>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to AWS re:Invent 2019, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, my name is Dave Vellante and here with my co-host, Justin Warren. We're going to talk about data protection, really important topic, particularly in the cloud. Chadd Kenney is here, he's the Vice President and Chief Technologist at Clumio, a hot new start-up, and to my left is Charlie Gautreaux, he's the Senior Director of cloud services at Ally. Gents, good to see you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're welcome. So let's start Charlie with you, tell us about Ally a little bit. >> Sure sure, we're a 10-year-old financial services company, a digital-only bank, multicloud at this point. Certainly, you know, talking to Chadd about data protection quite a bit these days. I think it's a very important topic, it's actually overlooked quite a bit in the marketplace for us, and that's what we're looking at. >> So Chadd, I mean, exciting days for you guys, early start-up days, you just get a couple of rounds, one sizable financing round. So that's, you got now some dry powder to really go after this opportunity. I first heard of Clumio, I met a guy on a plane, he had a Clumio shirt on and he was a customer. I was like ,"Hey, ah yeah, Clumio!" Just basically, and so he's very excited, we had him into our studio, so we want to learn more about that. But, so let's start with back up in the cloud. >> Yeah. >> Share with our audience kind of what you guys are all about. There's a ton of companies out there doing data protection. >> Sure. >> Why Clumio? >> So what Clumio is, is it's a enterprise backup business service solution, highly secure, built natively in the public cloud on cloud-native resources. And we really felt that back-up was just this complex solution of a lot of hardware, a lot of different resources and time spent, and it was really low-hanging fruit to move to the cloud in a full SaaS-based solution. There's been so much SaaS-ification going on in the enterprise as a whole, that this seemed like a perfect spot for people to be able to take advantage of the cloud, and longer term actually get value from the data sets that they're actually backing up in one common platform. >> I mean, it's kind of surprising, isn't it, that it's taken so, I mean, it started with CRM, I guess, and then of course e-mail went-- >> Yeah. >> Over to SaaS, and you had service management, which is kind of a big heavy lift. You know, data warehouses now in the cloud, so it seems like a logical move to put SaaS in the cloud, but I wonder if you could share with us what you guys are doing in a cloud generally, are you guys all cloud, a cloud-native company, or? >> I would say we're about two years on the journey at this point. You know, we started out very much on the IIS side of the house, I think like a lot of folks, more recently though, over the last few years, we're slowly shifting more towards cloud-native services for most of our applications that we're releasing. Certainly a large part of that for us is data management in general, where do we put the data, how do we store it, classify it, recover it, those sorts of things, and certainly our application portfolio is shifting quite a bit from your traditional software packages in the data center to more cloud-native services, either we build or that we buy as a SaaS product. So certainly, the SaaS feature, if you will, of Clumio is very interesting to us, and that model, and that delivery model. >> It's interesting, Charlie, how you described it as not, you didn't describe it as backup, you talked about data management, you talked about how do you categorize it, and so you're thinking, people are thinking about data protection in a different way, it sort of transcends backup these days. Maybe you could elaborate on that. >> Yeah, I definitely think it's broader than backup. We don't actually use that term too much, even in my space, you know to us it's all about availability recoverability, and durability, right, and all three of those things along with how you overall manage your data, I think we saw some announcements even today on that, are a big piece of the story for us. So it's not only about backup, but certainly that's one component. >> So one thing we've heard from the show so far certainly a lot today has been around transformation. So, a back-up is a pretty traditional kind of idea, it's been around for a very long time. People have had a go at transforming this a couple of times, so maybe Chadd, you can give us a bit of a flavor of what is it that Clumio is doing differently that is transformational here? Is it transformational or are you just basically doing the same stuff, but with some cloud rubbed on it? >> Yeah, I think if you look at the past, a lot of these solutions were iterative approaches that made it simpler to deploy, maybe add some new features to it, but it wasn't fully transformative to actually move it to the public cloud, and what we've done here is is we've fundamentally built an application 100% on cloud-native resources which are highly scalable, and it's not you're just make it easier to consume or you pay for the cloud services, and then there's a new consumption model by capacity, this is fundamentally an entirely authentic SaaS solution built in the public cloud. And the value that you get with that is that data structures that traditionally were built for backup never really were suited to do a lot of other things on top of it. Our vision is, is that data backup provides the ability to consolidate data into one common platform, but there are a lot of data services you can provide on top of it. I always jokingly say like, the backup guy actually had all of the data in one spot, and the trends that happened within that data, but the platform never gave him the ability to be able to leverage and get value from the data set itself, and the cloud gives us that. If you were to build a product today, you would build it 100% on the public cloud for the agility, the competitive advantage you get, it's very tough for people though to switch from the model of the old into the model of the new, and so we have the advantage of building from the cloud up, and taking advantage of all of the amazing innovations. Look at what's out here and the amount of innovation here, it's amazing, just walking around seeing all of it. It's really because people can get in quickly, innovate fast, and bring value to customers. >> Well it's interesting what you're saying about transformation because if you think about the sort-of post-mainframe era, and by that I mean, the era in which mainframe was the be all end all, it was, you know you had an application, you'd stick it on a you know, whatever Unix box, or whatever it is and you'd figure out how to back it up. Okay, and then virtualization came along and that forced everybody to re-think how they were doing data protection, and now cloud comes along, and it's really an opportunity to transform. And I guess what I mean is, you've had a lot of entrance into the space, with a lot of money, but they're sort of entering in a hybrid sort of model. You guys are just-- >> The cloud is fundamentally different than what it was before, it's like even a VM is like, well it's basically still a server, so it's still kind of anchored to this older way of doing things, bt the cloud-- >> You just have less physical resources and so you had to re-think that a little-- >> That's right. >> But you guys are coming at it completely differently, saying okay, we're going to put the control in the cloud. No appliance >> And data planes, yeah. >> Control plane, data plane, right, everything. >> It's an entirely new world. If you look at where data resides today, it's private cloud, public cloud, SaaS-based solutions, pretty much everyone's got the private cloud backup thing down to a science, it's all of the other things that are actually pretty challenging to deal with. And you know, that's where we're innovating in. We believe that the world is shifting heavily towards SaaS, we're already seeing that in the market growth numbers, many people are getting a competitive advantage of re-factoring towards cloud, and so we want to help them protect their data assets along that journey. And it's exciting because a lot of the innovation is being done there, and we're not trying to innovate into the last 20 years worth of stuff that everybody else is kind of built around. >> So Charlie, you mentioned you're about two years into your transformation journey, so okay, walk us through how does something like Clumio and this different way of thinking about data protection and data management, how does that join in to the way you think about that transformation journey? >> Yeah, sure. Taking just a little bit of a side step on that for a moment, I think one of the key components and key tenets to any of our transformation has been making sure that we do it in a way that doesn't disrupt the business, right? And all of the new innovations we're seeing in the cloud space are very transformative, but they're also disruptive in how applications are deployed and built, and we're looking at it from a, you know, if we're going to deploy to AWS for example, I don't want my backup to be in the same place that I'm running my application, right, necessarily. I want another provider or another solution to actually own that air gap for me. And especially as we look at multicloud, maybe it's Amazon, maybe it's something else, we don't want to be locked in to one provider in that sense. So from a transformation perspective, for us it's all about that availability from my perspective, so. >> You do mention multicloud there, which is a bit of a verboten word or term of choice. >> Not in theCUBE! >> Ah, not in theCUBE. So, talk to us about that a little bit. How do you, what, where do you see the benefits of multicloud, and when you say multicloud, what is it that you mean by that, or how do you think about multicloud? >> Yeah, sure. From my perspective, multicloud is a couple of components. One that you mentioned is SaaS and other options, we have data out there and maybe our CRM solutions, right. Multicloud from a, I'm either hosting data or executing the data in some application fashion. To me is exactly what I was really talking about, so whether it's Office 365, whether it's some type of CRM, Azure, Amazon, Google, anything else is really what I was referring to. I think that, you know, it's certainly, we're in an era where single provider is not really an option for the long run, right, so. >> So, in thinking about, you mentioned air gap, right, so ransomware is obviously a hot topic, do you think about that differently with the cloud data management, data protection solution than you would with sort of a conventional approach or how do you think about that? >> Yeah, I do, it's kind of interesting, you know, we were having a conversation earlier about this. Companies used to have my data in my server farm, I back it up, and I replicate it to another site. Huge air gap, right, and then all of a sudden, we've put data in the cloud and we kind of forgot about that, at least is what I see. And so I think, we have to kind of reintroduce that mindset again, and I don't see a way that, you know, forward without that type of mindset, really. >> So you've mentioned the SaaS model was attractive to you, what about, is there anything unique about pricing that you guys can share with us, whether it's the overall cost or the way in which pricing is done in the cloud, how important is that to you? >> It's really very important, you know, I think prior to any of the SaaS solutions, or pay as you go, it was large upfront costs, right, you usually even had to pay beyond that because you would need the growth room, right, so for two or three years, you're actually, costs were higher than they needed to be. So from my perspective on the pricing model for Clumio, or solutions even like that, we want to make sure that we pay as we go, and really, yeah. >> Yeah, some interesting stuff that we've been seeing, at least in the public cloud side of the house is, you know, retention periods are defined by the budgets somebody has to store snapshots. >> Yeah, yeah. >> The business requirements in the private cloud is based upon the business requirements, and the challenge with that is, is that you have this inflated cost at long-term durations, and we give some predictability to that, so there's a big value there. But the big one that we talked about a lot earlier is, having data reside right next to your backup or even having to manage all of that across many different accounts, the whole concept of having an air gap solution enables you to not only have disaster recovery capabilities into any of your AWS accounts, but also be able to actually protect against malware, or data loss from bad actors or whatever else, and there's huge value to that for consumers to have it out of their environment. And then the last part is, if you look at what happens in the enterprise, you have single file restores that occur constantly. Not full volume level restores, which snapshots give you the ability to do, and so Clumio has been able to index the data at a file level, have a Google search-like functionality, and be able to restore it to any of the accounts. So that full functionality that enterprises demand is really what we're trying to deliver in the public cloud as part of this offering. >> And, obviously you're in the marketplace today, or you're working on getting in the marketplace? >> We're not, we're working on it. >> Okay. >> We'll be a private listing. >> Okay, great. So, okay, so how's that work? So if I want to engage, I'm an AWS customer and I want to try out Clumio, how do I do that? >> Yeah, so engaging with our sales team, reach out to contacting us and we're happy to come out, show you a demo. The great part about SaaS is you can get up and running literally within 15 minutes, it's almost kind of comical. And we deploy a cloud connector in your environment, inventory the data, you decide what you want to backup. One of the cool parts too is that as you have more and more data sources across SaaS, private cloud, and public cloud, you can apply the same policies across all of them. So the power of that's really huge, to be able to define kind of consistent business practices across all of your data set. We're excited to talk to customers about it. >> And presumably, you can make it granular? I can, for one workload, I can have a different RPO, RTO than other workload? >> You can define by a whole bunch of different types, so in the cloud, everyone uses tags, everything's really defined by tags on the policy. In VMWare, it's more defined by cluster, or maybe foldering or those types. So we support all of them. So you can create different policies by different ways that the customers constructed their environment. >> Right. Okay, last thoughts on things you've seen at re:Invent this year that are exciting you, or? >> Wow, yeah, so many announcements, right, I think, just the pure velocity of innovation is exciting. And you know, it's hard to kind of put it into one thing. We were talking about this earlier, what's the big announcement, there's not one, there's, you know, 50. >> Yeah. >> So it's pretty exciting to see. >> There's a big theme of transformation, but Chadd, we'll leave it with you, you're the new kid on the block, exciting times for you guys. >> We're excited to be here, this show is like electric. You know, the scale of it, it's almost intimidating just walking around, but you know, we've been roaming around the booths just to see the amazing innovation, I think one of the coolest things is just people are able to develop quickly and bring value to customers and we're excited to continue to do that. The new round of funding will get us to really be able to expedite a lot of the data sources that we wanted to continue the platform on, and we're excited to be here next year even bigger with more and more stories to tell. >> All right, well Charlie, congratulations on the innovation that you're in, and Chadd, we're looking for good things from you guys. It's a very exciting time, so we appreciate you guys for coming on. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. Dave Vellante, for Justin Warren. You're watching theCUBE, from re:Invent 2019, in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (upbeat outro music)