>> Narrator: From the Silicon Angle Media office, in Boston, Massachusets. It's The Cube. Now here's you host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and we're coming to you from the Boston area studio here of The Cube. Excited to talk about some of my favorite topics. Talking about the culture, innovation, and really transformation in what's happening in data center. Digital transformation is on everybody's mind. Specifically happy to welcome Mike Grandinetti who is the Chief Marketing and Corporate Strategy Officer with Reduxio. Mike, thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, thank you so much for having me. Great to be out here with you today. >> Alright, so you're a local guy? >> Mike: Yeah. >> We're glad that you could join us here. Before we jump into the company tells a little about your background, what you worked on, what brought you to Reduxio. >> In a nutshell I guess my background is all about innovation. I've sort of eat, breathe and slept innovation for the last 25 years of my career. So I started off as an engineer in Silicon Valley with HP back when Bill and Dave were still around. At a time when it was America's most admired company. Was a remarkable sort of introduction to what is possible. Went back, got my MBA, did several years at McKinzie doing corporate strategy consulting. Mostly around innovation related projects. And then I moved up here to Boston to be a part of the first of what is now eight consecutive enterprise venture capital backed start ups. And I've been lucky enough that two of those went public on the NASDAQ. The prior seven have all been acquired by companies like AT&T and Oracle. And now Reduxio is my eighth start up. We're really having a great time building this business. >> Great, we're definitely going to big into some of the innovations of Redux I O. >> Yes. >> So the name kind of tells itself. We've seen a few companies with the I O at the end. We've talked so much that when we've talked about kind of 2018 data is at the center of everything. Really what is driving business. So for an audience that hasn't run across Reduxio kind of give us the why and the what. >> Yeah, and so to your point, data's driving everything. Mark Andressen famously said software's eating the world. I think if we were to update that it's data is eating the world. And so I think you and I have had this discussion off camera. Whether it's fair or not, I think it's true. And it needs to be stated that the amount of innovation that has occurred in the storage industry over the last 20 years, has been disappointing at best. The solutions that have evolved have evolved in an extremely fragmented way. They are over, way too complex. They're way too expensive. And because it's a collection of piece parts, you've got to manage multiple screens, multiple learning curves. And a lot of things fall through the cracks. So when you go and look at some of the research data from a wide range of analysts, what you hear from them is there's this extraordinary lack of confidence that even though I've spend a ton of money, invested a lot of staff time and attention to building out this infrastructure, very lacking in confidence that I'm actually going to get that data back when I need it. So it's the old adage, it's time to fix it. So this is exactly what the founders of Reduxio saw. They were looking at this evolutionary path and saying people are just making it worse. So they did what many people would condsider to be radical. They threw out the entire playbook of what storage architecture has been and they took a clean sheet of paper, design centric approach. What are the use cases? Where are we in the world with regard to technology? And how do we design and experience for storage admin or BD admin or a person in the dev center that doesn't require a PhD in storage? And so that's kind of what the premise was. >> Yeah, so many things there that there are to dig into. Absolutely. I live, I worked for one of the storage companies for a decade. Absolutely complexity is how we would describe it. And what companies are looking for today, is they need simplicity. They need to focus on the business. Turing dials and worrying about do I have enough capacity? Do I have enough performance? Do I have enough of those things, is not what drives the business. >> Mike: Exactly. >> They need to focus on their applications. The bit flip we saw in big data, and we can argue whether or not big data was hype or whatever we had there, but it was oh my gosh I'm getting all this data to oh my gosh I have all of this data and therefore I can do more things, I can find more value. >> Mike: Absolutely. >> I worry a little bit when I hear things like oh, the storage admin. >> Yeah. >> The storage admin's job before was how to I triage and kind of deal with those issues? Many solutions now you look at the wave of hyper convergence. Let's push that to a cloud architect or the virtualization layer. How do we start with a clean slate and get out of the storage business and get into the data business? >> Mike: I love it. So I'm going to bring you back ten years to one of the most remarkable product introductions that has ever been conducted on this planet. It was the introduction of the iPhone. And if you recall in those first five minutes that Steve Jobs took the stage in a way that only Steve Jobs could. He went onto tease the audience by saying that we are going to be introducing three products today. And then over the next minute or two became clear that it wasn't three products, it was one very innovative product at the time. The iPhone. What they basically did is they integrated these three previously disparate pieces of technology. Certainly the mobile phone but also a music player and an internet navigator. Behind this gorgeous revolutionary user interface. So what we've tried to do is take a page out of the Job's iPhone innovation. We're integrating. And Forrester Research has written an incredible report about this and others, IDC and others, have consistently supported it. Chris Malore from the Register has written about this at length as well. Reduxio is integrating primary and secondary storage along with built in data protection. So those previously siloed capabilities are now one. We're also, like Jobs did, when you looked at the old style smart phone, the BlackBerry and the Trio and the- ya know all of those things that had all of those keyboards, is we've created a user interface using game designers so when our customers go home at night and they log into Reduxio, their little kids will say, hey dad what game are you playing? And dad will say, I'm not playing a game. I'm actually working on Reduxio. And so what that's done for us I think is it's allowed us to be able to drop a Reduxio system into any number of use cases with someone who may not have the luxury of being deep in storage. And literally get time to value that they put production workloads on the system that day. >> It's interesting, another piece that I'll draw from your analogy is when you talk about how did Apple take all of those pieces. And it's kind of certain technologies moving along. But there's one specific technology that really helped drive that adoption. And it's Flash. >> Mike: Yes. >> And the consumer adoption of Flash ten years ago drove the wave that we've seen in enterprise storage. >> Right. >> So help connect the dots for us, because we look at- I remember a decade ago primary to secondary storage oh I'll give you a big eleven refrigerator size cabinet and you can do both. >> Mike: Right, sure. >> But I put expensive stuff here, I put cheap stuff here. I used the software to put it together. I'm assuming I can consolidate it down and I think Flash has something to do with it. >> Yeah, and so it's a multi tiered system. The array itself. It's an appliance. And obviously most of the value is in the software. There's a management platform that allows us to peer deep into the data. But everything is time stamped and indexed. So we have a global view of the data. And you can tier it, the most hot data very mission critical, business app data, goes to Flash. Secondary data can go to spinning disk or now we can archive to the cloud. Specifically any S3 target, Amazon or any S3 target. But what I think makes it very relevant is we've illuminated the notion of snapshotting. So we've built something that we call the time OS or the time operating system. And it's a time machine for your data. What happens is rather than incur that incredible burden of having to schedule snapshots, that only requires you at another incredible heroic effort to bring the data back, you have continuous data protection. I can go back at any point in time and literally with a very graphical screen point and say I want to bring data back from two seconds ago. And one of our best examples of that is we had a customer who had been attacked, has suffered from a ransomware attack. They went down for a week, they went down hard for a week. And they came and found Reduxio. They got attacked again. And the second time around they lost only two minutes of data. And the recovery time was 20 minutes. So this is what we enable you to do. By being able to give you access to wherever you're data may be, anywhere in the world, you can- we're approaching near zero RPO and RTO. >> Mike, there's been a number of companies that come and said data protection's been broken. We've been hearing that for a while. I think right down the road from us, like Tiffeo, company that looked at data management. Companies like Cohesity and Rubric, have quite a bit of buzz. Give us a little compare, contrast how Redxio looks at it verses some of those other- >> Yeah, and I'd say again, for anybody watching I think the Forrester Research Report outlines Reduxio, Cohesity and Rubric, right? And of course Cohesity and Rubric are doing an extraordinary job. They're scaling rapidly. They've got world class in Silicon Valley money in the company. They've got a world class client base. I think the primary difference is that we are bringing that third component. We're integrating primary storage along with secondary storage in data protection. Both of them are focusing just on the secondary and the data protection. We take issue architecturally with the fact that you've got to make additional copies. We take issue with the fact that the way they're approaching this actually they're in some ways exacerbating the problem because they're creating more data. But at the same time, they're also, for a given amount of capability two to three times the cost. So what we're hearing from a lot of our customers and our vars that sell both is they're walking into a lot of more, let's call them price sensitive accounts. Where they don't believe that the incremental value of what Cohesity or Rubric is offering is easily justifiable. There's going to be some pretty extreme use cases to justify a $300,000 initial investment as you go into the data center. >> Another piece, when I talk to companies today, one of the biggest challenges they have is really figuring out what their strategy is and how that fits. You talked about tiering and how the cloud fits into it, but how does Reduxio fit in that overall cloud strategy for companies today? >> Again, it's very early in our product evolution and so with version three which we announced back in late June, we allow companies to archive to the cloud. But do instantaneous recovery from the cloud. So we have two capabilities. One is called no migrate. So there's no longer a need to migrate data. So you were at the Amazon invent show and you saw the snowmobile get rolled out. And the reason that Amazon rolled that snowmobile and at first I thought it was a joke, is because it takes an incredible amount of time and effort to move data from one data center to the next. Reduxio has this no migrate capability where if I need to move data from that data center, I set that data in motion. And I don't know if you're a Trekkie or not, but you remember the teleporter? In version three we've created a teleporter. You can move that data from the cloud and although it may take a long time for that data to actually get to its target, you can start working on that app as if that data had already been migrated. When we run usability tests, and I remember one of them very specifically. And I know that you speak a little bit of Hebrew. I speak zero Hebrew. But I can remember watching one of our Israeli customers seeing this happen and this visceral reaction, like oh my god, I can't believe they did that. So we're trying to bring that end to end ease of use experience to managing and protecting your data wherever it may be. Bringing it back with almost zero RPOs, zero RTO. >> Mike, one of the questions, I've been talking to a number of CMOs lately, and just you've worked for a number of start ups. Today, digital transformations on the mind, what's the changing role of the CMO today? What have you seen the last five to ten years that's different and exciting? >> It's a great question. And I'd say that, and again, I did my first start up in 1991. So I can't begin to tell you how much high tech marketing has changed. But everything changed with social, digital and inbound marketing. It used to be that the sales team was responsible for filling the funnel. It is very clear that is an incredibly non scalable unproductive effort. And so we now are all about acquiring high quality prospects. We're a hub spot shop. We're a highly automated shop. And we are very biased toward digital and social. Is doesn't mean that we're not going to events and things like that but we feel that the way that we're going to scale this business, especially when we compete against big guys like Dell EMC and HP and others, there's no way that we can go person to person. So I'm not a very big fan of cold calling. I'm not a very big fan of going to trade shows. And collecting business cards in fish bowls and giving away tee shirts. We really believe that our customers are too busy, the know what they need when they need it. They've built a fortress around themselves. They're getting hammered. Just like I'm a CMO. And I must get 150 LinkedIn inmails and emails a day telling me about the next great lead management service. I can't even imagine what our customers are putting up with. So our job is to find relevant personas with highly relevant content at the moment that that is relevant to them. And there's many ways to do that, but this is really what we have to do with the data. >> So, Mike, at the beginning of the conversation we talked a little bit about innovation. >> Mike: Yes. >> Those of us that have been in a while, they're too many peers of mine that I think if you say the word innovation they roll their eyes. You have the great opportunity, you're working with master students around the globe, talk to us the people coming out of those programs. What does innovation mean today? What are they looking for, from a career standpoint? >> It's a great question. I think you and I could probably go for the next three hours on this subject so we'll have to be careful. >> We'll make sure to post on the website the expanded audio. >> Okay, but I mean innovation is such an overused word. And most companies really can't spell it and they can't spell it because their culture doesn't allow for it. So first and foremost, I think any innovative company or any innovative team starts with a culture that is all about trying to manage at the bleeding edge of best practices and really understand what's current. I have the blessing of being both the Chief Marketing and Corporate Strategy Officer of Reduxio and a global professor of innovation entrepreneurship at the Hult International School of Business. I teach between 1,200 and 1,500 students a year. I teach them courses in entrepreneurship, in innovation, in digital marketing. And I run hackathons on campus. We do a lot of events that give me an insight into who's passionate about innovation. And it's one thing to think innovation is interesting, because you can get a good job. It's another thing to actually have the comfort level of living in a world of ambiguity and high velocity. So a lot of it is, I'm looking for students that really want to sort of push the envelope. And they exhibit that in the classroom, they exhibit that in hackathons. They exhibit that in some of the internships that we take. They exhibit it by getting certified on HubSpot. Without me telling them to. Getting certified on Idio without me telling them to. Going to conferences. Learning. And then me learning from them. Because nobody can know everything. It's just so much new stuff going on right now. I've now got a team of 11 people and nine of them were my former students. I had a chance to observe them in action over 18 months and they're world class. And they have that innovation gene in their DNA. We're really at a point where I'm learning from them everyday. It's a very symbiotic relationship. >> Mike, for closing comments, I want to give you the opportunity, people find out more about Reduxio. What should we be looking for in 2018? >> Yeah, and so again, the one thing is will say is we are now at 200 distinct customers. We have in a very short period of time, and you know, when you sell into the data center people don't have a real sense of humor. It's pretty important that the stuff works. So the first thing I would say is we've gotten to that point now where we've got a lot of very significant customer references across websites and a lot of peer review sites. So we're now, so 2018 is building on that foundation. I think what you're going to see from us is couple of very radically innovative new projects. One a software only project. That will allow us to drive an inflection point in growth. By making available some of our core capabilities to anybody. Whether they own a Reduxio system or not. We really want to go big now. We've validated the architecture. We've got some great early indications from the market that this stuff works as advertised. Our customers are telling us we're simplifying their lives, we're making them more productive. And 2018 is about to really kick this thing into high gear. >> Stu: Mike Grandinetti, pleasure chatting with you. Thanks so much for sharing. And thank you for watching The Cube. >> Mike: Great. (upbeat music)