>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to theCUBES Wall-To-Wall coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual reinvented our coverage over three weeks over cloud. We're looking into the next decade of innovation. And with me are two great guests, Chris Wiborg is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Cohesity and Sabina Joseph is the General Manager for Americas Technology for Partners AWS. Folks, thanks for coming to theCUBE. Great to see you. >> Great to be here today. Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. It's great to see you and Chris, before we get into the partnership, I want to ask kind of what you've seen in the market, with the increased focus on data, digital business, obviously the last nine months, people have really shifted their priorities. How have you seen customers responding? >> Yeah, it's sort of strange to say this at a time. It's really hard for all of us dealing with a global pandemic, but the market has picked up in many ways and perhaps that's not surprising given a lot of folks have started to shift things to more virtual way of working and the data hasn't slowed down. And so with that we've also seen a little bit of a shift and this is part of the reason behind the announcement we're making of trying to accelerate for many organizations projects that had originally been planned to put in a data center to moving more towards the cloud. Part of this as a CapEx to OpEX shift. But I think it also in some cases all is under this umbrella of digital transformation, where they're trying to accelerate new ways of doing things while in some cases, people can't even get into data centers in some cases anymore. And so how can you do that more remotely? How can you go to a model to loot more Self-Help? And all that leads up to part of what we're going to be talking about today. So the market has been very busy because again, data growth hasn't slowed down. I think the one thing that I'd add to that is you'd see an uptake in terms of focus and interest in some of the things that we do because of all the ransomware attacks that are out there. That's another piece of it. >> I want to get into the announcement as well, but I mean, you're right, Chris, it's a very hexy, it's tough as it is for the climate. It's a good time to be in tech. It's even better if you're in cloud. So Sabina, I wonder if you'd had... I think you must have a lot of people in the ecosystem really wanting to work with you. >> We do, I think with the proliferation of data. And data across many different silos I think the key is, how do we provide customers more value from this data, that way they can make it optimal for their business. So, yes, we do have a lot of different partners wanting to work. >> Okay, so we're all busy. I feel like we've never worked so hard in our lives, but so Cohesity and AWS, you've announced a strategic collaboration. Tell me more about it. Why did you choose to collaborate together Chris, other than AWS is the number one cloud platform. What were some of the other factors that we should be focused on? >> I think it's the Sabina, please do chime in here as well. I think the big portion of it, Dave has to do with this shared vision that we have around. Really what we believe is the next chapter in data management. And so how do we make it simple for organizations to not only protect and secure and manage their data, but also get more value out of it and derive more value from that data, which is kind of what Sabina was hinting at. And a lot of the reasons that we think this is such a good match, given all the varying services Amazon has, that you can build off, given what Cohesity does. So Sabina, I know you going to start with customers. You always interviewed enough Amazon, and it was only us to know that's really the starting point, the prison from which you looked, but so from that prison, from your perspective, what's the collaboration? Why the collaboration? What does it bring for customers? >> So, you know, I've the saying here. I think there was a lot of alignment, both in terms of culture and working backwards from customers, customers session. And really kind of understand, what can we do right into the Intelligent Data Management Solution to enterprise and mid-sized customers and provide simplicity, flexibility, and reduced total cost of ownership. And that's where Cohesity and AWS, we really shared that vision. I would say over the last couple of years, Cohesity of course, has been a partner of AWS for quite some time now. And then when we started to talk to each other, we understood that these were some of the things we wanted to not just address, but also provide an opportunity for customers. So that's why we collaborated in this unique way to bring forward a Data Management as a service solution for our customers. >> All right, Chris, I really want to dig into this a little bit more because I've talked to a number of CEOs that have said, boy, our business resilience strategy was way to focused on DRA maybe too much focus on backup. We're now a digital business, because every business, so you're out of business, if you're not a digital business overnight. And so this notion of data management and data management as a service, what problems are you really focused on solving there? >> I think two things, Dave and let's go back to a Cohesity after solving as a company. And that's the problem with what we call mass data fragmentation, where you have data stored in many different locations, prem, cloud, edge, et cetera, typically in many different pieces of infrastructure. So there's a lot of silos going on there, and it's really hard to get your hands around the entirety of what you have. And first of all, make sure it is protected. And there's some compliance implications to that and so on. And then also again, how can you not only protected, but do more with it and get better transparency and more value out of that data that today might be dark, might be opaque because a, do you know where it is? And b, even if you do, what more can you do with it? And so that's kind of the first problem we're setting out to solve. And why as we look at moving to doing what we're doing with AWS, providing an alternate consumption option is also really important, we think. So some people have staff and skills to roll their own, to do their selves and cohesively we'll continue to support those customers, obviously, as we do today. But what we also want to provide a new option for those that want to make that shift from CapEx to OpEX, and more from a management of their environment doing it themselves to having somebody else manage it for them, and really reducing that cost and overhead associated with running your own data center effectively. And so bringing valuable Cohesity leaders to the cloud is the second piece of that, where we want to make sure we carry that bigger vision along where we're not just doing one thing, we're doing multiple things. And so Data Management in our sense is not just about backup, although that's the first thing you'll see. We're also going to tackle that dr problem, you raised as well. If you look closely a couple of weeks ago, we made an announcement around what we're doing with a product we call Site Continuity on the on-prem world, guess what that's going to come real soon to AWS. And then beyond that files and objects, test data management and as we'll get to a little bit later more when we start leveraging the value and the power of some of the advanced services, AWS hasn't been to the table for things like compliance and so on. >> Great, thank you for that. And so Sabina, I mean, we run on AWS, we're small, but still we go into the console and there's this buffet of services and we have a lot of options. So, I wonder if you could talk about customer choice, your philosophy around that, why that's important, how you're providing different deployment models. And the example I would use is why is backup as a service? Not enough, why do we need to go beyond that? >> First of all, thank you very much for being our customer. >> Welcome. >> And I think the key behind this solution that Cohesity is building on top of AWS is to really provide one platform and one user interface. Yes, backup as a service is the first service that we will start with and we are starting with, but I think we all realize that customers do many different things, but get data. They do disaster recovery, they have file services, Dev and test, and then the value add services, which we'll talk about in a bit around analytics compliance, machine learning and so on. So those are all the different value, at least we want to provide the date with that data. In addition of course, backup as a service disaster recovery, as a service file services and so on. Well the backup services comprehensive that we are launching with and provide some rich protection across all of this data, but at the end of the day, it's customer's choice whether they want to manage your own data and infrastructure or Cohesity kind of manage this across the infrastructure for them both in a hybrid model and in a cloud model. And we have many customers kind of wanting to look at both options because they had both environments. I don't know Chris, if you want to talk about Dolby a little bit, but I can certainly get into it. I don't know if you want to get a little bit into Dolby and how they're using it. >> Yeah, that's a great example, actually Sabina. So, I think Dave, Sabina is suggesting, one of our early design partners on this was Dolby and they're an existing Cohesity customer. Today they're very happy what we're doing on-prem. And so I asked them why would you be interested in managing data also in the cloud? And his answer was, well, "look for me, it's really all about the self-help option. "I have a lot of clients, I do well centrality, "I have a lot of clients in my organization, "but I want to point to do their own thing "and not have to directly manage them. "This is going to be the perfect option for them. "They can just go sign up, connect and protect "to get started. All right, Step one." >> I talked to another customer who commented well in this sort of hybrid configuration that Sabina suggests the stuff that they have on-prem today. They'll probably protect on-prem, but workloads like let's say Microsoft 365, mailboxes or something like that, it's in the cloud. Why would they back haul that into their data center? Why not just protect it there in the cloud itself? It just seems to make sense. And then we also have customers we're talking to that, there are large distributed organizations where maybe the stuff that's in the branch office, the remote office, they want to backup to the cloud because of land back, haul costs and so on. It's easier to do it that way. And then the central stuff is still central. So we going to give as Sabina said, customers that choice. You can do cloud only if you want to, you can do prem only with us, or you can do both. And we expect a lot of customers loaded up in a third bucket and that sort of hybrid scenario and let them choose why they do it and use that combination. The great thing is when you go to Cohesity Helio's, that's going to be the control center, if you will, for both things on-prem and also in this new DevOps offering in cloud. So one experience from a manageability standpoint, that's just the only thing I'd add to Sabina's answer about what's great about this and why you want to do more than just one thing. Well, if you sort of solve this problem of infrastructure silos and in your traditional data center, and now you're bringing in the cloud, why we create silos and best of breed things all over again, don't you want to consolidate some of that for ease of use and lower cost of ownership as well. And so that's one of the things we think we're going to bring to the table. It's pretty unique versus letting customers pick and choose, five or 10 different solutions and trying to merge those together. We think we've got a better way. >> Got it. So then let's come back to some of the comments you were making about added value. So what the customers really do with data, with data management as a service and AWS that maybe they couldn't do before. >> So the way I look at it, Cohesity and AWS are custodians of this data, on behalf of the customer, ultimately it is their data, but we want to unlock the value from this data versus having it being in different silos, different locations and so on. So the vision that we have, which we are on the road right now, in terms of unlocking this data is to really add additional services, maybe compliance as a service, analytics as a service, machine learning as a service. So let's just kind of walk through these three things, So if you think about compliance as a service, using Amazon Macie, which uses machine learning to really kind of discover, classify and protect sensitive data. And if you think about analytics as a service, using AWS Glue to run ETL on this data, Amazon Athena to run sequel queries and then potentially create data warehouse using Amazon Redshift. Then if you really start thinking about other machine learning services, right across the AWS machine learning stack, if you look at it at a high level, customers could use Amazon text tracks, Amazon transcribe to extract value from the Metadata to allow deeper business specific content that they need for their different solutions they have to end customers. For example, another logical use case could be Amazon comprehend medical using that to kind of distract extract medical information from this data. And then finally customers can also use Amazon SageMaker to build advanced machine learning models, to really start deriving even additional value and gain business insights from this data. So those are kind of the things we have in our mind, in terms of compliance to service, machine learning as the service, analytics as a service. And then of course, I want to bring in Chris here to talk a little bit about what they plan to do with their MarketPlace, the Cohesity Marketplace. >> Yeah, no, I think, it's a great Sabina. So we've always had this concept at Cohesity, Dave, of being able to do more with your data. And you've seen express so far in our marketplace, which is still going to be there. We just think plugging some of the additional services that Sabina mentioned. When you have a center of gravity for your data in the cloud is going to make that concept even more powerful. And so day one, when we GA just right now, actually during re:Invent you going to be able to do it yourself. You'll have data backed up into the cloud. For example, you can apply those services if you have the skill to do that. But over time, working in conjunction with Amazon, the goal is to be able to make those services something that you would just go in again to Helios and say, for example, turn on the compliance service. And behind the scenes we're invoking and it was on Macie doing all right thing with all the data under management like Cohesity already. And so you just get them to report back out if that's what you're aiming to do. And so we going to try and make this as simple and easy to use as possible, leveraging the power of all the great things that Amazon has does through the API that they have combined with what we do in an engineering effort that we'll be driving with our guidance, to really give a great value, add customers far beyond the insurance policy you get with backup and being able to do more with that data and add value to your organization. >> And that's okay. So you've announced at re:Invent GA of Cohesity dataprotect how should customers think about getting started? >> Well, they can get started today, since we're an LGA I just go to www.queasy.com and I have the ability to go ahead there and actually join in on a free trial and to get started. And if they decided to convert them, then they can go from there. So risk-free gone in, check it out. We welcome feedback as always from our customers and then stay tuned because right around the corner after we're done with one offer as part of the bigger DevOps umbrella, you'll see disaster recovery and additional services, really the whole value of the Cohesity platform over time delivered through AWS. >> As a service bring it on guys, Sabina and Chris, thanks so much, really appreciate you coming on and thank you for watching everyone. Keep it right there with digging deep into AWS and the re:Invent ecosystem. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018, brought to your by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. (techy music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE live here in Las Vegas for Amazon Web Services, AWS re:Invent 2018, I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, the cohost of theCUBE on this set. There's two sets, and we're getting all the great interviews from the smartest people here in the ecosystem. AWS re:Invent is the industry conference that makes it all happen in the cloud. We're excited to have Lynn Lucas here, CMO of Cohesity, back on theCUBE, CUBE alumni, also the architect of the greatest party of all time. The Cohesity parties, you guys had a great party last night. I tweeted some live footage of it. Got a little bit of backlash on Twitter, but it's okay, you know. >> We don't want that. >> A lot of FOMO. >> Hopefully also the architect of some great marketing here. We're here to get the word out about Cohesity and our news with Amazon, so glad to have you here. Thanks for having me on the set again. >> You guys really hit the formula for parties at events because normally they can be kind of boring. You bring artists in, you have a great venue. You glam it up with green, the color of Cohesity. How's that working out for you guys, what's been the feedback? I was going to say people last night were jamming, great crowd. Tell us what's going on, what's the success look like, what's the vibe? >> Yeah, well it certainly is about appreciating our partners and customers that are here, but really it's all about getting the word out about Cohesity, and you know, I think you know the numbers here were somewhere between 50 and 60,000 people here, crazy, at re:Invent, and we want people to know what Cohesity can do for them in terms of their use of Amazon and making that investment even better and smarter for them, for what we call secondary data, so that was the purpose of the party, thank our customers and partners and get the word out about what we can do. >> As they say in the old marketing cliche, if you've got the sizzle you've got to have the steak. >> Absolutely. >> So, tell me, you've got some great sizzle, great marketing, congratulations, doing a great job. Love working with you and love going to your events. What is the action on the products, like where's the meat on the bone? >> Sure thing, so we had a really important announcement here yesterday extending our partnership with Amazon. We had an extension to some already great, killer features that we have. Three things, so three things you got to know. One, integration without agents to do backup of your cloud native, AWS applications, full failover and fail back to the Amazon cloud and back again for DR, and we also are now offering integration with Snowball, so a lot of customers looking at how they can get more of their data into Amazon, and now we facilitate that and of course give you the indexing that allows that to become searchable and usable for the longer term. >> I want to ask you a question. I saw a presentation this morning at Teresa Carlson's public sector breakfast, packed house, again. She's really doing an amazing job, so shout out to her and her team, but the presentation was from the deputy of the FBI counter terrorism, she talked about all the bad things that have happened and how they tried to catch up and find the bad guys, or gals, and the problem they have is that they have a data crisis, and she said that: "The FBI has a data crisis," and they can't put the puzzle together fast enough because although the data's there, they can't get it out of the databases and there are all these different fragmented systems. This is a problem, how are you guys helping clients fix this fragmentation problem? Is that an area you're solving? What's your vision, or Cohesity's vision, around this notion of how does cloudification solve this speeding up of value around data that's kind of spread out everywhere? >> Yeah, so you hit the nail on the head. We call this mass data fragmentation, and that's the problem that she's talking about. In fact, we just completed a global study of secondary data, and nine out of ten, not surprisingly, of IT organizations around the globe think that this is going to cost them somewhere between 50% and 100% more than what they're currently spending to manage their data, because it's in silos, it's in silos on-premise, but it's also then started to silo inside the cloud, and how Cohesity helps is creating a unified platform, what we call the Data Platform, and spanning the on-premise and the cloud, the multicloud environment, and providing some really unique capabilities to help organizations take that fragmentation and now remove it, bust those silos, put it in one place, give you global search, indexing, and then compression, because we all know how many copies... Excuse me, deduplication, save storage, but then also the removal of copies, because we all know how many copies there are out there. >> So, Cohesity's brand message is you guys keep pounding the frequency, get the brand message out there, is what, what's the brand promise for Cohesity? >> Great question, the brand promise is we are going to end your mass data fragmentation problems and give you web scale simplicity, right? So, why are so many organizations here, right? They love what they see with AWS and that web scale and that hyper scale simplicity, but many companies, right, still have a lot of on-premise systems, and so they're struggling with it. Well, our founder, Mohit Aron, was one of the original developers of the Google file system, knows a little bit about building distributed file systems, and so he's brought that into an affordable platform for the enterprise to give you that scalability across your on-premise, your public cloud, private cloud edge sites. >> And I think that is critical across multiple environments, especially as people are trying to develop across those multiple environments, there really needs to be that consistency for them. Some of the things that I've picked up that I hear about you guys, it's really about user experience. It seems like you care a lot about that. You've got one graphical, you know, interface that you actually use, and it makes, I think, data less scary to folks. I would say the ecosystem, I don't know... You know, I looked at your architecture and I don't know who's not in those boxes, but you make it very clear, you know, in particular, and I think also saving people money, you know, that's going to be critical because everyone is scaling out and they're spending more and more and more, and what they're spending more on is, you know, this vast amount of data that they can't control anymore, and it's, you know, just kind of churning. >> Yeah. >> And we just had this great guy on here and he was talking about, you know, the movie that he did, and he's the one-stop shop, like, IT guy at this company, and he's the... He thinks, he's like, "They saved my life," was what he told us-- >> Yeah. >> About you guys, so-- >> So, I think you hit the nail on the head, it's all about simplicity. I mean, again, in our new study, and I don't think this is going to surprise anyone, but bringing it up to date for 2018, you still have, on average, five to six systems just for backup, up to 15 if you count all secondary, which is files and objects, analytics, test dev, and think about IT trying to manage all of that complexity from a user interface, a procurement, a training enablement. So, we give them that one-stop dashboard simplicity-- >> Yeah. >> And then on top of that build a foundation for the test dev organization, analytics organization to now do more with the data, because it's not enough to just bring, bust those silos and bring the data into one place. We need to do something with that data, right? >> Absolutely, and you know, you guys were talking, before we came on camera, about storytelling, and you know, I look at the story of the cloud. I want to get your perspective on this, and Lauren, feel free to chime in because I think you've got a good input on this. If you look at what the cloud is doing to changing the game, this narrative is changing. Andy Jassy calls it the old guard, other people call it legacy systems. We've all been in a tech industry. We've kind of seen where it's been and where it's going now. More visibility now in where it's going, AI and more automation, all this greatness. The narrative's changing, who's ready, who's prepared, what is the story of the modern cloud era? What is that narrative and how should companies be talking to themselves? What's their self-talk, how do they... What's your thoughts on the story of the modern era? What's actually happening in your mind? >> Well, I think, you know, the narrative is around if you are not cloud-forward, I don't like to call it cloud native because I think that really doesn't speak to so many organizations, so it's about being cloud-forward, and having that mindset, right, that you are going to be thinking about what are the advantages of the AWS cloud for me and my business. How can I use that to gain efficiencies, and that is something that I think really does separate the old guard from the new guard. You know, if I think about Cohesity in that vein, compared to some of the legacy solutions out there, that is what Mohit Aron built in. We're cloud native from the beginning with an S3 interface, but with those interfaces back into the enterprise world so that we can help customers bring that forward, data portability and app portability. >> That's Amazon's mission, they're just forward, forward, forward progress. They're not even looking in the rear view. Although, Andy does look at Oracle, but we have to Oracle, Lauren, what's your take on the storytelling, because I'd love to get your perspective on this, too. I hate to go on a little tangent here, but I think it ties to the Cohesity brand promise. You got developers changing, you got IT experts being devops kind of, you know, culture change there, and you've got the role of opensource communities. This is a new mosh pit of action. What's your-- >> Yeah, I think it's a mosh pit of action, but it's more of a mosh pit of opportunity-- >> Yeah, absolutely. (chuckling) >> If you really want to look at it. You know, you have developers, so you know, in 2003 I was at BEA building developer communities around web servers, and then I actually went, you know, in 2008 I was at Microsoft building the web platform, which was the precursor to Azure, and you know, then skip ahead, you know, 10 years, and this is where we are and this is what we're looking at, and I think that what we've gotten to along that, you know, kind of timeline, is it has to be easy for users. Development has to be easy, it doesn't matter where in the stack people are working, it has to be accessible, people have to be able to learn it or up skill to it very, very quickly, and it's really a new, you know, shape and form that's kind of coming to the table, and as people look to study computer science and things along those lines it will be important, but it will become less important as more companies start to look at the Salesforce model where you literally can become a developer in a week, and things along those lines. >> Right. >> That's what I think the cloud is really bringing to the table. >> It's the new software methodology. Clearly Amazon announcing this cool ground station, satellite as a service, spin up, fly your own drones, whatever you want to do. You don't have to provision a satellite anymore, just turn it on. It's going to empower the edge, because the edge is where conductivity stops. So, if you've got conductivity everywhere, that now means that all data will be coming in even probably more exponentially. This is kind of in your wheelhouse. As you look forward, as you go cloud-forward and IoT edge forward more data's coming. Are you ready for that, what's the vision for you guys, how do you handle all that? >> Well, you know, I think the story about more data, with respect, is old. We all know that, right, you know. What people haven't been able to solve is as it's coming in, how are you going to keep track of it, and is it even feasible to try to put it all in one place, and I think the answer's not really, right? I mean, think about IoT-- >> Yeah. >> And all these edge sites-- >> Yeah. >> And the promise of what's going on, so this vision, which I love, is of a spanning system that gives you that operating model of one platform, but not trying to do the impossible of continually trying to put data all in physically one place, coupled with, I so agree with you, this API-first economy. If you aren't building systems that way, you know, then it really isn't built for the future because who can imagine all of the things that we do with our smartphones, and we like to think of what the Cohesity Data Platform is is the analogy to the smartphone, right? We used to carry the flip phone, the GPS, the music player, the flashlight, that device changed the world, and then we changed it again by using APIs to build new apps on it. Cohesity Data Platform is that same vision. We're going to create that unified operating environment, and then through APIs let companies build on it. >> So, it's a data platform is not so much a category of backup and recovery. It's a benefit, a lot of value there, get a magic quadrant, maybe, written up someday, but you're a data platform. >> Yeah, well I go back to that analogy of the smartphone, right? You know, so we solve, and want to solve and be the world's best at solving some of the toughest problems, and data protection is one of them. Like, I'll speak to one of our other AWS customers that's here, which is Dolby, and Dolby had a massive challenge with their on-premise data center moving their workloads to AWS since 2016, had a fire in their data center and started realizing, "Hey, there's a lot of benefits "to doing more backup in the cloud, "but also doing more archive to the cloud," both from a protection point of a view, as well as a cost saving point of view, and that is, you know, the kind of thing where we're going to solve each of those use cases. Your phone is still great as a phone, but it's also great to order your Uber here, and maybe get you a meal. >> And there's data in there, too, okay. >> Yeah. >> Question, final question for you is competition, a lot of heat in the kitchen with competition. You don't shy away from it, I love that about you. You guys are loud and proud at Cohesity, love that brand. >> Super green. >> Yeah, super green, green light, go, green is money, too. How are you different from competition, why are you winning, what's the advantage? >> Well, let me go back to, I think, a phrase, old guard, new guard. So, I think there's an old guard, and we would clearly separate ourselves from the old legacy solutions that are not hyperconverged and are not web scale, and are not web-first or cloud-forward. There's another group that are looking at, and even some of the old players now, trying to move into the new world, but I think what differentiates Cohesity is three things: A true spanning file system, web scale, that is not focused on just being a better backup. So, you just touched on backup, it's an important workload, but our vision is to consolidate all secondary workloads, so that's backup, yes, but it's also files and objects. It's also then making that data productive for test dev and analytics, and doing that across, again, the edge, the cloud, and on-premise, and that's what makes us different. >> Final, final question, because I always do this because one pops into my head when you're talking, Andy Jassy's going to talk a lot about this tomorrow, because I got a little preview on Monday last week, net new workloads, latency, all these new things. Got some of the announcements trickling out. He's seeing, and a lot of people are, we included agree with him, when you have the kind of compute that's available and the kind of data platforms and the horizontal scalability to cloud, these new net workload will be enabled. AIs been enabled by great compute. AIs been around for decades-- >> Mm-hm. >> And it's got a renaissance with compute. What new net work, net new workloads do you envision Cohesity bumping into or pioneering in the future? >> Well, actually we're going to look to the developer community, honestly, right. I think we have a strong ethos and belief that, you know, we're not the smartest people in the room, so to speak, so let's bring that out to the developers and let them in their companies or in the third parties, the great community that's here, figure out what is the next thing that we can do. When we don't have these fragmented silos of data and we can actually see in its entirety what is available to us, what might be possible? I think it could change the world. >> Developer community's a very key part of it, I would agree. Again, there's hardcore new developers emerging, IT expert developers, opensource community contributors all coming together, all here on theCUBE covering, that's our audience, that's you guys out there. Bringing the best action here at re:Invent. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, here with Lynn Lucas with Cohesity. We'll be back with more live coverage here from the two sets, double barrel shotgun of theCUBE, we call it theCUBE canons. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (techy music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCube, covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. (techno music) >> Welcome back to NAB, live from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with theCube. Join me in welcoming our next guest, Rich Welsh CEO of Sundog Media Toolkit. Hey Rich welcome to theCube. >> Hi, thank you for having me. >> Great to have you. So, first and foremost, now that I got all my tongue twitches out of the way, I have to ask you, what is a sundog? >> A sundog is actually a weather affect. It's an optical illusion caused by ice crystals in cirrus clouds. And the crystals are hexagonal and they diffract the light and you get these two, they're called mock suns, or parhelians, and the aboriginal word for that is a sundog. And so, that's where that comes from. And because we're in the cloud and we're like hexagons, we have a hexagonal user inter-face in our system. So we thought this was a perfect name for the company. >> Very unique. So tell us a little bit more. Sundog is a cloud-native solution for post-production in the cloud. >> Yes. >> You were founded in 2013. Give us a little bit more of an understanding of what you're doing for post-production in the cloud. >> Okay, so the system is built around running the kind of processes that require a lot of heavy-lifting and need to scale, such as very complex image manipulation processes, restoration, format conversions, working with uncompressed content, high-dynamic range, 4K, high frame rate. These are things that become much easier in a cloud environment and you scale up and down with the workload, and how peaky demand of a production. Obviously productions come along, they do a load of work and then they shut down again. So it's really built around that kind of ability to scale in a very peaky environment. >> So given that, you mentioned 4K. There was the live stream from The International Space Station today via 4K here to Las Vegas, amazing. 4K, HG, UHG, AK, massive opportunities, generating massive content that requires agility, speed, et cetera, et cetera. Talk to us about really what the genesis was for Sundog. What opportunity did you see in the market to create this company? >> So my background is operations in post-production distribution. I worked for Dolby and then Technicolor, and while I was doing that work, I found that there was often issues again with the kind of workloads where the formats were constantly increasing, I mean, we see that now, more formats than ever in terms of not just the things people might think of in terms of downstream tablets, mobile, and so on, but even in the cinema, we have massive amounts of different picture formats, sound formats, and so on. And it makes that whole content creation process so much more complex. We felt, Chris Ralph, who is my business partner and the co-founder of Sundog, and we'd worked together in that environment, but we always had machines in a machine room in the basement. And that really was a big limiting factor to what you could do and how quickly you could adapt to new formats and new requirements for the customers, and just the workflows they may want to suddenly adopt. So we felt that building something in the cloud gave us a lot of flexibility to be able to adapt to those different workflows, to new formats very quickly because you don't worry so much about the actual difficulty of doing the processing, you're not buying boxes anymore, so speed of processing becomes a function of how much of the cloud you want to use. So it's very simple to be able to go well, if for a 4K show we have way more compute power just to keep us going at the same speed as we would have for an HD, when then as we move into things like AK, high-dynamic range, high frame rate, these things are all coming along. You can just adapt more or less instantaneously to those things as they happen without having the burden of capital expenditure and limitations of whatever you already have installed. >> So give us an idea, you mentioned cinema and I know that you work with Hollywood-level cinema organizations. You talked about the speed, the flexibility, the agility, that they get. Walk us through an example of a film studio. What's the transition like for them moving post-production to the cloud? Is it a straightforward process, multiple steps involved? >> No, there are definitely multiple steps involved. I wouldn't say it's straightforward. It's maybe not quite as difficult as people would think, but there are a lot of factors that you need to consider when you're moving to the cloud. I mean, the first obvious one is you have to move the data in. So traditionally, a broadband infrastructure is going to be something that you have to invest in over a fairly long period of time to get good cost-effective bandwidth when you're moving uncompressed data and particularly if you're now moving up and down to the cloud, but we're seeing telecoms providers moving to much more flexible business models basically. So they're installing very high bandwidth fiber, but then you have the actual amount of data that you want to move on-demand. These kind of models are enabling people to move their post-production to the cloud. And the next thing, obviously, is security. People do have concerns about security. But with that said, actually the really big cloud providers have worked very hard to lock down that element. And in fact, there are many other industries whose security requirements are very stringent. You know, military applications, pharmaceuticals, banking, oil and gas. You can imagine all these very high-value industries that require really good security. And the big public clouds are geared towards that, so actually, you can have a lot of confidence as a studio or a broadcaster that if you implement it correctly, you can have really good, I would argue better than facility security, in a cloud environment, because they're actually dealing with stuff that cannot be lost. >> Right. We were actually, theCube, just at the Amazon Web Services Summit in San Francisco last week, and that was kind of a recurring theme that the security concerns really have been quite mitigated in the public cloud. Give us an idea in terms of maybe reducing the time from shot to post-production to actually showing a cinema in the theaters. How much reduction can a cinema, or film studio expect by moving to the cloud? >> Well, I mean, you can get incredible amounts of reduction because now if you can scale to that workload, let's say a big international release feature film might have three, 400 versions that will go out to cinemas, those versions in their current kind of paradigm have to be made manually in boxes, and with operators and then they have to be watched and qualified to make sure they're going to work, and then they get shipped to the theater. If you imagine moving that workflow wholesale to the cloud and we have done that work with some of the studios, now if you can get all of the elements together up front instead of having several weeks of work to get that out of the door and into theaters, you can literally do it in hours. There's no real limitation to the amount of compute resource that you would use in that scenario, certainly not going to trouble a really big data provider like Amazon, AWS. So you can get the assets out very quickly, but then you're actually able to leverage other features of the cloud such as content delivery networks to push those files to the cinemas. So in a real like joined up workflow in that way, I mean, we're not doing all of those things yet, but we will get there I'm absolutely certain and these things can take the release cycle from weeks down to days or hours. >> So dramatic, dramatic savings. Talk to us about, before we talk about the underlying infrastructure of Sundog, walk us through where Sundog is in that entire production pipeline. >> Okay, well actually Sundog's quite a broad platform in terms of the feature set, so we find the systems used by different productions at various different stages and that can be upfront in terms of dailies, and visual effects approvals, it can be right back at the distribution end when you're making all your foreign language versions, dubbed subtitles, and so on. And then we have a lot of processes which would typically take place in the middle of the post-production phase with things like image clean-up, de-noisers, we have super resolution converters, and actually a lot of tools that aren't available in hardware, simply because it's been very difficult to get a hardware platform that could reasonably process those elements in any amount of time. Again, we're finding that the cloud is becoming an environment for productizing those really complex algorithms and image processing techniques that just have not been available to creatives up till now. >> So with the customer journey, this transition that we talked about, what does, under the hood of Sundog in the cloud, compute, storage, networking, tell us about this ecosystem? >> So we took the approach from the start that we didn't want to deal with the storage element, that was for two reasons. The one is that customers really want to control their content themselves. So we felt if we could simply point the system to their storage, then that would be a much easier way for them to have to confidence that they know where their assets are and they're in control of them. So we work in a hybrid setup where you can have your assets stored anywhere you want. In a cloud, it will have to be a cloud environment, and then our system authenticates to it. Now the system itself is in Amazon, so all the compute, and data-base resource, and then all the kind of dynamic features around automation and so on, are built on the Amazon AWS platform, but the data may exist elsewhere so it might be in Amazon, it might be in Amazon S3 storage, but it could equally be somewhere else in the world in a different data center, it be on-prem in a cloud store that you've built yourself. So our architecture really is to provision and orchestrate that resource and scale, to provide the tools, so we have all these workflows with different manufacturers tools in there that you can call on-demand. But then when it comes to actually processing it, the data starts and finishes where you want it to go and gives you complete control. So it's quite a different architecture to a lot of solutions that are currently out there where you really have a box in the cloud with the storage attached to the box, and that's kind of it. >> Well not only do you have a very unique name with a great meaning, but you also seem to have quite differentiated technology. We thank you so much for stopping by theCube, we wish you the best of luck with Sundog, and have a great rest of your day three at NAB. >> Thank you very much. >> We want to thank you for watching. Again we are live at NAB in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, stick around we'll be right back. (techno music)