2018, you can see prior to Sanjay taking over this thing was dipping and dipping, losing momentum coming into kind of the April survey and then July survey of 2019, and it's kind of bouncing off the bottom now. So it seems like they're making some progress there, and what we want to see is that momentum continue to grow. Again, net score is a measure of spending velocity. So what you want to see is as that transition occurs more sort of a net score increases over each quarter. >> Yeah, well, Dave as you mentioned earlier, there absolutely are some headwinds potentially there, but it looks like Sanjay, at least, has stopped some of the bleeding on this and, stated goal of course, to return to growth. And so we would want to see that go from just up one or 2% to be able to track with the cloud. Probably a good time for us to talk a little bit about the competition, Dave, because if you talk just in cloud markets, are you tracking along with the cloud? So the hyperscales themselves, of course, growing at very huge percent. A company that's been around as long as Veritas isn't necessarily going to be doing 35 to 70% growth as you would see from AWS or Azure. But what do you see out there for some of the competition in general, who were some of the key players that we need to look at? >> Yeah, so I mean, think about the backup guys. I mean, the traditional space, you've mentioned Veritas. Veritas, by the way, in the ETR survey data is not playing well, they're in the red. They've been losing share, the share donors, as they say, you've got some big players, Dell EMC, obviously, kind of living off the data domain base. Remember Dell EMC fell behind, prior to the Dell acquisition, they weren't investing heavily in the data protection business. They were kind of living milking off that data domain base. Back when you were there, they had the networker and they had Avamar, and so there was a bifurcated thing. Frank Slootman came and he tried to clean some of that up, but then he was onto his next big thing, of course, it was ServiceNow. And so, you know, Dell is a big footprint, obviously, but they're very hardware centric, as you know, so they have a big hardware agenda. IBM with Spectrum Protect, Veem was hurting them. They did the deal with Catalogic to kind of stop the bleeding, he kind of did. Again, big install base, and then you got the sort of newcomers. Veem is not really a newcomer anymore. I think they've been around for 15 years, big acquisition. Decent momentum in the market, especially started the Microsoft base, and they're kind of everywhere, so you see them. And of course you see Cohesity and Rubrik spend a lot of money, as you said. And it's interesting, let me pull up this next data point. In the ETR data set this past quarter you saw Cohesity actually overtake Rubrik. Rubrik was very, very strong earlier on. They're kind of neck and neck in this chart, what this chart shows is not net score, it's now market share. Now market shares, not real market shares, Stu. I have to be cautious here because it's not like IDC tracks market share. What it is is pervasiveness in the dataset. So in other words, within this segment, the number of mentions of the vendor divided by the total mentions in the segment, okay? So it's really pervasiveness or presence in the data set. And what this shows is you can see we've got 65 Commvault customers in the survey, and it shows the impact of Veem, Rubrik and Cohesity in the Commvault base. And you can see up through, let's see, that's the recent surveys is you see the increases up to the increasing red line is Veem, and then you got the Rubrik line and then the Cohesity line, but they're all recently, since the October 19th survey, down, trending down. So that says to me that Commvault is holding serve within its own base and actually doing better as these guys are declining in this base. You can see the comment that ETR made, "Rubrik, Cohesity and Veeam are all seeing "market share declines in shared accounts with Commvault," so that's good news. I think this is very important, Stu, and here's why. Is Commvault has got to hunker down and maintain those customers. It does not want to be a share donor much in the same way that Veritas has been. So that's a quick scan of the competitive marketplace. And again, from my standpoint, I'd like to see Sanjay maybe get a little bit more aggressive. I liked the acquisitions. Hedvig, it's great, deal with actually some more subscription, but I'd like to see them go hard after a cloud native. I have to dig into that, maybe you can comment, but really cloud native and multicloud across clouds being able to have that same experience on-prem as I do in the clouds at very high performance, very low latency. >> Yeah. Well, Dave, first of all, one thing, talk about the competitive win rate. That's something you always look at is how are you doing against the competitors? Not only did Sanjay come in, but you saw changes along how the channel chief, I believe, and the salespeople. So definitely reinvigorating that piece of it, as well as, Dave we saw, in the keynote. So the portfolio is updated, an aggressive engineering investment, some through acquisition, some through changing the code and moving in these environments, leveraging partnerships, great to see the Microsoft one, love to see something along the lines of Google. We understand Amazon, you play in that ecosystem, it is challenging to necessarily partner deeply with AWS, unless you're one of a few strong players in the marketplace, but working closer in cloud. And Dave, one thing I'd point out, last year, one of the things that really impressed me at Commvault GO is they did have some good developer actions. So when you talk about cloud native, of course, enabling developers is one of the key things. Like many companies out there, inside the company you've got developers, so how are you unleashing that? So Hedvig, a good acquisition along those lines, but you know, in the middle of the show floor, they had people that you set up with whiteboards and just go at it. So, you know, reminds me of days past when you used to have these engineering-driven shows where you could go in and really understand that. So helping to developers, enable them, backup and recovery just needs to tie into all my DevOps and IT Ops and all my other environments to make things just more automated because also you talk cloud native, Dave, automation has to be a big piece of it. And to your point, we actually have really good guests coming on the program. Not only will we have Sanjay, relatively fresh off the keynote, I've got a panel with the product people to really dig in and understand that. We'll poke and prod at some of the cloud native pieces and understand where that's going, got their head of strategy also on the program. >> Yes, I think you're making a great point about automation. Just speaking about M&A for a moment, I like M&A, I like growth through M&A, I'm comfortable with that as long as it fits into the portfolio. Your point about automation, I see opportunities there for M&A, things like visibility, observability, obviously hot analytics, automated operations, IT Ops, anything that sort of removes labor and complexity and gives me visibility across clouds. That I think is something that could be interesting, again, as long as it fits into the portfolio. I'll say this, I mean, Sanjay was at EMC and knows M&A because I've no doubt they were bringing all their M&A candidates to Sanjay and saying, "Okay, what do you think of this tech, do you use it?" Probably kick the tires a little bit, so he, I'm sure, was a part of those. I'm sure he saw the good, the bad, and the ugly. You were there, EMC was pretty good at acquisitions, but then it got a little out of control. >> And Dave, talk automation, Sanjay came from Puppet. Puppet was one of the early companies along helping people move along from those manual tasks to how can we automate those? So, absolutely, Sanjay now a little over a year in there, starting to see from the product standpoint, and expect to see some of the trailing results as to how that moves forward. >> And then again, blending that, if it's a tuck in or whatever, maybe there's some big chess move out there. I would just suspect given Commvault's conservative nature you wouldn't see that. Although, they could do it. I mean, at their revenue level, their balance sheet would allow them to raise some debt, if they wanted to do that now would be the time to do it. But it's interesting, everybody's doing it and they're not. So I kind of liked the contrarian play. Given the opportunity in the market, given the TAM expansion through, beyond backup into data management, and it's a cloud and multicloud, I do think there's maybe an opportunity for them to be a little bit more aggressive. >> All right, well, Dave, thanks so much for helping us dig in and kick off our coverage. >> You're welcome, Stu. >> All right, stay with us. We have a bunch of interviews here for Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering veeAMON 2019. Brought to you by veeAM. >> Welcome back to veeAMON 2019, in Miami. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Justin Warren as my co-host. Simon Robinson here is the Senior Vice President, 451 Research, Simon it's great to see you, thanks for coming to the cube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So is this your, is this right, your first veeAMON. >> It is, it is, first veeAMON, the first time in Miami, first time on theCUBE. So kind of bucket list check. >> Hey, got to give you a sticker here then, so here you go, thank you for coming on. And of course you've got the veeAM party tonight, which you may have been to some other veeAM parties at other shows, but-- >> Simon: I know them by reputation. >> Yeah, they're good. So looking forward to that. Two days, what have you learned here in the last couple of days, what are your impressions? >> Yeah, my impressions are that this is a conference that reflects the type of company that I think veeAM is, and veeAM's a little atypical for a technology company in this space, they didn't go down the traditional route, they had a very kind of different model right from the get-go, but what I see is real grass roots innovation, and veeAM has always been short on rhetoric, short on hype, and long on actually delivering the products and the capabilities that customers want, and it's been great to see examples of how that's playing out at the show, and we heard Ratmir talking about innovation, and 451 Research, we're an analyst firm focused on understanding the impacts of innovation, we provide data and insight around the technology innovation lifecycle, and it's always been, we've covered veeAM from pretty much day one, and it's always been clear to us that veeAM is a pretty special company, not just you have to be in the right place at the right time with the right product, but you also have to do it in a way that, they're kind of table stakes, you've got to do it in a way that actually engages and empathizes with what a customer is looking to achieve, and I think they've got that at the grassroots level, the veeAM admin level, a decade or more ago, and really have doubled down on that, so it's been awesome to see some of the examples of that at the conference this last couple of days, to have a general session with the eight demos. (laughing) >> And they all worked. >> They all worked. >> All of the eight!. >> I was terrified when they wheeled out the tub of water and it was like, they were dropping a laptop in there. Hey, you know, it was awesome and I think Ratmir is talking around, this being Act Two of veeAM's journey and veeAM's story. But firstly, lets kind of pay tribute to what they did in Act One. I think for any company to build a billion dollar revenue business software is a phenomenal achievement. But to do it in the data protection space? It's even more so. >> It's on backup, possibly the most boring thing ever, and they've kind of made it exciting. >> They used to say that backup was, well they used to say two things about backup. Firstly it's an insurance policy. And secondly, it was the one part of the IT environment that even storage people found boring. (laughing) But I mean, just see the kind of energy, enthusiasm, passion, of the folks here. That really isn't the case. >> That's true. It's been one of those boring but important factors. And then, veeAM's ascendancy, I've said this many times, has coincided with the birth of virtualization. We were consolidating physical servers because they were under-utilized, but then the backup had to be completely rethought because you didn't have enough band-width in the servers, and the capacity to run a backup job, and here comes veeAM, and it's just perfect fit, boom. Takes off. Now you've got Act Two, which is cloud. And I feel like it's jump balled, to use a U.S. basketball analogy, for you-- >> Simon: No idea what that means. >> --folks who don't follow basketball. (laughing) But it's "start over," right? And so, everybody's going after cloud, multi-cloud hybrid. And so, do you feel as though veeAM can replicate a success in what Ratmir's calling "Act Two" and draft from "Act One"? And one of the key factors, what's the tail wind for them, and what are some of the head winds. Certainly competition, we're going to' talk about that, but what are some of the other things that you guys see in your research? >> Yeah, so I think, I mean, first off, I think the hybrid cloud is a reality. Our research tells us that 60% of organizations are looking to, or characterize their strategy as being hybrid cloud strategy. But they're really struggling with actually enacting that and doing that in a processed, organized, deliberate way. We got a lot going on in the multi-cloud world, but multi-cloud is often an accident rather than something deliberate. It just turns out that they've got all these assets across all these different-- >> Dave: Multi-vendor, "Oh, I've got all these clouds!" >> That's right, that's right. Again, go back a decade, and how relatively straight forward the data and application environment seemed, right? I mean you had your application, it was probably on-prem, it really on a server that was connected to this bit of tin, and-- >> Little did we know at the time, right? >> Yeah, and fast forward to today, and data is just everywhere. So I think the tailwind for a company like veeAM is that, obviously, there's always going to be a need for backup, but I think that the conversation is evolving from one around data backup into one of data management, because you can only manage the data in your environment if you understand where it is, what its value is, what the potential exposures are, and I think that's why we see a big opportunity in managing data across this much more diverse and broader environment. >> So given that, do you think customers are better able to manage their data environment now than they used to be, or is it actually getting worse because now it's a much more dynamic and disparate environment. People weren't that great at it beforehand, have they gotten better, or not? >> It's hard to generalize. I think, in the main, customers acknowledge that they do a pretty bad job of managing it on a holistic basis. And I think we are seeing many organizations do it on a piece by piece basis. I think things like GDPR have been a wake-up call that, "Hey, your data is your responsibility!" And whether that data is on your facilities or it's in somebody else's, that doesn't matter. It's still your responsibility. So that was kind of a little bit of a wake-up call for organizations, certainly in Europe, and I think we're going to' see that replicated across the region also. >> We had the rise of Ransomware as well, which was actually the best advertisement for backup that you could ever have had. >> No doubt. >> Absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> These, we talk about the shared responsibility model, I mean, to your point, Simon, I mean, it's like security, right? I mean, somebody misconfigures an Amazon EC2-- >> Simon: That's right. >> -okay, it's not Amazon, it's the shared responsibility, and the same thing with the GDPR, malware. >> It really is, but I think, when we think about what the major challenges that just about every business faces, it's how do they scale their operations in a way that's going to' allow them to really take advantage of this thing we're calling "Digital Transformation," I know it's an over-used term, but-- >> Dave: But it's real. >> It is real, it is real. And I'll research, we asked a question in a survey recently, which is, "What is your organization's single biggest barrier?" And it's, "We don't respond quickly enough to the business." It's the biggest objective, but it's also the most difficult barrier to overcome. And I think we're only going to start to address this if we can fundamentally have a different look at how we scale operations, and that's across the application estate, across the infrastructure, it's also across data, right? And it's modernized, and it's transforming the way we think about managing data, and it's, we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past and end up with a zillion silos that all have a person that needs managing that silo, that environment. We've done that. We don't want to, as we move to multi-cloud, and we acknowledge that data and applications are going to' be in a greater diversity of locations, we have to have a model that scales to managing across those environments. And it's that kind of consistency of approach that I think the industry is lacking, but there's definitely an awareness that we need to address though. >> Yeah, so given that there's that awareness and there's a need there for the market, there has been a refresh in data protection in that part of the industry. Nothing much was happening for probably a good 10 years. David LaMein was kind of the last big disrupter that we had in that marketplace. And then it feels like overnight, everything changed. And suddenly there were a whole bunch of competitors all trying to go after this data-protection market, and veeAM being one of them. So with that challenge for customers happening, and this dynamic market, how do you see the market dynamics evolving as we go through what veeAM calls its "Act Two," and people start moving to this hybrid cloud. What does that look like from your research? >> I think from a customer's perspective, it is often actually just perplexing. I mean, where do you start? How do you think about this on a strategic basis? And again, some of our research has pointed out, highlighted that, again, it's kind of obvious, but, how do we get better alignment between IT and the business? And when we asked about that in the context of digital transformation, it was the businesses, it was the respondents that said, "Yes, our IT strategy is being developed in lock-step with the business," right? Those are the companies that feel like they can, that they have a good handle on this digital transformation. Data transformation. And we do see a bit of a, almost kind of a schism opening up. There is a kind of digital leaders, and there are definitely digital laggards that are really, really struggling with this. And I think that, to me, means opportunity. I mean, there's opportunity for vendors to come here, to come in here and address it. I think with data protection specifically, if you'd have said 10 years ago that there was almost kind of a Cambrian explosion of start-ups and new companies in backup recovery, and data protection, DR. That sounded like madness a decade ago. You know, we've seen absolute explosion, huge number of companies coming together, coming to market with real innovation, which ultimately, I think, is going to' be good for customers. I think there's probably too many for the market to sustain at this point, 'cause all these new entrants, none of the incumbents are going away. But I think it's going to' be very much a partner-centric kind of success. There's a realization I think from, certainly from the hyperscale cloud providers that they're not going to be able to do this on their own, right? They're going to' have to work with "legacy" incumbents. These guys definitely have a role to play. I mean, I was just in a session earlier today talking about VTL in the cloud. >> Dave: Yeah. >> I mean (laughing) VTL?! In the cloud?! (laughing) >> Legacy processes, they're hard to kill. >> But the more this evolves, the more it seems like the public cloud is starting to resemble kind of the on-prem world in some ways. >> Well that's interesting. You know I was in London a couple of weeks ago for the AWS summit and Matt Garman, who's the AWS exec, I think he's the guy who first launched EC2, he was the product manager at the time. Now he's the senior executive. He said, "We believe the vast majority of customers will eventually migrate all workloads into the cloud." And then it was, "But," and this is the "but" that they wouldn't have acknowledged two years ago, we realize that its a hybrid world-- >> We can't do this ourselves. >> And then they talked about snowball, and outpost, and all these other things that they're doing. And Microsoft has always had a different posture. Of course it has a huge on-premise state. But let's talk a little bit about the horses on the track. So you were mentioning some of the legacy backup guys, all the start-ups coming in. There's been over a billion and a half raised for data protection. So you've got Veritas, Dell EMC, IBM with its Tivoli business, it's done some stuff with Catalogic. And then you've got Cohesity and Rubrik trying to get escape velocity, so they got tons of cash, having big parties, trying to replicate that marketing momentum. And you've got veeAM, has, to your point, Simon, built a billion dollar software business, okay. And is now saying, "Okay, we're going into the next wave." >> And profitable! I was speaking with Ratmir this morning, and they were actually cash-flow positive and on gap-basis as well, they're making money! >> There's nothing more atypical than-- >> I know! >> --a start-up type company that's making money. >> And you've got specialists. You've got Drover in there and Zerto-- >> Simon: Yeah, you've got Zerto, you got, >> --you know, a lot of guys, Amantis just got taken out by Cohesity, so. How do you guys see that competitive market shaking out, Dave Russel did the bubble chart, Ratmir showed it yesterday, 15 billion. Is the tam big enough to support all these guys? What do they have to do to get return for their investors? We're talking IPO's in the future before the window closes. It's getting hairy. >> It is, and you know, certainly some of those incumbents are not without having their challenges. I think it's incumbent on them to listen to what customers are asking for. Customers are moving to the cloud, right? They're going to' do that with or without the legacy guys. So they have to get on-board with that and help manage that process for customers. I think what I like about some of the newer guys, the Rubrik's, the Cohesity's, is they are talking about this bigger picture, this issue that, we said at the start, that many organizations acknowledges is a real challenge, and that's having an overall view into their data estate, their data assets. But for many different reasons, it's always been very, very difficult to crack that on a holistic basis. These guys are putting together some compelling stories, some compelling products to do that, and customers are definitely buying it. Now it's not on the scale that they're buying Veeam on a very tactical basis, so I think the challenge for Veeam is to evolve their own proposition from being pretty tactical, important, absolutely, but to kind of move up the value chain from there. And I think we are starting to see many examples of how that is coming into play with some of the announcements we've had at the show today. >> Yeah, I mean, to your point. A billion dollars profitable, 350,000 customers, and a modern sort of approach. >> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. We've heard simplicity so many times over the last couple of days, but to me when we talk about if the challenge is operational scale, you can't do that without simplicity. And I think the fact that they acknowledge that from a very early date, we speak to a lot of, you know, customers overall, but lots of veeAM customers. Every single one says, "I love the simplicity." It works, it just works. You know, it's these kinds of things that they really do matter, because, not just because it just sounds great, but actually it lets, it either lets the administrator do other things, it's freeing up their time, or it allows a different part, maybe a less experienced or different type of professional to come in and manage the environment and not have to have a PhD in storage and backup and all those things that made this such a human capital-intensive process in the past. >> Easy and simple, they're easy, things to claim, and many companies actually try to claim that they're either easy or simple. It's really difficult to actually deliver on. >> That's right. >> But when you have customers coming back to you and telling you, "You are simple and easy to use," That's when you know that you've got it right. >> What I like about veeAM's messaging is, I've heard it a lot this week, is it's, start with backup. It actually is all about the backup, and you don't hear that from a lot of the upstarts, they're like, "No, no, no, backup. It's all about the data management." It's this sort of vision, these guys used the term "aspirational," almost as a pejorative. >> Right. >> So it's kind of interesting to see that competitive battle and then you've got the legacy guys trying to hang onto their install base, maybe making some announcements, I mean, Dell EMC just made a bunch of announcements, and kind of came out and admitted, "Hey, we took our eye off the ball." Obviously Veritas has a huge install base that everybody's trying to attack. IBM with Tivoli. >> There's a new CEO at Commvault. >> Yeah, and Commvault. We, I don't want to leave them out of the equation, right? They're doing their enterprise piece. And they've always had a little different angle on this space, so, there's a lot of action going on here. 15 billion, half of that is probably backup. >> The challenge is that this isn't a homogenous market, right? >> Dave: Right, very fragmented. >> There are just so many different things that we need to protect. There are so many different ways we can protect them, that soon just started getting into the details, that's when it starts, the market starts to stratify. >> And with cloud and new programming-- >> And people keep creating new ones, you know, object storage comes up, and then we've got no sequel databases that are now happening. >> Microservices, kubernetes, protection-- >> The whole container thing which we haven't really heard an awful lot about this week, I think. I mean, I'm looking forward to seein' how veeAM's story evolves there, but if we do accept that containers, kubernetes is going to be the new middleware that connects a new breed of infrastructure to a new application paradigm, if you like, then that's going to' need protecting. So I think we talk about it, backup, as being tactical, but actually it is a start of a journey, and also, I think one thing that's come out from this last couple of days is the importance of DR, and that's absolutely reflected in our research when we ask about, "What are big challenges in the storage and data arena, DR is a top two challenge every single time. It's too expensive. It's too difficult to run, to build, to test. I've been hearing that for 15, 20 years, right? And we're still not there. >> You can't automate the testing, it's too dangerous to fail over and fail back, so we don't do it, and we don't test it, so we clearly haven't cracked this one as an industry, and there is massive latent demand, I think, and I think, as we think, I mean who can tolerate any sort of down time for any sort of application, right? It just becomes a prerequisite to have applications always on-line. You know, that prerequisite for effective DR is going to' continue. >> Okay, guys, we got to' go. Thanks very much, Simon, for coming on theCUBE. >> Simon: Hey, great! Great to be here! >> Great to have you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest, you're watching theCUBE, live, from veeAMON, 2019, Miami. We'll be right back. (theme music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018, brought to you by Pure Storage. (bright music) >> Welcome to theCUBE. We are live at Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin also known as Prince for today with Dave Vellante. We're at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, really cool, unique venue. Dave, you've been following Pure for a long time. Today's May 23rd, they just announced FY19 Q1 earnings a couple days ago. Revenue up 40% year over year, added 300 new customers this last quarter including the Department of Energy, Paige.ai, bringing their customer tally now up to about 4800. We just came from the keynote. What are some of the things that you've observed over the last few years of following Pure that excite you about today? >> Well Lisa, Pure's always been a company that is trying to differentiate itself from the pack, the pack largely being EMC at the time. And what Pure talked about today, Matt Kixmoeller talked about, that in 2009, if you go back there, Fusion-io was all the rage, and they were going after the tip of the pyramid, and everybody saw flash, as he said, his words, as the tip of the pyramid. Now of course back then David Floyer in 2008 called that flash was going to change the world, that is was going to dominate. He'd forecast that flash was going to be cheaper than disk over the long term, and that is playing out in many market segments. So he was one of the few that didn't fall into that trap. But the point is that Pure has always said, "We're going to make flash cheaper than "or as cheap as spinning disk, "and we're going to drive performance, "and we're going to differentiate from the market, "and we're going to be first." And you heard that today with this company. This company is accelerated to a billion dollars, the first company to hit a billion dollars since NetApp. Eight years ago I questioned if any company would do that. If you look at the companies that exited the storage market, that entered and exited the storage market that supposedly hit escape velocity, 10 years ago it was 3PAR hit $250 million. Isilon, Data Domain, Compellent, these companies sold for between $1 and $2.5 billion. None of them hit a billion dollars. Pure is the first to do that. Nutanix, which is really not a storage company, they're hyper-converged infrastructure, they got networking and compute, sort of, hit a billion, but Pure is the the first pure play, no pun intended, storage company to do that. They've got a $5 billion evaluation. They're growing, as you said, at 40% a year. They just announced their earnings they beat. But the street reacted poorly because it interpreted their guidance as lower. Now Pure will say that we know we raised (laughs) our guidance, but they're lowering the guidance in terms of growth rates. So that freaks the street out. I personally think it's pure conservativism and I think that they'll continue to beat those expectations so the stock's going to take a hit. They say, "Okay, if you want to guide lower growth, "you're going to take the hit," and I think that's smart play by Pure because if and when they beat they'll get that updraft. But so that's what you saw today. They're finally free cash flow positive. They've got about a billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet. Now half a billion of that was from a convertible note that they just did, so it's really not coming from a ton of free cash flow, but they've hit that milestone. Now the last point I want to make, Lisa, and we talked about this, is Pure Storage at growing at 40% a year, it's like Amazon can grow even though they make small profit. The stock price keeps going up. Pure has experienced that. You're certainly seeing that with companies like Workday, certainly Salesforce and its ascendancy, ServiceNow and its ascendancy. These companies are all about growth. The street is rewarding growth. Very hard for a company like IBM or HPE or EMC when it was public, when they're not growing to actually have the stock price continue to rise even though they're throwing off way more cash than a company like Pure. >> Also today we saw for the first time the new CEO's been Charlie Giancarlo, been the CEO since August of 2017, sort of did a little introduction to himself, and they talked about going all in on shared accelerated storage, this category that Gartner's created. Big, big focus there. >> Yeah, so it's interesting. When I look at so-called shared accelerated storage it's 2018, Gartner finally came up with a new category. Again, I got to give credit to the Wikibon guys. I think David Floyer in 2009 created the category. He called it Server SAN. You don't know if that's David, but I think maybe shared accelerated storage's a better name. Maybe Gartner has a better V.P. of Naming than they do at Wikibon, but he forecast this notion of Server SAN which really it's not DAS, it's not SAN, it's this new class of accelerated storage that's flash-based, that's NVMe-based, eliminates the horrible storage stack. It's exactly what Pure was talking about. Again, Floyer forecast that in 2009, and if you look at the charts that he produced back then it looks like you see the market like this going shoom, the existing market and the new market just exploding. So Pure, I think, is right on. They're targeting that wide market. Now what they announced today is this notion of their flash array for all workloads, bringing NVMe to virtually their entire portfolio. So they're aiming their platform at the big market. Remember, Pure's ascendancy to a billion really came at the expense of EMC's VMAX and VNX business. They aimed at that and they hit it hard. They positioned flash relative to EMC's either spinning disk or flash-based systems as better, easier, cheaper, et cetera, et cetera, and they won that battle even though they were small. Pure's a billion, EMC at the time was $23, $24 billion, but they gained share very rapidly when you see the numbers. So what they're doing is basically staking a claim, Lisa, saying, "We can point our platform "at the entire $30, $40, $50 billion storage TAM," and their intention, we're going to ask Charlie Giancarlo and company, their aspiration is to really continue to gain share in that marketplace and grow significantly faster than the overall market. >> So they also talked about the data-centric architecture today and gave some great examples of customers. I loved the Domino's Pizza example that they talked about, I think he was here last year, and how they're actually using AI at Domino's to analyze the phone calls using this AI engine to identify accurate order information and get you your pizza as quickly as you want. So not only do we have pizza but we were showered with confetti. Lot of momentum there. What is your opinion of Pure, what they're doing to enable companies to utilize and maximize AI-based applications with this data-centric architecture? >> So Pure started in the what's called block storage, really going after the high-volume, the transaction OLTP business. In the early days of Pure you'd see them at Oracle OpenWorld. That's where the high-volume transactions are taking place. They were the first really, by my recollection, to do file-based flash storage. Back in the day it was you would buy EMC for a block, you'd buy NetApp for file. What Pure did is said, "Okay, let's go after "the biggest market player, EMC, "which we'll gain share there in block, "and then now let's go after NetApp space and file." They were again the first to do that. And now they're extending that to AI. Now AI is a small but growing market, so they want to be the infrastructure for artificial intelligence and machine intelligence. They've struck a partnership with Nvidia, they're using the example of Domino's. It's clearly not a majority of their business today, but they're doing some clever things in marketing, getting ahead of the game. This is Pure's game. Be first, get out in the lead, market it hard, and then let everybody else look like they're following which essentially they are and then claim leadership position. So they are able to punch above their weight class by doing that, and that's what you're seeing with the Domino's example. >> You think they're setting the bar? >> Do I think they're setting the bar? Yeah, in many respects they are because they are forcing these larger incumbents to respond and react because they're in virtually all accounts now. The IT practitioners, they look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant, who's in the upper right, I got to call them in for the RFP. They get a seat at that table. I would say it was interesting hearing Charlie speak today and the rest of the executives. These guys are hardcore storage geeks, and I mean that with all due respect. They love storage. It kind of reminds me of the early days of EMC. They are into this stuff. Their messaging is really toward that storage practitioner, that administrator. They're below the line but those are the guys that are actually making the decisions and affecting transactions. They're touching above the line with AI messages and data growth and things like that, but it's really not a hardcore CIO, CFO, CEO message yet. I think that will come later. They see a big enough market selling to those IT practitioners. So I think they are setting the bar in that IT space, I do. >> One of the things I thought that they did well is kind of position the power of data where, you know people talk about data as fuel. Data's really a business catalyst that needs to be analyzed across multiple areas of a business simultaneously to really be able to extract value. They talked about the gold rush, oh gee, of 1849 and now kind of in this new gold rush enabling IT with the tools. And interestingly they also talked about a survey that they did with the SEE Suite who really believe that analyzing data is going to be key to driving businesses forward, identifying new business models, new products, new services. Conversely, IT concern do we have the right tools to actually be able to evaluate all of these data to extract the value from it? Because if you can't extract the value from the data, is it, it's not useful. >> Yeah, and I think again, I mean to, we give Pure great marketing, and a lot of what they're doing, (laughs) it's technology, it's off-the-shelf technology, it's open source components. So what's their differentiation? Their differentiation is clearly their software. Pure has done a great job of simplifying the experience for the customer, no question, much in the same way that 3PAR did 10 or 15 years ago. They've clearly set the bar on simplicity, so check. The other piece that they've done really well is marketing, and marketing is how companies differentiate (laughs) today. There's no question about it that they've done a great job of that. Now having said that I don't think, Lisa, that storage, I think storage is going to be table stakes for AI. Storage infrastructure for AI is going to have to be there, and they talked about the gold rush of 1849. The guys who made all the money were the guys with the picks and the axes and the shovels supplying them, and that's really what Pure Storage is. They're a infrastructure company. They're providing the pickaxes and the shovels and the basic tools to build on top of that AI infrastructure. But the real challenges of AI are where do I apply and how do I infuse it into applications, how do I get ROI, and then how do I actually have a data model where I can apply machine intelligence and how do I get the skillsets applied to that data? So is Pure playing a fundamental catalyst to that? Yes, in the sense that I need good, fast, reliable, simple-to-use storage so that I don't have to waste a bunch of time provisioning LUNs and doing all kinds of heavy lifting that's nondifferentiated. But I do see that as table stakes in the AI game, but that's the game that Pure has to play. They are an infrastructure company. They're not shy about it, and it's a great business for them because it's a huge market where they're gaining share. >> Partners are also key for them. There's a global partner summit going on. We're going to be speaking, you mentioned Nvidia. We're going to be talking with them. They also announced the AIRI Mini today. I got to get a look at that box. It looks pretty blinged out. (laughing) So we're going to be having conversations with partners from Nvidia, from Cisco as well, and they have a really diverse customer base. We've got Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport Formula One, we've got UCLA on the CIO of UCLA Medicine. So that diversity is really interesting to see how data is being, value, rather, from data is being extracted and applied to solve so many different challenges whether it's hitting a race car around a track at 200 kilometers an hour to being able to extract value out of data to advance health care. They talked about Paige.ai, a new customer that they added in Q1 of FY19 who was able to take analog cancer pathology looking at slides and digitize that to advance cancer research. So a really cool kind of variety of use cases we're going to see on this show today. >> Yeah, I think, so a couple thoughts there. One is this, again I keep coming back to Pure's marketing. When you talk to customers, they cite, as I said before, the simplicity. Pure's also done a really clever thing and not a trivial thing with regard to their Evergreen model. So what that means is you can add capacity and upgrade your software and move to the next generation nondisruptively. Why is this a big deal? For decades you would have to actually shut down the storage array, have planned downtime to do an upgrade. It was a disaster for the business. Oftentimes it turned into a disaster because you couldn't really test or if you didn't test properly and then you tried to go live you would actually lose application availability or worse, you'd lose data. So Pure solved that problem with its Evergreen model and its software capability. So its simplicity, the Evergreen model. Now the reality is typically you don't have to bring in new controllers but you probably should to upgrade the power, so there are some nuances there. If you're mixing and matching different types of devices in terms of protocols there's not really tiering, so there's some nuances there. But again it's both great marketing and it simplifies the customer experience to know that I can go back to serial number 00001 and actually have an Evergreen upgrade is very compelling for customers. And again Pure was one of the first if not the first to put that stake in the ground. Here's how I know it's working, because their competitors all complain about it. When the competitors are complaining, "Wow, Pure Storage, they're just doing X, Y, and Z, "and we can do that too," and it's like, "Hey, look at me, look at me! "I do that too!" And Pure tends to get out in front so that they can point and say, "That's everybody following us, we're the leader." And that resonates with customers. >> It does, in fact. And before we wrap things up here a lot of the customer use cases that I read in prepping for this show all talked about this simplicity, how it simplified the portability, the Evergreen model, to make things much easier to eliminate downtime so that the business can keep running as expected. So we have a variety of use cases, a variety of Puritans on the program today as well as partners who are going to be probably articulating that value. >> You know what, I really didn't address the partner issue. Again, having a platform that's API-friendly, that's simple makes it easier to bring in partners, to integrate into new environments. We heard today about integration with Red Hat. I think they took AIRI. I think Cisco's a part of that partnership. Obviously the Nvidia stuff which was kind of rushed together at the last minute and had got it in before the big Nvidia customer show, but they, again, they were the first. Really made competitors mad. "Oh, we can do that too, it's no big deal." Well, it is a big deal from the standpoint of Pure was first, right? There's value in being first and from a standpoint of brand and mindshare. And if it's easier for you to integrate with partners like Cisco and other go-to-market partners like the backup guys you see, Cohesity and Veeam and guys like Catalogic are here. If it's easier to integrate you're going to have more integration partners and the go-to-market is going to be more facile, and that's where a lot of the friction is today, especially in the channel. >> The last thing I'll end with is we got a rain of confetti on us during the main general session today. The culture of Pure is one that is pervasive. You feel it when you walk into a Pure event. The Puritans are very proud of what they've done, of how they're enabling so many, 4800+ customers globally, to really transform their businesses. And that's one of the things that I think is cool about this event, is not just the plethora of orange everywhere but the value and the pride in the value of what they're delivering to their customers. >> Yeah, I think you're right. It is orange everywhere, they're fun. It's a fun company, and as I say they're alpha geeks when it comes to storage. And they love to be first. They're in your face. The confetti came down and the big firecracker boom when they announced that NVMe was going to be available across the board for zero incremental cost. Normally you would expect it to be a 15 to 20% premium. Again, a first that Pure Storage is laying down the gauntlet. They're setting the bar and saying hey guys, we're going to "give" this value away. You're going to have to respond. Everybody will respond. Again, this is great marketing by Pure because they're >> Shock and awe. going to do it and everybody's going to follow suit and they're going to say, "See, we were first. "Everybody's following, we're the leader. "Buy from us," very smart. >> There's that buy. Another first, this is the first time I have actually been given an outfit to wear by a vendor. I'm the symbol of Prince today. I won't reveal who you are underneath that Superman... >> Okay. >> Exterior. Stick around, you won't want to miss the reveal of the concert tee that Dave is wearing. >> Dave: Very apropos of course for Bill Graham auditorium. >> Exactly, we both said it was very hard to choose which we got a list of to pick from and it was very hard to choose, but I'm happy to represent Prince today. So stick around, Dave and I are going to be here all day talking with Puritans from Charlie Giancarlo, David Hatfield. We've also got partners from Cisco, from Nvidia, and a whole bunch of great customer stories. We're going to be right back with our first guest from the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport F1 team. I'm Lisa "Prince" Martin, Dave Vellante. We'll be here all day, Pure Storage Accelerate. (bright music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering Dotcom 2017. Brought to you by Splunk. >> And welcome back to the nation's capital. The Cube, continuing our coverage of Dotcom 2017. At Splunk's annual get together and coming to Washington D.C. for the first time. Huge success, 7,000 plus attendees, 65 countries. I forget the millions of miles. Was it three million miles traveling? >> Let's see, was it three million? It was 30 million. >> Maybe 30 million. >> Yeah. It's a big number. >> 30 million miles. Dave Vellante and John Walls here on theCUBE. I'd say off to a roaring start here, to say the least. Josh Rogers joins us, he's the CEO of Syncsort. And Josh, good to have you on theCUBE. Good to you see sir. >> Thanks sir. Thanks for having me. >> Good week for you, big week for you. Couple of announcements that you made here recently. Go ahead and share with us a little bit about those. >> Sure, so we made two announcements yesterday. The first is a new product, it's called Transaction Tracing, it's an add on to our Ironstream product. Ironstream is a solution that delivers mainframe machine data to Splunk Enterprise, and has integration points on the security and on the IT service intelligence components within Splunk. What Transaction Tracing does, the new product introduction, is it adds additional capabilities to understand and trace a transaction that could begin on a mobile device and follow it all the way through the multiple hops it will take to ultimately transact against a mainframe. And when that transaction hits the mainframe, there's several things that you want to understand. One is, you want to understand how is is performing, how is it affecting my mainframe environment. Is it causing problems in other places? And you want to be able to look at that transaction, or that application, as a service. And so you want to be able to track that whole service end to end. And so what we've done with Transaction Tracing is created an ability for Splunk customers to be able to surface all of that data, collate it together, and get a unified view of both how the service is behaving, the performance that characteristics it's delivering to the customers that are utilizing the service, and then the impacts that it's having on the mainframe. All of which are, core components of understanding how you're IT operations are performing. And kind of all about what Splunk is supporting. We're just adding on additional capabilities for Splunk customers. >> So I wonder if I could follow up on Transaction Tracing. So I remember about 20 years ago, David Floyer did a piece of research, when we were working together at a former company, and I was struck at the time by the number of subsequent transactions that had to occur just to get an outcome of a check process. >> Right, right, right. >> I mean it was like some orders of magnitude >> Right. >> greater. Add to that mobile transactions, I can't imagine with all the internet traffic and other activities going on, now add to that big data, and security, and fraud detection, and all the other things that we're doing with the data. The number of ancillary transactions >> Right. >> has got to be enormous. Hence the need presumably for Transaction Tracing. >> Absolutely. >> So maybe talk about the market need, and why Syncsort? You would think doesn't the mainframe have all this stuff integrated into it? Maybe talk about that. >> Yeah sure, so I think one of the things to understand is that the mainframe compute volumes continue to go up. I think people just tend to think about mainframes as a environment that perhaps isn't growing, but in fact, it is growing. And one of the key drivers is this new transaction workload that is driven in part my mobile, and other devices. And so what you have if you're running a mainframe is I'm experiencing increase in my transaction workloads, I need to figure out how to kind of support that. But I also have a lot more characteristics I care about, security, performance, et cetera. And so I need deeper analytics. And of course, they are difficult systems. You need to understand the mainframe, you need to understand how KICKS and DB2 interact and support a transaction. But you also need to understand kind of this next generation analytic environment, how can I leverage that to actually get the insight I want. And that's really what we call, it's an example of, a big iron to big data challenge. And so what Syncsort's been incredibly focused on is helping customers understand the very specific use cases that are included in that big iron to big data space, and providing very differentiated solutions with very deep differentiation to solve those specific use cases. And Transaction Tracing is a good example of that. It sounds fairly narrow, but it's incredibly important if you're a bank and you want to give your customers an ability to kind of check account balances, interact with you in a way that they haven't in the past. >> Well, it's one of those things that we talk about you know depth apps, in depth apps, this is a depth app. >> Right. >> Alright, okay. And then in terms of the Splunk relationship, where does that fit in, and what are the swim lanes between you and Splunk? >> Well we view Splunk as a key platform in the world today for kind of understanding IT operations and security. We view them as incredibly powerful from a platform perspective. And we also view them as a partner that we can add value to. That we can provide access to data that enrich their platform and allows their customers to get more value of it, and that we can do that in a unique way. And so we have a very close relationship with Splunk. And that's not just at a go to market level, it's also at a product management and engineering level. We work very closely to make sure that our products integrate well with Splunk. So we've got deep integration with IT service intelligence, we've got deep integration with enterprise security, and we'll continue to drive deeper integration into the Splunk platform. So when a customer comes across a scenario where they want to ingest mainframe data, they can be assured that they will get no better product on the marketplace than Syncsort Ironstream and associated modules, in terms of both how it will perform on its own, but also how it will integrate with Splunk. >> So that deep integration something that's always interesting to us on theCUBE. Lot of times you see Barney deals. Barney, I love you, you love me, let's do a press release. And so one of the ways in which we measure, or try to measure, the intensity of the integration is the engineering that's involved. So I wonder if you could, sort of double click on that. >> Sure. >> Is it kind of just making sure you're familiar with the APIs? Are you actually doing integration and engineering on both sides? Maybe you could talk about that. >> Well, so I'll talk about our integration with enterprise, security, and IT service intelligence. >> Dave: Great. >> And those are, you can think of those as specific applications to support deep analytics. And these are Splunk offerings. Deep analytics around those two areas of confidence. Such that a user can rapidly build a set of dashboards that would allow them to answer the questions you want to answer if you're focused on IT service intelligence or understanding security. Fundamentally they're data models. They've gone out and mapped what are all the data elements that you need, what's the structure that you need of that data model, to be able to answer the questions that a security minded analyst would want to answer. That allows you to, if you map the data sources into those data models, that would allow you to rapidly build those to that dashboards that support those types of roles on the enterprise. What we've done is taken the very large amount of mainframe machine data that gets produced, generally it's an SMF record, so there's 260 types of SMF records, each one has its subtype. We've mapped it into those two data models that Splunk has created. Nobody else has done that. And what that does is it allows those customers to get a complete end to end view of how can I rapidly enhance my IT service intelligence application, or my enterprise security application with mainframe data. Which just happens to run my most sensitive applications and most voluminous applications, from a transaction perspective in my enterprise. So we thing that deep integration is a really powerful capability, and it's just an example of where we like to go deeper with our partners than what we see other companies doing. >> You know when you talked about the mobile environment a little while ago, and complexities and that, I'm always just kind of curious. With everybody talk about what that does in terms of when you're harvesting data and now you're in a non-stationary environment. And that comes with it a whole different set of characteristics and challenges. I mean, what layer of complexity do you take on when you all of a sudden you can be anywhere and feeding data at any time from any machine. >> Sure, well I mean what it creates is a lot more interaction points. So I probably interact with my bank a lot more today than I did 10 years ago, 'cause I don't have to find an ATM, or go by a branch, >> John: You never walk into a branch. >> And I did this over the weekend. I had to kind of transfer some money, right. So I just transferred it and I was in Colorado hiking, and I transferred funds between accounts. And then later on the golf course I did a wire, literally. >> John: You didn't have to transfer money on the golf course for a reason, did you? >> No, no, no, those were unrelated events. >> Just making sure. >> Lost a few, Josh? >> But that type of interaction. So you get more frequent interaction, which creates an operational challenge. Particularly when you think about the mainframe and how customers pay for that, right. They pay for it based on how much CPU they use on a monthly basis. And so what we want to do is help customers run that system as efficiently as possible. It also creates a massive analytic opportunity, because now I have a lot more data that I can start to analyze to understand trends, because I have more touchpoints. But the trick is I've got to get that data into a repository and into an analytic environment that can handle that data. And that's where I think Splunk creates such an interesting opportunity. And what we're trying to do is just add value to that, make it easy for customers to leverage all of their data. Does that make sense? >> Yeah. >> It does. How 'about the government marketplace? We're here in the District. You guys have an announcement around new partners. >> Yes. >> Maybe talk about the importance of government, and what you do in there. >> Sure, so we signed a distribution relationship with Carahsoft, also a big Splunk partner. And that is going to allow government customers to more easily take advantage of Ironstream and Transaction Tracing in these used cases. The federal government is a enormous market opportunity, it's also a big mainframe environment. There's a lot of government core, government applications, that still run on mainframe environments. In fact, I would tell you most do. IRS, Social Security, CIA, and other agencies. And so we think giving ourselves an easy route to market for these customers is a great opportunity for us, it's also a good opportunity for Splunk's customers who are in the government, 'cause they can go and buy additional capabilities that are relevant to their environment through the same partners that they've been working with Splunk. >> But is there a difference with how you deal with public and private sector then? I mean, governance and compliance, and all those things. I would assume you have different hurdles. >> They're different contract vehicles, which have different kind of requirements in them. And that's one of the values that we get with the Carahsoft relationship, is just giving us access to those various contract vehicles. Yeah. >> Talk to me a little bit about life. I mean, you've always been a private company. But you're you don't have the 90 day shot clock, you have new owners, what's the objective, maybe talk about that sort of the patience of the capital, what your priorities are with regard to these owners. Maybe discuss that a little bit. >> Yeah, sure. So just to give a little background in early July we announced and in mid August we closed a transaction whereby Centerbridge Partners acquired Syncsort and another company, Vision Solutions, from our previous owner, Clearlake Capital. And we combined the companies under the Syncsort umbrella, and myself and our leadership team is going to take the company forward. So the 90 day shot clock, I would say definitely we still care about the 90 day shot clock. We are very focused on growing this business and doing that in a consistent way on a quarterly basis. I guess the difference is I get to talk to my investors every day rather than once a quarter. But they've been great partners. The Centerbridge guys have a lot of resources, they've been incredibly helpful in helping us start to think through kind of the strategies, some of the integration work we're doing with Vision. But we think there's an opportunity to build a big business. We employed a dual strategy of organic growth focused largely in the big iron to big data spaces, as described earlier, combined with MNA. And you know, over the last 24 months we've tripled the size of Syncsort. So it's grown 3X-- >> So you are growing, that was one of my questions, were you growing. >> And in revenue, >> Substantially. >> we've doubled in employees. >> So, say that again. >> We've tripled revenue. >> You've tripled revenue. Double head count. >> And double head count. >> Okay, so you've increased profitability in theory then. >> So, and we will continue to run the same play. We're seeing acceleration in our organic place, but focus on the big iron to big data market. And we also believe there are additional data management capabilities that are relevant to our customers, that we can acquire and help point towards that big iron to big data play. And so we'll continue to look at various spaces that are interesting adjacencies that are relevant to our customers. >> And some of that revenue growth obviously is through acquisition. >> Josh: Right. >> Right, and so when you think about, you know it used to be the classic private equity play was to suck all the money out of the company, leave the carcass for somebody else to deal with. It seems like there's a new thinking. Not seems like, there is a new thinking here. Invest, acquire, increase the value, the money guys are realizing wow this, there's a lot more money to be made. >> Absolutely. I definitely-- >> The technology business. >> We have an eye towards profitable growth. But we are absolutely making investments. And as you get larger scale you can make meaningful investments in these specific areas that can help deliver really great innovation to customers. And Transaction Tracing is an example of that. And certainly I can give you others. But for sure, we are trying to build value. This is not a traditional kind of private equity play. And I also think that private equity is generally understanding there's an opportunity to create value after the catch, if you will, in the tech industry. And I was looking at an analysis last week that financial investors, private equity, for the first time ever will do more deals in technology than strategics, in 2017. And so I think that's a statement that says that there's certainly an opportunity to create long term sustained value in a private equity backed kind of model. And I think to some extent, Syncsort's been pioneering that. With a dual approach on organic growth, and on additional acquisitions. >> Well, and you've seen it, coming out of the down turn, or sort of in the down turn, a lot of these public companies were struggling. >> Right. >> I mean you certainly saw with Dell, BMC, Riverbed, Infor, all examples of private equity where there's investment going on and I think a longer term vision. >> Right. >> With some, as a I call, patient capital. Syncsort is obviously part of that. Syncsort, actually interesting, when it spun out its storage business, you know as a successful company. Catalogic is doing its thing. So Syncsort was able to monetize that. And then really focus on the core knitting. >> Yeah. >> And then figure out where in the big data space that you can make money. Which, not a lot of people were making money in the big data space. So, that's good, congratulations on that. >> I like to tell folks that we've had a really good run, but it's really the first couple of innings. The Centerbridge team is going to be incredibly supportive, and I can't wait to get started on the next leg of the journey. I think there's going to be a lot more innovation to come and I'm looking forward to it. >> Dave: Great. >> So, you're in the middle of the game. We appreciate the time here. Good luck with that, the long term plan down the road. I hope the show's going well for you. >> It's going great. >> And it's good seeing you. >> Great, thanks John. >> Thanks, Josh. >> See you Dave. >> Josh Rogers from Syncsort with us today here. Syncsort, rather, here on theCUBE. Back with more Washington D.C., theCUBE live at Dotcom 2017, right after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back, here at Las Vegas at The Venetian. As theCUBE continues our coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. Along with our co-host, Paul Gillin, I'm John Walls, good to have you with us. As we, I guess were coming down the home stretch. >> Paul: We are. >> Day one. >> Paul: End of the day. >> Here at Dell EMC World 2017. With us now is Chhandomay Mandal, who is product marketing director at Dell EMC. Double dipping on us, we just had you on a few moments ago. This is nice, we get two shots. >> Thanks for having me. >> Good to have you back with us, yeah, it's good. >> Chhandomay: Thanks for having me. >> So before we were talking about XtremeIO, what you were doing in the healthcare space. Moving over now to copy data management, different part of your portfolio, and kind of what's up in that world with you. So just give us a little rundown, an overview of what you're up to right now. >> Sure, so let's start with what exactly is copy data problem. Why it's a problem, and why we need to be solving it? If you think of any business application, it comes with its production data. But for every bit of production data, you have many different copies. For example, when you're developing applications, you need copies for your development and testing. You need copies for your backup. You need copies for running your analytics environment. It's for every single production database, typically, we see five to 12 copies of that data. And in fact, I did see estimates. The copy data sprawl is like 40 billion dollar market, and 60% of all the data that exists are on copies. Now, our mission, especially with Dell EMC XtremIO, is to solve that copy data problem, giving the customers back a lot in terms of the storage efficiencies, and not only is the storage TCO, but transforming the business workflows. We did copy data management so that they can realize storage and infrastructure settings, but also the business impact from transforming the application workflows and bringing new production market in a much quicker way. >> So you said a 40 billion dollar market, I mean, what are the costs here? Is it just storage cost? Is it bandwidth, is it errors? Lack of data being out of sync? >> So the cost here has multiple components, right? First of all, there is the cost of the lost storage where you need to put the data on. But then, there comes the cost of managing the storage. How do you figure out where you backup copies are, if you need to restore, where are you going to get the data from? It's a cost of inefficiency meaning, like if your developer who is the highly paid, highly productive guy, supposed to be, right? He is waiting for the DBA or the storage admin to give the copy that he needs, then, that's just enough money, right? It's not just the infrastructure cost, but also the soft cost of, like your ability to bring the product to the market in a quicker way, addressing your customer needs in a quicker way. That acts up and those are the components in, like, how I value this intermarket. >> I guess what I'm hearing here, if you got five to 12 copy sets of data, I mean, massive amounts of waste in some cases, right? And maybe some of your clients, they like to know where everything is, but do they lose track of it, and so it's taking up space, taking up money, taking up time. Is that, are these the problems they're facing? >> Chhandomay: Yes, yes. >> Alright, so then, what's the answer then in terms of this better identification? There's X2, get to the heart of that, and help them in terms of better efficiencies? >> How do we achieve that efficiencies? Now, one thing is, the way, first of all, like, if you can consolidate your copies into one single platform. And copies are duplicate bits, right? So, first of all, the first thing in the process is you eliminate all the duplication that exists in your storage. You have your production data base, and you have your copies, which are, if not unique, then basically should not take up any extra space. Now, you take those copies, and make it like a repair plus one. So for example, your Dell part can run tests on it. So when the rights are coming in, only the changes that are happening, that should go into the storage. So that's Part A. Part B is, when you are running production environment, as well as what works on your copies, you need huge performance with consistently low latency. Because you cannot impact your production SLS. You have to meet that. >> You can't tell it, "Hang on, I've got something "else going on over here, right?" >> So you need a platform that can handle consistently high performance with low latency no matter what workload you are running. And then the copies themselves need to be very efficient. They should not take any extra space, unless there is something unique. And they should be able to perform just as well as in a production value. The hard part of this is, you need to orchestrate the inner process, right? I mean, you as in oracle admin. You really do not need to worry about how and where the storage is going to be saved for your copies. You click on a button, and it should do all the steps necessary right from your application console down to the storage. So this is the application orchestration that we in-built with AppSync and XtremIO. And then we have APIs that our customers can use to provide their own service catalog. So using these pillars, we consolidated all the copies, on the same platform, running different applications, with the same SLS, okay? And that kind of helps the customers to bring product faster, and address the copy needs. >> Now, this is a very hot market right now. And I'm thinking there's some startups, I'm thinking of Actifio and Catalogic in particular, that say that you shouldn't have many copies. You should have one copy, and then you should have pointers to that. What's your opinion of that? What are the pros and cons of that approach versus yours? >> So our approach, essentially, I mean, since you mentioned, right, there are copy data management vendors. What they're doing is, you have your production, then you make a gold copy off your production, and from that gold copy you run off different applications on those copies, right? So here you are introducing another element, another software, and another appliance, so to speak, to manage the copies. What we are doing, is kind of like you don't need that extra copy that your analytic part provider can provide. And then there are performance implications with the integrated copy data management that we are referring. The reason we can do it is, all of our metadata is in memory. It does not consume any extra space for storage. And no matter what the workload is, we can offer consistently high latency because everything is, the metadata is operating from the memory itself. So the way the third parties are doing, we do it the same way, even better, and at the production level. >> Another thing, and forgive my technical ignorance here, but David Fleur at Worky-Ban, has talked a lot about the benefits of flash storage. In that you don't have to create copies, you can create a single copy in flash, and then multiple users or applications can work from that. Do I have that straight? He says that's a game changer. >> Yes, that will be that game changer, and that's really like what we do. The caveat to that is, when you are creating the copies, and you want to run applications on the copies, your production should not be impacted, and the copies should also be able to deliver the same performance. And that part has been the challenge with other solutions in terms of providing the same performance, the same data services on the copies themselves. That's the idiot we solve will our intelligent content error in memory metadata architecture with XtemIO. >> You're talking about the integrated data management just a little bit ago. I mean, from a real life perspective, can you give us an idea about maybe a success story, somebody that you can point to and say, "This is how they incorporated that "into their process, I see it work for them, "and we can make it work for you too?" >> So, I'll give you an interesting statistic. We have 3,000 plus customers running XtremIO in production, and we get all the phone home data at our end, and we can see what they're doing. Now, for XtremIO customers, 56% of the copies that they're making, they are running workloads on them. They are not just for local data production. And, all the IOs, XtremIos that is out there in the field we'll see, 40% of the IOs are because of the copies. So we see across the board on the customers. I have many examples. For the sake of time, I'll just speak one. We all know Moen, they are the leading, not American manufacturers of the faucets, right? It's a big shop, and they have like, a lot of SLP landscapes in there. Before XtremIO, they could not keep up with the backups and the copies that they needed. After moving to XtremIO, now they can actually take the copies of their production SLP landscapes twice a day. They are quietly running reports. They are actually running like 90% shorter, and in fact, we were talking with Harvey H., literally, like before this segment, right? He was also talking about how efficient their copies are. I was talking with Scripps Health, who are also going to be presenting in here. They run like 3,000 copies in their environment, with XtremIO and AppSync, and like it's all working great. No impact on the performance, and they are meeting their SLS. >> Well, your performance on theCUBE has been outstanding. Back-to-back saves, we appreciate the time. Chhandomay, thanks for hanging with us. Best of luck down the road, and continued success here at the show as well. >> Thank you, it was a pleasure. >> We will continue with more from theCUBE here in Las Vegas. We are live at Dell EMC World 2017.