>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2017. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're live in San Francisco for CUBE's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier, SiliconANGLE. Our next guest, Anil Chakravarthy who's the CEO of Informatica, CUBE alumni multiple times, but the chief executive officer leading the charge of a great private company doing very well. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> It's great to be here, John. Thanks very much. >> We've got a couple of things to talk about, but I want to just jump in. Behind us you see the new logo, Informatica. Really kind of the last leg of the stool, if you will, you guys have gone private, >> Yep. >> Great product work over the years. You know I've been pretty complimentary of you guys, although we've had a critical analysis session yesterday. But all the big bets were very well done playing off. You've got a great product team, great leadership team, new CIO hire. But the last leg of the stool is the brand. >> Anil: That's right. >> You guys haven't been showboating much. Now you got to kind of brag and be humble about it and get the word out. New marketing program, what's that all about? >> Yeah that's exactly right. So you just said, the transformation that we are going through, three big steps is the transformation. The product portfolio transformation, we've been talking about that. This is all driven by cloud, by big data, and machine learning, and all of that. Then the transformation of the business model, from license to subscription and cloud services. And now the brand transformation. And we see the brand transformation as actually catching up to where the company actually was. We were just talking about that right before we got started. We actually have done a lot of things. Like for instance, did you know that we are doing 1 trillion transactions a month in the cloud? I mean, very few people knew about that. >> Yeah, what's more impressive on that, I found that out earlier it was 1 billion in January. >> Anil: It's unbelievable. It's-- >> I mean how do you do that? It's a growth hockey stick, straight up. >> It's a hockey stick, it's huge, it's huge growth, and that's driven by the fact that we are the leader in cloud data management for the biggest ecosystems, for Salesforce, for Amazon, for Azure, and that drives a lot of the data volume across the cloud. >> Before we get in the keynotes, on that note, one of the big bets you know I've been very impressed on is the cloud play, right? The data architecture of things, the winning formula. But you got cloud presses, you had Amazon Web Services. Google just announced span or horizontally scalable database, generally available. You were on the of the three data partners on the front end of that. >> Anil: That's correct. >> And part of the launch of Google. >> That's correct, yeah. >> I didn't know that. >> So you know, the way we think of the world is from our customer's perspective. It really is the best way to think about it is as the enterprise cloud. Put it together. All the data you have in the enterprise that you have generated over the years, that's still very valuable data. And then the data you have in the cloud. And you can't think of those two things as separate. For instance, you could have customer data, the same customer. John, you're the customer of a retailer. Some of that data about you is in their on-premises systems, and some of the data may be in a cloud system, but it is all interconnected data and you can't have two separate silos. We believe that we are the only ones that can really manage that. And that's why we are supporting every major cloud platform or cloud system, just like we are supporting every major on-premises system. >> Yeah, you guys call it Switzerland. It was a great way to describe it. But really to me it puts bigger than that, is that you guys make data ready. And that's really the value of what I call the tier two data layer that's building, where you've got stuff in memory, I get that, it's some odyssey streaming stuff, and things going on there. But now, then you have third tier, archive, but data tier two is just like all the data: IoT, structured data. That's growing, but the cost of storage is getting lower and lower. Now companies are incented to store. How is that impacting your business? We heard that at DellEMC World over and over and obviously they're in the storage business, but the tier two storage is significantly growing. >> Well data is still growing at over 25% a year. That's a huge number given all the way the size that you have, so it's going to be within by 2020, it'll be over 15 zetabytes, and a zetabyte, for those of you who are interested, is 10 to the 21. That's a huge amount of data. And what we're seeing is, the value comes from being able to first of all see your way through the data, being able to understand what data is valuable and what's not, and then connect the data. If you have customer data, product data, location data, et cetera, being able to put all of that together. That's really where the value comes from. >> So I've got to ask you about your keynote. You talk about the digital transformation's unfolding and data is the critical foundation for digital transformation. Okay, we've heard digital transformation. I mean, I'm not to say it's played, I know you guys have your theme, but this business transformation going on. So digital transformation is a known trend, but it kind of is played in my mind. I want to know what's different about Informatica now. Why is it unfolding now versus two years ago when we started talking about digital transformation? What's the most relevant thing now? >> Well I think the biggest relevance is, two years ago, as you exactly said, people were talking about digital transformation. Now they're doing digital transformation. Now you're seeing, you know, we talk about our own customers like Tesla or GE or Amazon doing it, but lots of other customers are actually doing the digital transformation. Now when you first take the first step toward the digital transformation, that's when you realize, my data, I got to fix the data foundation. If I can't have a data foundation, then I just, you know, everybody cares about a good customer experience. If I can't tell all the interactions a customer has with my company, and that data is in different places, there is no way I can provide a good customer experience because the customer knows what they're doing with me and I don't know what they're doing with me. And that's really the foundation for the data foundation. >> I want you to take a minute to just re-explain that because this is something comes up all the time and I get different answers and people have different definitions. What does it mean to have a digital data foundation and what are some of the impacts to the customers when they do have that? >> Think of it the simplest way. Let's say you have a customer and a lot of the new customers are like that. You are a bank, and you have a customer who doesn't want to talk to anybody. They only want to do everything through a mobile application. They want to file a loan application through the mobile, they want to check their balance through mobile, they want to deposit a check through mobile, et cetera, et cetera. If they have a problem, they might talk to somebody through a chat on a mobile, but they don't really want to talk to a live person. And this is, by the way, a common scenario now. Now they are doing probably 20 different things through the mobile. But when you get into your back end, that's the front end. You can put 20 things on the mobile, but the back end you've got 20 different things. But you have to have a single picture across those 20 things. When did the customer interact with us? What did they do? What is the pattern of that customer? How do you profile what the customer is doing? If you don't have that picture, everything that you do with the customer is going to just appear disconnected to them. It's going to frustrate them even more. And that's really the reason we have to have the data foundation. >> Okay, so, that's kind of a data layer, I get that, and believe me, horizontally-scalable data, making it accessible only helps the apps. The question to you is, your reaction to people saying, "Hey, Anil, I got to be innovative. "I got to free the data up and I got to let it grow "and you know a thousand flowers bloom, all this goodness. "But hey, I got to control it." So that's a huge issue. I've got governance, I've got compliance, there's laws now. So am I stuck in the mud? I want to be innovative and go fast, but now I've got to govern it and control it. How do you answer that question? >> You can do both now and that's the reason why we're announcing CLAIRE and all these innovations that we announced this. The advent of machine learning and metadata let's you do both. You basically say, look, I can use all these new technologies to find out what data I have. It's not going to slow you down. In fact, if you set up something like an intelligent data lake, because it has the metadata layer, you are actually opening up the data you have to the end user without having to come through IT for every piece of data, which means they can go faster. That's where the innovation happens. So you can do both. >> John: So it's a control catalog, basically. >> It's exactly right. It's a controlled catalog and you basically get to define different levels of trust. You can say, this data is curated data, it's trusted data and we can vouch for it. And maybe other data that's just shared collaboratively, and you can just flag it and then that way the user knows, okay here's data that I'm getting from a central system and this is what I need to use when I'm talking about something like revenue. And I'm tying something like a trend of what's going on. I might be able to use other data and that's the key there. >> Talk about the trend around CLAIRE. A lot of buzz here at the show. CLAIRE stands for clairvoyant. It's got the word AI in it. It's a name. SAP's got Leonardo, Salesforce has Einstein, all these different terms, but it's a clever way to point to AI, augmented intelligence, and machine learning. >> Anil: Correct. >> What does that mean for Informatica as a company? Certainly it kind of humanizes it. >> Anil: Correct. >> Shows the access of data should be democratized. What does it mean for you guys and the customers? How does that play out in your mind as the CEO? What do you see CLAIRE doing? >> Well the three big points I'll make about CLAIRE. First of all, when we built CLAIRE, we did not invent the artificial intelligence or the machine learning. A lot of that is already available. So we took a lot of the best algorithms in machine learning and applied them to metadata and applied them to data management. That's the secret sauce. It's not the building the AI itself, it's the use of the AI for data management. That's number one. Second, we defined CLAIRE very clearly and we said it's not a product. It's an engine, it's an AI-powered engine. In fact, I call for CLAIRE, I say it's cloud-scale, AI-powered real time engine, that's CLAIRE. Right, so it's an acronym, but it's the engine that powers other products. The third big thing is we're telling customers, you're going to get the benefit of CLAIRE, but you don't need to deploy CLAIRE. When you buy any of our products that are powered by CLAIRE or any of our solutions that are powered by CLAIRE, that will automatically come in there. So it means once you have any product like our enterprise information catalog or our secured source or data governance, you're starting to use CLAIRE and then you can use CLAIRE for other use cases as well. >> What's been the reaction? You know, and obviously you get nervous, CEO, probably got these things out there, probably wonder what the reaction is. What's your take on the reaction? >> People are very intrigued. I know that's what they, they look at CLAIRE and go, what is CLAIRE? How are you guys using it? I think people are asking us, tell us a little bit more about how AI is being used in the world of data and data management. So it's absolutely the reaction we wanted. >> So I got to ask you this question. I asked Mark Hurd the same question at the Oracle media day a few weeks ago. I want to ask you the same question. Everyone's number one at everything now. You guys are number one in six quadrants. Oracle's number one, the Dell E's. Everyone's number one at something. So the question really is, not so much about being number one, congratulations, you've got some magic quadrant wins that was highlighted in the keynote. But you guys are going through a transformation. You're telling your customers that they're going through a transformation. Wouldn't it make sense that the transformation scoreboard looks different than the old way? And I want to get your thoughts on this because, not that we have the answer, but there's one answer in customer wins, but as this new world transforms and unfolds, what's the scoreboard look like? How, because it's not as clean to say, this is the category, you're starting to see a little blending, as you mentioned how data is evolving. What's the new scoreboard look like? >> Is it the scoreboard for us or for the customer? >> John: You guys, the industry. How do I know if you're doing well? Obviously customer wins is obviously number one. >> Yeah, I think the best way to. I'll give you a couple of metrics, financial and nonfinancial, okay. From a nonfinancial perspective, as you said, a couple of key metrics. One is customers. How many new customers, how many new customers, reference customers do we have? Second one that you want to look at is just mind share or when people think about digital transformation, do they think of, hey, Informatica, they have a key role in my digital transformation. Just looking at mind share and so on, because that's a good leading indicator. In terms of the nonfinancial, or the financial metrics for us, obviously as more customers do what we call enterprise cloud data management, you're going to see our subscription revenue grow dramatically and you know, that's something that when you look at our subscription revenue, you'll see that impact of the enterprise cloud data management. >> And you guys made the move to subscription, obviously went private. Bruce Chizen and Jerry Held, your board members talked about this. You can do a lot of things 'cause it doesn't, it impacts the P&L but that it's still baking out, it's evolving, you're private, not public, but you want to get it right before you go public. >> That's correct. >> How do you feel about the progress on that front now? >> Oh we're making fabulous progress. We're very pleased with where we are. From my perspective, we are ahead of where we thought we would be by this time. I think customer buying behavior has converged really nicely with where we are in terms of where we want to go. So I think that's definitely been a big plus. >> Sally Jenkins, your new CMO, you got to feel good about her coming on the board-- >> Anil: Oh she's done a great job. >> High impact. She said on theCUBE that you guys are the hottest privately held pre-IPO startup. >> Anil: That's right. >> Twenty years in the making, whatever. I mean, but you guys are private. >> Billion dollar startup. >> But you act like a startup, which is why we like you guys a lot. You guys are like a very hustling like a startup. But now you're growing and you're getting beyond the 200 million, over a billion dollars now. When's the IPO coming? >> Yeah, I mean, you know look, I can tell you the factors that will be the lead to the perfect timing for the IPO. When those factors come together, I don't have a crystal ball right now, but I can tell you it weighs both on us and the market. From our perspective, we are making this big shift in the business model. We want to make sure that we can say, hey look, now the shift is very clear and stable and we can see where they where you know we'll be able to project out our own forecast for the next three, four quarters. So that's one key indicator for us. The second key indicator that we look at is the total revenue growth of the company and what percent of the growth of the revenue is recurring revenue for us. So we're going to be looking at those two factors. And of course from the market perspective, we want to make sure that the market wants to, continues to be. >> If you wait four years til we have a new president, and then heard all the politics from the Kara Swisher thing was, got a lot of people stirred up, in the conversation. But in all seriousness now, you also have private equity so you have to make the company worth money after they go public so you've got to have some growth left in you, right, I mean you guys are, you feel good about the? >> Oh we really do because you know, we look, that's where these six categories that we talked about make a lot of sense. You look at data integration, data quality, master data management, these are all categories that are well established. We know the patterns and we are seeing very good growth in those categories. Then you look at the new categories: cloud, big data management, data security. Those are all coming into their own right now. So that's why when you look at our portfolio, you go, wow, there are some that you already have great, well established and going well. These other ones, they're well established but they also have a lot of promise and future growth. >> Great chatting with you. You're a great, insightful, and inspiration. You guys have done a great job. But I've got to ask you the question because I think you have an interesting role. I mean, you have, you're acting like a startup, but you're not a startup. You went private from a public company. You've got a great board of directors. You've got Jerry Held and Bruce Chizen on there, but you've also got private equity sharks on the board. So, that's my definition, I won't say you said that. >> No, no, but I was actually in the private equity world, to my pleasant surprise, I've seen the whole spectrum of investors and our guys on the board are very much growth-oriented. They know that the value gets created for them through growth so it's well aligned. >> Yeah, but you're not sitting back having pizza and drinking wine. These PE guys, they're financially driven. >> Anil: That's right. >> So the question is, advice to other startups, whether they're venture backed or other companies going through innovation strategy. How do you manage the success of having such good product excellence? I know you've got good people, so that's an easy one answer. How as a CEO do you maintain the disciple to have the cadence of the financial performance? Because those guys look, they're probably not going to give you, hey how we doing? Numbers matter, but you're transforming technology and products. >> That's right, so what we do is-- >> How do you do it? >> We have a scorecard which has both the short term and the longterm metrics and we look at both of those. You know, we do monthly business reviews. So the pulse of the company has definitely quickened. We're operating at a new level of intensity. But when we look at the scorecard, it's not just the immediate financial metrics. It's things like, for example, are we building the back end infrastructure to be a subscription company? That doesn't get done in a month. >> John: That's an IT challenge, right? >> That's an IT challenge, a process challenge, it takes 12 months, 18 months, the kind of things that you talk with Graeme about. But that is an example of, you can have a scorecard. You don't necessarily have to look at a scorecard just for the short term metrics. You look at it for both short term and what makes you successful over the longterm. And that's, you know, that's what we're doing is just keep our eye on the ball, focus on a few things, both short term and longterm, and make sure we're doing them well. >> How about customer wins? To me, that's the scoreboard ultimately as we look at it at our team. How are you doing on customer wins? Can you share some, I see you have a lot of great customers. I met a few last night, obviously big wigs, big names. >> Anil: Yeah, exactly. >> What are some of the big wins look like and why are you winning? >> Well you know, we have 7,000 plus customers. We have a great customer base. Just at this show we've had 85% of our sessions here at the show have had customer or partner speakers. That gives you a sense of customers want to talk about us. A couple of ones that I would highlight for example, which are fairly recent for example, Amazon is one. They just spoke at the show and in fact the CMO of Amazon was here, Ariel Kelman. And he spoke about he is a customer of Informatica and how he's using Informatica for his own marketing systems and the marketing data analytics that he is doing. Another example is Tesla. You know, we talked about them at the show. >> I got a test drive on Friday with one. >> There you go, exactly, and then they are using us for the Tesla and the Solar City acquisition and driving synergies there. So lots of great examples. >> John: Tough customers, by the way, very, very finicky. >> Oh they are very demanding, very demanding customers and we are really proud to be serving them. >> Okay, final question, Anil. What's next? How do you look forward. Obviously this event, congratulations on getting the branding out. Peggy and the team did a great job. Sally and the team did a great job. What about next? What's next? >> Yeah, you know, what's next for us is simply work with customers to first of all get our story out, understand their priorities, and make sure that they understand that we can be a great partner for them. So we believe that this is the beginning of that journey. We talked about digital transformation and how we help them. Now we take the show on the road to our customers, make sure that we help them at their pace to transform. >> So bring the message out, build the brand. >> Absolutely. >> That's the key priority. >> And then continue. >> Product side, what's going on the products? >> Well on the product side, for instance, you saw a teaser of all the big trends. Machine learning, cloud, big data, security, all of these have full-fledged roadmaps that we're going to be working on over the course of the next six months. >> Anil, great to see you. Congratulations, you can tell, you're still intense. You've got the intensity, it's not going to stop by the way. >> Anil: No it's not. >> It's not like you're not going to get more intense as you guys grow. And congratulations. >> Thank you for having me on your show. >> We are here live in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017 with the CEO here, Anil Chakravarthy, inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more coverage from Informatica World after this short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Dell EMC world 2017 Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Dell E, Dell EMC world, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Keith Townsend. We are joined by Fernando Thompson. He is the CIO of University of the Americas, Puebla, Mexico. Thanks so much for joining us, Fernando. >> Thanks Rebecca, to you. >> So I want you to just set the scene a little bit for our viewers and talk a little bit about some of the biggest technology problems you were facing on your campus. >> Well, Universidad de las Américas Puebla is in the state of Puebla. We have around, less than 10,000 students. We have 1,000 employees. And we are full dedicated to research and development. And also bachelor's degrees. I used to work for the federal government and also for the private sector in television and entertainment. But I have never been in such a huge challenge, like, in a university because, you know, it is, it is so difficult to implement the governance but at the same time the freedom and, if you think, well for instance, when, when is a period of time where, where more appears in the world, it's on vacations where the students of the universities have enough time to build that kind of thing. Not very creative people, so in, in the sense that, well we live in an environment where you have to deal, to deliver technology, to protect to millennials that doesn't want to be protected and also, you know, they always ask for more services, no? And now is coming the generation C, so, it's going to be real tough for the next years. >> So, so, so set the scene and talk to us about the kinds of things that you are trying to deliver. Better products, better speed, better services to both students, perspective students, faculty and staff. Talk about what some of the needs were. >> Well, we have to think that, actually, technology is very important in the university because we have to prepare our students to give them the tools to face the future. The world is changing. And, in Mexico right now, we have a huge challenge because we're competing against China, Brazil, and India. We used to have an advantage with, with the price, and people that is very well prepared and with their salaries, but not any longer. So, we have to give this advantage to our students. So, nine years ago, when I arrived to university, for instance, we have the subscription system, and it was awful, no? Because it was very slow with the performance and not very reliable, so the people was really complaining, no? Because we're a private, private university. You always suspect, you know, good performance for a private university. And especially in subscription where your main customer, that is a student. So, we start to work to fix the main system and it take us years, years, no? So, we passed through availability and relability but bad performance. Now, performance, but since we implement XtremIO and we changed our data center with Dell products, this very year, in, in, in the spring, in the spring semester, we make a huge change cause the subscription system now became, you know, one of the biggest transformation tools in the service for the students. What happened was that, during the subscription, we announced on a special day, and a special hour, 8:30, and if you are okay with your administrative stuff and qualifications, you can get into the system and subscribe. Four years ago, that takes, like, one hour or 45 minutes. But with the change that we made, now it is a matter of two minutes. So-- >> Wow. It was a change of 100 degrees, no? What happened was that, yes, we changed the application, but also, you know, with this Flash technology, we use it because at the end, what we want to make was, you know, to impact to the student, in order that they can receive the schedule. He can take faster decisions. They move very fast with their computers and with their devices, so they needed the applications, so, we build it, we test it, and it worked fantastic. And let me tell you something, no? How I measure, I don't have a business analytic tool or a business intelligence tool. What I have was, you know, access to Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. And, man, they gave us such a compliment, no? Like, hey TI finally did something well for us also and it was thousands of comments, no? >> Members was waiting. >> A lot of thumbs up. >> Yeah, yeah. Members was waiting, you know, to attack us, like, you shall not pass, and stuff like that. Like past years. But not this year. So, it was, it was, it was a successful story and now we are thinking to implement all these changes that we made in an ordered space itself, of the university. >> So let's talk about that a little bit. So that's, I think, is a great example of digital transformation. I don't need to ask you if you believe in digital transformation. That was a digital transformation to your business. Specifically, I'm interested in research. What type of research does the university do and how does your group play a role in enabling that? >> Yeah, basically, for instance, we have four programs of PSD with specialization in technology and also in environment, no? One of the top challenge that we are facing in Latin America. So we have to supply the technology that our researchers need. And it has to be at the same level of the United States. We belong to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in the United States. So, it's not United States soil, but we belong to that association. >> Reporter: So you have the same SLEs? >> Yeah, basically, basically, you know? And we have to supply, you know, all the bandwidth and performance because they're discussing, at the same time, with people in Texas or Wisconsin or Alaska or Brazil and they need, you know, for instance, high-performance computing, storage, cloud tools, and for them, have to be, you know, pretty clear and transparent. What I mean is that they don't care, and they don't have to care about where it's working, of it is expensive or not, no? Do you have, do you have to supply what they need? Let me give you an example. For instance, a fractal. If you send the information of a fractal, we don't have a super-computer in our university, but we have a deal with another university and they have this super-computer. So, what we do is to supply the connection of the computer to send information and to receive information immediately, in order than the graphic can have information in real time. And people are taking decision in different parts of the, of the country with that information that we're sending. Sometimes, could be, you know, if we're facing a hurricane or we're going to have a problem with water or if we want to avoid, you know, you know, something that can happen with an earthquake or something like that. And with that kind of information, now, our researchers certainly can know what is happening. So, we give the info, we give the technology for them. We make a mixture between cloud-computing services and also our data center. Then that a wonderful tool because with XtremIO and with our new servers, if you can go to our new data center, you will realize that it's only Dell and EMC right there, no? And something funny is that we have a wonderful data center, but to be honest with you, we only use, right now, only three racks. So, the space that we are using right now with this new disk is, the space that we are saving is amazing, no? Because if you can, if you can see our racks, you will see that we have, for instance, Clarion, and DMX and another technology. Right now, we shut down all those racks. And right now, we are using just like, 40 inches of disk. And, man, you know, I have more performance, I have savings on air, savings on electricity. The people think then, right, we are having, you know, more space with more racks and more this. But not any longer. So, I think what is going to happen with Dell and EMC in the future, I think that they are going to deliver, for instance, 100 terabytes in just in a USB or something like that, it's the future. So, there's not going to be need over that, that's good, no? >> Hit it on the head of a, on the head of a pin. >> Yeah. >> Fernando, thank you so much for joining us. >> No, thank you to you. Thank you Rebecca, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Keith Townsen. We will have more from Dell EMC world after this. (progressive music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at Dell EMC World 2017. This is our eighth year of coverage of formerly known as EMC World but is now Dell World. First year of the combined companies. Some say Dell bought EMC, some say EMC bought Dell. Either way, the merger and the acquisition, or combination, however you want to call it, certainly working out. This is Cube coverage of the first year. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Keith Townsend, CTO advisor. Our next guest is Tarun Thakur, co-Founder and CEO of Datos IO, big news and as well, Peter Smails, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, a former EMCer, been in the industry. Guys, congratulations, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, John. Thank you Keith. >> Thank you very much. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> Big bang news at the Dell-E, so tons of stories here. Obviously the big story is the combination, but you guys have some really amazing news. Funding, traction, give us the update on the hard news. >> Excellent, thank you, John. First, thank you guys. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. The last couple of weeks have been just amazing for us. Last week was all about product, which Peter is going to talk about. Our journey from our one portal to our two portals. That journey is all driven by customers and where the market is headed. But this week was all about enterprise adoption. It's a&bout enterprise activity. You have these two industry stallworths, 200 billion dollars of market cap, recognizing the value of what we have been-- >> John: And so the hard news is, what, Cisco and NetApp have invested? >> Cisco and Neuron Motor invested in Datos today. >> So this is a round of funding from corporate investors. Any VC's coming in as well, or-- >> Both, you know, the investors were already in the company, they claimed their ownership-- >> John: Okay, so they did their pro-rata. They re-upped. Okay so, new corporate investors, that's validation. >> Yes, yes, yes. >> Why are they investing? My masses wants to know, why the hell are they investing? Why don't they just do it themselves? >> Yeah, so you know, look, I think this looks very, very clear that this industry of the data management, or this industry of enterprise with option to the cloud is just massive-paced right now, right? The acceleration is at it's highest gear, so to speak, and we've been working with both those companies for the last few months. They recognize at fundamental level what we've built, like, the application-centric nature of the product, build it fundamentally for cloud ready applications, helping existing customers mobilize their applications to the cloud. You know, you have to-- we have, now, three year lead, into the space, right, and it's best to join forces. >> Well, we had our Cube conversation in our studio in Palo Alto too, and you kind of smiling then, certainly smiling now. The big funding, big fat financing, as they say, but you really kind of coy about not sharing the news to me, which I thought was cool, kept the secret, but you guys have shell-- >> Tarun: I had valid reasons. >> But, the cloud is certainly accelerating. You guys have the tiger by the tail. But, if you look at the VC funding landscape, we were saying yesterday on our opening that, it's a canary in a coal mine. It's a really leading indicator of what's going on in the marketplace. If you're a storage start-up, you're DOA. No one is funding that. They're re-pivoting always. You see, "I got scale out, scale up storage," pivot, pivot, pivot but all of these companies, data management, data backup, and protection are all booming. Massive up, Rubrik, Cohesity, billion dollar valuations. Why are these companies getting such big funding? Why are you guys being so-- Is cloud just creating massive scale for what was normally a white space? >> No, sir. The answer-- I'll go first. >> Go for it. I'll jump in. >> Because you come from this all most recently. (laughter) >> Look, John, there has been no innovation in the space of backup and recovery for the last three years. We've been still living in the world of four-wall data center media-server based architectures, and backup and recovery products that were truly return for tape architectures. That world ain't exist in this cloud world. There has been no innovation, and now you see complete replacing of good companies. Great follow up companies to be p6art of. All of us recognize the disruption of opportunity, and recognize what we all do for the next 10, 20 years. >> And I'll jump on that. So, if you net it out, there's really two things happening. You know, 70% of CIO's have a cloud-first strategy. So, enterprise, one of the reason we're here. Enterprises have a cloud-first strategy. They're moving to the cloud. They're doing two things. One, they're either building net, new applications in the cloud. Geo-distributed, highly scaled applications. You need a fundamentally different approach for protecting those applications. That's number one. Number two is those same customers are saying, "I want to move as many of my non-recovery workloads from my traditional four wall data center off prim. I want to leverage the cloud. I want to put my data where I want to put it when I want to put it there." There has not been any good solution to do that. So, for us, that's cloud data management. We're about protect. If you have stuff in the cloud, we'll protect it. If you want to move stuff to the cloud, from the cloud, within the cloud, that's mobility to us. That's what we do. Ultimately, this is why there's so much attention being paid to cloud data management, because everybody's moving to the cloud. The one thing we have heard consistently-- >> John: It never existed before, really. >> They're not taking traditional tools to the cloud, simply put. >> You know what, go to the website, I don't see anything about backup. I don't see anything about, you know, there's data protection, but in an enterprise, when we go to the cloud for the first time, a couple of things we figure out first. Backup is hard, because, you know, I can't point my data domain to S3, and backup S3 or some type of &object storage. I also find out that these traditional architectures within the data center just don't translate to the cloud. So, where are you guys at in the education cycle of the enterprise, and helping them understand the value of the application-centric model, and where do you need to go? >> Yeah, so... Keith, that's a good question. You actually hit the nail on the head. You have these proprietary backup appliances. We used to call data domain, really a PPB appliance. You have these media-server based architectures with the likes of Vericlass and Condor. Perfect for four walls, right, in the cloud geo-distributor applications, right? You look at those, sort, that scale, the application centricity, and we started, what we did in our strategy, we started with absolutely green field. What does that mean? That means the cloud-native applications, the non-relatable databases, right? The analytics, the IO key applications. So you go towards the use-case where the world and the customers are already thinking cloud-native. Coaching and training customers, as you rightly called, is a very hard journey. It is a crossing the chasm. It takes time. You need to start with earlier doctors, the innovators, who will then latch onto you and take you forward. So, our strategy of picking the space, which was completely green field ablution, couldn't have served us better. >> So, what's that next step after we've figured out backup, because we have to back the data up. Data management is way more than backup. Now, as I've blown away the limits of my data center, and I can access data from anywhere in the world, what have you helped customers understand that they can do with their applications and data, now that I can access it anywhere in the world? >> Tarun: Excellent question. >> Yeah, so, I can take that. So, to your point, if you look at protect-- our three pillars: protect, mobilize, monetize. You'll hear us say that over and over and over again. We started with protection. It's a business-critical use case. You cannot have a cloud-first strategy if you don't protect your data. Got it. Second piece around the mobility piece is, like you said, giving. What have we done by being application-centric data management? What do we do that nobody else does,6 is we enable you to, very intelligently and very efficiently, move data sets, in native format, where ever you want. To any cloud that you want. We don't normalize data. We don't change formats. So, for example, I'll give you one great example of application centricity. I have an on-prim workload. I want to run a query against that. Star, not Peter star. That resulting data said, "That's all I want to move to the cloud, "because I want to run BIA against it. "I want to do something that helps me "monetize my data in the cloud. "That data set, I want to move." One, you can run a query against that database. Two, we'll intelligently and efficiently only move that data, in native format. Spin it up in the cloud as metadata set. All your metadata's there. Do whatever you want to that data. When you're done, move it back if you want. Do whatever you want. So, essentially, we've eliminated any silos from a cloud standpoint. So what we've done is, we've given people complete cloud freedom to move what they want when they want, where they need to. That's the essence of what we've done. >> Let's talk about the monetize portion of-- cause, you guys have me curious. If I can move the data to the cloud natively, that's great. That's really value add, but on top of that, I need to figure out really tough problem, which is metadata. I have global data, worldwide. I have data scientists wanting to pound against that in a completely new way. Do you guys provide a new way to access this data other than my legacy tools? >> Absolutely, Keith. So I really hit on those two points in the statement you made. Moving data efficiently, Keith, is a very hard problem. What we have done by being, only protecting what you need to protect, why back up an entire database when you only care about a couple of tables? Remember, we're going from traditional monalithic architectures to micro-services in the cloud, right? DBAs and augments, they only care about couple of tables. I want to run a BI query against certain part of the data. What we have fundamentally done, to the first part of your question, move data very highly efficient, which is 10x dedup of what data domain could do. We have significantly modified to be protected around that decon. The second piece around metadata question. What we've really done, Keith, in our, sort of, scale-out elastic data protection, to the tune of elastic compute and elastic storage, you need to extend that to elastic data management, is your metadata catalog can't back up, at the end of the day hasn't catalog. The golden nugget. >> Right. >> That catalog used to be siloed. If I had 10 media servers, I had that catalog siloed around that. >> Keith: No value met. >> No value met. >> Correct. >> Our catalog log is now distributed, stretched across cloud boundaries. If I have a Datos running on prim, and a Datos running on Amazon, those are two instances of the same software, two nodes, the metadata catalog can see each other. You back up here. John can see that backup in the cloud. He can spin up his sequence already in the cloud. You couldn't do that past. You couldn't do that back in the old world. The golden nugget. You need to stretch your metadata catalog and you need to make it distribute it across cloud boundaries, which is fundamentally what-- >> What's the impact to the application developers, because now, are you freeing up-- What is the ultimate value to the customers? I mean you're basically freeing up the hassles for the app developer to say, "whatever?" Give us the bottom line. >> So, you know, absolutely John. Look, I'll give you a customer's real scenario, okay? A world's leading e-commerce platform where we go, and wife's go spend a lot of money buying clothes, so I'm just going to leave it at that, right? They are moving from a monolithic architecture, the Oracle DB2, to the cloud-native architecture. Application developers want to take their CICD. I'm writing new code, I want to bring new catalog items on the website. I want to test my code changes, and I want to go from the data, not two days ago, which was the old backup world, every day you bring a backup. Now they want what we call, to your question of we don't call it backup, what we call it versioning. I want a version one hour ago, because I want to test my code changes. I want to deploy those code changes on the e-commerce platform driving a billion dollars in revenue, so-- >> So you're enabling more and more coolness with the developer from a data, stale verses fresh data. I mean to certain levels, I mean not-- >> But I want to jump on that as well, because the thing that sometimes goes over looked is that, one of the things that the cloud has done that people sort of don't always acknowledge, is it's created, we've pushed the silo problem from on-prim to the cloud. Clouds don't talk to each other. You know, the notion of that. So the notion of the universal file system, such as the cloud, which some of the competitive landscape tries to-- >> John: Wait a minute. We're supposed to have multi-clouds. >> Yeah we're supposed to, but no. To your point, we do have multi-cloud. But its amazing how difficult it is to deal with that. So to your point-- >> In the future they might be talking to each other, but today they're not. >> But, but, and my point is that we enable you to do that. So, the ultimate value to the customer? I'm the marketing guy, yes, but the notion of cloud freedom is a direct business value to the customer-- >> John: So that's legit from your standpoint. Cloud freedom... >> Put it where you need to put it, when you want to put it there. Bring it back when you want to bring it back. So, from an app standpoint, a lot more flexibility. A lot more agility in terms of app development. From a cost standpoint, from an IT standpoint, I can dramatically reduce my cost, cause I can leverage the cloud versus having everything on prim. From an operational standpoint, I ensure everything's protected, so-- >> And we know cloud-native developers are very, like, they won't tolerate a lot of the old baggage and dogma of IT. >> Peter: Right, right. Are ya freakin' kidding me? >> Tarun: Well, well all-- >> Peter: That's actually, can I take that one? >> Tarun: Please, please. >> That's actually a good-- >> You see how fired up he is? >> I don't know how many hours we have to talk on The Cube because that's a fascinating topic. >> Just pause. Can I pause you for a second? >> Yes. >> That's only 30 days since he left EMC. (laughter) >> Alright, alright. Anyway, the point is, but the problem is new, but there is a persona, what I refer to as basically like a persona innovator's dilemma, that we're also helping address, because there's a convergence of personalities of people involved in the protection and management of data. So, to your point, we've been dealing with a lot of the new personas going after cloud-native data protection, but you're watching the organizations. The enterprises, they're going through it and they are rapidly transforming these personas. So, part of our jobs, to your education point earlier, is making sure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing,% and marrying those two different pieces. That's ultimately, and that's value to the customer, and we help drive that process. >> Well, Tarun and Peter, congratulations, and good to see the journey continuing to accelerate. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> Entrepreneurial journey, and we'll keep in touch. Love the name, Datos OS. We believe, and Wikibon believes, and they're firm on this, that the business value of data is ultimately going to be a major, major disruptor for business. Not necessarily technology, but having that data operating system, that Datos, as you call it, is going to be fundamental. Congratulations. >> Thank you, John. >> Just keep it live here at Dell EMC World 2017. More live coverage, stay with us. More after this short break. (upbeat music)