>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Super Cloud Event preview. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube, and with Dave Valante, host of the popular Super cloud events. This is Super Cloud two preview. I'm joined by industry leader and Cube alumni, Victoria Vigo, vice president of klos Cross Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio. Great to see you. We're here for the preview of Super Cloud two on January 17th, virtual event, live stage performance, but streamed out to the audience virtually. We're gonna do a preview. Thanks for coming in. >>My pleasure. Always glad to be here. >>It's holiday time. We had the first super cloud on in August prior to VMware, explore North America prior to VMware, explore Europe prior to reinvent. We've been through that, but right now, super Cloud has got momentum. Super Cloud two has got some success. Before we dig into it, let's take a step back and set the table. What is Super Cloud and why is important? Why are people buzzing about it? Why is it a thing? >>Look, we have been in the cloud now for like 10, 15 years and the cloud is going strong and I, I would say that going cloud first was deliberate and strategic in most cases. In some cases the, the developer was going for the path of risk resistance, but in any sizable company, this caused the companies to end up in a multi-cloud world where 85% of the companies out there use two or multiple clouds. And with that comes what we call cloud chaos, because each cloud brings their own management tools, development tools, security. And so that increase the complexity and cost. And so we believe that it's time to usher a new era in cloud computing, which we, you call the super cloud. We call it cross cloud services, which allows our customers to have a single way to build, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. Lowering the cost and simplifying the environment. Since >>Dave Ante and I introduced and rift on the concept of Supercloud, as we talked about at reinvent last year, a lot has happened. Supercloud one, it was in August, but prior to that, great momentum in the industry. Great conversation. People are loving it, they're hating it, which means it's got some traction. Berkeley has come on board as with a position paper. They're kind of endorsing it. They call it something different. You call it cross cloud services, whatever it is. It's kind of the same theme we're seeing. And so the industry has recognized something is happening that's different than what Cloud one was or the first generation of cloud. Now we have something different. This Super Cloud two in January. This event has traction with practitioners, customers, big name brands, Sachs, fifth Avenue, Warner, media Financial, mercury Financial, other big names are here. They're leaning in. They're excited. Why the traction in the customer's industry converts over to, to the customer traction. Why is it happening? You, you get a lot of data. >>Well, in, in Super Cloud one, it was a vendor fest, right? But these vendors are smart people that get their vision from where, from the customers. This, this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. We all talk to customers and we tend to lean on the early adopters and the early adopters of the cloud are the ones that are telling us, we now are in a place where the complexity is too much. The cost is ballooning. We're going towards slow down potentially in the economy. We need to get better economics out of, of our cloud. And so every single customers I talked to today, or any sizable company as this problem, the developers have gone off, built all these applications, and now the business is coming to the operators and asking, where are my applications? Are they performing? What is the security posture? And how do we do compliance? And so now they're realizing we need to do something about this or it is gonna be unmanageable. >>I wanna go to a clip I pulled out from the, our video data lake and the cube. If we can go to that clip, it's Chuck Whitten Dell at a keynote. He was talking about what he calls multi-cloud by default, not by design. This is a state of the, of the industry. If we're gonna roll that clip, and I wanna get your reaction to that. >>Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, you know, multiple public clouds. On-premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was it can be, and it should be, it is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they wanna maintain an on-premise cloud. On-premise clouds are not going away. I mentioned edge Cloud, so it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud, by default we mean that's the state of the world. Today, our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design, as you heard. Yeah, I >>Mean, I, okay, Vittorio, that's, that's the head of Dell Technologies president. He obvious he runs it. Michael Dell's still around, but you know, he's the leader. This is a interesting observation. You know, he's not a customer. We have some customer equips we'll go to as well, but by default it kind of happened not by design. So we're now kind of in a zoom out issue where, okay, I got this environment just landed on me. What, what is the, what's your reaction to that clip of how multi-cloud has become present in, in everyone's on everyone's plate right now to deal with? Yeah, >>I it is, it is multi-cloud by default, I would call it by accident. We, we really got there by accident. I think now it's time to make it a strategic asset because look, we're using multiple cloud for a reason, because all these hyperscaler bring tremendous innovation that we want to leverage. But I strongly believe that in it, especially history repeat itself, right? And so if you look at the history of it, as was always when a new level of obstruction that simplify things, that we got the next level of innovation at the lower cost, you know, from going from c plus plus to Visual basic, going from integrating application at the bits of by layer to SOA and then web services. It's, it's only when we simplify the environment that we can go faster and lower cost. And the multi-cloud is ready for that level of obstruction today. >>You know, you've made some good points. You know, developers went crazy building great apps. Now they got, they gotta roll it out and operationalize it globally. A lot of compliance issues going on. The costs are going up. We got an economic challenge, but also agility with the cloud. So using cloud and or hybrid, you can get better agility. And also moving to the cloud, it's kind of still slow. Okay, so I get that at reinvent this year and at VMware explorer we were observing and we reported that you're seeing a transition to a new kind of ecosystem partner. Ones that aren't just ISVs anymore. You have ISVs, independent software vendors, but you got the emergence of bigger players that just, they got platforms, they have their own ecosystems. So you're seeing ecosystems on top of ecosystems where, you know, MongoDB CEO and the Databricks CEO both told me, we're not an isv, we're a platform built on a cloud. So this new kind of super cloudlike thing is going on. Why should someone pay attention to the super cloud movement? We're on two, we're gonna continue to do these out in the open. Anyone can participate. Why should people pay attention to this? Why should they come to the event? Why is this important? Is this truly an inflection point? And if they do pay attention, what should they pay attention to? >>I would pay attention to two things. If you are customers that are now starting to realize that you have a multi-cloud problem and the costs are getting outta control, look at what the leading vendors are saying, connect the dots with the early adopters and some of the customers that we are gonna have at Super Cloud two, and use those learning to not fall into the same trap. So I, I'll give you an example. I was talking to a Fortune 50 in Europe in my latest trip, and this is an a CIO that is telling me >>We build all these applications and now for compliance reason, the business is coming to me, I don't even know where they are, right? And so what I was telling him, so look, there are other customers that are already there. What did they do? They built a platform engineering team. What is the platform? Engineering team is a, is an operation team that understands how developers build modern applications and lays down the foundation across multiple clouds. So the developers can be developers and do their thing, which is writing code. But now you as a cio, as a, as a, as a governing body, as a security team can have the guardrail. So do you know that these applications are performing at a lower cost and are secure and compliant? >>Patura, you know, it's really encouraging and, and love to get your thoughts on this is one is the general consensus of industry leaders. I talked to like yourself in the round is the old way was soft complexity with more complexity. The cloud demand simplicity, you mentioned abstraction layer. This is our next inflection point. It's gotta be simpler and it's gotta be easy and it's gotta be performant. That's the table stakes of the cloud. What's your thoughts on this next wave of simplicity versus complexity? Because again, abstraction layers take away complexity, they should make it simpler. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, so I'll give you few examples. One, on the development side and runtime. You, you one would think that Kubernetes will solve all the problems you have Kubernetes everywhere, just look at, but every cloud has a different distribution of Kubernetes, right? So for example, at VMware with tansu, we create a single place that allows you to deploy that any Kubernetes environment. But now you have one place to set your policies. We take care of the differences between this, this system. The second area is management, right? So once you have all everything deployed, how do you get a single object model that tells you where your stuff is and how it's performing, and then apply policies to it as well. So these are two areas and security and so on and so forth. So the idea is that figure out what you can abstract and make common across cloud. Make that simple and put it in one place while always allowing the developers to go underneath and use the differentiated features for innovation. >>Yeah, one of the areas I'm excited, I want to get your thoughts of too is, we haven't talked about this in the past, but it, I'll throw it out there. I think the, the new AI coming out chat, G P T and other things like lens, you see it and see new kinds of AI coming that's gonna be right in the heavy lifting opportunity to make things easier with AI and automation. I think AI will be a big factor in super cloud and, and cross cloud. What's your thoughts? >>Well, the one way to look at AI is, is one of the main, main services that you would want out of a multi-cloud, right? You want eventually, right now Google seems to have an edge, but you know, the competition creates, you know, innovation. So later on you wanna use something from Azure or from or from Oracle or something that, so you want at some point that is gonna be prone every single service in in the cloud is gonna be prone to obstruction and simplification. And I, I'm just excited about to see >>What book, I can't wait for the chat services to write code automatically for us. Well, >>They >>Do, they do. They're doing it now. They do. >>Oh, the other day, somebody, you know that I do this song par this for. So for fun sometimes. And somebody the other day said, ask the AI to write a parody song for multi-cloud. And so I have the lyrics stay >>Tuned. I should do that from my blog post. Hey, write a blog post on this January 17th, Victoria, thanks for coming in, sharing the preview bottom line. Why should people come? Why is it important? What's your final kind of takeaway? Billboard message >>History is repeat itself. It goes to three major inflection points, right? We had the inflection point with the cloud and the people that got left behind, they were not as competitive as the people that got on top o of this wave. The new wave is the super cloud, what we call cross cloud services. So if you are a customer that is experiencing this problem today, tune in to to hear from other customers in, in your same space. If you are behind, tune in to avoid the, the, the, the mistakes and the, the shortfalls of this new wave. And so that you can use multi-cloud to accelerate your business and kick butt in the future. >>All right. Kicking kick your names and kicking butt. Okay, we're here on J January 17th. Super Cloud two. Momentum continues. We'll be super cloud three. There'll be super cloud floor. More and more open conversations. Join the community, join the conversation. It's open. We want more voices. We want more, more industry. We want more customers. It's happening. A lot of momentum. Victoria, thank you for your time. Thank you. Okay. I'm John Farer, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching.

(soft electronic music) >> Good afternoon guys and gals. Welcome back to theCube's Live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022. We've been in Sin City since Monday night, giving you a load of content. I'm sure you've been watching the whole time, so you already know. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, we love having these conversations at AWS re:Invent. So many different topics of conversation. We also love talking to AWS's partner ecosystem. There's so much emphasis on it, so much growth and innovation. >> Yeah, and the thing is we got two great leaders from a very popular company that's doing very well. Security, security's a big part of the story. Data and security. Taking up all the keynote time, you're hearing a lot of it. This company's a company we've been following from the beginning. Doing really good stuff in open source, cloud native, security, shifting-left. Snyk's just a great company. With the CTO and the head of the product organization, these guys have the keys to the kingdom in security. We're going to have a great conversation. >> Yeah, we are. Both from Snyk, Manoj Nair joins us, rejoins us, for your, I believe, 11th visit. Chief Product Officer of Snyk. Adi Sharabani, Chief Technology Officer. Welcome guys. Great to have you. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Great to be back. >> So what's going on at Snyk? I know we get to talk to you often, but Manoj, give us the lowdown on what are some of the things that are new since we last connected with Snyk. >> A lot of innovation going on. We just had a major launch last month and you know when we talked to our customers three big themes are happening in parallel. One is the shift to going from traditional development to, really, DevOps, but we need to make that DevSecOps and Snyk was ahead of, that was the genesis of Snyk, but we're still, you know, maybe 15, 20% of organizations have realized that. So that one big theme. Supply chain security, top of mind for everyone. And then really, cloud and, you know, how do you really take advantage of cloud. Cloud is code. So our innovation map to those three big themes, we have done a lot in terms of that shift-left. And Adi will talk about, kind of, some of our original, like, you know, thinking behind that. But we flipped the security paradigm on its head. Was to make sure developers loved what they were, you know, experiencing with Snyk. And oh, by the way, they're fixing security issues. The second one, supply chain. So you know, SBOMs and everyone hears about this and executive orders, what do you do? Who does what with that? So we launched a few things in terms of simplifying that. You can go to our website and, you know, just upload your SBOM. It'll tell you using the best security intelligence data. In fact, the same data is used by AWS inside their products, inside Inspector. So we use that data from Snyk's intelligence to light up and tell you what vulnerabilities do your third party code have. Even things that you might not be scanning. And then the last one is really code to cloud. Cloud is code. So we have brought the ability to monitor your cloud environments all the way into your platform and the security engineering teams, rather than later on and after the fact. Those are some of the big ones that we're working on. >> Lisa: Lots going on. >> Yeah. >> Lisa: Wow. >> Lots going on there. I mean, SBOMs, Software Bill of Materials. I mean, who would've thought in the developer community, going back a decade, that we'd be talking about bill of materials, open source becomes so popular. You guys are cloud native. Developer productivity's a hot trend. Not much going on here, talking about developer productivity. Maybe Werner, keynote tomorrow will talk about it. Software supply chain, huge security risk. You guys are in the front lines. I want to understand, if you can share, why is Snyk successful? Everyone is hearing about you guys. Your business is doing great. What's the secret sauce of your success? Why are you guys so successful? >> I think that, you know, I've been doing application security for more than two decades now and in the past we always saw the potential associated with transferring, shifting-left in a sense, before the term, right? Taking those security solutions out of the hands of the security people and putting it in the hands of developers. It's speeds up the process. It's very, very clear to anyone. The problem was that we always looked at it the wrong way. We did shift-left, and shift-left is not enough because in my terminology shift-left, meaning let's take those security solution put it earlier in the cycle, but that's not enough because the developer is not speaking those terms. The developer is not a security persona. The security persona is thinking in terms of risk. What are the risks that a specific issue creates? The developer is thinking in terms of the application. What would be the impact on application of a change I would might make into it. And so the root cause of Snyk success, in my opinion, is the fact that from the get-go we scratch that, we build a solution for the developer that is based on how the workflows of the developer, whether it's the ID, whether it's the change management, the pull request. Whether it's integration with the Gits and so on. And whether it's with integration with the cloud and the interaction with the cloud providers. And doing that properly, addressing the developers how they want to context, to get, with the context they want to get as part of the issues, with the workflows they want to get. That's kind of the secret sauce, in a sense. And very easy maybe to say, but very, very hard to implement properly. >> This is huge. I want to unpack that. I want to just, great call out, great description. This is huge. This is a, we're seeing the past three years in particular, maybe three with the pandemic. Okay, maybe go a couple years earlier, then. The developers' behavior is driving the change. And you know, if you look at the past three DockerCons we've covered, we've been powering that site, been following that community very closely since the beginning, as well. It just seems in the past three to four years that the developers choices at scale, not what they're buying or who's pushing tools to them, has been one big trend. >> Yeah. >> They're setting the pace. >> Developer is the king. >> If it's self-service, we've seen self-service. Whether it's freemium to paid, that works. This is the new equation. Developer, developer choice is critical. So self-service they want. And two, the language barrier or jargon between or mindsets between security and developers. Okay, so DevOps brings IT into the workflow. Check. DevSecOps brings in there. You guys crack the code on that, is that what you're saying? >> Yes, and it's both the product, like how do you use the solution, as well as the go to market. How do you consume the solution? And you alluded to that with the PLG motion, that I think Synk has done the superb job at and that really helped our businesses. >> Okay, so Manoj, product, you got the keys to the kingdom, you got the product roadmap. I could imagine, and what I'd love to get your reaction too Adi, if you don't mind. If you do that, what you've done, the consequence of that is now security teams and the data teams can build guardrails. We're reporting a lot of that in the queue. We're hearing that we can provide guardrails. So the velocity of the developer seems to be increasing. Do you see that? Is that a consequence? >> That's something that we actually measure in the product. Right, so Snyk's focus is not finding issues, it's fixing issues. So one of the things we have been able to heuristically look at our thousands of customers and say, they're fixing issues 27 days faster than they were prior to Snyk. So, you know, I'm a Formula one fan. Guardrails, you say. I say there's a speed circuit. Developers love speed. We give them the speed. We give the security teams the ability to sit on those towers and, you know, put the right policies and guardrails in place to make sure that it's not speed without safety. >> And then I'm sure you guys are in the luxury box now, partying while the developers are (Lisa laughing) no more friction, no more fighting, right? >> The culture is changing. I had a discussion with a Fortune 50 CISO a month ago, and they told me, "Adi, it's the first time in my life where the development teams are coming to me, asking me, hey I want you to buy us this security solution." And for, that was mind blowing for him, right? Because it really changes the discussion with the security teams and the development teams >> Before Lisa jumps in, well how long, okay, let me ask you that question on that point. When did that tipping point change, culturally? Was it just the past few years? Has there, has DevOps kind of brought that in, can you? >> Yeah, I think it's a journey that happened together with Snyk's, kind of, growth. So if three years ago it was the very early adopters that were starting to consume that. So companies that are very, you know, modern in the way they developed and so on. And we saw it in our business. In the early days, most of our business came from the high tech industry. And now it's like everywhere. You have manufacturing, you have banks, you have like every segment whatsoever. >> Talk about that cultural shift. That's really challenging for organizations to achieve. Are you seeing, so that, that CISO was quite surprised that the developer came and said, this is what I want. Are you seeing more of that cultural changes? Is that becoming pervasive? >> Yeah, so I think that the root cause of that is that, you mentioned the growth, like the increased speed of velocity in applications. We have 30 million developers in the world today. 30 millions. By the end of the decade it's going to be 45 millions and all of them are using open source, third party code. Look at what's going on here in the event, right? This accelerates the speed for which they develop. So with that, what happened in the digital transformation world, the organizations are facing that huge growth, exponential growth in the amount of technology and products that are being built by their teams. But the way they manage that before, from a security perspective, just doesn't scale. And it breaks and it breaks and it breaks. This is why you need a different approach. A solution that is based on the developers, who are the ones that created the problems and the ones that will be responsible of fixing the issues. This is why we are kind of centering ourselves around them. >> And the world has changed, right? What is cloud? It's code, it's not infrastructure. Old infrastructure, hosted infrastructure. So if cloud is code and cloud native applications are all code and they're being deployed with Terraform packages and cloud formations, that's code. Why take an old school approach of scanning it outside-in. I talked to CISO today who said, I feel bad that, you know, our policy makes it such that a terraform change takes six months. What did I do? I made cloud look like infrastructure. >> Yeah, it's too slow. >> So that, you know, so both sides, you know, CISOs want something that the business, you know, accepts and adopts and it's, culture changes happen because the power is with the developers because all of this is code, and we enabled that whole seamless journey, all the way from code to cloud. So it's kind, you know, I think that this is a part of it. It's by direction, it's a bridge and both sides are meeting in the middle here. >> It's a bridge. I'm curious, how are you facilitating that bridge? You, we talk about the developers being the kings and queens and really so influential in business decisions these days. And you're talking about the developers now embracing Snyk. But you're also talking to CISOs. Is your customer conversation level changing as a result of security folks understanding why it needs to shift-left. >> We had a breakfast meeting with customers, prospects and everyone, I think this morning. It was interesting, we were remarking. There are CTOs, VPs of engineering, CISOs, VPs of AppSec. And it was such a rich conversation on both sides, right? So just the joy of facilitating that conversation and dialogue. CISOs, and so the levels are changing. It started for us in CTOs and VPs of engineering and now it's both because, you know, one of the things Adi talks about is, like, that security has to become development aware. And that's starting to be like the reality. Me getting another solution, with maybe a better acronym than the old acronym, but it's still outside-in, it's scan based. I light up up the Christmas tree, who is going to fix it? And with the speed of cloud, now I got throw in more lights. Those lights are no longer valid. >> The automation. >> The automation without prioritization and actual empowerment is useless. >> All right, I know we got a couple minutes left, but I want to get into that point about automation because inside-out, you've made me think about this. I want to get your thought Adi, if you don't mind. The integration challenges now are much more part of the ecosystem, more joint engineering. You mentioned these meetings are not just salesperson and customer buyer, it's teams are talking to each other. There's a lot of that going on. How do you guys look at that? Because now the worst things that I hear and when I talk to customers is, I hate the word PenTest and AppSec review. It slows things down. People want to go faster. So how do you guys look at that? What's Snyk doing around making the AppSec review process, integration across companies, work better? >> So I'll give you an example from the cloud and then I will relate to the AppSec. And this relates to what you mentioned before. We had a discussion yesterday with a CISO that said, we are scanning the cloud, we are opening the lights, we see this issue. Now what do I do? Who needs to fix this? So they have this long process of finding the actual team that is required to fix it. Now they get to the team and they say, why didn't you tell me about it when I developed it? The same goes for AppSec, right? The audit is a very late stage of the game. You want to make sure that the testing, that the policies, everything is under the same structure, the same policies. So when you do the same thing, it's part of the first time of code that you create, it's part of the change management, it's part of the build, it's part of the deployment and it's part of the audit. And you have everything together being done under the same platform. And this is, kind of, one of the strengths that we bring to the table. The discussion changes because now you have an aligned strategy, rather than kind of blocks that we have, kind of, mashed up together. >> So the new workflow, it's a new workflow, basically, in the mindset of the customer. They got to get their arms around that thing. If we don't design it in, the wheels could come off the bus at the 11th hour. >> Adi: Yeah. >> And everything slows down. >> I had a discussion with Amazon today, actually, that they had an internal discussion and they said, like, some of the teams were like, why have you blocked my app from being released? And they said, have you ever scanned your app? Have you ever looked at your, like, and, and they're like, if you haven't, then you're not really onboard with the platform and it just breaks. This is what happens. >> Great conversation. I know we don't, I wish we had more time. We'll do a follow up on theCube for sure. Should we get into the new twist? >> I've got one final question for you guys. We're making some Instagram reels, so think about your elevator pitch in 30 seconds. And I want to ask you about Snyk's evolution. Manoj, I want to start with you. What is that elevator pitch about Snyk's evolution to the end user customer? >> Empower developers, help them go faster, more productive and do it in a way that security is really built in, not bolted on. And that's really, you know, from a, the evolution and the power that we are giving is make the organization more productive because security is just happening as a part of making the developer more productive. >> Awesome. And Adi, question for you, how, your elevator pitch on how Snyk is really an enabler for CISOs these days? >> Yeah, so I always ask the CISO first of all, are you excited about the way your environment looks like today? Do you need to have a cultural change? Because if you need to have a cultural change, if you want to get those two teams working closely together, we are here to enable that. And it goes from the product, it goes from our education pieces that we can talk about in another section, and it works around the language that we build to allow and enable that discussion. >> Awesome. Guys, that was a double mic drop for both of you. >> Manoj: Thank you. >> Adi: Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you so much for joining John and me, talking about what's happening with Snyk, what you're enabling customers to do and how, really, you're enabling cultural change. That's hard to do. That's awesome stuff guys. And congratulations on your 11th and your first Cube. >> Second, second, >> Second. >> Adi: I will be here more, but (laughs) >> You got it, you got it. You have to come back because we have too much to talk about. >> Adi: Exactly. (laughs) >> Thanks guys, we appreciate it. >> If we can without Manoj, so I can catch up. (Manoj laughs) >> Okay. We'll work on that. >> Bring you in the studio. (everyone laughing) >> Exactly. >> Eight straight interviews. (John and Lisa laughing) >> We hope you've enjoyed this conversation. We want to thank our guests. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in emerging and enterprise tech coverage. (soft electronic music)

>>Hey everyone, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I have the pleasure of welcoming back our most prolific guest on the cube in its history, the CMO of Fin Ad, Eric Herzog. Eric, it's great to see you. Welcome back, >>Lisa. It's great to be here. Love being on the cube. I think this might be number 55 or 56. Been doing 'em a long time with the Cube. You guys are great. >>You, you have, and we always recognize you lately with the Hawaiian shirts. It's your brand that's, that's the Eric Hizo brand. We love it. But I like the pin, the infin nut pin on brand. Thank you. >>Yeah. Oh, gotta be on brand. >>Exactly. So talk about the current IT landscape. So much change we've seen in the last couple of years. Specifically, what are some of the big challenges that you are talking with enterprise customers and cloud service providers? About what, what are some of those major things on their minds? >>So there's a couple things. First of all is obviously with the Rocky economy and even before covid, just for storage in particular, CIOs hate storage. I've been doing this now since 1986. I have never, ever, ever met a CIO at any company I've bid with. And I've been with four of the biggest storage companies on this planet. Never met a cio. Used to be a storage guy. So they know they need it, but boy, they really don't like it. So the storage admins have to manage more and more storage. Exabytes, exabytes, it just ballooning for what a storage admin has to do. Then you then have the covid and is it recession? No. Is it a growth? And then clearly what's happened in the last year with what's going on in Europe and the, is it a recession, the inflation. So they're always looking to, how do we cut money on storage yet still get what we need for our applications, workloads, and use cases. So that's definitely the biggest, the first topic. >>So never met a CIO that was a storage admin or as a fan, but as you point out, they need it. And we've seen needs changing in customer landscapes, especially as the threat landscape has changed so dramatically the last couple of years. Ransomware, you've said it before, I say it too. It's no longer if it's when it's how often. It's the frequency. We've gotta be able to recover. Backups are being targeted. Talk to me about some of, in that landscape, some of the evolutions of customer challenges and maybe those CIOs going, We've gotta make sure that our, our storage data is protected. >>So it's starting to change. However, historically with the cio and then when they started hiring CISOs or security directors, whatever they had, depending on the company size, it was very much about protecting the edge. Okay, if you will, the moat and the wall of the castle. Then it was the network in between. So keep the streets inside the castle clean. Then it was tracking down the bad guy. So if they did get over, the issue is, if I remember correctly, the sheriff of Nottingham never really caught Robinhood. So the problem is the dwell time where the ransomware malware's hidden on storage could be as much as 200 days. So I think they're starting to realize at the security level now, forget, forget the guys on the storage side, the security guys, the cso, the CIO, are starting to realize that if you're gonna have a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, must include storage. And that is new >>That, well, that's promising then. That's new. I mean obviously promising given the, the challenges and the circumstances. So then from a storage perspective, customers that are in this multi-cloud hybrid cloud environment, you talked about the the edge cloud on-prem. What are some of the key things from a storage perspective that customers have to achieve these days to be secure as data volumes continue to grow and spread? >>So what we've done is implement on both primary storage and secondary storage and technology called infin safe. So Infin Safe has the four legs of the storage cyber security stool. So first of all is creating an air gap. In this case, a logical air gap can be local or remote. We create an immutable snapshot, which means it can't be changed, it can't be altered, so you can't change it. We have a fenced forensic environment to check out the storage because you don't wanna recover. Again, malware and rans square can is hidden. So you could be making amenable snapshots of actually malware, ransomware, and never know you're doing it right. So you have to check it out. Then you need to do a rapid recovery. The most important thing if you have an attack is how fast can you be up and going with recovery? So we have actually instituted now a number of cyber storage security guarantees. >>We will guarantee the SLAs on a, the snapshot is absolutely immutable. So they know that what they're getting is what they were supposed to be getting. And then also we are guaranteeing recovery times on primary storage. We're guaranteeing recovery of under one minute. We'll make the snapshot available under one minute and on secondary storage under 20 minutes. So those are things you gotta look for from a security perspective. And then the other thing you gotta practice, in my world, ransomware, malware, cyber tech is basically a disaster. So yes, you got the hurricane, yes, you got the flood, yes, you got the earthquake. Yes, you got the fire in the building. Yes you got whatever it may be. But if you don't practice malware, ransomware, recoveries and protection, then it might as well be a hurricane or earthquake. It will take your data, >>It will take your data on the numbers of customers that pay ransom is pretty high, isn't it? And and not necessarily able to recover their data. So it's a huge risk. >>So if you think about it, the government documented that last year, roughly $6 trillion was spent either protecting against ransomware and malware or paying ransomware attacks. And there's been several famous ones. There was one in Korea, 72 million ransom. It was one of the Korea's largest companies. So, and those are only the ones that make the news. Most of 'em don't make the news. Right. >>So talk to me then, speaking and making the news. Nobody wants to do that. We, we know every industry is vulnerable to this. Some of the ones that might be more vulnerable, healthcare, government, public sector education. I think the Los Angeles Unified School district was just hit as well in September. They >>Were >>What, talk to me about how infin out is helping customers really dial down the risk when the threat actors are becoming more and more sophisticated? >>Well, there's a couple things. First of all, our infin safe software comes free on our main product. So we have a product called infin Guard for Secondary Storage and it comes for free on that. And then our primary storage product's called the Infin Box. It also comes for free. So they don't have to use it, but we embed it. And then we have reference architectures that we give them our ses, our solutions architects and our technical advisors all up to speed on why they should do it, how they should do it. We have a number of customers doing it. You know, we're heavily concentrated the global Fortune 2000, for example, we publicly announced that 26% of the Fortune 50 use our technology, even though we're a small company. So we go to extra lengths to a B, educated on our own front, our own teams, and then B, make sure they portray that to the end users and our channel partners. But the end users don't pay a dime for the software that does what I just described, it's free, it's included when you get you're Infin box or you're ingar, it's included at no charge. >>That's pretty differentiating from a competitive standpoint. I might, I would guess >>It is. And also the guarantee. So for example, on primary storage, okay, whether you'd put your Oracle or put your SAP or I Mongo or your sequel or your highly transactional workloads, right? Your business finance workload, all your business critical stuff. We are the first and only storage company that offers a primary guarantee on cyber storage resilience. And we offer two of them on primary storage. No other vendor offers a guarantee, which we do on primary storage. Whether you the first and right now as of here we are sitting in the middle of October. We are still the only vendor that offers anything on primary storage from a guaranteed SLA on primary storage for cyber storage resilience. >>Let's talk about those guarantees. Walk me through what you just announced. There's been a a very, a lot of productivity at Infin DAT in 2022. A lot of things that you've announced but on crack some of the things you're announcing. Sure. Talk to me specifically about those guarantees and what's in it for me as a customer. It sounds pretty obvious, but I'd love to hear it from you. >>Okay, so we've done really three different types of guarantees. The first one is we have a hundred percent availability guarantee on our primary storage. And we've actually had that for the last, since 2019. So it's a hundred percent availability. We're guaranteed no downtime, a hundred percent availability, which for our customer base being heavily concentrated, the global Fortune 2000 large government enterprises, big universities and even smaller companies, we do a lot of business with CSPs and MSPs. In fact, at the Flash Memory Summit are Infin Box ssa All Flash was named the best product for hyperscaler deployment. Hyperscaler basically means cloud servers provider. So they need a hundred percent availability. So we have a guarantee on that. Second guarantee we have is a performance guarantee. We'll do an analysis, we look at all their workloads and then we will guarantee in writing what the performance should be based on which, which of our products they want to buy are Infin Box or Infin Box ssa, which is all flash. >>Then we have the third one is all about cyber resilience. So we have two on our Infin box, our Infin box SSA for primary storage, which is a one the immutability of the snapshot and immediately means you can't erase the data. Right? Camp tamper with it. Second one is on the recovery time, which is under a minute. We just announced in the middle of October that we are doing a similar cyber storage resilience guarantee on our ARD secondary product, which is designed for backup recovery, et cetera. We will also offer the immutably snapshot guarantee and also one on the recoverability of that data in under 20 minutes. In fact, we just did a demo at our live launch earlier this week and we demoed 20 petabytes of Veeam backup data recovered in 12 minutes. 12 >>Minutes 2012. >>20 petabytes In >>12 bytes in 12 minutes. Yes. That's massive. That's massively differentiating. But that's essential for customers cuz you know, in terms of backups and protecting the data, it's all about recovery >>A and once they've had the attack, it's how fast you get back online, right? That that's what happens if they've, if they can't stop the attack, can't stop the threat and it happens. They need to get that back as fast as they can. So we have the speed of recovery on primary stores, the first in the industry and we have speed on the backup software and we'll do the same thing for a backup data set recovery as well. Talk >>To me about the, the what's in it for me, For the cloud service providers, they're obviously the ones that you work with are competing with the hyperscalers. How does the guarantees and the differentiators that Fin out is bringing to market? How do you help those cloud SPS dial up their competitiveness against the big cheeses? >>Well, what we do is we provide that underlying infrastructure. We, first of all, we only sell things that are petabyte in scale. That's like always sell. So for example, on our in fitter guard product, the raw capacity is over four petabytes. And the effective capacity, cuz you do data reduction is over 85 petabytes on our newest announced product, on our primary storage product, we now can do up to 17 petabytes of effective capacity in a single rack. So the value to the service rider is they can save on what slots? Power and floor. A greener data center. Yeah, right. Which by the way is not just about environmentals, but guess what? It also translate into operational expense. >>Exactly. CapEx office, >>With a lot of these very large systems that we offer, you can consolidate multiple products from our competitors. So for example, with one of the competitors, we had a deal that we did last quarter 18 competitive arrays into one of ours. So talk about saving, not just on all of the operational expense, including operational manpower, but actually dramatically on the CapEx. In fact, one of our Fortune 500 customers in the telco space over the last five years have told us on CapEx alone, we've saved them $104 million on CapEx by consolidating smaller technology into our larger systems. And one of the key things we do is everything is automated. So we call it autonomous automation use AI based technology. So once you install it, we've got several public references who said, I haven't touched this thing in three or four years. It automatically configures itself. It automatically adjusts to changes in performance and new apps. When I put in point a new app at it automatically. So in the old days the storage admin would optimize performance for a new application. We don't do that, we automatically do it and autonomously the admin doesn't even click a button. We just sense there's new applications and we automate ourselves and configure ourselves without the admin having to do anything. So that's about saving operational expense as well as operational manpower. >>Absolutely. I was, one of the things that was ringing in my ear was workforce productivity and obviously those storage admins being able to to focus on more strategic projects. Can't believe the CIOs aren't coming around yet. But you said there's, there's a change, there's a wave coming. But if we think about the the, the what's in it for me as a customer, the positive business outcomes that I'm hearing, lower tco, your greener it, which is key. So many customers that we talk to are so focused on sustainability and becoming greener, especially with an on-prem footprint, workforce productivity. Talk about some of the other key business outcomes that you're helping customers achieve and how it helps them to be more competitive. >>Sure. So we've got a, a couple different things. First of all, storage can't go down. When the storage goes down, everyone gets blamed. Mission. When an app goes down, no one really thinks about it. It's always the storage guy's fault. So you want to be a hundred percent available. And that's today's businesses, and I'd actually argue it's been this way for 20 years are 24 by seven by 365. So that's one thing that we deliver. Second thing is performance. So we have public references talk about their SAP workload that used to take two hours, now takes 20 minutes, okay? We have another customer that was doing SAP queries. They improved their performance three times, Not 3%, not 3%, three times. So 300% better performance just by using our storages. They didn't touch the sap, they didn't touch the servers. All they do is to put our storage in there. >>So performance relates basically to applications, workloads and use cases and productivity beyond it. So think the productivity of supply chain guys, logistics guys, the shipping guys, the finance guys, right? All these applications that run today's enterprises. So we can automate all that. And then clearly the cyber threat. Yeah, that is a huge issue. And every CIO is concerned about the cyber threat. And in fact, it was interesting, Fortune magazine did a survey of CEOs, and this was last May, the number one concern, 66% in that may survey was cyber security number one concern. So this is not just a CIO thing, this is a CEO thing and a board level >>Thing. I was gonna say it's at at the board level that the cyber security threats are so real, they're so common. No one wants to be the next headline, like the colonial pipeline, right? Or the school districts or whatnot. And everybody is at risk. So then what you're enabling with what you've just announced, the all the guarantees on the SLAs, the massively fast recovery times, which is critical in cyber recovery. Obviously resilience is is key there. Modern data protection it sounds like to me. How do you define that and and what are customers looking for with respect to modern cyber resilience versus data protection? >>Yeah, so we've got normal data protection because we work with all the backup vendors. Our in ARD is what's known as a purpose built backup appliance. So that allows you to back at a much faster rate. And we work all the big back backup vendors, IBM spectrum Protect, we work with veritas vem com vault, oracle arm, anybody who does backup. So that's more about the regular side, the traditional backup. But the other part of modern data protection is infusing that with the cyber resilience. Cuz cyber resilience is a new thing. Yes, from a storage guy perspective, it hasn't been around a long time. Many of our competitors have almost nothing. One or two of our competitors have a pretty robust, but they don't guarantee it the way we guarantee it. So they're pretty good at it. But the fact that we're willing to put our money where our mouth is, we think says we price stand above and then most of the other guys in the storage industry are just starting to get on the bandwagon of having cyber resilience. >>So that changes what you do from data protection, what would call modern data protection is a combination of traditional backup recovery, et cetera. Now with this influence and this infusion of cybersecurity cyber resilience into a storage environment. And then of course we've also happened to add it on primary storage as well. So whether it's primary storage or backup and archive storage, we make sure you have that right cyber resilience to make it, if you will, modern data protection and diff different from what it, you know, the old backup of your grandfather, father, son backup in tape or however you used to do it. We're well beyond that now we adding this cyber resilience aspect. Well, >>From a cyber resilience perspective, ransomware, malware, cyber attacks are, that's a disaster, right? But traditional disaster recovery tools aren't really built to be able to pull back that data as quickly as it sounds like in Trinidad is able to facilitate. >>Yeah. So one of the things we do is in our reference architectures and written documentation as well as when we do the training, we'd sell the customers you need to practice, if you practice when there's a fire, a flood, a hurricane, an earthquake or whatever is the natural disaster you're practicing that you need to practice malware and ran somewhere. And because our recovery is so rapid and the case of our ingar, our fenced environment to do the testing is actually embedded in it. Several of our competitors, if you want the fenced environment, you have to buy a second product with us. It's all embedded in the one item. So A, that makes it more effective from a CapEx and opex perspective, but it also makes it easier. So we recommend that they do the practice recoveries monthly. Now whether they do it or not separate issue, but at least that's what we're recommending and say, you should be doing this on a monthly basis just like you would practice a disaster, like a hurricane or fire or a flood or an earthquake. Need to be practicing. And I think people are starting to hear it, but they don't still think more about, you know, the flood. Yeah. Or about >>The H, the hurricane. >>Yeah. That's what they think about. They not yet thinking about cybersecurity as really a disaster model. And it is. >>Absolutely. It is. Is is the theme of cyber resilience, as you said, this is a new concept, A lot of folks are talking about it, applying it differently. Is that gonna help dial up those folks just really being much more prepared for that type of cyber disaster? >>Well, we've made it so it's automated. Once you set up the immutable snapshots, it just does its thing. You don't set it and forget it. We create the logical air back. Once you do it, same thing. Set it and forget it. The fence forensic environment, easy to deploy. You do have to just configure it once and then obviously the recovery is almost instantaneous. It's under a minute guaranteed on primary storage and under 20 minutes, like I told you when we did our launch this week, we did 20 petabytes of Veeam backup data in 12 minutes. So that's pretty incredible. That's a lot of data to have recovered in 12 minutes. So the more automated we make it, which is what our real forte is, is this autonomous automation and automating as much as possible and make it easy to configure when you do have to configure. That's what differentiates what we do from our perspective. But overall in the storage industry, it's the recognition finally by the CISOs and the CIOs that, wait a second, maybe storage might be an essential part of my corporate cybersecurity strategy. Yes. Which it has not been historically, >>But you're seeing that change. Yes. >>We're starting to see that change. >>Excellent. So talk to me a little bit before we wrap here about the go to market one. Can folks get their hands on the updates to in kindergar and Finn and Safe and Penta box? >>So all these are available right now. They're available now either through our teams or through our, our channel partners globally. We do about 80% of our business globally through the channel. So whether you talk to us or talk to our channel partners, we're there to help. And again, we put our money where your mouth is with those guarantees, make sure we stand behind our products. >>That's awesome. Eric, thank you so much for joining me on the program. Congratulations on the launch. The the year of productivity just continues for infinit out is basically what I'm hearing. But you're really going in the extra mile for customers to help them ensure that the inevitable cyber attacks, that they, that they're complete storage environment on prem will be protected and more importantly, recoverable Very quickly. We appreciate your insights and your input. >>Great. Absolutely love being on the cube. Thank you very much for having us. Of >>Course. It's great to have you back. We appreciate it. For Eric Herzog, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation live from Palo Alto.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California for a great remote interview with Ameya Talwalkar, CEO of Cequence Security. Protecting APIs is the name of the game. Ameya thanks for coming on this CUBE Conversation. >> Thank you, John. Thanks for having us. >> So, I mean, obviously APIs, cloud, it runs everything. It's only going to get better, faster, more containers, more Kubernetes, more cloud-native action, APIs are at the center of it. Quick history, Cequence, how you guys saw the problem and where is it today? >> Yeah, so we started building the company or the product, the first product of the company focused on abuse or business logic abuse on APIs. We had design partners in large finance FinTech companies that are now customers of Cequence that were sort of API first, if you will. There were products in the market that were, you know, solving this problem for them on the web and in some cases mobile applications, but since these were API first very modern FinTech and finance companies that deal with lot of large enterprises, merchants, you have it, you name it. They were struggling to protect their APIs while they had protection on web and mobile applications. So that's the genesis. The problem has evolved exponentially in terms of volume size, pain, the ultimate financial losses from those problems. So it has, it's been a interesting journey and I think we timed it perfectly in terms of when we got started with the problem we started with. >> Yeah, I'm sure if you look at the growth of APIs, they're just exponentially growing because of the development, cloud-native development wave plus open source driving a lot of action. I was talking to a developer the other day and he's like, "Just give me a bag of Lego blocks and I'll build whatever application." I mean, this essentially- >> Yeah. >> API first is, has got us here, and that's standard. >> Yeah. >> Everyone's building on top of APIs, but the infrastructure going cloud-native is growing as well. So how do you secure APIs without slowing down the application velocity? Which everyone's trying to make go faster. So you got faster velocity on the developer side and (chuckles) more APIs coming. How do you secure the API infrastructure without slowing down the apps? >> Yeah, I'll come to the how part of it but I'll give you a little bit of commentary on what the problem really is. It's what has happened in the last few years is as you mentioned, the sort of journey to the cloud whether it's a public cloud or a private cloud, some enterprises have gone to a multi-cloud strategy. What really has happened is two things. One is because of that multi-environment deployment there is no defined parameter anymore to your applications or APIs. And so the parameter where people typically used to have maybe a CDN or WAF or other security controls at the parameter and then you have your infrastructure hosting these apps and APIs is completely gone away, that just doesn't exist anymore. And even more so for APIs which really doesn't have a whole lot of content to be cashed. They don't use CDN. So they are behind whatever API gateways whether they're in the cloud or whatever, they're hosting their APIs. And that has become your micro parameter, if you will, as these APIs are getting spread. And so the security teams are struggling with, how do I protect such a diverse set of environments that I am supposed to manage and protect where I don't have a unified view. I don't have even, like a complete view, if you will, of these APIs. And back in the days when phones or the modern iPhones and Android phones became popular, there used to be a sort of ad campaign I remember that said, "There is an app for that." >> Yeah. >> So the fast forward today, it's like, "There's an API for that." So everything you wanted to do today as a consumer or a business- >> John: Yeah. >> You can call an API and get your business done. And that's the challenge that's the explosion in APIs. >> Yeah. >> (laughs) Go ahead. >> It's interesting you have the API life cycle concept developing. Now you got, everyone knows- >> Right. >> The application life cycle, you know CI/CD pipelining, shifting left, but the surface area, you got web app firewalls which everyone knows is kind of like outdated, but you got API gateways. >> Yep. >> The surface area- >> Yeah. >> Is only increasing. So I have to ask you, do the existing API security tools out there bring that full application- >> Yeah. >> And API life cycle together? 'Cause you got to discover- >> Yep. >> The environment, you got to know what to protect and then also net new functionality. Can you comment? >> Right. Yeah. So that actually goes to your how question from, you know, previous section which is really what Cequence has defined is a API protection life cycle. And it's this concrete six-step process in which you protect your APIs. And the reason why we say it's a life cycle is it's not something that you do once and forget about it. It's a continuous process that you have to keep doing because your DevOps teams are publishing new APIs almost every day, every other day, if you will. So the start of that journey of that life cycle is really about discovering your external facing API attack surface which is where we highlight new hosting environments. We highlight accidental exposures. People are exposing their staging APIs. They might have access to production data. They are exposing Prometheus or performance monitoring servers. We find PKCS 7 files. We find Log4j vulnerabilities. These are things that you can just get a view of from outside looking in and then go about prioritizing which API environments you want to protect. So that's step number one. Step number two, really quick is do an inventory of all your APIs once you figure out which environments you want to protect or prioritize. And so that inventory includes a runtime inventory. Also creating specifications for these APIs. In lot of places, we find unmanaged APIs, shadow APIs and we create the API inventory and also push them towards sort of a central API management program. The third step is really looking at the risk of these APIs. Make sure they are using appropriate security controls. They're not leaking any sensitive information, PCI, PHI, PII, or other sort of industry-specific sensitive information. They are conforming to their schema. So sometimes the APIs dba.runtime from their schema and then that can cause a risk. So that's the first, sort of first half of this life cycle, if you will, which is really making sure your APIs are secure, they're using proper hygiene. The second half is about attack detection and prevention. So the fourth step is attack detection. And here again, we don't stop just at the OWASP Top 10 category of threats, a lot of other vendors do. They just do the OWASP API Top 10, but we think it's more than that. And we go deeper into business logic abuse, bots, and all the way to fraud. And that's sort of the attack detection piece of this journey. Once you detect these attacks, you start about, think about prevention of these attacks, also natively with Cequence. And the last step is about testing and making sure your APIs are secure even before they go live. >> What's- >> So that's a journey. Yeah. >> What's the secret sauce? What makes you different? 'Cause you got two sides to that coin. You got the auditing, kind of figure things out, and then you got the in-built attacks. >> Yeah. >> What makes you guys different? >> Yeah. So the way we are different is, first of all, Cequence is the only vendor that can, that has all these six steps in a single platform. We talked about security teams just lacking that complete view or consistent and uniform view of all your, you know, parameter, all your API infrastructure. We are combining that into a single platform with all the six steps that you can do in just one platform. >> John: Yeah. >> Number two is the outside looking in view which is the external discovery. It's something Cequence is unique in this space, uniquely doing this in this space. The third piece is the depth of our detection which is we don't just stop at the OWASP API Top 10, we go to fraud, business logic abuse, and bot attacks. And the mitigation, this will be interesting to you, which is a lot of the API security vendors say you come into existence because your WAF is not protecting your APIs, but they turn around when they detect the attacks to rely on a WAF to mitigate this or prevent these threats. And how can you sort of comprehend all that, right? >> Yeah. >> So we are unique in the sense we can prevent the attacks that we detect in the same platform without reliance on any other third-party solution. >> Yeah, I mean we- >> The last part is, sorry, just one last. >> Go ahead. Go ahead. >> Which is the scale. So we are serving largest of the large Fortune 100, Fortune 50 enterprises. We are processing 6 billion API calls per day. And one of the large customers of ours is processing 1 billion API calls per day with Cequence. So scale of APIs that we can process and how we can scale is also unique to Cequence. >> Yeah, I think the scale thing's a huge message. There, just, I put a little accent on that. I got to comment because we had an event last week called Supercloud which we were trying to talking about, you know, as clouds become more multicloud, you get more super capabilities. But automation, with super cloud comes super hackers. So as things advance, you're seeing the step function, the bad guys are getting better too. You mentioned bots. So I have to ask you what are some of the sophisticated attacks that you see that look like legitimate traffic or transactions? Can you comment on what your scale and your patterns are showing? Because the attacks are coming in fast and furious >> Correct. So APIs make the attack easier because APIs are well documented. So you want your partners and, you know, programmers to use your API ecosystem, but at the same time the attackers are getting the same information and they can program against those APIs very easily which means what? They are going to write a bunch of bots and automation to cause a lot of pain. The kind of sophistication we have seen is I'll just give a few examples. Ulta Beauty is one of our customers, very popular retailer in the US. And we recently found an interesting attack. They were selling some high-end hair curling high ends which are very high-end demand, very expensive, very hard to find. And so this links sort of physical path to API security, think about it, which is the bad guys were using a bot to scrape a third-party service which was giving local inventory information available to people who wanted to search for these items which are high in demand, low in supply. And they wrote a bot to find where, which locations have these items in supply, and they went and sort of broke into these showrooms and stole those items. So not only we say are saving them from physical theft and all the other problems that they have- >> Yeah. >> But also, they were paying about $25,000 per month extra- >> Yeah. >> For this geo-location service that was looking at their inventory. So that's the kind of abuse that can go on with APIs. Even when the APIs are perfectly secure, they're using appropriate security controls, these can go on. >> You know, that's a really great example. I'm glad you brought that up because I observed at AWS re:Inforce in Boston that Steven Schmidt has changed his title from chief information security officer to just chief security officer, to the point when asked he said, "Physical security is now tied together with the online." So to your point- >> Yeah. >> About the surveillance and attack setup- >> Yeah. >> For the physical, you got warehouses- >> Yep. >> You've got brick and mortar. This is the convergence of security. >> Correct. Absolutely. I mean, we do deal with many other, sort of a governance case. We help a Fortune 50 finance company which operates worldwide. And their gets concern is if an API is hosted in a certain country in Europe which has the most sort of aggressive data privacy and data regulations that they have to deal with, they want to make sure the consumer of that API is within a certain geo location whereby they're not subject to liabilities from GDPR and other data residency regulation. And we are the ones that are giving them that view. And we can have even restrict and make sure they're compliant with that regulation that they have to sort of comply with. >> I could only imagine that that geo-regional view and the intelligence and the scale gives you insights- >> Yeah. >> Into attacks that aren't really kind of, aren't supposed to be there. In other words, if you can keep the data in the geo, then you could look- >> Yep. >> At anything else as that, you know, you don't belong here kind of track. >> You don't belong here. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. >> All right. So let's get to the API. >> Yeah, I mean- >> So the API visibility is an issue, right? So I can see that, check, sold me on that, protection is key, but if, what's the current security team makeup? Are they buying into this or are they just kind of the hair on fire? What are security development teams doing? 'Cause they're under a lot of pressure to do the hardcore security work. And APIs, again, surface area's wide open, they're part of everyone's access. >> Yeah. So I mentioned about the six-step journey of the life cycle. Right? We see customers come to us with very acute pain point and they say, "Our hair is on, our hair on fire. (John laughing) Solve this problem for us." Like one large US telco company came to us to, just a simple problem, do the inventory and risk assessment of all our APIs. That's our number one pain point. Ended up starting with them on those two pain points or those two stops on their life cycle. And then we ended up solving all the six steps with them because once we started creating an inventory and looking at the risk profile, we also observed that these same APIs were target by bots and fraudsters doing all kinds of bad things. So once we discovered those problems we expanded the scope to sort of have the whole life cycle covered with the Cequence platform. And that's the typical experience which is, it's typically the security team. There are developer communities that are coming to us with sort of the testing aspect of it which integrated into DevOps toolchains and CI/CD pipelines. But otherwise, it's all about security challenges, acute pain points, and then expanding into the whole journey. >> All right. So you got the detection, you got the alerting, you got the protection, you got the mitigation. What's the advice- >> Yeah. >> To the customer or the right approach to set up with Cequence so that they can have the best protection. What the motion? What's the initial engagement look like? How do they engage? How do they operationalize? >> Yeah. >> You guys take me through that. >> Yeah. The simple way of engaging with Cequence is get that external assessment which will map your APIs for you, it'll create a assessment for you. We'll present that assessment, you know, to your security team. And like 90% of the times customers have an aha moment, (John chuckles) that they didn't know something that we are showing them. They find APIs that were not supposed to be public. They will find hosting environments that they didn't know about. They will find API gateways that were, like not commissioned, but being used. And so start there, start their journey with an assessment with Cequence, and then work with us to prioritize what problems you want to solve next once you have that assessment. >> So really making sure that their inventory of API is legit. >> Yep. Yep, absolutely. >> It's basically- >> Yep. >> I mean, you're starting to see more of this in the cloud-native, you know, Sbot, they call 'em, you know, (indistinct) materials. >> (Ameya faintly speaking). What do you got out there, kind of full understanding of what's being instrumented out there, big time. >> Yeah. The thing is a lot of analysts say that APIs is the number one attack vector this year and going forward, but you'll be surprised to see that it's not the APIs that get targeted that are poorly secured. Actually, the APIs that are completely not secured are the ones that are attacked the most because there are plenty of them. So start with the assessment, figure out the APIs that are out there and then start your journey. That's sort of my recommendation. >> So based on your advice what you're saying is there's a, most people make the mistake of having a lot of undocumented or unauthorized APIs out there that are unsecured. >> Yeah. And security teams are unaware of those APIs. So how do you protect something that you don't know even exists? >> Yeah. >> Right? So that's the challenge. >> Okay. You know, the APIs have to be secure. And as applications connect too, there's the other side of the APIs, whether that's credential passing, so much is at stake here relative to the security. It's not just access it's what's behind it. There's a lot of trust coming in. So, you know, I got to ask you a final question. You got zero trust and you got trust kind of coming together. What's (laughs), how do you respond to that? >> Yeah. Zero trust is part of it in the sense that you have to not trust sort of any API consumer as a completely trusted entity. Just like I gave you the Ultra Beauty example. They had trusted this third party to be absolutely safe and secure, you know, no controls necessary to sort of monitor their traffic, whereas they can be abused by their end consumers and cause you a lot of pain. So there is a sort of a linkage between zero trust. Never trusts anybody until you verify, that's the sort of angle, that's sort of the connection between APIs security and zero trust. >> Ameya, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate the conversation. I'll give you the final word. What should people know about Cequence Security? How would you give the pitch? You go, you know, quick summary, what's going on? >> Yeah. So very excited to be in this space. We sort of are the largest security of API security vendor in the space in terms of revenue, the largest volume of API traffic that we process. And we are just getting started. This is a exciting journey we are on, we are very happy to serve the, you know, Fortune 50, you know, global 200 customers that we have, and we are expanding into many geographies and locations. And so look for some exciting updates from us in the coming days. >> Well, congratulations on your success. Love the approach, love the scale. I think scale's a new competitive advantage. I think that's the new lock-in if you're good, and your scaling providing a lot of benefits. So Ameya, thank you for coming, sharing the story. Looking forward to chatting again soon. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having us. >> Okay. This is a CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, here at Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching. (cheerful music)

(light music playing) >> Welcome back to VEEAMON 2022 in Las Vegas. We're at the Aria. This is theCUBE and we're covering two days of VEEAMON. We've done a number of VEEAMONs before, we did Miami, we did New Orleans, we did Chicago and we're, we're happy to be back live after two years of virtual VEEAMONs. I'm Dave Vellante. My co-host is David Nicholson. Eric Herzog is here. You think he's, Eric's been on theCUBE, I think more than any other guest, including Pat Gelsinger, who at one point was the number one guest. Eric Herzog, CMO of INFINIDAT great to see you again. >> Great, Dave, thank you. Love to be on theCUBE. And of course notice my Hawaiian shirt, except I now am supporting an INFINIDAT badge on it. (Dave laughs) Look at that. >> Is that part of the shirt or is that a clip-on? >> Ah, you know, one of those clip-ons but you know, it looks good. Looks good. >> Hey man, what are you doing at VEEAMON? I mean, you guys started this journey into data protection several years ago. I remember we were actually at one of their competitors' events when you first released it, but tell us what's going on with Veeam. >> So we do a ton of stuff with Veeam. We do custom integration. We got some integration on the snapshotting side, but we do everything and we have a purpose built backup appliance known as InfiniGuard. It works with Veeam. We also actually have some customers who use our regular primary storage device as a backup target. The InfiniGuard product will do the data reduction, the dedupe compression, et cetera. The standard product does not, it's just a standard high performance array. We will compress the data, but we have customers that do it either way. We have a couple customers that started with the InfiniBox and then transitioned to the InfiniGuard, realizing that why would you put it on regular storage? Why not go to something that's customized for it? So we do that. We do stuff in the field with them. We've been at all the VEEAMONs since the, since like, I think the second one was the first one we came to. We're doing the virtual one as well as the live one. So we've got a little booth inside, but we're also doing the virtual one today as well. So really strong work with Veeam, particularly at the field level with the sales guys and in the channel. >> So when INFINIDAT does something, you guys go hardcore, high end, fast recovery, you just, you know, reliable, that's kind of your brand. Do you see this movement into data protection as kind of an adjacency to your existing markets? Is it a land and expand strategy? Can you kind of explain the strategy there. >> Ah, so it's actually for us a little bit of a hybrid. So we have several accounts that started with InfiniBox and now have gone with the InfiniGuard. So they start with primary storage and go with secondary storage/modern data protection. But we also have, in fact, we just got a large PO from a Fortune 50, who was buying the InfiniGuard first and now is buying our InfiniBox. >> Both ways. Okay. >> All flash array. And, but they started with backup first and then moved to, so we've got them moving both directions. And of course, now that we have a full portfolio, our original product, the InfiniBox, which was a hybrid array, outperformed probably 80 to 85% of the all flash arrays, 'cause the way we use DRAM. And what's so known as our mural cash technology. So we could do very well, but there is about, you know, 15, 20% of the workloads we could not outperform the competition. So then we had an all flash array and purpose built backup. So we can do, you know, what I'll say is standard enterprise storage, high performance enterprise storage. And then of course, modern data protection with our partnerships such as what we do with Veeam and we've incorporated across the entire portfolio, intense cyber resilience technology. >> Why does the world, Eric, need another purpose built backup appliance? What do you guys bring that is filling a gap in the marketplace? >> Well, the first thing we brought was much higher performance. So when you look at the other purpose built backup appliances, it's been about our ability to have incredibly high performance. The second area has been CapEx and OpEx reduction. So for example, we have a cloud service provider who happens to be in South Africa. They had 14 purpose built backup appliances from someone else, seven in one data center and seven in another. Now they have two InfiniGuards, one in each data center handling all of their backup. You know, they're selling backup as a service. They happen to be using Veeam as well as one other backup company. So if you're the cloud provider from their perspective, they just dramatically reduce their CapEx and OpEx. And of course they've made it easier for them. So that's been a good story for us, that ability to consolidation, whether it be on primary storage or secondary storage. We have a very strong play with cloud providers, particularly those meeting them in small that have to compete with the hyperscalers right. They don't have the engineering of Amazon or Google, right? They can't compete with what the Azure guys have got, but because the way both the InfiniGuard and the InfiniBox work, they could dramatically consolidate workloads. We probably got 30 or 40 midsize and actually several members of the top 10 telcos use us. And when they do their clouds, both their internal cloud, but actually the clouds that are actually running the transmissions and the traffic, it actually runs on InfiniBox. One of them has close to 200 petabytes of InfiniBox and InfiniBox, all flash technology running one of the largest telcos on the planet in a cloud configuration. So all that's been very powerful for us in driving revenue. >> So phrases of the week have been air gap, logical air gap, immutable. Where does InfiniGuard fit into that universe? And what's the profile of the customer that's going to choose InfiniGuard as the target where they're immutable, Write Once Read Many, data is going to live. >> So we did, we announced our InfiniSafe technology first on the InfiniGuard, which actually earlier this year. So we have what I call the four legs of the stool of cyber resilience. One is immutable snapshots, but that's only part of it. Second is logical air gapping, and we can do both local and remote and we can provide and combine local with remote. So for example, what that air gap does is separate the management plane from the actual data plane. Okay. So in this case, the Veeam data backup sets. So the management cannot touch that immutable, can't change it, can't delete it. can't edit it. So management is separated once you start and say, I want to do an immutable snap of two petabytes of Veeam backup dataset. Then we just do that. And the air gap does it, but then you could take the local air gap because as you know, from inception to the end of an attack can be close to 300 days, which means there could be a fire. There could be a tornado, there could be a hurricane, there could be an earthquake. And in the primary data center, So you might as well have that air gap just as you would do- do a remote for disaster recovery and business continuity. Then we have the ability to create a fenced forensic environment to evaluate those backup data sets. And we can do that actually on the same device. That is the purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at the architectural, these are public from our competitors, including the guys that are in sort of Hopkinton/Austin, Texas. You can see that they show a minimum of two physical devices. And in many cases, a third, we can do that with one. So not only do we get the fence forensic environment, just like they do, but we do it with reduction, both CapEx and OpEx. Purpose built backup is very high performance. And then the last thing is our ability to recover. So some people talk about rapid recovery, I would say, they dunno what they're talking about. So when we launched the InfiniGuard with InfiniSafe, we did a live demo, 1.5 petabytes, a Veeam backup dataset. We recovered it in 12 minutes. So once you've identified and that's on the InfiniGuard. On the InfiniBox, once you've identified a good copy of data to do the recovery where you're free of malware ransomware, we can do the recovery in three to five seconds. >> Okay. >> So really, really quick. Actually want to double click on something because people talk about immutable copies, immutable snapshots in particular, what have the actual advances been? I mean, is this simply a setting that maybe we didn't set for retention at some time in the past, or if you had to engineer something net new into a system so to provide that logical air gap. >> So what's net new is the air gapping part. Immutable snapshots have been around, you know, before we were on screen, you talked about WORM, Write Once Read Many. Well, since I'm almost 70 years old, I actually know what that means. When you're 30 or 40 or 50, you probably don't even know what a WORM is. Okay. And the real use of immutable snapshots, it was to replace WORM which was an optical technology. And what was the primary usage? Regulatory and compliance, healthcare, finance and publicly traded companies that were worried about. The SEC or the EU or the Japanese finance ministry coming down on them because they're out of compliance and regulatory. That was the original use of immutable snap. Then people were, well, wait a second. Malware ransomware could attack me. And if I got something that's not changeable, that makes it tougher. So the real magic of immutability was now creating the air gap part. Immutability has been around, I'd say 25 years. I mean, WORMs sort of died back when I was at Mac store the first time. So that was 1990-ish is when WORMs sort of fell away. And there have been immutable snapshots from most of the major storage vendors, as well as a lot of the small vendors ever since they came out, it's kind of like a checkbox item because again, regulatory and compliance, you're going to sell to healthcare, finance, public trade. If you don't have the immutable snapshot, then they don't have their compliance and regulatory for SEC or tax purposes, right? With they ever end up in an audit, you got to produce data. And no one's using a WORM drive anymore to my knowledge. >> I remember the first storage conference I ever went to was in Monterey. It had me in the early 1980s, 84 maybe. And it was a optical disc drive conference. The Jim Porter of optical. >> Yep. (laughs) >> I forget what the guy's name was. And I remember somebody coming up to me, I think it was like Bob Payton rest his soul, super smart strategy guy said, this is never going to happen because of the cost and that's what it was. And now you've got that capability on flash, you know, hard disk, et cetera. >> Right. >> So the four pillars, immutability, the air gap, both local and remote, the fence forensics and the recovery speed. Right? >> Right. Pick up is one thing. Recovery is everything. Those are the four pillars, right? >> Those are the four things. >> And your contention is that those four things together differentiate you from the competition. You mentioned, you know, the big competition, but how unique is this in the marketplace, those capabilities and how difficult is it to replicate? >> So first of all, if someone really puts their engineering hat to it, it's not that hard to replicate. It takes a while. Particularly if you're doing an enterprise, for example, our solutions all have a hundred percent availability guarantee. That's hard to do. Most guys have seven nines. >> That's hard. >> We really will guarantee a hundred percent availability. We offer an SLA that's included when you buy. We don't charge extra for it. It's like if you want it, like you just get it. Second thing is really making sure on the recovery side is the hardest part, particularly on a purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at other people and you delve into their public material, press releases, white paper, support documentation. No one's talking about. Yeah, we can take a 1.5 petabyte Veeam backup data set and make it available in 12 minutes and 12 seconds, which was the exact time that we did on our live demo when we launched the product in February of 2022. No one's talking that. On primary storage, you're hearing some of the vendors such as my old employer that also who, also starts with an "I", talk about a recovery time of two to three hours once you have a known good copy. On primary storage, once we have a known good copy, we're talking three to five seconds for that copy to be available. So that's just sort of the power of the snapshot technology, how we manage our metadata and what we've done, which previous to cyber resiliency, we were known for our replication capability and our snapshot capability from an enterprise class data store. That's what people said. INFINIDAT really knows how to do the replication snapshot. I remember our founder was one of the technical founders of EMC for a product known as the Symmetric, which then became the DMAX, the VMAX and is now is the PowerMax. That was invented by the guy who founded INFINIDAT. So that team has the real chops at enterprise high-end storage to the global fortune 2000. And what are the key feature checkbox items they need that's in both the InfiniBox and also in the InfiniGuard. >> So the business case for cyber resiliency is changing. As Dave said, we've had a big dose last several months, you know, couple years actually, of the importance of cyber resiliency, given all the ransomware tax, et cetera. But it sounds like the business case is shifting really focused on avoiding that risk, avoiding that downtime time versus the cost. The cost is always important. I mean, you got a consolidation play here, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Dedupe, does dedupe come into play? >> So on the InfiniGuard we do both dedupe and compression. On the InfiniBox we only do compression. So we do have data reduction. It depends on which product you're using from a Veeam perspective. Most of that now is with the InfiniGuard. So you get the block level dedupe and you get compression. And if you can do both, depending on the data set, we do both. >> How does that affect recovery time? >> Yeah, good question. >> So it doesn't affect recovery times. >> Explain why. >> So first of all, when you're doing a backup data set, the final final recovery, you recovered the backup data set, whether it's Veeam or one of their competitors, you actually make it available to the backup administrator to do a full restore of a backup data set. Okay. So in that case, we get it ready and expose it to the Veeam admin or some other backup admin. And then they launch the Veeam software or the other software and do a restore. Okay. So it's really a two step process on the secondary storage model and actually three. First identifying a known good backup copy. Second then we recover, which is again 12, 13 minutes. And then the backup admin's got to do a, you know, a restore of the backup 'cause it's backup data set in the format of backup, which is different from every backup vendor. So we support that. We get it ready to go. And then whether it's a Veeam backup administrator and quite honestly, from our perspective, most of our customers in the global fortune 2000, 25% of the fortune 50 use INIFINIDAT products. 25% and we're a tiny company. So we must have some magic fairy dust that appeals to the biggest companies on the planet. But most of our customers in that area and actually say probably in the fortune 500 actually use two to three different backup packages. So we can support all those on a single InfiniGuard or multiples depending on how big their backup data sets. Our biggest InfiniGuard is 50 petabytes counting the data reduction technology. So we get that ready. On the InfiniBox, the recovery really is, you know, a couple of seconds and in that case, it's primary data in block format. So we just make that available. So on the InfiniBox, the recovery is once, well two. Identifying a known good copy, first step, then just doing recovery and it's available 'cause it's blocked data. >> And that recovery doesn't include movement of a whole bunch of data. It's essentially realignment of pointers to where the good data is. >> Right. >> Now in the InfiniBox as well as in InfiniGuard. >> No, it would be, So in the case of that, in the case of the InfiniGuard, it's a full recovery of a backup data set. >> Okay. >> So the backup software just launches and it sees, >> Okay. >> your backup one of Veeam and just starts doing a restore with the Veeam restoration technology. Okay? >> Okay. >> In the case of the block, as long as the physical InfiniBox, if that was the primary storage and then filter box is not damaged when you make it available, it's available right away to the apps. Now, if you had an issue with the app side or the physical server side, and now you're pointing new apps and you had to reload stuff on that side, you have to point it at that InfiniBox which has the data. And then you got to wait for the servers and the SAP or Oracle or Mongo, Cassandra to recognize, oh, this is my primary storage. So it depends on the physical configuration on the server side and the application perspective, how bad were the apps damaged? So let's take malware. Malware is even worse because you either destroying data or messing, playing with the app so that the app is now corrupted as well as the data is corrupted. So then it's going to take longer the block data's ready, the SAP workload. And if the SAP somehow was compromised, which is a malware thing, not a ransomware thing, they got to reload a good copy of SAP before it can see the data 'cause the malware attacked the application as well as the data. Ransomware doesn't do that. It just holds it for ransom and it encrypts. >> So this is exactly what we're talking about. When we talk about operational recovery and automation, Eric is addressing the reality that it doesn't just end at the line above some arbitrary storage box, you know, reaching up real recovery, reaches up into the application space and it's complicated. >> That's when you're actually recovered. >> Right. >> When the application- >> Well, think of it like a disaster. >> Okay. >> Yes, right. >> I'll knock on woods since I was born and still live in California. Dave too. Let's assume there's a massive earthquake in the bay area in LA. >> Let's not. >> Okay. Let's yes, but hypothetically and the data center's cat five. It doesn't matter what they're, they're all toast. Okay. Couple weeks later it's modern. You know, people figure out what to do and certain buildings don't fall down 'cause of the way earthquake standards are in California now. So there's data available. They move into temporary space. Okay. Data's sitting there in the Colorado data center and they could do a restore. Well, they can't do a restore. How many service did they need? Had they reloaded all of the application software to do a restoration. What happened to the people? If no one got injured, like in the 1989 earthquake in California, very few people got injured yet cost billions of dollars. But everyone was watching this San Francisco giants played in Oakland, >> I remember >> so no one was on the road. >> Al Michael's. >> Epic moment. >> Imagine it's in the middle of commute time in LA and San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of people. What if it's your data center team? Right? So there's a whole bunch around disaster recovery and business country that have nothing to do with the storage, the people, what your process. So I would argue that malware ransomware is a disaster and it's exactly the same thing. You know, you got the known good copy. You've got okay. You're sure that the SAP and Oracle, especially on the malware side, weren't compromised. On the ransomware side, you don't have to worry about that. And those things, you got to take a look at just as if it, I would argue malware and ransomware is a disaster and you need to have a process just like you would. If there was an earthquake, a fire or a flood in the data center, you need a similar process. That's slightly different, but the same thing, servers, people, software, the data itself. And when you have that all mapped out, that's how you do successful malware ransomeware recovery. It's a different type of disaster. >> It's absolutely a disaster. It comes down to business continuity and be able to transact business with as little disruption as possible. We heard today from the keynotes and then Jason Buffington came on about the preponderance of ransomware. Okay. We know that. But then the interesting stat was the percentage of customers that paid the ransom about a third weren't able to recover. And so 'cause you kind of had this feeling of all right, well, you know, see it on, you know, CNBC, should you pay the ransom or not? You know, pay the ransom. Okay. You'll get back. But no, it's not the case. You won't necessarily get back. So, you know, Veeam stated, Hey, our goal is to sort of eliminate that problem. Are you- You feel like you guys in a partnership can actually achieve that. >> Yes. >> So, and you have customers that have actually avoided, you know, been hit and were able to- >> We have people who won't publicly say they've been hit, but the way they talk about what they did, like in a meeting, they were hit and they were very thankful. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> And so that's been very good. I- >> So we got proof. >> Yes, we absolutely have proof. And quite honestly, with the recent legislation in the United States, malware and ransomware actually now is also regulatory and compliance. >> Yeah. >> Because the new law states mid-March that whether it's Herzog's bar and grill to bank of America or any large foreign company doing business in the US, you have to report to the United States federal government, any attack, same with the county school district with any local government, any agency, the federal government, as well as every company from the tiniest to the largest in the world that does, they're supposed to report it 'cause the government is trying to figure out how to fight it. Just the way if you don't report burglary, how they catch the burglars. >> Does your solution simplify testing in any way or reduce the risk of testing? >> Well, because the recovery is so rapid, we recommend that people do this on a regular basis. So for example, because the recovery is so quick, you can recover in 12 minutes while we do not practice, let's say once a month or once every couple weeks. And guess what? It also allows you to build a repository of known good copies. Remember when you get ransomeware, no one's going to come say, Hey, I'm Mr. Rans. I'm going to steal your stuff. It's all done surreptitiously. They're all James Bond on the sly who doesn't say "By the way, I'm James Bond". They are truly underneath the radar. And they're very slowly encrypting that data set. So guess what? Your primary data and your backup data that you don't want to be attacked can be attacked. So it's really about finding a known good copy. So if you're doing this on a regular basis, you can get an index of known good copies. >> Right. >> And then, you know, oh, I can go back to last Tuesday and you know that that's good. Otherwise you're literally testing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday to try to find a known good copy, which delays the recovery process 'cause you really do have to test. They make sure it's good. >> If you increase that frequency, You're going to protect yourself. That's why I got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBEs. Great to see you. >> Great. Thank you very much. I'll be wearing a different Hawaiian shirt next to. >> All right. That sounds good. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Eric Herzog on theCUBE, Dave Vallante for David Nicholson. We'll be right back at VEEAMON 2022. Right after this short break. (light music playing)

(gentle music) >> High profile cyber attacks like the SolarWinds hack, the JBS meat and the Florida municipality breach, have heightened awareness of how exposed, critical infrastructure has become. Because the pandemic has shifted employees to remote modes of work, hackers now have a much easier target to fish for credentials and exploit less secure home networks. Take the recent Log4j vulnerability, that's yet another example, of how hackers can take advantage of weak links in the chain. Now data storage companies have an important role to play in fighting cyber crime. Ultimately, they provide the equivalent of a bank vault if you will, and are responsible for storing and protecting the data that cyber criminals are targeting to steal or encrypt, in an effort to hold companies hostage, in a ransomware attack. Now in an effort to help customers understand how to protect themselves from such vulnerabilities, and how one storage company is addressing these challenges, the Cube is hosting this special presentation InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: New Cybercrime Solutions. And we're going to speak with Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of Infinidat, and then we'll bring in Stan Wysocki who is the president of Mark III Systems who is either an expert in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. First, let me welcome Eric Herzog back to the Cube, hello, Eric. >> Great, Dave, thank you very much, always love talking to you and the Cube, about leading edge technology solutions for end users. >> Alright let's do it. So, first we want to address the transformation and big business progress of Infinidat. New CEO, he's injected new management, new head of marketing obviously, Phil Bullinger is really been focused on accelerating the company's original vision, and doing so, Eric, in the typically unconventional style of Infinidat, you just put out a press release, capping 2021, can you set the stage for us, and give us the business update? >> Sure, so of course we summarized our 2021 results. What a very, very strong year. What a very, very strong year. We increased our bookings over 40% year to year. Even in Q4, we increased our bookings over 68%. And over 25% of the fortune 50 use an Infinidat solution, either our InfiniBox, or InfiniBox SSA, all flash array, or our Infiniguard, which is the focus of the launch we're doing today, on February 9th. >> Yeah, so I always said that Infinidat is one of the best kept secrets in the storage business. So let's talk about that hard news, what you launched on February 9th, and why it's important. >> Well, what we've done is we've got a high end enterprise purpose-built backup appliance, the InfiniGuard. We made some substantial advances in that. The key is focused on cyber resilience with what we call our infinisafe technology. Infinisafe incorporates a number of subsets, of cyber resilience from immutable snapshots, to logical air gapping, to fenced isolated networks, to almost instantaneous recovery for your backup data sets. In addition, we also dramatically improved the performance of the backup and recovery, which means, for example, if a backup window was taking three hours, now the backup window on that primary backup dataset could take only an hour and a half, which of course, as we all know backup dramatically impacts the performance of your primary applications, your primary servers, and your primary storage. So we've done both the cyber resilience aspect and then, on modern data protection, making sure that the backup and recovery are faster, for a traditional backup workload. >> So tell us a little bit more about Infinisafe, and specifically, Eric I'm interested in how it's different from other solutions, don't make me a liar, I had said, you guys always kind of take nonconventional approaches so tell us, add a little color to Infinisafe and how is it really unique from competitors? >> Sure, well Infinisafe incorporates as I mentioned, several different aspects. First of all, the immutable snapshots. So immutable snapshots can not be deleted, they cannot be altered, you cannot accelerate the rate, you can set the rate of immutable stuff, do I want to do it once a day? Do I want to do it twice a day? And obviously if a hacker could get in, you could accelerate that. Our immutable snaps are physically separated from the management schema. So the inside of an Infiniguard, we have what we call a data dedupe appliance, and that data dedupe engine, it goes ahead and it applies data reduction technology, to that back up data set. But we've divorced the immutable snapshots from the management of what we now call a DDE. So the DDE has kind of access of giving you that gap, that logical gap between the management schema of a DDE, and of course the immutable snapshot. We also combine that with this air gap technology, you've got the immutability and the air gap, which is local in that instance, but we also can do it remotely. So we can replicate from one Infiniguard in data center A, to a different Infiniguard in data center B. You then can configure that backup data set with the same immutable snapshot, and the same length, one day, half a day, six hours, whatever you choose, and then of course it'll have that same capability. The third thing we've done is very unique. We have a fenced isolated network to perform forensics. So, if the Cube has a cyber or malware attack, you need to make sure that once you've cleaned it up, off the primary storage, the primary servers, that you recover, a known good data set. So we set up this isolated fence network in which to perform that forensic analysis, to give you the appropriate good recover point. However, unlike many of our competitors, we can do it with a single InfiniBox. Some of our competitors, right on their websites say, you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances, to do cyber resilience. Meaning, twice the CapEx and twice the OpEx, which we can do with a single Infiniguard solution. And then lastly is our near instantaneous recovery. As you know, we're recovering backup data sets. We can make between 15 and 30 minutes time, the backup data set fully accessible to the backup admin or the storage admin to use their Commvault, their Veeam, their Veritas, their IBM Spectrum Protect, or whatever their backup software is, to do recovery from the InfiniGuard box, back to the primary storage using of course the backup software that they created the original dataset with. That is very unique. When you look out in the industry and look at, whether it be purpose-built backup competitors, or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery, and the one or two that do, talk about recovering the data set. We recover the entire environment. We are ready to go, and the backup admin, if they were, for example, Commvault, Veeam or Veritas, they could immediately start the backup, as soon as we did our recovery, which again, takes between 15 and 30 minutes, independent of the data set size. That could be 50 terabytes, it could be a petabyte, it could be two petabytes. And even two petabytes of data can be available in 15 to 30 minutes. And then of course, the backup admin can restore from that backup dataset. Very powerful and very unique in those aspects. >> Whilst the reason why this is so important is like I said, it's like the bank vault, because hackers are going to go after that backup corpus that's where the gold is, that's where all the data is. So this all really sounds good. But there's more than Infinisafe in this launch. What else should we know? >> Well, the other thing we've done is dramatically improved the performance of the purpose-built backup plants at the core. So for example, the last time we publicly announced our numbers, we were at 74 terabytes an hour, now we're 180 terabytes an hour. So of course, as we all know, when you do a backup, it impacts the performance of the primary applications, the primary servers and the primary storage. So if that backup window was taking three hours, now that we've more than doubled the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three hour backup window, if that's what the dataset took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half or even faster. So that of course minimizes the impact on primary storage, primary applications, and of course your primary storage, making it much, much more efficient, from a backup perspective, and of course less impact on the primary applications, the primary servers, and primary storage. >> So I've talked to a number of Infinidat customers, they're very loyal and kind of passionate. So I wonder if you could kind of put that perspective on this discussion. The impact that InfiniGuard, this announcement, that's going to have for your customers, paint a picture as to how it's going to change their business. >> Sure, so let me give you an example. One of our customers is a cloud service buyer, in North America, they focus only on healthcare. So here's a couple of key benefits that they got. First of all, they use our integration with two different backup vendors. They don't have one, they have two. So we're tightly integrated with our backup software partners. They got a 40% cost savings on CapEX, compared to the previous vendor that they had. And, they used to be able to do 30,000 backup per day, now they can do 90,000 backup a day. And by the way, that's all with the previous version of InfiniGuard, not the version we just announced on the 9th. One of our other customers, which is in AMEA and they happened to be an energy company, they were using purpose-built backup from the other vendor, and they had 14 of them, seven in data center one, and seven in data center two. With InfiniGuard, they've got one in data center one, and one in data center two. So 14 purpose-built backup appliances consolidated down into two. And on top of that, those purpose-built backup appliances from the other vendor actually had a couple recovery failures, where they were not able to recover the data. They've been installed for a year now, they've had zero recovers, zero recovery failures, whereas the previous vendor had some. And lastly, let's talk about a large global fortune financial services. So, one of the biggest in the industry, their cost savings from their previous vendor was 46%. In addition, when you look at their cyber resilience design, they were using one of those vendors that probably talks about needing two system products to do their cyber resiliency. They again were able to take those two systems out, and use one InfiniGuard solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure, two going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one InfiniGuard versus two of the other guys appliances. Those are just three examples all over the world. One in cloud service providing, one in the energy space, and one a global fortune 500 financial services company. Just some real world examples. And all those by the way, Dave, were before the enhancements of Infinisafe, and before the additional performance we've added in the launch of InfiniGuard on February 9th. >> So like I'm just kind of sketching out the business case, you know, put my CFO hat on. So you're lowering costs cause you're consolidating, so that means I need less hardware and software. But also there's probably labor costs associated with that. If I could do it faster with less resources, I got less stuff to manage. You're accelerating the backup time, so that frees up resources that I can apply elsewhere, recovery, you know, is really important. So I'm inferring faster recovery, all this lowers my risk, and then I can sort of calculate the probability of having data loss, and then what that means to my business. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the other impact is on your primary service and your primary storage. If the backup window shrinks, then you're not slowing down that SAP app, that Oracle app, you know, that SQL app, whatever you're running, whether that be the financials, whether that be your logistics, whether it be your manufacturing system, every time you turn on that backup, to do that backup, that backup window slows you down. So cutting that in half has an impact on the real-world application side, which obviously most storage guys, you know, it's hard for us to quantify. But you are taking the impact of backup, and basically reducing it, if you will shrinking the backup window, so their primary applications don't get hammered as much by the backup while they're still trying to run that SAP, that Oracle or that SQL workload. >> And you're not a backup software vendor, so I have optionality there. I can pretty much choose all the popular, you know. >> Absolutely, so Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect, all the majors. And in fact, one of the players I mentioned, as you were talking about the end-users, they use two different backup packages, two of 'em. So, two of the major vendors that I named, we work with them just within one account. So, we're very flexible, the user picks what they want from a backup software perspective, and we can work with anything. So, whatever they want to use, is fine with us. We integrate with all of them, we have integration, for example, also with VMware, for vVols and other aspects in container integration, so you know, whether it be our purpose-built backup appliance, InfiniGuard, or what we do with the InfiniBox, we always make sure we integrate with the surrounding environment. 'Cause storage is not an island, storage needs to exist in your data center, or your hybrid cloud data center, or what you're doing for containers. So we make sure we have integration with our InfiniBox, our InfiniBox SSA, all flash. And of course the product we're enhancing today, the InfiniGuard. >> Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions, they're busy. (laughs) They don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plugging stuff together. So, okay Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. >> Great, thank you very much Dave. Always love talking to the Cube. >> Okay, in a moment Stan Wysocki is coming in. He's the president of Mark III Systems. He's going to join us for a drill down on how InfiniGuard is impacting customers. You're watching the Cube, your global leader, in enterprise tech coverage. (gentle music)

(gentle music) >> High profile cyber attacks like the SolarWinds hack, the JBS meat and the Florida municipality breach, have heightened awareness of how exposed, critical infrastructure has become. Because the pandemic has shifted employees to remote modes of work, hackers now have a much easier target to fish for credentials and exploit less secure home networks. Take the recent Log4j vulnerability, that's yet another example, of how hackers can take advantage of weak links in the chain. Now data storage companies have an important role to play in fighting cyber crime. Ultimately, they provide the equivalent of a bank vault if you will, and are responsible for storing and protecting the data that cyber criminals are targeting to steal or encrypt, in an effort to hold companies hostage, in a ransomware attack. Now in an effort to help customers understand how to protect themselves from such vulnerabilities, and how one storage company is addressing these challenges, the Cube is hosting this special presentation InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: New Cybercrime Solutions. And we're going to speak with Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of Infinidat, and then we'll bring in Stan Wysocki who is the president of Mark III Systems who is either an expert in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. First, let me welcome Eric Herzog back to the Cube, hello, Eric. >> Great, Dave, thank you very much, always love talking to you and the Cube, about leading edge technology solutions for end users. >> Alright let's do it. So, first we want to address the transformation and big business progress of Infinidat. New CEO, he's injected new management, new head of marketing obviously, Phil Bullinger is really been focused on accelerating the company's original vision, and doing so, Eric, in the typically unconventional style of Infinidat, you just put out a press release, capping 2021, can you set the stage for us, and give us the business update? >> Sure, so of course we summarized our 2021 results. What a very, very strong year. What a very, very strong year. We increased our bookings over 40% year to year. Even in Q4, we increased our bookings over 68%. And over 25% of the fortune 50 use an Infinidat solution, either our InfiniBox, or InfiniBox SSA, all flash array, or our Infiniguard, which is the focus of the launch we're doing today, on February 9th. >> Yeah, so I always said that Infinidat is one of the best kept secrets in the storage business. So let's talk about that hard news, what you launched on February 9th, and why it's important. >> Well, what we've done is we've got a high end enterprise purpose-built backup appliance, the InfiniGuard. We made some substantial advances in that. The key is focused on cyber resilience with what we call our infinisafe technology. Infinisafe incorporates a number of subsets, of cyber resilience from immutable snapshots, to logical air gapping, to fenced isolated networks, to almost instantaneous recovery for your backup data sets. In addition, we also dramatically improved the performance of the backup and recovery, which means, for example, if a backup window was taking three hours, now the backup window on that primary backup dataset could take only an hour and a half, which of course, as we all know backup dramatically impacts the performance of your primary applications, your primary servers, and your primary storage. So we've done both the cyber resilience aspect and then, on modern data protection, making sure that the backup and recovery are faster, for a traditional backup workload. >> So tell us a little bit more about Infinisafe, and specifically, Eric I'm interested in how it's different from other solutions, don't make me a liar, I had said, you guys always kind of take nonconventional approaches so tell us, add a little color to Infinisafe and how is it really unique from competitors? >> Sure, well Infinisafe incorporates as I mentioned, several different aspects. First of all, the immutable snapshots. So immutable snapshots can not be deleted, they cannot be altered, you cannot accelerate the rate, you can set the rate of immutable stuff, do I want to do it once a day? Do I want to do it twice a day? And obviously if a hacker could get in, you could accelerate that. Our immutable snaps are physically separated from the management schema. So the inside of an Infiniguard, we have what we call a data dedupe appliance, and that data dedupe engine, it goes ahead and it applies data reduction technology, to that back up data set. But we've divorced the immutable snapshots from the management of what we now call a DDE. So the DDE has kind of access of giving you that gap, that logical gap between the management schema of a DDE, and of course the immutable snapshot. We also combine that with this air gap technology, you've got the immutability and the air gap, which is local in that instance, but we also can do it remotely. So we can replicate from one Infiniguard in data center A, to a different Infiniguard in data center B. You then can configure that backup data set with the same immutable snapshot, and the same length, one day, half a day, six hours, whatever you choose, and then of course it'll have that same capability. The third thing we've done is very unique. We have a fenced isolated network to perform forensics. So, if the Cube has a cyber or malware attack, you need to make sure that once you've cleaned it up, off the primary storage, the primary servers, that you recover, a known good data set. So we set up this isolated fence network in which to perform that forensic analysis, to give you the appropriate good recover point. However, unlike many of our competitors, we can do it with a single InfiniBox. Some of our competitors, right on their websites say, you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances, to do cyber resilience. Meaning, twice the CapEx and twice the OpEx, which we can do with a single Infiniguard solution. And then lastly is our near instantaneous recovery. As you know, we're recovering backup data sets. We can make between 15 and 30 minutes time, the backup data set fully accessible to the backup admin or the storage admin to use their Commvault, their Veeam, their Veritas, their IBM Spectrum Protect, or whatever their backup software is, to do recovery from the InfiniGuard box, back to the primary storage using of course the backup software that they created the original dataset with. That is very unique. When you look out in the industry and look at, whether it be purpose-built backup competitors, or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery, and the one or two that do, talk about recovering the data set. We recover the entire environment. We are ready to go, and the backup admin, if they were, for example, Commvault, Veeam or Veritas, they could immediately start the backup, as soon as we did our recovery, which again, takes between 15 and 30 minutes, independent of the data set size. That could be 50 terabytes, it could be a petabyte, it could be two petabytes. And even two petabytes of data can be available in 15 to 30 minutes. And then of course, the backup admin can restore from that backup dataset. Very powerful and very unique in those aspects. >> Whilst the reason why this is so important is like I said, it's like the bank vault, because hackers are going to go after that backup corpus that's where the gold is, that's where all the data is. So this all really sounds good. But there's more than Infinisafe in this launch. What else should we know? >> Well, the other thing we've done is dramatically improved the performance of the purpose-built backup plants at the core. So for example, the last time we publicly announced our numbers, we were at 74 terabytes an hour, now we're 180 terabytes an hour. So of course, as we all know, when you do a backup, it impacts the performance of the primary applications, the primary servers and the primary storage. So if that backup window was taking three hours, now that we've more than doubled the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three hour backup window, if that's what the dataset took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half or even faster. So that of course minimizes the impact on primary storage, primary applications, and of course your primary storage, making it much, much more efficient, from a backup perspective, and of course less impact on the primary applications, the primary servers, and primary storage. >> So I've talked to a number of Infinidat customers, they're very loyal and kind of passionate. So I wonder if you could kind of put that perspective on this discussion. The impact that InfiniGuard, this announcement, that's going to have for your customers, paint a picture as to how it's going to change their business. >> Sure, so let me give you an example. One of our customers is a cloud service buyer, in North America, they focus only on healthcare. So here's a couple of key benefits that they got. First of all, they use our integration with two different backup vendors. They don't have one, they have two. So we're tightly integrated with our backup software partners. They got a 40% cost savings on CapEX, compared to the previous vendor that they had. And, they used to be able to do 30,000 backup per day, now they can do 90,000 backup a day. And by the way, that's all with the previous version of InfiniGuard, not the version we just announced on the 9th. One of our other customers, which is in AMEA and they happened to be an energy company, they were using purpose-built backup from the other vendor, and they had 14 of them, seven in data center one, and seven in data center two. With InfiniGuard, they've got one in data center one, and one in data center two. So 14 purpose-built backup appliances consolidated down into two. And on top of that, those purpose-built backup appliances from the other vendor actually had a couple recovery failures, where they were not able to recover the data. They've been installed for a year now, they've had zero recovers, zero recovery failures, whereas the previous vendor had some. And lastly, let's talk about a large global fortune financial services. So, one of the biggest in the industry, their cost savings from their previous vendor was 46%. In addition, when you look at their cyber resilience design, they were using one of those vendors that probably talks about needing two system products to do their cyber resiliency. They again were able to take those two systems out, and use one InfiniGuard solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure, two going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one InfiniGuard versus two of the other guys appliances. Those are just three examples all over the world. One in cloud service providing, one in the energy space, and one a global fortune 500 financial services company. Just some real world examples. And all those by the way, Dave, were before the enhancements of Infinisafe, and before the additional performance we've added in the launch of InfiniGuard on February 9th. >> So like I'm just kind of sketching out the business case, you know, put my CFO hat on. So you're lowering costs cause you're consolidating, so that means I need less hardware and software. But also there's probably labor costs associated with that. If I could do it faster with less resources, I got less stuff to manage. You're accelerating the backup time, so that frees up resources that I can apply elsewhere, recovery, you know, is really important. So I'm inferring faster recovery, all this lowers my risk, and then I can sort of calculate the probability of having data loss, and then what that means to my business. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the other impact is on your primary service and your primary storage. If the backup window shrinks, then you're not slowing down that SAP app, that Oracle app, you know, that SQL app, whatever you're running, whether that be the financials, whether that be your logistics, whether it be your manufacturing system, every time you turn on that backup, to do that backup, that backup window slows you down. So cutting that in half has an impact on the real-world application side, which obviously most storage guys, you know, it's hard for us to quantify. But you are taking the impact of backup, and basically reducing it, if you will shrinking the backup window, so their primary applications don't get hammered as much by the backup while they're still trying to run that SAP, that Oracle or that SQL workload. >> And you're not a backup software vendor, so I have optionality there. I can pretty much choose all the popular, you know. >> Absolutely, so Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect, all the majors. And in fact, one of the players I mentioned, as you were talking about the end-users, they use two different backup packages, two of 'em. So, two of the major vendors that I named, we work with them just within one account. So, we're very flexible, the user picks what they want from a backup software perspective, and we can work with anything. So, whatever they want to use, is fine with us. We integrate with all of them, we have integration, for example, also with VMware, for vVols and other aspects in container integration, so you know, whether it be our purpose-built backup appliance, InfiniGuard, or what we do with the InfiniBox, we always make sure we integrate with the surrounding environment. 'Cause storage is not an island, storage needs to exist in your data center, or your hybrid cloud data center, or what you're doing for containers. So we make sure we have integration with our InfiniBox, our InfiniBox SSA, all flash. And of course the product we're enhancing today, the InfiniGuard. >> Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions, they're busy. (laughs) They don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plugging stuff together. So, okay Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. >> Great, thank you very much Dave. Always love talking to the Cube. >> Okay, in a moment Stan Wysocki is coming in. He's the president of Mark III Systems. He's going to join us for a drill down on how InfiniGuard is impacting customers. You're watching the Cube, your global leader, in enterprise tech coverage. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE is live at AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. We have two live sets, theCUBE. We are running one of the largest hybrid tech events, most important events of the year with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners like as I said. Two live sets, two remote sets. Over a hundred guests on the program talking about the next generation of cloud innovation. I'm pleased to welcome a first timer to theCUBE. Seth Rao, the CEO of FirstEigen joins me. Seth, nice to have you on the program. >> Thank you nice to be here. >> Talk to me about FirstEigen. Also explain to me the name. >> So FirstEigen is a startup company based out of Chicago. The name Eigen is a German word. It's a mathematical term. It comes from eigenvectors and eigenvalues which is used and what it's called is principal component analysis, which is used to detect anomalies, which is related to what we do. So we look for errors in data and hence our name FirstEigen. >> Got it. That's excellent. So talk to me. One of the things that has been a resounding theme of this year's re:Invent is that especially in today's age, every company needs to be a data company. >> Yeah. >> It's all one thing to say it's as a whole other thing to be able to put that into practice with reliable data, with trustworthy data. Talk to me about some of the challenges that you help customers solve 'cause some of the theme about not just being a data company but if you're not a data company you're probably not going to be around much longer. >> Yeah, absolutely .So what we have seen across the board across all verticals, the customers we work with is data governance teams and data management teams are constantly firefighting to find errors in data and fix it. So what we have done is we have created the software DataBuck that autonomously looks at every data set and it will discover errors that are hidden to the human eye. They're hard to find out, hard to detect. Our machine learning algorithms figure out those errors before those errors impact the business. In the usual way, things are sorted out, things are done. It's very laborious, time-consuming and expensive. You have taken a process that takes man-years or even man-months and compressed it to a few hours. >> So dramatic time-savings there. >> Absolutely. >> So six years ago when you guys were founded, you realize this gap in the market, thought it's taking way too long. We don't have this amount of time. Gosh, can you imagine if you guys weren't around the last 22 months when certainly time was of the essence? >> Absolutely. Yeah. Six years ago when we founded the company, my co-founder who's also the CTO. He has extensive experience in validating data and data quality. And my own background and my own experiences in AI and ML. And what we saw was that people are spending an enormous amount of time and yet errors were getting down through to the business side. And at that point it comes back and people are still firefighting. So it was a waste of time, waste of money, waste of effort. >> Right. But also there's the potential for brand damage, brand reputation. Whatever products and services you're producing, if your employees don't have the right data, if there's errors there of what's going out to the consumers is wrong then you've got a big problem. >> Absolutely. Interesting you should mention that because over the summer there was a Danish bank, a very big name Danish bank that had to send apology letters to its customers because they overcharged them on the mortgage because the data in the backend had some errors in it and didn't realize it was inadvertent. But somebody ultimately caught it and did the right thing. Absolutely correct. If the data is incorrect and then you're doing analytics or you're doing reporting or you're sending people a bill that they need to pay it better be very accurate. Otherwise it's a serious brand damage. It has real implications and it has a whole bunch of other issues as well. >> It does and those things can snowball very quickly. >> Yeah. >> So talk to me about one of the things that we've seen in the recent months and years is this explosion of data. And then when the pandemic struck we had this scattering of people and data sources or so much data. The edge is persistent. We've got this work from anywhere environment. What are some of the risks for organizations? They come to you and saying help us ensure that our data is trustworthy. I mean that the trust is key but how do you help organizations that are in somewhat a flux figure out how to solve that problem? >> Yeah. So you're absolutely correct. There is an explosion of data, number one. And along with that, there is also an explosion of analytical tools to mine that data. So as a consequence, there is a big growth. It's exponential growth of microservices, how people are consuming that data. Now in the old world when there were a few consumers of data, it was a lot easier to validate the data. You had few people who are the gatekeepers or the data stewards. But with an explosion of data consumers within a company, you have to take a completely different approach. You cannot now have people manually looking and creating rules to validate data. So there has to be a change in the process. You start validating the data. As soon as the data comes into your system, you start validating if the data is reliable at point zero. >> Okay. >> And then it goes downstream. And every stage the data hops that is a chance that data can get corrupted. And these are called systems risks. Because there are multiple systems and data comes from multiple systems onto the cloud, errors creep in. So you validate the data from the beginning all the way to the end and the kinds of checks you do also increase in complexity as the data is going downstream. You don't want to boil the ocean upfront. You want to do the essential checks. Is my water drinkable at this point, right? I'm not trying to cook as soon as it comes out of the tap. Is it drinkable? - Right. >> Good enough quality. If not then we go back to the source and say, guys, send me better quality data. So sequence, the right process and check every step along the way. >> How much of a cultural shift is FirstEigen helping to facilitate within organizations that now don't... There isn't time to, like we talked about if an error gets in, there's so many downstream effects that can happen, but how do you help organizations shift their mindset? 'Cause that's hard thing to change. >> Fantastic point. In fact, what we see is the mindset change is the biggest wall for companies to have good data. People have been living in the old world where there is a team that is a group, much downstream that is responsible for accurate data. But the volume of data, the complexity of data has gone up so much that that team cannot handle it anymore. It's just beyond their scope. It's not fair for us to expect them to save the world. So the mindshift has to come from an organization leadership that says guys, the data engineers who are upfront who are getting the data into the organization, who are taking care of the data assets have to start thinking of trustable data. Because if they stopped doing it, everything downstream becomes easy. Otherwise it's much, much more complex for these guys. And that's what we do. Our tool provides autonomous solution to monitor the data. It comes out with a data trust score with zero human input. Our software will be able to validate the data and give an objective trust score. Right now it's a popularity contest. People are saying they vote. Yeah, I think I like this. I like this and I like that. That's okay. Maybe it's acceptable. But the reason they do it is because there is no way to objectively say the data is trustable. If there is a small error somewhere, it's a needle in the haystack. It's hard to find out, but we can. With machine learning algorithms our software can detect the errors, the minutest errors, and to give an objective score from zero to a hundred, trust or no trust. So along with a mindset, now they have the tool to implement that mindset and we can make it happen. >> Talk to me about some of the things that you've seen from a data governance perspective, as we've seen, the explosion, the edge, people working from anywhere. This hybrid environment that we're going to be in for quite some time. >> Yeah. >> From a data governance perspective and Dave Vellante did his residency. We're seeing so many more things pop up, you know different regulations. How do you help facilitate data governance for organizations as the data volume is just going to continue to proliferate? >> Absolutely correct. So data governance. So we are a key component of data governance and data quality and data trustworthiness, reliability is a key component of it. And one of the central, one of the central pillars of data governance is the data catalog. Just like a catalog in the library. It's cataloging every data asset. But right now the catalogs, which are the mainstay are not as good as they can be. A key information that is missing is I know where my data is what I don't know is how good is my data? How usable is it? If I'm using it for an accounts receivable or an accounts payable, for example, the data better be very, very accurate. So what our software will do is it'll help data governance by linking with any data governance tool and giving an important component which is data quality, reliability, trustability score, which is objective to every data asset. So imagine I open the catalog. I see where my book is in the library. I also know if there are pages missing in the book is the book readable? So it's not good enough to know that I have a book somewhere but it's how good is it? >> Right >> So DataBuck will make that happen. >> So when customers come to you, how do you help them start? 'Cause obviously the data, the volume it's intimidating. >> Yeah. >> Where do they start? >> Great. This is interestingly enough a challenge that every customer has. >> Right. >> Everybody is ambitious enough to say, no, I want to make the change. But the previous point was, if you want to do such a big change, it's an organizational change management problem. So the way we recommend customers is start with the small problem. Get some early victories. And this software is very easy. Just bring it in, automate a small part. You have your sales data or transactional data, or operational data. Take a small portion of it, automate it. Get reliable data, get good analytics, get the results and start expanding to other places. Trying to do everything at one time, it's just too much inertia, organizations don't move. You don't get anywhere. Data initiatives will fail. >> Right. So you're helping customers identify where are those quick wins? >> Yes. And where are the landmines that we need to be able to find out where they are so we can navigate around them? >> Yeah. We have enough expedience over 20 years of working with different customers. And I know if something can go wrong we know where it'll go wrong and we can help them steer them away from the landmines and take them to areas where they'll get quick wins. 'Cause we want the customer to win. We want them to go back and say, look, because of this, we were able to do better analytics. We are able to do better reporting and so on and so forth. We can help them navigate this area. >> Do you have a favorite example, customer example that you think really articulates that value there, that we're helping customers. We can't boil the ocean like you said. It doesn't make any sense, but customer that you helped with small quick wins that really just opened up the opportunity to unlock the value of trustable data. >> Absolutely. So we're working with a fortune 50 company in the US and it's a manufacturing company. Their CFO is a little in a concern whether the data that she's reporting to the Wall Street is acceptable, does it have any errors? And ultimately she signing off on it. So she had a large team in the technology side that was supporting her and they were doing their best. But in spite of that, she's a very sharp woman. She was able to look and find errors and saying, "Something does not look right here guys. Go back and check". Then it goes back to the IT team and they go, "Oh yeah, actually, there was an error". Some errors had slipped through. So they brought us in and we were able to automate the process, What they could do. They could do a few checks within that audit window. We were able to do an enormous number of checks more. More detailed, more accurate. And we were able to reduce the number of errors that were slipping through by over 98%. >> Big number. >> So, absolutely. Really fast. Really good. Now that this has gone through they feel a lot more comfortable than the question is, okay. In addition to financial reporting, can I use it to iron out my supply chain data? 'Cause they have thousands of vendors. They have hundreds of distributors. They have products all over the globe. Now they want to validate all the data because even if your data is off in a one or 2%, if you're a hundred plus billion dollar company, it has an enormous impact on your balance sheet and your income statement. >> Absolutely. Yeah. >> So we are slowly expanding as soon as they allow us. They like us now they're taking it to other areas from beyond finance. >> Well it sounds like you have not only great technology, Seth but a great plan for helping customers with those quick wins and then learning and expanding within and really developing that trusted relationship between FirstEigen and your customers. Thank you so much for joining me on the program today. Introducing the company, what you guys are doing really cool stuff. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> All right. >> Pleasure to be here. >> For Seth Rao, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. 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>>From around the globe. It's the cube covering Fortinet security summit brought to you by Fortinet. >>Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin here at the Fordham het championship security summit. Napa valley has been beautiful and gracious to us all day. We're very pleased to be here. I'm very pleased to welcome a first-timer to the cube. Rupesh Chuck Chuck Xi, VP a T and T cybersecurity and edge solutions at, at and T cybersecurity. Refresh. Welcome. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Lisa, I'm looking forward to our conversation today. >>Me too. First of all, it's we're in Napa we're outdoors. It's beautiful venue, no complaints, right? We're at a golf PGA tournament. Very exciting. Talk to me about the at and T Fordanet relationship. Give me, give me an, a good insight into the partnership. >>Sure, sure. So, as you said, you know, beautiful weather in California, Napa it's my first time. Uh, so it's kind of a new experience for me going back to your question in terms of the relationship between eight P and T and Ford in that, uh, a long lasting, you know, 10 plus years, you know, hand in hand in terms of the product, the technology, the capabilities that we are brought together in the security space for our customers. So a strategic relationship, and I'm so thrilled to be here today as a, Fordanet invited us to be part of the championship. Tommy, >>Talk to me. So your role VP of, and T cybersecurity and edge solutions, give me an, a deep dive into what's in your purview. >>Sure, sure. So I, uh, sort of, you know, run the PNL or the profit and loss center for product management for all of at and T cybersecurity and ed solutions and the whole concept behind putting the teams together is the convergence in networking and security. Um, so, you know, we are supporting the entire customer continuum, whether it's a fortune 50, the fortune 1000 to mid-market customers, to small businesses, to, you know, government agencies, you know, whether it's a local government agency or a school district or a federal agency, et cetera. And my team and I focus on bringing new product and capabilities to the marketplace, you know, working with our sales team from an enablement perspective, go to market strategy. Um, and the whole idea is about, uh, you know, winning in the marketplace, right? So delivering growth and revenue to the business, >>Competitive differentiation. So we've seen so much change in the last year and a half. I know that's an epic understatement, but we've also seen the proliferation at the edge. What are some of the challenges that you're seeing and hearing from customers where that's concerned >>As you stated, right. There's a lot happening in the edge. And sometimes the definition for edge varies when you talk with different people, uh, the way we look at it is, you know, definitely focused on the customer edge, right? So if you think about many businesses, whether I am a, a quick serve restaurant or I'm a banking Institute or a financial services or an insurance agency, or I'm a retail at et cetera, you know, lots of different branches, lots of different transformation taking place. So one way of approaching it is that when you think about the customer edge, you see a lot of virtualization, software driven, a lot of IOT endpoints, et cetera, taking place. So the cyber landscape becomes more important. Now you're connecting users, devices, capabilities, your point of sale system to a multi-cloud environment, and that, you know, encryption of that data, the speed at which it needs to happen, all of that is very important. And as we think ahead with 5g and edge compute and what that evolution revolution is going to bring, it's going to get even more excited because to me, those are kind of like in a playgrounds of innovation, but we want to do it right and keep sort of, you know, cyber and security at the core of it. So we can innovate and keep the businesses safe. >>How do you help customers to kind of navigate edge cybersecurity challenges and them not being synonymous? >>That's a great, great question. You know, every day I see, you know, different teams, different agendas, different kinds of ways of approaching things. And what I tell customers and even my own teams is that, look, we have to have a, a blueprint and architecture, a vision, you know, what are the business outcomes that we want to achieve? What the customer wants to achieve. And then start to look at that kind of technology kind of convergence that is taking place, and especially in the security and the networking space, significant momentum on the convergence and utilize that convergence to create kind of full value stack solutions that can be scaled, can be delivered. So you are not just one and done, but it's a continuous innovation and improvement. And in the security space, you need that, right. It's never going to be one and done. No >>We've seen so much change in the last year. We've seen obviously this rapid pivot to work from home that was overnight for millions and millions of people. We're still in that too. A fair amount. There's a good amount of people that are still remote, and that probably will be permanently there's. Those that are going to be hybrid threat landscape bloated. I was looking at and talking with, um, 40 guard labs and the, the nearly 11 X increase in the last 12 months in ransomware is insane. And the ransomware as a business has exploded. So security is a board level conversation for businesses I assume in any. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I agree with you, it's a board level conversation. Security is not acknowledged the problem about picking a tool it's about, you know, the business risk and what do we need to do? Uh, you mentioned a couple of interesting stats, right? So we've seen, uh, you know, two things I'll share. One is we've seen, you know, 440 petabytes of data on the at and T network in one average business day. So 440 petabytes of data. Most people don't know what it is. So you can imagine the amount of information. So you can imagine the amount of security apparatus that you need, uh, to Tofino, protect, and defend and provide the right kind of insights. And then the other thing that VOC and along the same lines of what you were mentioning is significant, you know, ransomware, but also significant DDoSs attacks, right? So almost like, you know, we would say around 300% plus said, DDoSs mitigations that we did from last year, you know, year over year. >>So a lot of focus on texting the customer, securing the end points, the applications, the data, the network, the devices, et cetera. Uh, the other two points that I want to mention in this space, you know, again, going back to all of this is happening, right? So you have to focus on this innovation at the, at the speed of light. So, you know, artificial intelligence, machine learning, the software capabilities that are more, forward-looking have to be applied in the security space ever more than ever before, right. Needs these do, we're seeing alliances, right? We're seeing this sort of, you know, crowdsourcing going on of action on the good guys side, right? You see the national security agencies kind of leaning in saying, Hey, let's together, build this concept of a D because we're all going to be doing business. Whether it's a public to public public, to private, private, to private, all of those different entities have to work together. So having security, being a digital trust, >>Do you think that the Biden administrations fairly recent executive order catalyst of that? >>I give it, you know, the president and the, the administration, a lot of, you know, kudos for kind of, and then taking it head on and saying, look, we need to take care of this. And I think the other acknowledgement that it is not just hunting or one company or one agency, right? It's the whole ecosystem that has to come together, not just national at the global level, because we live in a hyper connected world. Right. And one of the things that you mentioned was like this hybrid work, and I was joking with somebody the other day that, and really the word is location, location, location, thinking, network security, and networking. The word is hybrid hybrid hybrid because you got a hybrid workforce, the hybrid cloud, you have a hybrid, you have a hyper-connected enterprise. So we're going to be in this sort of, you know, hybrid for quite some time are, and it has to >>Be secure and an org. And it's, you know, all the disruption of folks going to remote work and trying to get connected. One beyond video conference saying, kids are in school, spouse working, maybe kids are gaming. That's been, the conductivity alone has been a huge challenge. And Affordanet zooming a lot there with links to us, especially to help that remote environment, because we know a lot of it's going to remain, but in the spirit of transformation, you had a session today here at the security summit, talked about transformation, formation plan. We talk about that word at every event, digital transformation, right? Infrastructure transformation, it security. What context, where you talking about transformation in it today? What does it transformation plan mean for your customers? >>That's a great question because I sometimes feel, you know, overused term, right? Then you just take something and add it. It's it? Transformation, network, transformation, digital transformation. Um, but what we were talking today in, in, in the morning was more around and sort of, you know, again, going back to the network security and the transformation that the customers have to do, we hear a lot about sassy and the convergence we are seeing, you know, SD van takeoff significantly from an adoption perspective application, aware to experiences, et cetera, customers are looking at doing things like internet offload and having connectivity back into the SAS applications. Again, secure connectivity back into the SAS applications, which directly ties to their outcomes. Um, so the, the three tenants of my conversation today was, Hey, make sure you have a clear view on the business outcomes that you want to accomplish. Now, the second was work with a trusted advisor and at and T and in many cases is providing that from a trusted advisor perspective. And third, is that going back to the one and done it is not a one and done, right? This is a, is a continuous process. So sometimes we have to be thinking about, are we doing it in a way that we will always be future ready, will be always be able to deal with the security threats that we don't even know about today. So yeah, >>You bring up the term future ready. And I hear that all the time. When you think of man, we really weren't future ready. When the pandemic struck, there was so much that wasn't there. And when I was talking with 49 earlier, I said, you know, how much, uh, has the pandemic been a, uh, a catalyst for so much innovation? I imagine it has been the same thing that >>Absolutely. And, you know, I remember, you know, early days, February, March, where we're all just trying to better understand, right? What is it going to be? And the first thing was, Hey, we're all going to work remote, is it a one week? Is it a two week thing? Right? And then if you're like the CIO or the CSO or other folks who are worried about how am I going to give the productivity tools, right. Businesses in a one customer we work with, again, tobacco innovation was said, Hey, I have 20,000 call center agents that I need to take remote. How do you deliver connectivity and security? Because that call center agent is the bloodline for that business interacting with their end customers. So I think, you know, it is accelerated what would happen over 10 years and 18 months, and it's still unknown, right? So we're still discovering the future. >>There's a, there will be more silver linings to come. I think we'll learn to pick your brain on, on sassy adoption trends. One of the things I noticed in your abstract of your session here was that according to Gardner, the convergence of networking and security into the sassy framework is the most vigorous technology trend. And coming out of 2020, seeing that that's a big description, most vigorous, >>It's a big, big description, a big statement. And, uh, we are definitely seeing it. You know, we saw some of that, uh, in the second half of last year, as the organizations were getting more organized to deal with, uh, the pandemic and the change then coming into this year, it's even more accelerated. And what I mean by that is that, you know, I look at sort of, you know, three things, right? So one is going back to the hybrid work, remote work, work from anywhere, right. So how do you continue to deliver a differentiated experience, highly secure to that workforce? Because productivity, human capital very important, right? The second is that there's a back and forth on the branch transformation. So yes, you know, restaurants are opening back up. Retailers are opening back up. So businesses are thinking about how do I do that branch transformation? And then the third is explosive business IOT. So the IOT end points, do you put into manufacturing, into airports in many industries, we continue to see that. So when you think about sassy and the framework, it's about delivering a, a framework that allows you to protect and secure all of those endpoints at scale. And I think that trend is real. I've seen customer demand, we've signed a number of deals. We're implementing them as we speak across all verticals, healthcare, retail, finance, manufacturing, transportation, government agencies, small businesses, mid-sized businesses. >>Nope, Nope. Not at all. Talk to me about, I'm curious, you've been at, at and T a long time. You've seen a lot of innovation. Talk, talk to me about your perspectives on seeing that, and then what to you think as a silver lining that has come out of the, the acceleration of the last 18 months. >>She and I, I get the question, you know, I've been with at and T long time. Right. And I still remember the day I joined at T and T labs. So it was one of my kind of dream coming out of engineering school. Every engineer wants to go work for a brand that is recognized, right. And I, I drove from Clemson, South Carolina to New Jersey Homedale and, uh, I'm still, you know, you can see I'm still having the smile on my face. So I've, you know, think innovation is key. And that's what we do at, at and T I think the ability to, um, kind of move fast, you know, I think what the pandemic has taught us is the speed, right? The speed at which we have to move the speed at which we have to collaborate the speed at which we have to deliver, uh, to agility has become, you know, the differentiator for all of us. >>And we're focusing on that. I also feel that, uh, you know, there have been times where, you know, product organizations, technology organizations, you know, we struggle with jumping this sort of S-curve right, which is, Hey, I'm holding onto something. Do I let go or not? Let go. And I think the pandemic has taught us that you have to jump the S-curve, you have to accelerate because that is where you need to be in, in a way, going back to the sassy trend, right. It is something that is real, and it's going to be there for the next three to five years. So let's get ready. >>I call that getting comfortably uncomfortable, no businesses safe if they rest on their laurels these days. I think we've learned that, speaking of speed, I wanna, I wanna get kind of your perspective on 5g, where you guys are at, and when do you think it's going to be really impactful to, you know, businesses, consumers, first responders, >>The 5g investments are happening and they will continue to happen. And if you look at what's happened with the network, what at and T has announced, you know, we've gotten a lot of kudos for whatever 5g network for our mobile network, for our wireless network. And we are starting to see that, that innovation and that innovation as we anticipated is happening for the enterprise customers first, right? So there's a lot of, you know, robotics or warehouse or equipment that needs to sort of, you know, connect at a low latency, high speed, highly secure sort of, you know, data movements, compute edge that sits next to the, to the campus, you know, delivering a very different application experience. So we're seeing that, you know, momentum, uh, I think on the consumer side, it is starting to come in and it's going to take a little bit more time as the devices and the applications catch up to what we are doing in the network. And if you think about, you know, the, the value creation that has happened on, on the mobile networks is like, if you think about companies like Uber or left, right, did not exist. And, uh, many businesses, you know, are dependent on that network. And I think, uh, it will carry on. And I think in the next year or two, we'll see firsthand the outcomes and the value that it is delivering you go to a stadium at and T stadium in Dallas, you know, 5g enabled, you know, that the experience is very different. >>I can't wait to go to a stadium again and see it came or live music. Oh, that sounds great. Rubbish. Thank you so much for joining me today, talking about what a T and T is doing with 49, the challenges that you're helping your customers combat at the edge and the importance of really being future. Ready? >>Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you having me. Thanks for 49 to invite us to be at this event. Yes. >>Thank you for refresh talk. She I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube at the 40 net championship security summits.

>>10 years ago, a group of industry storage veterans formed a company called Infinidat. The DNA of the company was steeped in the heritage of its founder, Moshe Yanai, who had a reputation for relentlessly innovating on three main areas, the highest performance, rock solid availability, and the lowest possible cost. Now these elements have historically represented the superpower triumvirate of a successful storage platform. Now, as Infinidat evolved, landed on a fourth vector, that has been a key differentiator and its value proposition, and that is petabyte scale. Hello everyone. And welcome to this Qube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome in two longtime friends of theCube. Phil Bullinger is newly minted CEO of Infinidat and of course, Lee Caswell, VMware's VP of Marketing for the cloud platform business unit. Gents, welcome. >>Great to be here. Always good to see you guys. Phil, so you're joining at the 10 year anniversary mark. Congratulations on the appointment. What attracted you to the company? >>You know I spent a long time in my career at enterprise storage and, and enjoying many of the opportunities, you know, through a number of companies. Last fall when I became aware of the Infinidat opportunity and it immediately captured my attention because of frankly my respect for the product through several opportunities I've had with enterprise customers in selling cycles of different products, if they happened to be customers of Infinidat, , they were not bashful about talking about their satisfaction with the product, their level of delight with it. And so I think from, from the sidelines, I've always had a lot of respect for the Infinidat platform, the implementation of the product quality and reliability that it's kind of legendary for. And so when the opportunity came along, it really captured my interest in of course behind a great product is almost always a great team. >>And as I got to know the company and the board, and, you know, some of the leaders, and learned about the momentum and the business, it was just a very, very compelling opportunity for me. And I'll have to say just, you know, 60 days into the job. Everything I hoped for is here, not only a warm welcome to the company, but an exciting opportunity with respect to where Infinidat is at today with the growth of the business. The company has achieved a level of consistent growth through 2020, cashflow positive, EBITDA positive. And now it's a matter of scaling, scaling the business and it's something that I have had success with several times in my career and really, really enjoying the opportunity here at Infinidat to do that. >>That's great. Thanks for that. Now, of course, Lee, VMware was founded nearly a quarter century ago and carved out a major piece of the enterprise pie and predominantly that's been on prem, but the data center's evolving the cloud is evolving, and this universe is expanding. How do you see the future of that on-prem data center? >>No, I think Satya recently said, right, that, that we've reached max consolidation almost right. You pointed that out earlier. I thought that was really interesting, right. You know, we believe in the distributed hybrid cloud and you know, the reasons for that actually turn out to be storage led in there and in, in the real thinking about it, because we're going to have distributed environments and, you know, one of the things that we're doing with Infinidat here today, right, is we're showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on prem and have bridges in across the hybrid cloud. We do that through something called the VMware Cloud Foundation. That's a full stack offering that, uh, an interesting here, right? It started off with a HCI element, but it's expanded into storage and storage at scale, you know, because storage is going to exist... We have very powerful storage value propositions, and you're seeing customers go and deploy both. We're really excited about seeing Infinidat lean into the VMware Cloud Foundation and vVols actually as a way to match the pace of change in today's application world. >>These trends, I mean, building bridges is what we called it. And so that takes a lot of hard work, especially when you're doing from on-prem into hybrid, across clouds, eventually the edge, you know, that's a, that's a non-trivial task. How do you see this playing out in market trends? >>Yeah. You know, we're, we're in the middle of this every day as, as you know, Dave, uh, and certainly Lee, uh, data center architectures ebb and flow from centralized to decentralized, but clearly data locality, I think, is driving a lot of the growth of the distributed data center architecture, the edge data centers, but core is still very significant for, for most enterprise. Uh, and it's, it's, it has, it has a lot to do with the fact that most enterprises want to own their own cloud. You know, when a Fortune 15 or a Fortune 50 or Fortune 100 customer, when they talk about their cloud, they don't want to talk about, you know, the AWS cloud or the GCP cloud or the Azure cloud. They want to talk about their cloud. And almost always, these are hybrid architectures with a large on-prem or colo footprint. >>Uh, the reason for that number of reasons, right? Data sovereignty is a big deal, uh, among the highest priorities for enterprise today. The control of the security, the, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, et cetera. These, these are the things that are just fundamentally important, uh, to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies. But I think one thing that has changed the on prem data center is the fact that it's the core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic. It has to be a transparent, seamless scalability. I think the days of, of CIO's  you know, even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with, with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is, is over. Um, they want to seamlessly add capacity. They want nonstop operation, a hundred percent uptime is the bar. >>Now it has to be a consolidation. Massive consolidation is clearly the play for TCO and efficiency. They don't want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance. You know, the, the very characteristics that you talked about upfront, Dave, that make Infinidat unique, I think are fundamentally the characteristics that enterprises are looking for when they build their cloud on prem. Uh, I, I think our architecture also really does provide a, a set it and forget it, uh, kind of experience. Um, when we install a new Infinidat frame in an enterprise data center, our intentions are we're, we're not going to come back. We don't intend to come back, uh, to, to help fiddle with the bits or, uh, you know, tweak the configuration as applications and, and multitenant users are added. And then of course, flexible economic models. I mean, everybody takes this for granted, but you really, really do have to be completely flexible between the two rails, the CapEx rail and the OpEx rail and every, uh, every step in between. And importantly, when a customer, when an enterprise customer needs to add capacity, they don't have a sales conversation. They just want to have it right. They're already running in their data center. And that's the experience that we provide. >>Yeah. You guys are aligned in that vision, that layer, that abstracts the complexity from the underlying wherever cloud on prem, et cetera. Right. Let's talk about the VMware and Infinidat relationship. I mean, every, every year at VMworld, up until last year, thank you COVID, Infinidat would host this awesome dinner. You'd have the top customers there. Very nice Vegas steak restaurant. I, of course, I always made a point to stop by not just for the food. I mean, I was able to meet some customers and I've talked to many dozens over the years, Phil, and I can echo that sentiment, but, you know, why is the VMware ecosystem so important to Infinidat? And I guess the question there is, is, is petabyte scale that really that prominent in the VMware customer base? >>It's a, it's a very, very important point. VMware is the longest standing Alliance partner of Infinidat. It goes back to really, almost the foundation of the company, certainly starting with the release one, the very first commercial release of Infinidat VMware and a very tight integration with the VMware was a core part of that. Uh, we, we have a capability. We call the Host PowerTools, which drives a consistent best practices implementation around our, our VMware, uh, integration and, and how it's actually used in the data center. And we built on that through the years through just a deep level of integration. And, um, our customers typically are, are at scale petabyte scale or average deployment as a petabyte and up, um, and over 90% of our customers use VMware. So you would say, I, I think I can safely say we're we serve the VMware environment for some of VMware's largest enterprise footprints, uh, in the market. >>I know it's like children, you got, you love all your partners, but is there anything about Infinidat that, that stands out to you a particular area where, where they shine that from your perspective? >>Yeah, I think so. You know, the, the best partnerships, one are ones that are customer driven. It turns out right. And the idea that we have joint customers at large scale and listen storage is a tough business to get, right, right. It takes time to go and mature to harden a code base. Right. And particularly when you're talking about petabyte scale, right now, you've basically got customers buying in for the largest systems. And what we're seeing overall is customers are trying to do more things with fewer component elements, makes sense, right? And so the scale here is important because it's not just scale in terms of like capacity, right. It's scale in terms of performance as well. And so, as you see customers trying to expand the number of different types of applications, this is one of the things we're seeing, right. Is new applications, which could be container-based Kubernetes orchestrated our Tanzu portfolio helps with that. >>Right. If you see what we're doing with Nvidia, for example, we announced some AI work, right. Uh, this week with vSphere. And so what you're starting to see is like the changing nature of applications and the fast pace of applications is really helping customers save us. And I want to go and find solutions that can meet the majority of my needs. And that's one of the things that we're seeing. And particularly with the vVols integration at scale, that we just haven't seen before, uh, and Infinidat has set the bar and is really setting a new, a new record for that. >>Yeah. Let me, let me comment on that a little bit, Dave, we've been a core part of the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, which is a very, very exciting engaging, investment that VMware has made. A lot of people have contributed to in the industry, but in the, in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, we recently demonstrated on a single Infinidat frame over 200,000 vVols on a single system. And I think that not only edges up the bar, I think it completely redefines what, what scale means when you're talking about a vVols implementation. >>So not to geek out here, but vVols, they're kind of a game changer because instead of admins, having to manually allocate storage to performance tiers. An array, that is VASA certified, VASA is VMware, or actually vStorage API for, for storage awareness, VASA, anyway, with vVols, you can dynamically provision storage that matches the way I say it as a match as device attributes to the data and the application requirements of the VM. So Phil,  it seems like so much in VMware land hearkens back to the way mainframes used to solve problems in a modern way. Right. And vVols is a real breakthrough in that regard in terms of storage. So, so how do you guys see it? I, I presume you're, you're sort of vVols certified based on what you just said in the lab. >>Yeah. We recently announced our vVols release and we're not the first to market with the vVols, but from, from the start of the engineering project, we wanted to do it. We wanted to do it the way we think. We think at scale in everything we do, and our customers were very prescriptive about the kind of scale and performance and availability that they wanted to experience in vVols. And we're now seeing quite a bit of customer interest with traction in it. Uh, as I said, we, we redefined the bar for vVols scalability. We support on a single array now, um, a thousand storage containers. Uh, and I think most of our competition is like at one or maybe 10 or 13 or something like that. So, uh, our customers are, again at scale, they said, if you're going to do vVols, we want it... We want it at scale. We want it to embody the characteristics of your, of your platform. We really liked vVols because it, it helps, it helps separate kind of the roles and responsibilities between the VI administrator and the storage system administrator. If you're going to put a majority of your most critical bits on Infinidat in your data center, you're going to want to, you're going to want to have control over how that resource is used, but yet the vVols mplementation and the tools that we provide with that deep level of integration, give the VI, the VI administrator, all of the flexibility they need to manage applications. And vVols of course gives the VI administrator the native use of our snapshot technology. And so it makes it incredibly easy for them to administrate the platform without having to worry about the physical infrastructure, but yet the people worried about the physical infrastructure still have control over that resource. So it's, it's a game changer as far as we're concerned. >>Yeah. Storage has come a long way. Hasn't it, Lee? I'm wondering if you could add some color here, it seems in talking to ... Uh, so that's interesting. You've had, you had a hand in the growth of vSAN and it was very successful product, but he chose Infinidat for that higher end application. It seems like vVols are a key innovation in that regard. How's the vVols uptake going from your perspective. >>Yeah, I think we you know, we're in the second phase of vVols adoption, right? First phase was, Hey, technically interesting, intriguing. Um, but adoption was relatively low, I think because, you know, up until five years ago, um, applications, weren't actually changing that fast. I mean, think about it, right? The applications, ERP systems, CRM systems, you weren't changing those at the pace of what we're doing today. Now what's happening is every business is a software business. Every business, when you work, when you interact with your healthcare provider right now, it's about the apps. Like, can you go and get your schedules online? Can you email your doctors? Right? Can you go and get your labs? Right? The pace of new application development, we have some data showing that there will be more apps developed in the next five years, and then the past 40 years of computing combined. >>And so when you think about that, what's changed now is trying to manage that all from the kind of storage hardware side was just actually getting in the way you want to organize around the fastest beat rate in your infrastructure today. That's the application. So what vVols has helped you do is it allows the vSphere administrator, who's managing VMs and looking at the apps and the changing pace, and be able to basically select storage attributes, including QoS, capacity, IOPS, and do that from the vCenter console, and then be able to rectify things and manage them right from the console right next to the apps. And that provides a really integrated way. So when you have a close interaction, like what we're talking about today, or, you know, integration, um, that the Infinidat has provided now, you've got this ability to have a faster moving activity. And, you know, consolidation is one of the themes you've heard from time to time from VMware, we're consolidating the management so that the vSphere administrator can now go and manage more things. What traditional VMs yes. VMs across HCI. Sure. Plus now, plus storage and into the hybrid cloud and into like containers. It's that consolidated management, which is getting us speed and basically a consumer like experience for infrastructure deployments. >>Yeah. Now Phil mentioned the solutions lab. We've got a huge ecosystem. Several years ago, you launched this, this via the VMware. I think it's called the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is the official name. What, explain what it does for collaboration and joint solutions development. And then Phil, I want you to go into more detail about what your participation is, but Lee, why don't you explain it? >>Yeah. You know, we don't take just any products that, because listen, there's a mixing. What we take is things that really expand that innovation frontier. And that's what we saw with Infinidat was expanding the frontier on like large capacity for many, many different mixed workloads and a commitment, right. To go and bring in, not just vVols support, of course, all the things we do for just a normal interaction with vSphere. But, uh, bringing vVols in was certainly important in showing how we operate at scale. And then importantly, as we expanded the VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, to include storagee systems for a customer, for example, right, who has storage and HCI, right? And it looks for how to go and use them. And that's an individual choice at a customer level. We think this is strategically important. Now, as we expand a multicloud experience, that's different from the hyperscalers. Hyperscalers are coming in with two kind of issues, maybe, right? So one is it's single cloud. And the other one is there's a potential competitive aspect or from some right around the ongoing, underlying business and a hyperscaler business model. And so what VMware uniquely is doing is extending a common control plane across storage systems and HCI, and doing that in a way that basically gives customers choice. And we love that the cloud lab is really designed to go and make that a reality for customers strip out perceived and real risk. >>Yeah. To Lee's point of, it's not like there's not dozens and dozens and dozens of logos on the slide for the lab. I think there's like, you know, 10 or 12 from what I saw and Infinidat is one of them. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your participation in the program and what it does for customers. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree it's I, we liked the lab because it's not just supposed to be one of everything eye candy it's a purpose-built lab to do real things. And we like it because we can really explore, you know, some of the most contemporary, workloads in that environment, as well as solutions to what I considered some of the most contemporary industry problems. We're participating in a couple of ways. I believe we're the only petabyte scale storage solution in the Cloud Solutions Lab at VMware. One of the projects we're working on with VMware is their machine learning platform.  That's one of the first cloud solutions lab projects that we worked on at Infinidat. And we're also a core part of, of what VMware is driving from a data for good initiative. This was inspired by the idea that that tech can be used as a force for good in the world. And right now it's focused on the technology needs of nonprofits. And so we're closely working in, in the cloud solutions lab with, the VMware cloud foundation layers, as well as, their Tanzu and Kubernetes environments and learning a lot and proving a lot. And it's also a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform. >>Yeah. So, yeah, it was just the other day I was on the VMware analyst meeting virtually of course in Zane and Sanjay and a number of other execs were giving the update. And, and just to sort of emphasize what we've been talking about here, this expansion of on-prem the cloud experience, the data from, especially from our survey data, we have a partner UTR that did great surveys on a regular quarterly basis, the VMware cloud on AWS, doing great for sure, but the VMware Cloud Foundation, the on-prem cloud, the hybrid cloud is really exploding and resonating with customers. And that's a good example of this sort of equilibrium that we're seeing between the public and private coming together >>Well on the VMware Cloud Foundation right now with, uh, you know, over a thousand customers, but importantly over 400 of the global 2000, it's the largest customers. And that's actually where the Venn diagram between the work that VMware Cloud Foundation is doing and Infinidat right, you know, this large scale, actually the, you know, interesting crossover, right. And, you know, listen for customers to go and take on a new store system. We always know that it's a high bar, right. So they have to see some really unique value, like how is this going to help? Right. And today that value is I want to spend less time looking down at the storage and more time looking up at the apps, that's how we're working together. Right. And how vVols fits into that, you know, with the VMware Cloud Foundation, it's the hype that hybrid cloud offering really gives customers that future-proofing right. And the degrees of freedom they're most likely to exercise. >>Right. Well, let's close with a, kind of a glimpse of the future. What do you see as the future of the data center specifically, and also your, your collaborations Lee? Why don't you start? >>I think what we hope to be true is turning out to be true. So, you know, if you've looked at the, you know, what's happening in the cloud, not everything is migrating in the cloud, but the public cloud, for example, and I'm talking about public cloud there. The public cloud offers some really interesting, unique value and VMware is doing really interesting things about like DR as a service and other things, right? So we're helping customers tap into that at the same time. Right. We're seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations. Right. And because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy. And so, you know, partnering with  leaders on, in storage, right, is a core part of our strategy going forward. And we're looking forward to doing more right with Infinidat, as we see VCF evolve, as we see new applications, including container based applications running on our platform, lots of futures, right. As the pace of application change, you know, doesn't slow down. >>So what do you see for the next 10 years for Infinidat? >>Yeah, well, um, we, I appreciated your introduction because of this speak to sort of the core characteristics of Infinidat. And I think a company like us and at our, at our juncture of evolution, it's important to know exactly who you are. And we clearly are focused in that on-prem hybrid data center environment. We want to be the storage tier that companies use to build their clouds. And, uh, the partnership with VMware, uh, we talked about the Venn diagram. I think it just could not be more complimentary. And so we're certainly going to continue to focus on VMware as our largest and most consequential Alliance partner for our business going forward. Um, I'm excited about, about the data center landscape going forward. I think it's going to continue to ebb and flow. We'll see growth in distributed architectures. We'll see growth at the edge in the core data center. >>I think the, the old, the old days where customers would buy a storage system for a application environment, um, those days are over, it's all about consolidating multiple apps and thousands of users on a single platform. And to do that, you have to be really good at, uh, at a lot of things that we are very good at. Our, our strategy going forward is to evolve as media evolves, but never stray far from what has made Infinidat unique and special and highly differentiated in the marketplace. I think the work that VMware is doing and in Kubernetes >>Is very exciting. We're starting to see that really pick up in our business as well. So as we think about, um, uh, you know, not only staying relevant, but keeping very contemporary with application workloads, you know, we have some very small amount of customers that still do some bare metal, but predominantly as I said, 90% or above is VMware infrastructure. Uh, but we also see, uh, Kubernetes, our CSI driver works well with the VMware suite above it. Uh, so that, that complimentary relationship we see extending forward as, as the application environment evolves. Great, thank you. You know, many years ago when I attended my first, uh, VMworld, the practitioners that were there, you talked to them, half the conversations, they were complaining about storage and how it was so complicated and you needed guys in lab coats to solve problems. And, you know, VMware really has done a great job, publishing the APIs and encouraging the ecosystem. And so if you're a practitioner you're interested in how vVols and Infinidat and VMware were kind of raising the bar and on petabyte scale, there's some good blogs out there. Check out the Virtual Blocks blog for more information, guys. Thanks so much great to have you in the program. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thank you for watching this Cube conversation, Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> 10 years ago, a group of industry storage veterans formed a company called INFINIDAT. The DNA of the company was steeped in the heritage of its founder, Moshe Yanai who had a reputation for relentlessly innovating on three main areas, the highest performance, rock solid availability and the lowest possible cost. Now these elements have historically represented the superpower triumvirate of a successful storage platform. Now as INFINIDAT evolved it landed on a fourth vector that has been a key differentiator in its value proposition and that is petabyte scale. Hello everyone and welcome to this Cube Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome in two long time friends of the cube, Phil Bullinger is newly minted CEO of INFINIDAT and of course, Lee Caswell, VMware's VP of marketing for the cloud platform business unit. Gents welcome. >> Thank you so much. Yeah. Great to be here Dave. >> Yeah. Great to be here Dave. Thanks. >> Always good to see you guys. Phil, so you're joining at the 10 year anniversary, Mark, congratulations on the appointment. What attracted you to the company? >> Yeah that's a great question Dave. I spent a long time in my career at enterprise storage and enjoyed many of the opportunities through a number of companies. Last fall when I became aware of the INFINIDAT opportunity and immediately captured my attention because of frankly my respect for the product. Through several opportunities I've had with enterprise customers in selling cycles of different products, if they happen to be customers of INFINIDAT they were not bashful about talking about their satisfaction with the product, their level of delight with it. And so I think from the sidelines I have always had a lot of respect for the INFINIDAT platform, the implementation of the product quality and reliability that it's kind of legendary for. And so when the opportunity came along it really captured my interest and of course behind a great product is almost always a great team and as I got to know the company and the board and some of the leaders and learned about the momentum and the business it was just a very, very compelling opportunity for me. And I'll have to say just 60 days into the job everything I hoped for is here not only a warm welcome to the company but an exciting opportunity with respect to where INFINIDAT is at today with growth of the business, the company has achieved a level of consistent growth through 2020 cashflow, positive, even thought positive and now it's a matter of scaling the business and it's something that I have had success with at several times in my career and I'm really, really enjoying the opportunity here at INFINIDAT to do that. >> That's great. Thanks for that. Now, of course Lee, VMware was founded nearly a quarter century ago and carved out a major piece of the enterprise pie and predominantly that's been on prem but the data centers evolving, the cloud is evolving and this universe is expanding. How do you see the future of that on-prem data center? >> I think Satya recently said, right? That we've reached max consolidation almost right. You pointed that out earlier. I thought that was really interesting, right? We believe in the distributed hybrid cloud and the reasons for that actually turn out to be storage led in there and in the real thinking about it because we're going to have distributed environments. And one of the things that we're doing with INFINIDAT here today, right? Is we're showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on prem and have bridges in across the hybrid cloud. We do that through something called the VMware Cloud Foundation. That's a full stack offering that... And interesting here, right? It started off with a HCI element but it's expanded into storage and storage at scale. Because storage is going to exist we have very powerful storage value propositions and you're seeing customers go and deploy both. We're really excited about seeing INFINIDAT lean into the VMware Cloud Foundation and VVol has actually a way to match the pace of change in today's application world. >> Yes, so Phil you see these trends, I mean building bridges is what we called it. And so that takes a lot of hard work especially when you're doing from on-prem into hybrid, across clouds, eventually the edge, that's a non-trivial task. How do you see this playing out in market trends? >> We're in the middle of this every day and as you know Dave and certainly Lee, data center architecture is urban flow from centralized to decentralized but clearly data locality I think is driving a lot of the growth of the distributed data center architecture, the edge data centers but core is still very significant for most enterprise. And it has a lot to do with the fact that most enterprises want to own their own cloud when a Fortune 15 or a Fortune 50 or a Fortune 100 customer, when they talk about their cloud they don't want to talk about the AWS cloud or the GCP cloud or the Azure cloud. They want to talk about their cloud and almost always these are hybrid architectures with a large on-prem or colo footprint. The reason for that number of reasons, right? Data sovereignty is a big deal among the highest priorities for enterprise today. The control, the security, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, et cetera. These are the things that are just fundamentally important to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies. But I think one thing that has changed the on-prem data center is the fact that it's the core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic, it has to be a transparent seamless scalability. I think the days of CIOs even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is over. They want to seamlessly add capacity, they want nonstop operation, a hundred percent uptime is the bar now it has to be a consolidation, massive consolidation, is clearly the play for TCO and efficiency. They don't want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance. The very characteristics that you talked about upfront Dave, that make INFINIDAT unique I think are fundamentally the characteristics that enterprises are looking for when they build their cloud on prem. I think our architecture also really does provide a set it and forget it kind of experience when we install a new INFINIDAT frame in an enterprise data center, our intentions are we're not going to come back. We don't intend to come back to help fiddle with the bits or tweak the configuration and as applications and multi tenant users are added. And then of course, flexible economic models. I mean, everybody takes this for granted but you really really do have to be completely flexible between the two rails, the cap X rail and the objects rail and every step in between. And importantly when an enterprise customer needs to add capacity they don't have a sales conversation. They just want to have it right there already running in their data center. And that's the experience that we provide. >> Yeah. You guys are aligned in that vision, that layer that abstracts the complexity from the underlying wherever cloud on prem, et cetera. >> Right? >> Let's talk about VMware and INFINIDAT their relationship, I mean, every year at VMworld up until last year, thank you COVID, INFINIDAT would host this awesome dinner, you'd have his top customers there, very nice Vegas steak restaurant. I of course, I always made a point to stop by not just for the food. I mean, I was able to meet some customers and I've talked to many dozens over the years Phil, and I can echo that sentiment, why is the VMware ecosystem so important to INFINIDAT? And I guess the question there is, is petabyte scale really that prominent in the VMware customer base? >> It's a very, very important point. VMware is the longest standing alliance partner of INFINIDAT. It goes back to really almost the foundation of the company certainly starting with the release one, the very first commercial release of INFINIDAT, VMware and a very tight integration where VMware was a core part of that. We have a capability we call the host power tools which drives a consistent best practices implementation around our VMware integration and how it's actually used in the data center. And we built on that through the years through just a deep level of integration and our customers typically are at scale, petabyte scale or average deployment as a petabyte and up and over 90% of our customers use VMware. I think I can safely say we serve the VMware environment for some of VMware's largest enterprise footprints in the market. >> So Lee It's like children, you love all your partners but is there anything about INFINIDAT that stands out to you, a particular area where they shine from your perspective? >> Yeah, I think so. The best partnerships won are ones that are customer driven it turns out, right? And the idea that we have joint customers at large-scale, I must say storage is a tough business to go, right? Right, it takes time to go and mature to harden a code base, right? And particularly when you talk about petabyte scale right now, you've basically got customers buying in for the largest systems. And what we're seeing overall is customers are trying to do more things with fewer component elements. Makes sense, right? And so the scale here is important because it's not just scale in terms of like capacity, right? It's scale in terms of performance as well. And so, as you see customers trying to expand the number of different types of applications and this is one of the things we're seeing, right? Is new applications which could be container-based, Kubernetes orchestrated, our Tansu portfolio helps with that, right? If you see what we're doing with Nvidia, for example we announced some AI work, right? This week with vSphere. And so what you're starting to see is like the changing nature of applications and the fast pace of applications is really helping customers say, listen I want to go and find solutions that can meet the majority of my needs. And that's one of the things that we're seeing and particularly with the VVol'sintegration at scale that we just haven't seen before, INFINIDAT is setting the bar and really setting a new record for that. >> Yeah. Let me comment on that a little bit, Dave. We've been a core part of the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, which is a very very exciting engaging investment that VMware has made. A lot of people have contributed to in the industry but in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab we recently demonstrated on a single INFINIDAT frame over 200,000 VVols on a single system. And I think that not only edges up the bar I think it completely redefines what scale means when you're talking about a VVol implementation >> So lets talk about both those things. Not to geek out here but VVols they're kind of a game changer because instead of admins having to manually allocate storage to performance tiers, an array that is VASA certified, VASA is VMware or actually the storage API for storage awareness, VASA, anyway with VVols you can dynamically provision storage that matches, the way I say it as matches device attributes to the data and the application requirements of the VM. So Phil, it seems like so much in VMware land harkens back to the way mainframes used to solve problems in a modern way, right? And VVol is a real breakthrough in that regard in terms of simplifying storage. So how do you guys see it? I presume you're sort of VVol certified based on what you just said in the lab. >> Yeah. We recently announced our VVols release and we're not the first to market with VVols but from the start of the engineering project we wanted to do it. We wanted to do it the way we think. We think at scale in everything we do and our customers were very prescriptive and the kind of scale and performance and availability that they wanted to experience in VVols. And we're now seeing quite a bit of customer interest with traction in it. As I said, we redefined the bar for VVol scalability. We support on a single array now a thousand storage containers. And I think most of our competition is like at one or maybe 10 or 13 or something like that. So our customers are again at scale, they said if you're going to do VVols we want it at scale. We want it to embody the characteristics of your platform. We really liked VVols because it helps separate kind of the roles and responsibilities between the BI administrator and the storage system administrator. If you're going to put the majority of your most critical bits on INFINIDAT in your data center you're going to want to have control over how that resource is used, the at the VVols in rotation and the tools that we provide with that deep level of integration give the BI administrator all of the flexibility they need to manage applications and VVols of course gives the BI administrator the native use of our in minute snapshot technology. And so it makes it incredibly easy for them to administrate the platform without having to worry about the physical infrastructure but yet the people worried about the physical infrastructure still have control over that resource. So it's a game changer as far as we're concerned. >> Yeah. Storage has come a long way hasn't it Lee? If you could add some color here it seems in talking needs so VASA that's interesting you had a hand in the growth of VASA and very successful product but he chose INFINIDAT for that higher end application. It seemed like VVols are a key innovation in that regard. How's the VVol uptake going from your perspective. >> Yeah, I think we're in the second phase of VVol adoption, right? First phase was, hey, it technically interesting, intriguing but adoption was relatively low I think because you know up until five years ago applications weren't actually changing that fast. I mean, think about it, right? The applications, ERP systems, CRM systems, you weren't changing those at the pace of what we're doing today. Now what's happening is every business is a software business. Every business when you work, when you interact with your healthcare provider right now it's about the apps. Like, can you go and get your schedules online? Can you email your doctors, right? Can you go and get your labs, right? The pace of new application development, we have some data showing that there will be more apps developed in the next five years and then the past 40 years of computing combined. And so when you think about that what's changed now is trying to manage that all from the kind of storage hardware side was just actually getting in the way you want to organize around the fastest beat rate in your infrastructure, today that's the application. So what VVOls helps you do is it allows the vSphere administrator who's managing VMs and looking at the apps and the changing pace and be able to basically select storage attributes including QoS, capacity, IOPS and do that from the V center console and then be able to rectify things and manage them, right? From the console right next to the apps. And that provides a really integrated way. So when you have a close interaction like what we're talking about today or integration that the INFINIDAT has provided now you've got this ability to have a faster moving activity. And consolidation is one of the themes you've heard from time to time from VMware, we're consolidating the management so that the vSphere administrator can now go and manage more things. What traditional VMs, yes, VMs across HI sure put now plus storage and into the hybrid cloud and into like containers, it's that consolidated management which is getting us speed and basically a consumer like experience for infrastructure deployments. >> Yeah. Now Phil mentioned the solutions lab. We've got a huge ecosystem. Several years ago you launched this, the VMware, I think it's called the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is the official name. Explain what it does for collaboration and joint solutions development. And then Phil, I want you to go in more detail about what your participation has been but Lee why don't you explain it? >> Yeah. We don't take just any products that because listen there's a mixing, what we take is things that really expand that innovation frontier. And that's what we saw with INFINIDAT was expanding the frontier on like large capacity for many many different mixed workloads and a commitment, right? To go and bring in not just VVol support, of course all the things we do for just normal interaction with vSphere but bringing VVOls in was certainly important in showing how we operate at scale. And then importantly as we expanded the vSphere or cloud foundation to include store systems, fair customer for example, right? Who has storage and HCI, right? And it looks for how to go and use them. And that's an individual choice at a customer level. We think this is strategically important now as we expand a multi-cloud experience that's different from the hyperscalers, right? Hyperscalers are coming in with two kind of issues, maybe, right? So one is it's single cloud. And the other one is there's a potential competitive aspect from some right around the ongoing underlying business and a hyperscaler business model. And so what VMware uniquely is doing is extending a common control plane across storage systems and HCI and doing that in a way that basically gives customers choice. And we love that the cloud lab is really designed to go and make that a reality for customers strip out perceived and real risk. >> Yeah. Phil to Lee's point, it's not dozens and dozens and dozens of logos on the slide for the lab. I think there's like 10 or 12 from what I saw and INFINIDAT is one of them. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your participation in the program and what it does for customers. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree it's, we like the lab because it's not just supposed to be one of everything I can do it, it's a purpose-built lab to do real things. And we like it because we can really explore some of the most contemporary workloads in that environment as well as solutions to what I centered as some of the most contemporary industry problems we're participating in a couple of ways. I believe we're the only petabyte scale storage solution in the cloud solutions lab at VMware. One of the projects we're working on with VMware is their machine learning platform. That's one of the first cloud solutions lab projects that we worked on with INFINIDAT. And we're also a core part of what VMware is driving from at but we call it data for good initiative. This was inspired by the idea that tech can be used as a force for good in the world. And right now it's focused on the technology needs of nonprofits. And so we're closely working in the cloud solutions lab with the VMware Cloud Foundation layers as well as the Tansu and Kubernetes environments and learning a lot and proving a lot. And it's also a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform. >> Yeah. So Lee, I was just the other day I was under VMware analyst meeting virtually of course and Zane and Sanjay and a number of other execs were given the update. And just to sort of emphasize what we've been talking about here this expansion of on-prem, the cloud experience, the data especially from our survey data we have a partner at ETR they do great surveys on quarterly basis. The VMware cloud on AWS do great for sure but the VMware Cloud Foundation, the on-prem cloud, the hybrid cloud is really exploding and resonating with customers. And that's a good example of this sort of equilibrium that we're seeing between the public and private coming together. >> Well, VMware Cloud Foundation right now with over a thousand customers but importantly over 400 of the global 2000, right? It's the largest customers. And that's actually where the Venn diagram between the work that VMware Cloud Foundation is doing and INFINIDAT, right? This large scale actually the interesting crossover, right? And listen for customers to go and take on a new storage system we always know that it's a high bar, right? So they have to see some really unique value, like how is this going to help, right? And today that value is I want to spend less time looking down at the storage and more time looking up at the apps, that's how we're working together, right? And how VVols fits into that with the VMware Cloud Foundation, it's that hybrid cloud offering really gives customers that future-proofing, right? And the degrees of freedom they're most likely to exercise. >> Right. Well, let's close with a kind of a glimpse of the future. What do you two see as the future of the data center specifically and also your collaborations Lee? Why don't you start? >> So I think what we hope to be true is turning out to be true. So, if you've looked at what's happening in the cloud not everything is migrating in the cloud but the public cloud for example and I'm talking about public cloud there, the public cloud offers some really interesting unique value. And VMware is doing really interesting things about like Dr as a service and other things, right? So we're helping customers tap into that at the same time, right? We're seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations, right? And because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy. And so partnering with leaders in storage, right? Is a core part of our strategy going forward. And we're looking forward to doing more, right? With INFINIDAT as we see VCF evolve, as we see new applications including container-based applications running on our platform, lots of futures, right? As the pace of application change doesn't slow down. >> So Phil, what do you see for the next 10 years for INFINIDAT? >> Yeah, well, I appreciated your introduction because it does speak to sort of the core characteristics of INFINIDAT. And I think a company like us and at our juncture of evolution it's important to know exactly who you are. And we clearly are focused in that on-prem hybrid data center environment. We want to be the storage tier that companies use to build their clouds. The partnership with VMware we talked about the Venn diagram, I think it just could not be more complimentary. And so we're certainly going to continue to focus on VMware as our largest and most consequential alliance partner for our business going forward. I'm excited about the data center landscape going forward. I think it's going to continue to ebb and flow. We'll see growth and distributed architectures, we'll see growth at the edge. In the core data center I think the old days where customers would buy a storage system for a application environment, those days are over it's all about consolidating multiple apps and thousands of users on a single platform. And to do that you have to be really good at a lot of things that we are very good at. Our strategy going forward is to evolve as media evolves but never stray far from what has made INFINIDAT unique and special and highly differentiated in the marketplace. I think the work that VMware is doing in Kubernetes is very exciting. We're starting to see that really pick up in our business as well. So as we think about not only staying relevant but keeping very contemporary with application workloads, we have some very small amount of customers that still do some bare metal but predominantly as I said 90% or above is a VMware infrastructure. But we also see Kubernetes, our CSI driver works well with the VMware suite above it. So that that complimentary relationship we see extending forward as the application environment evolves. >> It's great. Thank you. Many years ago when I attended my first VMworld the practitioners that were there you talked to them, half the conversations they were complaining about storage and how it was so complicated and you needed guys in lab coats to solve problems. And VMware really has done a great job publishing the APIs and encouraging the ecosystem. And so if you're a practitioner you're interested in in how VVols and INFINIDAT and VMware, we're kind of raising the bar and on petabyte scale there's some good blogs out there. Check out the virtual blocks blog for more information. Guys thanks so much. Great to have you in the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much, Dave. >> All right. Thank you for watching this cute conversation, Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe. These are Cloud Native Insights. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. And when we talk about cloud native, we're talking about how do I take advantage of the agility in innovation, in cloud and the ecosystem out there? And a big question is if I'm a company that's not born in the cloud, or if I'm person that's not steeped in the knowledge of leveraging and using all of these wonderful tools out there, how do I get there? To help us dig into the people and company moving to cloud and adopt the use of these technologies, happy to welcome to the program, Forrest Brazeal. He is a senior manager with A Cloud Guru is his official title, but he is the cloud bard, as many people know in a bard, of course, an oral transition. He creates poems, he sings, he's got a book coming out to illustrate the cloud and really great to be able to talk to you Forrest. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey, it's great to be on the show, Stu, thanks for having me. >> All right, so first if you could just share a little bit about your background. So you joined A Cloud Guru, you know, relatively recently, I'd seen some of the cartoons and videos you've done in the past. You've got kind of a renaissance man look, you're not just a tech guy, as I said, you do have some of those musical pursuits also. So I'd love to hear a little of your background. >> Yeah, so I've been an engineer for a long time. I've been an engineer, been a manager of engineers, a consultant, and that's from, you know, startups ranging all the way up to the fortune 50. So I've seen a lot of enterprises in other companies at various stages of their cloud journey. From, you know, just trying to figure out how to get to the cloud out of the data center, all the way to being very cloud native. As you were saying in your intro, you know, figuring out how to build directly on cloud services. I'm very passionate about that. Very passionate about helping people figure out how to take that next step. Not to be a stucker, to get into a state where they are, but to figure out how to get, as I say up the Serverless ladder, right to that next stage of cloud native adoption. And I've realized that, you know, a lot of these technologies and a lot of these concepts, these practices are very abstract. And sometimes what helps the most is to put that in a format that people can engage with. And so I draw and I sometimes sing and I write all sorts of things just to try to help people understand. You know, even though these technologies and practices, these ideas are abstract, they don't have to be difficult, right? Everybody's got some intuitive understanding of why a doctor exists or why a lawyer exists. It's a little bit harder to get your head around, you know, why does a cloud architect exist? What do they build, right? And that's what I try to do with things like the book, The Read Aloud Cloud, that's coming out in just a couple of months. >> All right, so I love that, you know, helping companies understand these things because, you know, for so many years it was like, ah, well we need a mandate for the cloud. You know, cloud, cloud, cloud. When I started this, it was, you know, cloud is not a destination. There is how do we really take advantage of cloud? And there was one post that you wrote talking about lift and shift. And it was one of those things that we've seen for years, there's arguments of, you know, is lift and shift good, if it's bad? And of course the reality is sometimes lift and shift is needed, but it is step one of what you need to do, because if you're not taking advantage of the cloud, the rift reaches a certain point that you say, oh my gosh, maybe I'm not taking advantage of it, maybe the cost don't make sense, and therefore we scrambled and we pull things back and we celebrate repatriation, which to my mind was always, oh, geez, we kind of didn't understand it, we failed. And then we kind of went back to doing what we didn't want to do. So walk us through, if you could, we've even got an illustration of yours that we'll talk about, but you know, give us, you know, what is the proper way that people should think about lift and shift? >> Yeah, exactly. And to be clear, I'm not dissing lift and shift as a concept. It's very necessary in a lot of cases and you can reel off a bunch of reasons why lift and shift would be an important stepping stone in a cloud journey. And of course, that could be just, you know, I've got to get out of the data center, right? Because my lease is expiring or, you know, my servers are haunted and the whole thing is on fire. I've talked to people who, you know, have fireworks stored in their data center, literally that they're afraid are going to go off, right? The roof is leaking. It's time to get out of there and just get to someplace that's professionally managed. You could be using a lift and shift migration almost as like a financial engineering tactic to go from a CapEx to an OPEX model, right? And tie what you're doing a little bit more closely to what you're spending. There's several other reasons that you might choose to have lift and shift is that first stage you might want just to get your feet wet a little bit in cloud. You know, you might not have the confidence or the expertise in-house to build on fully cloud native services right now, you've got to go in and get your Ops teams hands-on right with the technologies and with the tooling so that they understand a little better, how to get you to that next step. But the really, really key thing is lift and shift is a phase you've got to get through it, you've got to keep innovating. And a lot of people don't realize that they think they can go to the cloud, pick up their servers, run them pretty much as they did in the data center, they can stop there, and they're going to get longterm benefits from cloud. And over time, that gets less and less true. Because as I say, once you move that first VM into EC2 or whatever the case may be, you've started a shot clock on your chances for success in the cloud. That clock is ticking cause your initial benefits are very front-loaded. You're potentially getting some initial cost wins as your, hopefully matching your usage a little bit better to what you're spending on infrastructure, right? You're potentially getting some time to learn and plan for version two of your cloud infrastructure. But the longer you stay in that lift and shift states, some dangers are going to start compounding. Because in the absence of a true cloud native strategy, your teams, your Ops teams, your governance teams, if you have those, right? They're going to continue to do things the way they did it in the data center. Because they don't have true SRE, they don't have true automation, they're going to build manual slow error-prone processes that are going to drag down your time to value your MTTR, all those operational metrics at you look at. You're going to see those costs winds actually start to evaporate because you know, you're still running that legacy monolith, You can't effectively charge back spend to different units inside of your business, you realize you're not getting that value, you thought you were running. You know, because you're running the cloud like a data center, and let's be honest, that's super expensive. And then unfortunately over time, and usually you start hitting this threshold 18 months, two years out, your best people, the experts who were bringing you to the cloud in the first place, they get disillusioned because they're not seeing the continued forward motion that they'd been led to believe was going to happen. And so they start moving on, you get brain drain, and now you've created this new legacy swamp of poor procedures and practices, the very thing that you were hoping to avoid. And so at that point, the negative side effects of the lift and shift have overwhelmed, the benefits you thought you were going to get. That's when you're lift and shift shot clock has expired. And that's what you want to avoid by continuing to innovate and continuing to refactor towards a true cloud native deployment. >> Yeah, well, again, I thought that the visual was excellent and it's so good to explain, you know, what is the journey we're going through? What are the decision points? You might look through some of these and say, oh, well, you know, these three definitely apply to my business, some of the others I might not be concerned about, but I can take that and apply it to what I'm doing. So that that's the company side of things. You know, Forrest, you're an AWS Serverless Hero, and also in your day job, your company helps people with the training. So let's talk about people. You know, when it comes to, you know, how do we get involved? One of the things I loved about the Serverless community from the early times that I met it, was, it seemed that the bar to enter was relatively low. So many of these things, it's like, ah, well, do I have the basic skill set? Do I understand how to get there? How do I actually get to where I need to be? And that so many people are hesitant to start that journey, cause it just seems so daunting. So what are you seeing out there? You know, give us the landscape in 2020 as to, you know, how we move forward. And I know you've got a project you've been doing called the cloud resume challenge. So, you know, definitely talk a little bit about that too. >> Yeah, for sure. So look, even going beyond 2020, I think the numbers I've heard, we're looking at potentially a hundred million software developers being added to the workforce over the course of the next decade and change. That's a lot of people who are going to have to interact with these services who are going to have to build and create value on top of cloud infrastructure. And so there's a huge need for us to continue to create abstractions and to create guided, you know, best practices and principles that will help people get where they need to be with as little unnecessary work as possible. And really that's a lot of what underlay the Serverless community and the ideas behind that. I've been involved in Serverless for a long time, going back to when I was, you know, building on Serverless inside of large companies early on in that revolution. And I've carried that forward now with my work as an AWS Serverless Hero, even the work that I'm doing at A Cloud Guru. And really the bar to entry, as you mentioned, is so low, because you're cutting out a lot of things that were seen as sort of gate keeping mechanisms in the past. You know, oh, if you haven't learned this underlying protocol or whatever, then you don't qualify as a real developer. Serverless turns out on its head and says, no, I'm providing you with abstractions that you're going to be able to build on top of. And you're going to be able to focus so much more of your energy on things that actually provide value for the business. And yeah, that kind of started as a very leading edge, early adopter thing, but we're seeing more and more even large enterprises. We're seeing that start to click and they're realizing, you know, wherever I can, wherever I'm not potentially constrained by legacy practices or other code bases, I do want to explore, you know, seeing how quickly I can turn a prototype around, how quickly I can A, B, C, D, E, F, G test something if you will, by spinning up these low cost prototypes in the cloud, right on infrastructure, that's just costing me fractions of a cent to run. There's some really, really compelling avenues that even larger businesses can explore. But taking it back to the individual for a second, Think about, you know, I'm in the middle of a global pandemic, okay? And potentially I'm looking for a career switch now more than ever, I'm thinking, you know, I'd like to get into development, I'd like to get into IT. And it's so close to me now. You look at these services out there, like Networkify which you and I were talking about before the break, right? Talking about how easy those technologies make it for someone to get out there and actually we do web development. But you still need someone to kind of step alongside you and say, you know, these are the things you need to care about, these are things that might be irrelevant. There's an explosion, almost like an infodemic, if you will, of information out there that makes it really hard for folks who are trying to actually skill up, and who're trying to make that transition into tech and into code. That's what A Cloud Guru does of course, which is that the company I work for. We've got about 2.2 million learners on our platform right now that we're helping to scale up and take that step toward the modern tech skills that they need to succeed. The cloud resume challenge, which you mentioned is something I've been doing kind of on the side. And that's a project-based approach that compliments a lot of the additional training that I was talking about. Where we say, you know, I'm going to give you a project, it's going to have some sort of spec based steps to it. So you're going to create a resume, but it's going to be deployed, you know, in the cloud, you're going to have to do some source control, some CICD, some, you know, all these other things that are going to be built into a basic DevOps competency. You're going to have to go away and do some Googling and open some tabs, in order to figure this out on your own cause the project doesn't tell you exactly how to do it. So you actually wind up with some kind of some pain. There's some failure involved there, and that of course is what makes the learning stick. And so we've got people working this on every continent now, we've had many people that have completed it, we've seen people get interviewed. We've seen people get hired coming out of a totally non tech background. So that's really exciting. And you know, those stories, aren't going to be unusual forward. We're going to see more and more of this, and really that's what these cloud abstracting technologies have allowed us to do. Probably it wouldn't be possible to do something like the cloud resume challenge 20 years ago, the barrier to entry with, you know, even just procuring the infrastructure you'd need to be successful in a reasonable amount of time, you know, was accessible to everybody, but now we're there. Those services are at your fingertips. You just need a little bit of guidance, a little bit of curation to get you down the right path. >> Well, yeah, it was actually, you know, what excited me when I first met the ACG team was the bar to entry was so low. In previous decades, you talk about, you know, how much time and how much money I needed to spend just to get some of these courses, even if they were online. And it was just order of magnitudes easier and, you know, built for that cloud environment that I can start I can pause, I have learning resources, and it's been really impressive to watch the expansion of the team there. I'm curious, when you look at, you know, certifications out there, when you look at the need for jobs out there, if I'm not, you know, if I'm in the tech industry, what are some of the things that you think that people should be learning moving forward to? Where would you recommend people start looking there? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think one thing, a lot of people miss is, you know, it's a good idea to get started with technologies that are new, if you're new. Because let's be real, you can't ask for five years of experience in a technology that's only been around for 18 months. So it's really smart to major on something and get good at something that not a lot of people are good at yet. And you say, well, how do I know that technology is going to take off and succeed? Well, the fact of the matter is even if that specific technology doesn't, you still have a much greater understanding of the problem space, and you'll be right at the cutting edge, ready to jump in on, you know, whatever the next thing is. So I always recommend that people look at things like Serverless and the managed services that are coming out. Get really good at automating, you know, services on the major cloud providers pick AWS, Azure, GCP, right? And just make that your thing, don't specialize in too niche of an area, you know, especially if you're very new, but especially pick a cloud provider, get good at working with the basic services, you'll find that that sets you apart more than, for example, I don't know, going after a certification that's been around for 20 years, that tons and tons of people in the job market have, right? That doesn't necessarily set you apart as much as some of these modern skills do. So I definitely recommend that. >> Yeah, it's funny for us, actually, I laugh a little bit. You mentioned that you've been doing Serverless for a long time, and I'm like, well, okay, I remember sitting in the audience at 80 bus Re-invent when Lambda was unveiled, I think it was re:Invent 2014. So, you know, there's nobody out there that's been, "Oh, I've been doing this for a decade." We always laugh, when there's a job applications out there and say, oh, okay, you know, I want 10 years of a technology that's been around for five years. But yeah, maybe there's one other, a cartoon that you brought along talking about the difference between transition cloud, excuse me, cloud translation and cloud fluency. Maybe just walk through that difference. And especially people that have been in the industry for awhile, how do we make sure that we're actually embracing and understanding and moving to that cloud world, not just, you know, cloud washing? >> Yeah, that's a good word. You know, something that struck me, I think a bit of an epiphany that I had around the time that I started at A Cloud Guru and keep in mind, I'm coming out of years of having worked with these large organizations and try and help them figure out how to migrate to cloud. And what I had seen is there's a lot of these kind of central cloud teams, if you will, that get established right at the beginning of an organization's cloud adoption. And that's a well known pattern, you know, this "cloud center of excellence", if you will, that people establish. A lot of times, those are small teams. You take your best cloud people and you say, okay, you define the standards and the processes that are going to get us to cloud, and they do that. And then they're shocked when nobody adopts the standards, right? And the migration sort of stalls, and they're not having the impact that they expected to have. And what turns out is going on is just having that small group of people who understands cloud, surrounded by this huge legacy, diaspora of legacy, you know, product and engineering teams that don't speak the language of cloud, if you will. Means that anytime you want to innovate, or anytime you want to make a move, you've got to go through this process of translation. You've got to go to those legacy teams who were saying, what's EC2 instance again? You know, how do you spell S3? I thought that I wanted to log into the AWS Console, but this access and secret key, isn't going into my password box, right? You know, they have that low level of competency. And so you're constantly having to explain everything you're going back and forth, and that of course leads to kind of less sophisticated architectures that leads to poor outcomes, and it takes you much longer to get where you want to go. That's that process of cloud translation. That's an anti-pattern. So instead of that, what we try to advocate for is what we call cloud fluency. Just like with any other language you want your entire organization as much as possible to speak the language of cloud at some baseline level. We do that through a couple of things. Of course, obviously through training and certification, cloud certifications can be a great proxy to measure how well your organization's cloud competency is improving. But also through taking those cloud experts, those central experts that previously were kind of in their ivory tower doing their own thing and embed them as much as you can in a roving fashion with these legacy product teams and help them to improve, right? Sort of teach them to fish so that you're not putting all the weight on that central team to be the only experts. Because that doesn't scale, those people are going to burn out. They're going to get overwhelmed with support tickets, we see that over and over again. So you want to empower those teams. And we want to actually talk a little bit less about a cloud center of excellence sometimes, and a little more about a cloud center of enablement, right? Where we want to, instead of knowing the most about cloud, we want to show the most about cloud to those other teams. That's a sustainable pattern for success. That's what we try to do through A Cloud Guru, and that's what I try to advocate for individually, wherever I can, because I've seen people burnt out. I don't want that to happen. >> Yeah, for those of us that have been through a few of these waves here, it's something that you're right, you need to actually be involved in embracing these technologies. You don't have a center for internet usage anymore. If you think about, you know, everybody now for the most part has used the internet, understand some of pieces, it needs to be the same way when it comes to cloud. It just becomes the underlying substrate and, you know, bring forward the innovation and agility that people are looking for. All right, Forrest, last thing we talked about, you've got a book coming out a little bit later this year, The Read Aloud Cloud, give us the quick thing, you know, love, it's visual, is very accessible and definitely looking forward to hearing about that. >> Yes, yes, exciting. So it'll be out in September from Wiley. And basically you've seen a couple of the cartoons over the course of this time here. But, you know, I've been drawing for a long time trying to help people get a sense for what the cloud is and in a way that they can understand and get a grasp on. And so what The Read Aloud Cloud is, it's the history and practice of cloud computing. And it takes you from the mainframe days through artificial intelligence. And along the way, we talk about the basics of cloud architecture, we talk about security, We talk about resilience and all those important things. But it's written and drawn in a way that can be accessible even to a nontechnical person. So the person who's never been able to understand what it is that you do. And I include, you know, potentially your CEO in that conversation, right? This is a book you can hand to them that you can put on your desk, it'll give you a chuckle. But I think there's actually some really strong ability for you to gain actually a concrete visual understanding those really abstract terminologies that float around with cloud. Again, what we're doing is not necessarily complicated, it's just really abstract, it's really arcane. So let's put it in a format where we can get our heads around and hopefully have a good laugh while we're doing it. That's what The Read Aloud Cloud is, and you can check that out, wherever books are sold. >> All right, well Forrest Brazeal. Thank you so much for joining us, real pleasure talking with you. And absolutely we need to make sure that "cloud" becomes as ubiquitous as computers and the internet have before us. Really pleasure chatting with you, thanks so much for joining. >> Awesome, thanks so much Stu, it's great to be here. All right, and I'm Stu Miniman, looking forward to hearing more about your Cloud Native Insights. (bright upbeat music)

>> (vocalizing) >> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCube. Covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vallante and this is our continuing coverage of Think 2020, the digital event experience. This is the post-thing, the sort of halo effect, the afterthoughts, and joining me is Rob Thomas, he's back. The Senior Vice president of Cloud and Data Platform. Rob, thanks for taking some time to debrief on Think. >> Absolutely Dave, great to be here, good to see you again. >> Yeah, so you have a great event, you guys put it together in record time. I want to talk about sort of your innovation agenda. I mean, you are at the heart of innovation. You're talking cloud, data, AI, really the pillars of innovation, I could probably add in edge to extend the cloud. But I wonder if you could talk about your vision for the innovation agenda and how you're bringing that to customers. I mean, we heard from PayPal, you talked about Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Mutual, a number of customer examples. How are you bringing innovation forward with the customer? >> I wouldn't describe innovation, maybe I'd give it two different categories. One is, I think the classic term would be consumerization, and you're innovating by making interiorized technology really easy to use. That's why we built out a huge design capability, it's why we've been able to get products like Watson Assistant to get companies live in 24 hours. That's the consumerization aspect, just making enterprise products really easy to use. The second aspect is even harder, which is, how do you tap into an institution like IBM Research, where we're doing fundamental invention. So, one of our now strengths in the last couple of months was around taking technology out of IBM Debater, project Debater, the AI system that could debate humans and then putting that into enterprised products. And, you saw companies like PayPal that are using Watson Assistant and now they have access to that kind of language capability. There's only two aspects here, there's the consumerization and then there's about fundamental technology that really changes how businesses can operate. >> I mean, the point you made about speed and implementation in your key note was critical, I mean really, within 24 hours, very important during this pandemic. Talk about automation, you know, you would think by now right, everything's automation. But, now you're seeing a real boom in automation and it really is driven by AI, all this data, so there's seems to be a next wave, almost a renaissance, if you will, in automation. >> There is and I think automation, when people hear first of the term, it's sometimes a scary term. Because people are like hey, is this going to take my job? Gain a lot of momentum for automation is a difficult, repetitive tasks that nobody really wanted to do in the first place. Whether it's things like data matching, containerizing an application. All these are really hard things and the output's great, but nobody really wants to do that work, they just want the outcome. And, as we've started to demonstrate different use cases for automation that are in that realm, a lot of momentum has taken off, that we're seeing. >> I want to come back to this idea of consumerization and simplification. I mean, when you think about what's been happening over the last several years. And, you and I have talked about this a lot, AI for consumer versus AI for business and enterprise. And really, one of the challenges for the encumbrance, if you will, is to really become data driven, put data at the core and apply machine intelligence to that, just to that data. Now the good news is, they don't have to invent all this stuff, because guys like you are doing that and talk about how you're making that simple. I mean, cloud packs is an example of that, simplification, but talk about how customers are going to be able to tap into AI without having to be AI inventors. >> Well, the classic AI problem actually is a data problem, and the classic data problem is data slide over, which is a company has got a lot of data but it's spread across a hundred or a thousand or tens of thousands different repositories or locations. Our strategy when we say a hybrid cloud is about how do we unify those data storage. So, it's called PaaS, on red hat open shift. We do a lot of things like data virtualization, really high performance. So, we take what is thousands of different data sources and we have that packed like a single fluid item. So then, when you're training models, you can train your models in one place and connect to all your data. That is the big change that's happening and that's how you take something like hybrid cloud, and it actually starts to impact your data architecture. And once you're doing that, then AI becomes a lot easier, because the biggest AI challenge that I described is, where's the data? Is the data in a usable form? >> A lot of times in this industry, you know, we go whale hunting, there are a lot of big companies out there, a lot of times they take priority. You know, at the same time though, a lot of the innovations are coming from companies, you know, we've never even heard of that could be multi-billion dollar companies by the end of the decade. So, how can, you know, small companies and mid-sized companies tap into this trend? Is it just for the big whales or could the small guys participate? >> The thing that's pretty amazing about modern cloud and data technology, I'll call it, is it's accessible to companies of any size. When we talked about, you know, the hundred or so clients that have adopted Watson Assistant since COVID-19 started, many of those are very small institutions with no IT staff or very limited IT staff. Though, we're making this technology very accessible. when you look at something like data, now a small company may not have a hundred different repositories, which is fine, but what they do have is they do want to make better predictions, they do want to automate, they do want to optimize the business processes that they're running in their business. And, the way that we've transformed our model consumption base starting small, it's really making technology available to, you know, from anywhere from the local deli to the Fortune 50 Company. >> So, last question is, What are your big takeaways from Think? I would ask that question normally when we're in a live event. It's a little different with the digital event, but there are still takeaways. What was your reaction and what do to leave people with? >> Even as we get back to doing physical events, which I'm positive will happen at some point. What we learned is there is something great about an immersive digital experience. So, I think the future of events is probably higher than this. Meaning, a big digital experience, to complement the physical experience. That's one big takeaway because the reaction was so positive to the content and how people could access it. Second one is the, all the labs that we did. So, for developers, builders, those were at capacity, meaning we didn't even take any more. So, there's definitively a thirst in the market for developing new applications, developing new data products, developing new security products. That's clear just by the attendance that we saw, that's exciting. Now, I'd say third, that is that AI is now moving into the mainstream, that was clear from the customer examples, whether it was with Tansa or UPS or PayPal that I mentioned before, that was talking with me. AI is becoming accessible to every company, that's pretty exciting. >> Well, the world is hybrid, oh you know the lab, the point you're making about labs is really important. I've talked to a number of individuals saying, "Hey I'm using this time to update my skills. I'm working longer hours, maybe different times of the day, but I'm going to skill up." And you know, the point about AI, 37 years ago, when I started in this business AI was all the buzz and it didn't happen. It's real this time and I'm really excited Rob, that you're at the heart of all this innovation, so really, I appreciate you taking the time. And, best of luck, stay safe, and hopefully we'll see you face to face. >> Offscreen Man: Sure. >> Thanks Dave, same to you and the whole team at theCube, take care. >> Thank you Rob, and thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante for theCube and our coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital event experience and the post-event. We'll see you next time. (music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. (upbeat music) Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this Cube Conversation on data protection. You know, I've been reporting for the last several months that spending on storage is reverting back to pre-2018 levels, but at the same time, it's not falling off a cliff. Now, one area of storage that is still very, very strong is the data protection segment. In the past 18 months, we've seen about a half a billion dollars in venture funding come into the market. We've just seen a big multi-billion dollar exit. And backup specifically in data protection, data management generally is where all the action is right now. And one of the leaders in data protection is Dell EMC. The company has the largest share of the market and the new entrants, believe me, want a piece of their pie. But anyone who follows this company knows that the firm is not likely to give up it's turf very easily. So much is changing in the market today. And I want to understand how Dell EMC's data protection division is responding to both the competitive threats and the changing market dynamics. With me are two experts from Dell EMC to address these issues. Nelson Hsu is Director of Solutions, Product Marketing for the data protection division at Dell EMC, and Colm Keegan is Senior Consultant, Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> So you heard my intro. You guys are the leader. You got the biggest market share. You got all the upstarts coming at ya. What's your response? >> Want me to take that? >> Sure. >> Yeah. It's interesting, so we were talking about this before we came on set, you know and often times they want to poke holes at us 'cause you know we're perceived as being the old timers, or the stodgy ones of the group out there. And play a little jiu jitsu, you move in say you know well time in market counts for something. You know we've been solving data protection challenges for customers for literally decades now. You know and so, water under the boat and knowing the experience that we've derived from that allows us to bring solutions that are mature, that are proven. What we're doing is we're taking those proven solutions and pairing them with modern capabilities. So that, you know we look at it and say, hey, look, Mr. Customer. You have significant data protection challenges today because, as you said, the world's changing. It's changing rapidly. We can help you address those while also sowing the seeds for the foundation for the future. So we think that's a compelling message and we think that while some of our competitors, in particular the upstarts, have had some interesting things to say, big picture-wise, they don't know what they don't know. 'Cause they just don't have the time in the market. Their solutions are also largely absent upmarket, you know, when you look at the enterprise. So we're comfortable. We think we're in a very good spot right now. >> So cloud obviously was the huge mega trend of the past decade. You guys said from the beginning, it's going to be a hybrid world. Some of that was we hope it's going to be a hybrid world. Well you were right, it's a hybrid world. So how is cloud, hybrid cloud affecting your customer decisions around data protection, and how are you responding? >> Well, you know, there's no doubt that the growth in cloud and the growth in hybrid cloud is real. And it's there today. As we look, and as Colm mentioned, we've been protecting data across the enterprise, across the edge and in the cloud, and that growth continues. So today, we have over 1,000 customers that we're protecting their data in the cloud. To the tone of over 2.7 exabytes of data protected in the cloud by Dell EMC data protection. So there is absolutely no doubt that that growth is there. We have a lot of innovation that we're driving on, both in various ares of cloud native, cyber security and deep integration. >> Okay, so that's good, 1,000 customers. That's a pretty good observation space. But when you think about hybrid, what I think when I talk to customers is they want that same exact cloud experience. They don't want to have to context switch. They don't want to have to buy different platforms. So how are you specifically addressing that customer requirement? >> So there's a couple ways we look at that, right? For our customers, simplicity is very key in ease of use. So that's one of our core tenants as we go across both the edge, the core and the cloud. And the other aspect of that is consistency. So giving them and allowing them to use the tools that they know today to be able to protect their data, wherever that data resides. So with the cloud, with cloud native, your data becomes very, very distributed. And you have to be able to see all that data, and control and manage that data. So the whole aspect around cloud data management has now risen to the top as a major concern. We do that in a great way in a sense that we both have a hybrid strategy and a lot of that is working with Dell Technologies cloud. And it's based upon VMware. And so we have a very good deep relationship with VMware to utilize their tools that our customers use today. Whether it be vSphere or vcontrol that they can manage their data protection from one console, from one environment itself. >> Yeah, Dave, I think when you look at the split today, the latest cut of research is that roughly 52% of VM's are in the cloud, and 48 percent are on-prems so it's already hybrid, and as Nelson said, it's largely predicated on VMware. So as organizations start consuming cloud they're going to go with the platform that they've been operating under for years now. So it'll be VMware. We've always had very tight integration with VMware. We have a very strong partnership with them. And that's both on the existing portfolio as well as the agile portfolio that we're building out today under PowerProtect. So as that hybrid world evolves for the customers obviously we want to make sure they're protected from a virtual machine standpoint. And make that, as Nelson said, very simple for them because the last thing customers need is complexity particularly as their environments are becoming inherently more complex. Because now you look at most enterprises today, they're going to have a mix of workloads. It's physical, it's virtual, containers are unaccounted for. It's cloud native apps, it's SaaS. You know we were talking earlier about multi-clouds. Oftentimes it just kind of came up organically and now you've got this huge distribution of workloads and oftentimes, customers have been just sort of reactive to that. In other words, let me find a way to protect that and I'll worry about the details later. We're looking at that and saying, we have the portfolio to help you protect all your workloads, and as importantly, we'll help consolidate the management in that environment. It's going to start with VMware, but then longer term we're planning for things like a SaaS control plane so that we can give you a complete view of that environment and allow you to assign the policies you need in terms of SLA's, in terms of compliance. You're basically hitting all the security, hitting all the key things that you need and so directionally we think starting with VMware and building from there is probably the most realistic way we can get customers protected from a hyper cloud. >> So the vision is a single point of control that is SaaS based that lives in the cloud or lives wherever you want it to live? >> Right, it can be either. >> So one of our core tendencies here, right, is that we want and deliver the ability to protect our customer's data wherever it resides. Whether it's edge, core or cloud. >> So sticking on cloud for a second, and then sort of segue into the VMware conversation that I want to have is VMware is the sort of linchpin of your multi-cloud strategy. That makes a lot of sense. VMware is going to be a leader, if not the leader in multi-cloud. We'll see how that all shakes out. It's kind of jump ball right now but VMware is in pretty good position with 500,000 customers. But your perspective on cloud is different than say, take an AWS cloud provider, it's a place. Put your data in my cloud. You guys are talking about the experience. And that's really what you're trying to drive with VMware, whether is Ron-prem, whether it's in Google, Azure, AWS, wherever. The cloud, you name it. Is that the right way to think about your strategy? Specifically as it relates to multi-cloud. >> Yeah, so I think on the area of multi-cloud, it is a multi-cloud world. Years ago I was in a SaaS startup and we had customers that were looking to deploy to the cloud. And then that was the question. Okay, do we hedge on multi-cloud or not? As a SaaS provider, we actually implemented on both AWS and Azure at the time. Which became relevant, because now our customers are asking us, yes, my primary is with this particular hyper scaler. But do you also support this second hyper scaler? So the reality started to evolve. And so for us, yes, VMware is a very strategic aspect and partner with us, especially with Dell Technologies cloud. But we also have a multi-cloud relationship with AWS, with Azure and with Google. >> Yes, so the compatibility matrix, if you will, applies now to the cloud. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So now it's having that feature and functionality across multiple clouds. >> One of the things we obviously paid attention to is Project Tanzu with inside of VMware. All around bringing kind of Kubernetes and VMware together. How does that affect data protection? >> Well, I think it affects data protection in the sense that addressing the entire aspect of still your data is distributed now. And it's going to grow that way. I think that we've seen numbers upwards of 70% of applications will be container based. Some of that will be going forward to 2022 where there'll be multiple production applications that will be container based. I think what Tanzu will bring to the table is a cohesive way to manage and control that environment itself. >> Okay, and so maybe we could sort of drill into that a little bit. Containers, it's becoming more obvious that people want to persist some of that data. It's largely stateless, but you've got to figure out how to recover. So do you have solutions in that space, is that sort of more road mapping? You can talk about that a little bit. >> No, absolutely. So definitely we have concrete solutions with our Dell EMC PowerProtect data manager for Kubernetes. It's actually one of the first that was in the market to support cloud native environments. >> It is the first. >> Yeah, the first offering out there to support Kubernetes. And so the aspect there is that as cloud native has moved from DevOps, and now into production in the mission critical applications, now becomes the aspect of originally the DNA of DevOps was my data doesn't have to be persistent. Now when you move into a mission critical environment, you're entire environment needs to be protected. And to be able to bring those workloads back up should anything happen and to be able to protect that data that is critical to those workloads. >> Okay, and so you're saying you're first, and you see this as a differentiator in the marketplace, or is everybody going to have this, or it's one of these confusing ice cream cone of solutions. So why you guys? What's your big differentiation? Let's stick to containers. I have the same questions sort of overall come back to that. >> So great question, and the matter of fact is that with our experience across the edge, core and cloud, Kubernetes and containers will be prevalent throughout. And it'll be the way that applications will be developed. It's meeting the demands of the business and being agile. And I think that with our ability internally that would move to that agile emotion. We have that ability to address the customer's needs especially in the cloud native Kubernetes space. >> I think going back to what you said too about VMware, certainly our partnership there is differentiated. We even heard some echos of that during Vmworld. Pat Gelsinger usually doesn't give call outs on the main stage very frequently. And he said that they were working with us as a best-in-class partner for data protection with Tanzu. And so there is a very tight partnership there, so if I'm a customer and I'm looking at containers, I'm probably going to want to do it within the framework of VMware to start with. But it's important to point out that we're also not dependent on VMware. So we can still deliver protection for Kubernetes containers outside of say the VMware management domain. But I would say from a differentiation standpoint there are some real tight partnering going on to make these capabilities mature. >> Well it helps that your CEO owns 80% of the company. (laughing) But it's an interesting point you're making because again, dial back 10 years ago, VMware had much more of a Switzerland strategy under Maritz, almost to, at the time, EMC's detriment. I think Michael Dell is very clearly, as is Jeff Clarke, said look, we're going to do more integration. And Pat Gelsinger has been, look, I love all my partners. It's true but we're entering sort of a new era. And that integration is key, you know, again, because of the ownership structure, and your long history there. It's got to confer some advantages in the marketplace. >> Yeah, and he's also got to remove some of the headwinds to adoption of VMware cloud. And data protection, as we discussed often times can be a headwind if customers are concerned that they're not going to be able to protect their data, chances are they're going to stand pat for a while. So I mean you need to find ways to take some of those objections off the table. >> Yeah, and not to take anything away from your competitors. Look, it's an open API world, and again, people are going to compete. But at the end of the day this stuff is still really complex and if you can do some core engineering together it's definitely an advantage. Let's talk a little bit about cyber. I often say it's become a board level topic. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. SecOps teams are overtaxed. I think I put out a stat lately, I got it from Robert Herjavec actually. He said think about this. The worldwide economy is 86 trillion and we spend .014% on cyber, that's it. We're barely scratching the surface. And that's part of the problem. Okay, but with that limited resource we have to be as smart as possible. You've got this ransomware coming in. So what are your customers asking you for and how are you responding? >> So it's interesting, right, because it is top of mind, cyber and cyber attacks, and it takes many forms. The attacks can be malware, they could be encryption, they could be deletion. Which is ultimately the worst case scenario. And I think as you go forward and you look at it cyber is the number one concern for any CIO, CISO or anyone that's worried about their security infrastructure. >> Which is everybody >> Which is everybody, right, exactly. I think that we have delivered for the cloud data protection area a first and best offering with an air gap data protection solution. So inherently, we can insulate and protect our customer's data from cyber threats. So when a ransom event occurs you can recover your data without having to pay that ransom. Or not be concerned that in most severe cases your data gets deleted. I think most recently there was a healthcare provider who was threatened about their data being deleted. And that was the worst case. We were able to protect their data in the sense that with our cyber recovery offering they protected their data in an air gap vaulted solution. And they didn't have to pay for that ransom. >> So what I'm hearing from you guys is okay, cloud, very important. Hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, fundamental to our strategy. VMware, they say bet on sure things. VMware is pretty much a sure thing. Large customer base, leader in the space. And then cyber as a key concern of customers, you want to expand the notion of backup and data protection to really point it at cyber as well. >> Absolutely, in fact with this recent research, it's called the Global Data Protection Index Survey and we just refreshed it. And what customers identified as the most compelling reasons to adopt cloud is for better performance, better data protection, and better security. Not necessarily in that order but those were the top three. So we look at that and say, you know we've got plays there. Certainly we have capabilities protecting workloads in the cloud whether they be virtual machines, cloud native, containers. But the security aspect of it is huge. Because oftentimes customers, and Dave, you and I were talking about this, they make some broader assumptions about once data is in the clouds they can kind of wash their hands and walk away. Not so fast, because certainly there is a shared responsibility model that extends not only to data protection, but also to security. Look, don't get me wrong, the cloud service providers have fantastic security capabilities, have a great perimeter. But as you said, it's not a question of if, it's a question of when. And when something happens, are you ready for it? So these solutions extend not only to on-prem but into the cloud. So it's that ability wherever the workload lives that you can get the right protection and what we're really now referring to as safeguarding data. Because it's a combination of data protection and security that's embedded and doing it wherever the workload resides. >> I'm glad you brought that up Colm. I have a follow up on that, but Nelson, did you want to add something? >> Well, I just want to mention that one of the biggest concerns is making sure that that data you vaulted is actually clean and safe. So we have a cyber sense capability within our cyber recovery product, that when you vault that data it does about 100 analytics on that data to make sure that there's no malware. That it's not infected. And it does it automatically and even on incremental using machine learning. >> That's really important because mistakes happen really fast. (laughing) So if you're vaulting corrupted data, >> What do you do? >> Oops. >> Yeah, exactly. >> I want to come back, I think the shared responsibility model is not well understand and there's a lot of confusion in the industry. At a conference this year, AWS' CISO Stephen Schmidt was saying, look all this talk about security is broken it's not really productive. The state of security in the cloud is actually really good and to your point Colm, yeah, he's right about that. Then you hear Pat Gelsinger saying, he's told me many times in theCUBE security is a do-over. To my point, you know the 86 trillion. And so I kind of lean, when I talk to IT people what Pat is saying. So you say okay, where is the dissidence there? Well, the reality is is the cloud service providers and the shared security model, they'll secure the physical infrastructure. But it's up to the customer to be responsible for everything else. You know, the edicts of the organization are applied. We were talking to the CISO of a large insurance company and she said to us, oh no, shared responsibility means it's our responsibility. So you're not going to go after the cloud service provider, you're going to go after the insurance company, or the financial service institution. Their brand is the one that's going to get hurt. So that's misunderstood. My question, very long winded rant, but what role do you guys play in that shared responsibility model? >> Well, ultimately it comes down to the customer. And the shared responsibility model really is admissible, as you mentioned, right? And so at the end of the day, you as the customer own and are responsible to protect that data. So your data protection strategy, your cyber resilience strategy has to be sound. And it has to be secured by those that can actually do it across multiple distribution models and platforms, whether it's edge, core or cloud. Whether it's VM's, containers. It doesn't change. You're still ultimately responsible for it. >> I think maybe what you might be driving at the question, Dave, is empowering the customers to maintain control of their data. And having the tools in place so that they feel comfortable. And part of it too is moving more towards automation. Because as their applications grow, and as Nelson said, become more distributed, as the data grows exponentially, this just fundamentally isn't a task that humans can manage very much longer. >> I'm glad you brought that up, because you ask a CISO, what's your number one problem? And he or she will tell you the skill sets to keep up with all this complexity. And that's where automation comes in. >> Correct, it does. So that's where we're taking it. Is trying to make things more automated and take tasks away from humans that they just can't keep up with. >> All right guys, I'll give you the last word. We go back a decade or so ago and backup was a whole different situation. And we saw the rise of virtualization and now cloud and all these other things that we have been talking about. Edge, the cyber threats, et cetera. So bring us home, where do you see the future and how does Dell EMC data protection fit in? >> It's an exciting time, it really is. It's kind of like the coming of that second storm as you mentioned. Businesses have that demand of needing more services to load more quickly in an agile fashion. And as they pair that with the growth of their data which is distributed, they really have that challenge overall of how do I manage this environment? So you have to have the observability to understand where your data is and to be able to monitor it. You have to be able to orchestrate your workloads so that they're automated, and the data protection of those workloads are automated as well. And so the imperative that aspects like Tanzu are addressing with cloud native, that Kubernetes brings to the table to deliver containerized applications. That's really quite honestly is the biggest evolution I've seen in my last 20 to 30 years. This is definitely a different paradigm shift. >> Yeah, you know, six months ago I was with a competitor and was taking a look at EMC, sorry, I should say Dell EMC, and I was wondering, should I make a move over here? And really what convinced me was the fact that the company was willing to basically solve internally the innovator's dilemma. You're making so much money on your existing portfolio, now you're going to start investing in what appears to be almost internal competition to your portfolio. It's not, it's complimentary. So that's what drove the decision for me to come here, but I will also say it's great to be a part of an organization that has a long-term vision. You remember, I think the phrase that was being used, being held captive to the 90-day shot clock. You know, the earnings reports and stuff. And that drives behavior. Well, if your organization is looking at decade-long goals, that means that you can actually plan to do things that over time are going to actually bring real value to customers. So I think we're doing the right things. We're obviously innovating, we're on this agile software development cadence gives us the ability to solve the problems incrementally over time so customers can see that value instead of waiting for large batch releases. But is also gives us the ability to say, hey, when we've made mistakes or when we hadn't seen certain things come around the corner, we're agile enough to change with that. So I think the combination of having that vision and putting in the investments, and we've kind of likened ourselves to the biggest startup in the industry with the backing of a Fortune 50. And so from a customer standpoint you got to look at that and think, you know, that's interesting, because I need to solve my current problems today. I need to have a path forward for the future. And who am I betting on to deliver that? And the other thing I'll leave on is customers are trying to work with fewer suppliers, not more suppliers. Because they want to reduce the complexity. Well who has the ability to not only bring data protection to bear, but a whole portfolio of technology is really end to end. That can snap into those environments to again reduce complexity and drive more business value. >> That's a really interesting point you make about consolidations. Ever since I've been in this industry people want to deal with less suppliers and reduce the complexity. But you still see startups and VC's funding things. And what's happened is this consolidation, the big guys, you guys are the biggest consolidator. And I always say the rich get richer. There's always this tension between sort of, do I go out and buy the spoke, best of breed tools, or do I get them from somebody who can help me across the portfolio? That's really where your strength is. Guys, thank you so much. This is really a very important topic. Data protection is one of the most important areas that we've been covering. I've been reporting on it a lot. As I said, a lot of venture money has been flowing in. So I really appreciate you guys coming in, sharing your perspectives. And best of luck in the marketplace. >> Appreciate it, Dave. >> Thanks, this was great. >> You're welcome. All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)