>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios (upbeat music) in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, coming to you from our Boston Area studio, and today, March 31st, 2020, is World Backup Day. Joining me is one of our CUBE alumni, Simon Taylor, who's the CEO of HYCU. Simon, we had you a couple weeks ago in our studio, of course. Today we have you joining us remotely. Thank you so much for joining us, and great to see you. >> Great to see you, as well Stu, as always. >> So, there's certain dates that everybody circles on the calendar and gets ready. In your industry, I have to imagine, normally World Backup Day would be a huge party, cake, and everything like that. Just, in all jest, it's my understanding, HYCU did not create World Backup Day, but it is gratuitous to talk about that, and it's something that's been around for a few years. Let's start there, thank you for joining. >> Yeah, absolutely Stu, and again, thanks for having me back on. You're going to get sick of having me on your wonderful program if we keep visiting too much, but I do appreciate it. I'm actually calling in today, as you can imagine, from Vermont, as we sort of escape the city here and get out in the countryside away from all the hectic and the crisis. You know, it's speaking of the crisis, I think that World Backup Day really could not have come at a better time, in some senses. It's so important, and I think it was created to help the world remember that their data loss is such a major issue, and that if we don't watch out for our data, if we don't backup our data, if we don't put proper data protection practices into place, we really can have a problem. And I think when we are moving to work-from-home environments, when we are moving out of the office, when the world is in such a state of flux, as it is today with Coronavirus, these are the moments when you want to really know that your data is protected, that you're safe. You know, we're seeing a rise in ransomware attacks. We're seeing all sorts of things that are tangential to the crisis with COVID-19, and I think, you know, us all taking a moment to kind of realize what an issue data loss is in the world, there just couldn't be a more important time to do that than during a crisis like this one. >> Yeah, Simon, unfortunately, it's scary times also for the IT department because bad actors are definitely making even more attacks right now, in the midst of the global pandemic, something that people are concerned about. When I've been looking out at the community, there's been conversations about, you know, "What does this mean for digital transformation, "and cloud adoption?" And some of the things I'm hearing, especially over in Europe, is there were certain companies, and if you look at certain countries, take Germany for one example, where they might have been a little bit slow to say, "Uh, I'm not sure "if I want to do the cloud." Well, if everybody's working from home for a little bit, and IT needs to keep the business running, there's been a push even faster to the cloud, and one of the main things we're going to talk about today is your partnership with Microsoft Azure. So love to hear what you're hearing from your customers out there, especially ones that normally it's, "Oh, I'm going to make my plan," and we know how fast, or slow, the enterprise normally moves, and now there's a little bit of an acceleration to say, "Hey, we need to get involved in the cloud, and my backup, my data protection is absolutely even more critical when I go to the public cloud." >> Oh my gosh, Stu, absolutely. You're right on all counts. I mean, one of the most horrific issues that we're seeing over, and over, and over again with our customers, and it's such a shame, is that there are bad actors out there. There are bad individuals out there who are trying to take advantage of this crisis, and what they're doing is they're understanding that they can now exploit the fact there's so much work from home. We're seeing more man-in-the-middle attacks. We're seeing more customers who are calling us up and saying, "I've just been hit with a ransomware, "all my data's locked down. "Somebody didn't follow protocol when they were working "from home, and boom, all of the sudden we're being asked "to pay a million dollars in bitcoin, "and what do I do?" I'm really, really proud of my team for stepping up during the crisis. We've actually seen more than 10 different customers, just in the last month, who've called us up and have said, "You know, I'm supposed to pay this bitcoin ransom. "Can you get my data back?" In all 10 out of 10 cases, because of how natively integrated HYCU is into the platforms we support, we were actually able to recover that data within the next few hours to days, get it back for them before they had to pay out those ransoms. So again, not just a plug for HYCU, a plug for backup and recovery in general. A plug for everybody who's thinking about, "How do I keep myself safe when I'm moving to the cloud?" Absolutely, this is the time to keep yourself safe with proper data protection strategies. You know, I think the second thing that you bring up, very rightly so, is that there were a lot of countries, Germany's one of them but there's many, who had sort of been on the back foot during this crisis, and had always expected that on-prem was going to be a majority of their infrastructure for the foreseeable future. They were all dipping their toe in the cloud water, the cloud pond, as it were, but you didn't see a lot of folks in Europe who were 100% committing to cloud. Well, wow, has that changed. You know, as we moved to work from home, you need a lot of that dynamic scaling that only true cloud environments, public cloud, can provide. But I think the second thing, and maybe more importantly, is we don't want to see our IT departments having to go into the office. We don't want to see them having to put themselves, and potentially their families at risk, simply to go in and manage data. So being able to work off of infrastructure-as-a-service, hugely critical during the crisis, and to the fact that HYCU is a natively integrated service into those different enterprise and public clouds means that you can do all of it remotely. And I think this is where the whole HYCU simplicity is a pillar, and a guiding principle for the company has become so important. I can't tell you how many customers have called us up and said, "I wanted to be at home with my family. "The other backup companies, the legacy deployments we had, "just simply wouldn't have allowed me to stay at home. "I would have needed to go back to the office. "Do you have something that's as-a-service?" That certainly brings me to, I think, your third point, which is we are absolutely thrilled here today, on World Backup Day, in the midst of this crisis, to be announcing the launch of HYCU for Azure. And again, this is a natively integrated service that customers can literally just VPN to their set data center, go directly to their cloud, go directly to Azure, in the marketplace turn on HYCU for Azure, and boom, you're going to have all of that wonderful, natively integrated, purpose filled backup recovery as a service. You're going to have all of that application support. You're going to have all of the things you've become, sort of used to, Stu, when we talk about HYCU, natively integrated into Azure as well. And again, I think because of this crisis, because we want people to stay at home, we want to flatten that curve, the fact that we've got this new service for Azure, which is so important for everybody, I think is just critical at this particular time. >> Yeah, definitely hugely important. We've been talking to you and HYCU for a number of years, Simon. Of course, started out very focused on, really, a Nutanix environment, broadened out to really the virtualization environment, and you're really going with your customers heavily into a cloud environment. So, Azure, really important. When I was at Microsoft Ignite last year, CEO Satya Nadella, I could sum up his main them in one word, and that was trust. So, number one, it was a knock against a certain company in the cloud that mainly drive their revenue from ads, but when he talked about customers and partners, he wanted Microsoft to really be the company that people trust in that environment. We've seen Microsoft, one of the biggest movers from an application standpoint, the real push to Office 365, got people to really embrace and trust SaaS. Would love to hear your early customers who you've been working through for this announcement, why this is so important that HYCU, not only supporting and integrating with Azure, but in the Azure marketplace, and what your customers are telling you. >> Gosh, that's such a great question, Stu. You know, first, just talking about Satya Nadella, I really think the world of him. I think he does truly believe it, when he, you know, if you've read his book, "Hit Refresh", you do start to see a man who truly cares, not just about the bottom line, or even the top line, for that matter, but really strives to drive real customer value. And I think one of the things he really did at Microsoft is he talks a lot about how the solutions that they're selling have real world effects across so many different industries. It's the net result of the technology that I think he cares about, as opposed to just the sum of its parts. So it's really, really interesting, I think, when we think about him and his leadership style, to think about how HYCU kind of fits into that. And you know, one of the things I'm really proud to announce is that here, on World Backup Day, in the midst of this horrible pandemic, what we're doing, as we launch HYCU for Azure is we're actually going to give it entirely free, no cost, no strings attached, to the entire world for the next three months. And the reason we're choosing to do that is we believe that data protection is so important, that in a situation like this, it's incredibly important that people don't take life threatening risks, things that could threaten not only them, but their families, going in to the office to do this. You know, and I think one of the great things about HYCU and also HYCU with Protege, our multi-cloud data management platform, is that you can now migrate your data from on-prem to the cloud with the touch of a button from home. You can literally go sign up, it's free of charge for all the HYCU backup you want for the next three months. You know, get on there and protect your data, that's number one. You know, that adds real value to customers in the midst of this crisis. Number two is you can use HYCU Protege to then migrate entire workloads, keep them safe, whether it's applications, whether it's databases. You know, we want customers to know that they can trust a third party, like HYCU, to be able to automate the process of migration to the cloud, and then you know, in the midst of a crisis like this everybody's thinking about disaster recovery. Well, guess what? We can even more data back on-prem, using a runbook, and we can actually drive true disaster recovery preparedness, as well, all for Azure customers. You know, Stu, you and I were talking about this offline a few minutes ago, but the reality is, we've interviewed our customers, and 72% of them, and that's in 71 countries now around the world, funny enough, but 72% of those customers are Azure customers, as well. So when we talk about our on-prem business, 72% of our on-prem business is also using Azure. So the ability to dynamically move these workloads to the cloud, move it back again for DR, as well as protect that data wherever it's sitting, and do all of that from home, with simplicity, and for the next three months no cost, I think that's how we're trying to drive value and trust into the Azure marketplace. >> Yeah, first of all, Simon, that's really a lot of good pieces here. It almost becomes a little bit trite when we talk about, "Oh, well, I want to build optionality "into my product, I want to be ready to change "and adjust things." But the environment and landscape that we're living with today is we understand, companies need to be able to react really fast, and they need to be able to adjust with this changing landscape. So what they're doing last month, versus what they're doing today, versus what they might doing in a couple of months, you know, I don't want to get locked in. I don't want to make any big decision. So therefore, it's great to see you're giving customers flexibility there. They've got both the free usage of the software, but also that migration built in to HYCU Protege. You know, how do I move my data around? How do I make sure it's still protected? So important that, you know, we've been talking for years about the ability to make changes fast and to move with speed, but you know, I think today's landscape really just put the point on (laughs), you know, we've been planning for this, in some ways, and this might have been the exact thing we're planning for, but this is the reason that this technology's so important. >> It's so well said, Stu. I mean, honestly, just like you said, we started out with the purpose-built back up recovery for Nutanix, and then we added GCP, we added VMware, now of course, we're launching Azure, but in each case, we said it's got to be natively integrated, it's got to be super simple, we've got to automate every process we can. We want to make sure that customers can wake up in the morning, log in to their cloud infrastructure, whether it's GCP, now Azure, you know, turn this on as a service. We always say, "There's nothing to download "when it's a true service," right? And I think that's so important now. It used to be kind of a talking point, but I think now people are really seeing the true value, which is when you don't need to go in to your data center, when you don't need to VPN in, when you don't need to figure out all the rest of this architecture. Well, when people are moving enormous amounts of data, and buying so much VDI, and deploying all these work-from-home modules to, sort of, protect their infrastructure, and create and environment that works for the current conditions, the last thing they have to do is put themselves at risk for the backup. I think because this is purpose-built, because it's a true service, because it's a natural extension, really, of the cloud provider they've chosen, or multiple, I think we make that really, really easy for customers, and we're very proud of the work we've done on that front. >> All right, Simon, just want to give you the opportunity. You know, what kind of feedback have you had from customers over the last couple of weeks, specifically? You talked about how important Azure was for them, of course, prior to this announcement, but just anecdotally, we'd love to hear just viewpoints as to customers you're talking and working with in these challenging times. >> Sure, sure, so first of all, everybody's hard pressed. I mean, there's a crunch everywhere. You know, people are feeling this sort of potential for a really, really systemic downturn into the economy, but at the same time, there were really urgent needs in terms of acquiring mission-critical infrastructure to support the move to work from home. And I think that's caused massive shifts in the way people are thinking about purchasing technology, and specifically infrastructure technology in the marketplace. People truly want services now. You know, before it was something that maybe drove the valuation of a company, et cetera, et cetera, but now people are saying, "Hey, it's nothing to do with that at all. "I just want a service that I can scale up, "and I can scale down. "I want it now, I want it fast, and I want it simple." So I think anything that's natively integrated, and is acting as a SaaS, true SaaS offering, has a real advantage in today's marketplace. I think the second thing is, that as customers are moving in droves to VDI, you know, I think there's a lot of talk right now about whether it's ever going to move 100% back. I think as people are discovering how effective and powerful we can be as we work from home, I mean, Stu, look at us right now having this very conversation, I think it's amazing what we're able to achieve with the technology that's out there, and I think that's really reduced the panic, and I think it's something that people aren't talking about. That there's such, imagine what the panic would have been if we didn't have Zoom, if we weren't able to do a GoToMeeting, if we weren't able to log in with a VPN and access our infrastructure. I mean, the entire world would have shut down like this. Now there's arguments being made that it may still shut down, et cetera, but you know we have at least delayed that process. I think we've created a lot of support for the economy and the environment through all of the technology that the marketplace is presenting to customers. And I think the next step in that is making sure that we recognize a couple of things. You know, we're seeing, again, a huge rise in ransomware attacks. There are many, many bad actors out there looking to exploit and take advantage of this situation, which is why I say you don't need to buy our product, but please, if you've got Azure, go and turn on the backup. Well, why wouldn't you? Protect your data, make sure it's recoverable. God forbid anything bad happens, or you do get attacked, make sure you can get that data back from a third party. Make sure it's really easy to recover. Make sure all your mission-critical applications and databases are supported. And I think if we do those things, and we work together to protect our customers, and for just a very short period of time, really don't worry so much about how much money we're going to make off of them, but think about how to protect them, truly, I think that's where the value is, and I think that's how we as human beings, can sort of do a better job of protecting each other. >> All right, well, Simon, thank you so much for all the updates. Happy World Backup Day. You know, I definitely look forward to chatting with you soon, and thanks for joining, and please be safe. >> Stu, always a pleasure. Please stay healthy, as well, take care. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, and you've been watching theCUBE here with some of our remote interviews. Check out thecube.net for everything online, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat digital music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston massachusetts, it's theCUBE. (techno music) Now, here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. One of the biggest topics we've been digging into as we head through 2020, has really been multi-cloud and as the customers as they're really going through their own transformations understanding what they're doing in their data center to modernize what's happening between all of the public clouds they use, and all the services that fit amongst them. Happy to bring back one of our CUBE alumni to dig into a specific topic. Simon Taylor, who's the CEO of HYCU. Of course data protection, a big piece. A big buzz in the industry for a number of years, in one of those areas, in multi-cloud, that's definitely of big importance. Simon, great to see you, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having me back on, it's exciting to be here. >> All right, so, Simon, first, give us the update. >> Sure. >> It's 2020. We've seen you at many of the conferences we go to. You're based in Boston, so not to far for you to come out to our Boston area studio here. You know a 40 minute drive without traffic so, >> Not bad at all. >> give us the latest on HYCU. >> Certainly well and Stu, thanks again for having me into your studio, it's gorgeous, everything looks great. It's a lot easier than traveling over to Europe to see you. So this is very very convenient actually. But since we last spoke, which I think was about six months ago now, HYCU has been growing fast and furiously, you know we started out with the world's first purpose built backup and recovery product for Nutanix Of course, we added VMware we added Google Cloud, we wrapped all the data together into multi-cloud data protection as a service, and we called that HYCU Protege. Well I am so thrilled to announce that in just the three months since we've launched Protege, we have seen hundreds of customers flocking to it. And what we're finding is that customers are calling us and they're saying things like, "let me get this straight, "I'm already backing up my data on-prem with you, "I can now migrate to the cloud, "bring it back again for disaster recovery as a service, "and it's all part of HYCU?" and we say yes, you know, and they say, "and this is all offered as a service?" Yes, "and it's natively integrated "into all the platforms that I'm using?" Yes. And I think so customers today, are more and more in need of the kind of expertise that HYCUs providing because they're looking now much more strategically than ever before, at what workloads to leave on-prem and which workloads to migrate to the cloud, and they want to make sure that, that entire data pathway is protected from beginning to end. >> Yeah, it's really interesting stuff, I think back to early in my career that you know that data protection layer was like, "well, this is what I'm running "and don't change it." Think about like when you've rolled out like virtual tape as a technology it was, you know, "I don't want to have to change my backup "because that is just something that runs "and I don't do it." For last five years or so it feels like customers. There's so much change in their environment that they are looking for things that are more flexible, you talked about some of the flexible adoption models for payment and the like that they're looking for. So, you know, what do you think customers are just more embracing of that change, is it just that changes their daily business and therefore data protection needs to come along with that. Well it's funny you asked because just a few years ago I was on theCUBE with you and you said to me, "you guys have a perpetual license model, "what are you doing about that?" and I said, "don't worry, it is shifting to as a service it's going subscription," which was super important for the market is, I've had conversations with folks who are selling cooking gear and they're trying to sell that as a service, I saw yesterday, somebody, I think Panera Bread, is offering a coffee as a service. You know, I think what we've started to realize is that the convenience of the as a service model, the flexibility, which I would argue was probably driven by cloud technology and cloud technology adoption, is something the market has truly embraced and I think anybody who's not moved in that direction at this point is probably very much being left behind. >> Okay, another technology that often goes hand in hand in discussion with data protection is security. Of course ransomware is a hot topic conversation the last few years, how does that fit into your conversations with customers, what are you saying? >> That's a great question. So you know one of our advisory board members, his name is Kevin Powers, and he runs the Boston College cyber security program. I had the privilege and the honor of attending the FBI Boston College cyber program recently at a large scale event at Boston College, and FBI Director Ray was actually on hand to talk about this problem, and it was incredible you know he said, "cyber crime as a service "is becoming a major issue," you're talking about the commoditization of hard to build malware, that's now just skyrocketing off the charts, the amount of cyber exploitation that's going on across the world. This is creating massive massive issues for the FBI because they've got so many thousands of cases, they've got to deal with. And while they're doing a fantastic job. We believe prevention is certainly the key. So one of the things that has been really really wonderful as a CEO to watch has been the way that some of our customers have actually been able to crack the code in terms of not having to give in to these bad actors. We've had actual customers who have had ransomware attacks had millions of dollars in data, literally stolen from them, and they've been told, "you've got to deposit, "$5 million on this Bitcoin account by midnight, "or we're deleting the data." Right? Because HYCU is Linux based because HYCU is not Windows Server based because HYCU is natively integrated into all the platforms that we support. We were able to help those customers get their data back without paying a penny. So I think that that's one of those moments where you really sort of say to yourself, "God I'm glad I'm in this business here," we've built a product that doesn't just do what we say it's going to do, it does a heck of a lot more. And I think it's it's absolutely a massive problem and data protection is really a key part of the answer, >> You know it's great to hear their success stories there, you know I think back to earlier days where it'd be like well you know what if I set up for disasters and data protection and things like that, well maybe I haven't thought about it or maybe I kind of implemented it but I've never really tested it, but there's more and more reasons why I might actually need to leverage these technologies that I've deployed, and it's nice to know that they're there. You know it's not just an insurance thing that I've never used. >> Oh absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. >> All right. So I started off our discussion time in talking about multi-cloud So you talked about earlier we first first met it was at the Nutanix shows in their environments, and some of that you've gone along with Nutanix as they've gone through hybrid and multi-cloud what they call enterprise Cloud Messaging. >> Sure. >> And play with those environments so bring us up to speed. What have your big customers doing with cloud where does HYCU fit in and what are the updates on your product. >> Yeah, sure. And I'll start off by saying that at this point about a third of all AHV customers are using a HYCU for backup AND recovery. >> And just for our audience that doesn't know, AHV of course is Nutanix's >> Yes. >> Acropolis Hypervisor >> Absolutely. >> That comes baked into their solution as an alternative to people like VMware. >> Perfectly said as always sir, yes very much, and you know we've been thrilled as the rise of AHV and Nutanix has sort of taken the market by storm. And when we started out, you know we use to came on the show with zero customers and a new product and said, "we believe in AHV and we think it's going to be great "and we're going to back it up." And that's really paid off in spades for us, which was wonderful, but we also recognize that customers needed that VMware backups. We built a VADP integration and then we started going after the public cloud. So we started with Google Cloud, and we said we're going to build the world's first purpose built backup and recovery as a service for GCP. We launched that last year and it was tremendous you know some of the world's largest companies and organizations and governments are actually now running HYCU specifically for Google Cloud. So we've been thrilled about that. I think the management team at GCP has done a terrific job of making sure that Google can be really competitive in the cloud wars, and we're thrilled to support them. >> Yeah, and I'm glad you've got some customer stories on Google because you know the industry watchers out there it's like, "well you know Google they're number three," and you know we know that Google has some really strong data products Where they're very well known but I'm curious when you're talking to your customers. Is there anything that's kind of commonalities to why customers are using Google and you know what feedback you're hearing from your customers out there. >> Sure I mean I'll start off by saying this, we've polled our customers and we've now got over 1,300 customers in 56 countries. So we polled all of them and we just said, "how many data silos do you have, "how many platforms, how many clouds?" The average was five. Right, so the first thing to say is that I think almost all of these large enterprise customers in public sector and private sector are really using all of them, the extent to which they may be using AWS versus Azure versus GCP, versus Nutanix versus VMware on-prem. we can argue and debate but I think all customers at this point of any size and scale are trying them all out. I think what Google's done really well is they've started to build a really strong partner program. I think where they were a little bit sort of late to the party in terms of AWS and Azure being there sort of first. But I think what Thomas Kurian did when he came in is he sort of tripled down on sort of building out that ecosystem and saying, "what's really important "to make cloud customers comfortable "that their data is going to be as safe on Google Cloud, "as it was on-prem," and I'm thrilled that they've elected to make data protection sort of one of the key pillars of that strategy, not just because we're a data protection company, but because I do think that that was one of the encumbrances in terms of that evolution to cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely, seen a huge growth in the ecosystem around Google. The other big cloud provider that has a very strong partner ecosystem is the one when I went to the show last year, their CEO Satya Nadella talked about trust, so of course talking about Microsoft and Azure, very large ecosystem there, trying to emphasize, maybe against others and by the way you saw this as much of a shot against Google >> Sure. >> you know, how do I trust Google with my data and information from the consumer side as AWS is I might be concerned that they might be competing against them. So, how about the Microsoft relationship? >> It's a great question. So again, so when we started on-prem, with our initial purpose built backup recovery products. We added Google Cloud. You know I'm now thrilled to announce that we're also going to be launching Azure backup and recovery. It's also native, it is purpose built into the Azure Marketplace. All the things you've come to expect from HYCU backup. The simplicity, the fact that it's SLO based. The fact that you can actually go in and decide how many times a day you want a different recovery point et cetera. All of those levels of configuration are now baked in to HYCUs own purpose built backup and recovery as a service for Azure. But I think the important thing to remember about this wonderful wonderful new addition to our portfolio. Is that, it is a critical component of HYCU Protege. So getting back to your question from before about multi-cloud data protection and what we're seeing, we call this the year of migration, because for all of these cloud platforms, what are they really trying to do they need to move massive amounts of data in a safe and resilient manner, to the cloud. So remember after we built out these purpose built backup recovery services, Azure is now one of those. We then pulled all that data together under a single pane of glass we called it HYCU Protege. We then said to customers, we're going to enable you to automatically migrate with the touch of a button an entire workload to the cloud, and then bring it back again for disaster recovery, and we will protect the data on-prem in the cloud and back again. >> Yeah, it's interesting 'cause when we kind of look at what's happening in the marketplace, for many years it was a discussion of what's moving from the data center to the public cloud, some things are moving back from the environment edge, of course, pulls things even further. Often it's, I say it's not even migration anymore it's just mobility, because we are going to be moving things and spinning things up and building things in many more places, and it's going to change. As we started out that conversation, there's so much change going on that so you're giving customers some optionality there, so that this isn't just a one way, you know, let's stick it on a truck put it on this thing and get it to that environment but I need to be able to enable some of that optionality and know what I'm doing today but also knowing that you know six months a year from now, we know things are going to be different >> Yes, yes! >> And in each of these some of those environments. >> Absolutely. We call it the three Ds data assurance, data mobility, and disaster recovery. So I think the ability to not only protect your data, whether it's on-prem as it journeys to the cloud or whether it's in the cloud, the ability to actually assist the customer in the migration. And what I hear time and time again is, "oh but Azure has a tool," or "Google has a tool for migration." Of course they have tools for migration, but I think the challenge for customers is, how do I affect that data resiliency, how do I ensure that I can move the data as a complete workload. Moving an entire SAP HANA instance, for example, to the cloud. And it protected the entire time as it journeys up there, and then bring it back for the disaster recovery without professional services. Because again, you know HYCU it's about simplicity, we want to make sure that these customers can get the same level of readiness, the same ease of deployment that they get from their cloud vendor, when they're thinking about the data protection and the migration. >> All right, I want to click down one layer >> Please. >> in here. We're talking about multi-cloud, you talk about simplicity. >> Sure. >> Well, Kubernetes might not be the simplest thing out there but it absolutely is a fundamental piece of the infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment so you know your partners, Google with GKE, Azure with AKS and >> And Carbon. >> Carbon with a K from Nutanix everyone now, I say it's not about distributions it's really every platform that you're going to use is going to have Kubernetes built into it so what does that mean from a data protection standpoint? Do you just plug into all of these environments you've tested it got customers using it? >> It's a great question it comes up, as you can imagine, all the time. I think it's something that is becoming more and more ready for prime time. A lot of the major vendors are moving to it, making heavy investments in Kubernetes, we ourselves have over 100 customers that are actively using Kubernetes in one form or another and backing the data up using HYCU so there's no question in my mind that HYCU is Kubernetes ready. I think what's really exciting for us is some of the native integrations we're working on with Google and with Nutanix so whether it's Carbon whether it's GKE, we want to make sure that when we work with these platforms that we mimic, how the platform is supporting Kubernetes, so that our customers can get the same experience from HYCU that they're getting from the platform provider itself. >> All right, Simon want to give you the final word. Bring us inside your customers what they're doing with multi-cloud and where HYCU fits there, here in 2020. Sure, we talked about prime time. Cloud for many years has been something that I think large enterprises have talked a big game about, but have been really dipping their toe in the water with. What we've seen the last two years, is a massive massive at scale migration to the largest three public clouds, whether that's GCP, whether that's Azure or the other one. (laughing) We're thrilled to support GCP and Azure because GCP and Azure, we believe do provide the most value to our customers. But I think the name of the game here is not just supporting a customer in the cloud, it's understanding that every customer today is to is on a journey, whether they're on-prem, whether their journeying to cloud or they're in cloud those three Ds, data assurance, which is our backup, data mobility, which is the automated migration, or disaster recovery readiness. That's the name of the game and that's how HYCU wants to help. >> All right, Simon Taylor. Always a pleasure to catch up with you thank you so much for the HYCU updates, >> Stu thanks so much for having us on. >> All right, be sure to check out www.thecube.net for all of our inventory of the shows that we've been at the videos we've done, you can even search on keywords in companies, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (Techno Music)

>>Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the cube covering Nutanix dot. Next 2019 brought to you by Nutanix. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of next here in Copenhagen. We are of course here at the Nutanix show. We are wrapping up a fantastic today show. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Been Cosa hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Simon Taylor. He is the CEO of haiku, a good friend of the cube. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. It's great to see you guys again. Final guest. Oh my gosh. It's a, it's a fare to stay interested in your energy. Yes. So for our viewers who are not as familiar with haiku, tell us a little bit about your business and how you are a strategic partner of Nutanix. >> Sure, sure. So haiku actually is a software company that focuses on data protection as a service. We actually started by spinning out of a much larger company called calm train that had about a thousand engineers and was doing all sorts of things, but they had an amazing talent for building backup and recovery software. >>Um, my vision was really that we can move up the value chain and we can establish ourselves as our own brand, as long as we could find a place in the market that was fast growing, building like a rocket ship and was really requiring a new kind of data protection and backup. And honestly, as soon as we fell, we saw Nutanix, we sort of fell in love. We realized that, you know, they had developed an entirely new category of business with hyperconverged and they were really a pioneer in that space. So we said is why don't we build the world's first purpose-built backup and recovery for Nutanix? And that's exactly what we did. And I think, you know, Stu was actually one of the first people to ever hear about it. Uh, we came on the cube and we talked about that. We've GA that in 2017 in July. I think@that.next, um, so just two and a half years later, we now have 1200 customers and we're in 62 countries around the world. So it's been absolutely astonishing. It's been wonderful growth. We're seeing 300% year over year growth. Uh, and really a lot of that is just based on our ability to protect the data of Nutanix customers around the world. >>Well and and Simon, right? That early question was, is new CanOx is going to be big enough to support ISV is that, you know, can run the, you know, grow their business underneath them before we get further and talk about mine and everything. Give us a little bit, you know, the state of the state for haiku because started with Nutanix, but that's not the only solution they are offering Dave. So just give us kind of the snapshot of the whole business. >>What we realized as we were building out high Q in this purpose build backup recovery for new TEDx. We said that's the on-prem, you know, but there's a lot of on prem that is still legacy three tier architecture. So we added a VMware product. But really the goal was to offer true multi-cloud data protection as a service. So what we did is we built the independent purpose-built backup and recovery service from Nutanix, one for VMware. Then we built the world's first purpose build backup as a service for Google cloud. And I'm really thrilled to announce the next month we're launching Azure backup as well. And the brilliant thing about our system and our solution is that we actually enabled customers to not only back up their data independently for that cloud, but that then migrate their data to whatever other cloud they want to use. So we actually becomes data protection as a service, data migration, and dr. >>So for, for customers, this is wonderful, but how is it to be strategic partners with all of these big players? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I think you have to place your bets, right? So if you notice, I didn't say AWS and almost every company that I talked to says, why wouldn't you start with AWS? They're the biggest, you know, that's never been our philosophy. You know, I think the fact that we attach ourselves to Nutanix so early, not just because they were a rocket ship on fire, but also because we truly believed in their vision. We believe in the Nutanix products, we love Daraja entire philosophy around simplicity and customer delight and we felt like we could be students of Nutanix, we could actually build out our product with those same philosophies and principles in mind. You know? So I think really going deep with Nutanix is number one for us remains number one. I would also say though that you know, Google has been an excellent partner and Microsoft been an excellent partner. So with the large cloud providers you have to take a different approach. You cannot offer a downloadable product, right? All of our public cloud backup and recovery is a true managed service. You go into their app store, you turn it on rather than download it, you configure and you're able to perform all your backup and do all your recovery right from the console. >>All right, so Simon let, let's get into the kind of the, the, the guts of what's happening at Nutanix. Mine, of course is a partnership to extend for data protection, partnering with Veeam and haikus as a, as the first two partners. Uh, the other thing that everybody's pretty excited about is XY clusters. And that sounds like, and we've talked to Newtanics people, you know, as Nutanix brings their stack into the clouds, not just on the clouds, will that pull things like mine along with them. And so, so give us what you're seeing with mine first and maybe he's, I clusters along. >>Yeah. So maybe we start with mine, right? This whole concept that I think that these guys have pioneered and they've done a really terrific job of it. I think, you know, the, the vision there, and you know, I count marketing or Meyer in this group and Tim Isaacs and some wonderful folks on the product team in Nutanix. Their vision was, you know, there's rubric and there's Cohesity, there's these sort of large secondary storage platforms. Personally, when I look at them, what I see as Newtanics with a backup workload, right? And I think that, you know, Nutanix being the original is the best. It's the most complete solution. And it's very, very comprehensive. So I think the, the tannics folks understood this intuitively and their idea was instead of us building our own backup and going after that space, we've got amazing partners like haiku. Why don't we just natively integrate them into the mind platform and offer that sort of secondary storage workload, uh, as a key part of Nutanix is product proposition. >>So the really exciting thing for us is that we are skewed up with Nutanix. Nutanix, we'll be able to resell haiku as a part of mine. Uh, and I think that's gonna really complete their end tour tire story when it comes to being able to own the data center, uh, and really own the sort of cloud in general. You know. So I think your second question still was about clusters. And I think that the answer there is very simple. You know, multi Gloucester is, has become extremely important for Nutanix customers. They've done a great job of going after that. The simple fact is if you don't support XY clusters as a backup vendor, you really can't compete in this market. So I'm really thrilled to announce, of course, that haiku is the first backup recovery vendor that does support. Gluster. >>Okay. So interesting. We talked about how you hadn't done a solution for AWS. Sounds like this might be a path for you to get with Nutanix onto AWS. >>Absolutely, absolutely. And again, for us it's not about looking for some Trojan horse or backdoor into a go to market strategy. It's about making sure that the customers are truly delighted by the value that we provide. And I think that when we go after a specific market, we want to do it the best, you know, so we don't go shallow and just sort of check the box. We want to make sure, for example, when we build out Azure that we're not just dealing with, you know, the, the general principle of backing up and keeping things consistent. We want to make sure the applications people are running on Azure or supported by haiku. That's what we do with Nutanix. That's what we do with GCP. We want to always go as deep as possible so we can really compliment the platform in a really, really comprehensive way. >>One of the things you said earlier was that your philosophy is very much aligned with Nutanix, your your end goal to simplify and delight the customer, uh, this, this much more intuitive, uh, youth and user interface. So talk a little bit about how you, you said you wanted to become a student of Nutanix, yo, this, this cross company learning is very interesting to me. How, how, what have you learned? Yeah. What have you learned and how do you go about being tutored by your customers? >>No, I'm a very visual guy, right? And whenever I think about Nutanix, I always had this image in my head. All right. Whenever I thought about legacy, three-tier architecture and the move to hyperconverged, rather, I always pictured an 80 stereo system. Remember those big eighties boxes? And they have all the graphic equalizers and all the way down. And some kid would come and push them all down. You could never reset the darn things, you know? And then along comes, you know, automation and suddenly, you know, you press a button and you listen to jazz and it sounds like good jazz and the treble and the bass all fixed themselves. You know, I effectively think that Nutanix brought that same concept, funnily enough into the data center. They simplified so much that was impossible to handle for admins across the world. They made it so simple to use their product that actually the customers could start to enjoy their work more. >>And I really love that. That's a true, that's a really an intangible sort of value proposition that I think people don't talk about it enough. Yes, you want to save time. Yes, you want to save money, but if you could enjoy your job more as a result of getting a product, what's better than that? Um, so I think that philosophy is something we baked into haiku in the following ways. You know, the first is when we were designing the UI, we wanted it to look and feel like the platform it supports. So when you use haiku for Nutanix, it looks like prism, when you are using our console for GCP, you're gonna feel like you're using GCP. The idea is that backup and recovery should be an extension of that cloud expression, that platform, so that the customer who is an expert with that platform can easily manage this with no training at all. So again, driving that simplicity right there and in the platform. >>Yeah. So Simon, you know, one of the things we love to do is get hear from customers and what they're doing. Of course you've got 1200 customers that are Nutanix customers. So we'd love to hear, you know, any insights you have in a lot of discussion about AHV in the last 12 months has been about half of the deployment. Is there anything around HV or any of the, you know, new software features and products and experiences that Nutanix has been launching that you hear customers buzzing and talking to you about? >>I mean, I, I, the first thing I would say is it is truly a multicloud world now. Um, I think that legacy vendors are having a harder and harder time coping with the fact that cloud washing no longer works. You know, if you show up to the market and you say, Oh, this, now I can deploy an agent into this cloud, it's sort of stop, stop, don't say agent around me. You know? So I think, I think the ability to really natively integrate into any of these clouds and support all of these clouds equally is key. You know? So in the past a vendor would start with one thing and it would be great, right? And I won't use names here, but then they would do something else. They might move to another hypervisor and it was a little bit less great. Right. And I think that that notion has to change in a multicloud world, which brings me to the concept of HV. >>I think that HV has really grown. I mean, I would say that right now, you know, over half of our customers are HV customers. And I would say that that grows every single quarter and it not only grows in terms of net new logos, it also grows in terms of existing customers that we're finding SWAT to switch to HV and they want to switch fast. You know, they don't want to pay the V tax anymore, but more than that, I think they're seeing HV as a really robust enterprise hypervisor that really meets the complete need for the customer. And I think that's, that's been terrific to watch. So when you hear at.next, and this is not your first hot next, but what kinds of conversations are you having? What's been interesting to you? What are you going to take back to haiku? Yeah, head back to Brookline. Yeah. >>I mean obviously there's all the new stuff. I mean, Kubernetes, you know, containers. Um, I think these are all things we've been working on for some time. We'll have some surprises for you guys in Q4 at the end of Q four around that. Um, but you know, I think the big takeaway for me is we spent the first two years building our brand, getting the word out there, proving to companies and customers around the world that we were truly enterprise ready cause we were the new kid on the block. And you have to sort of start somewhere and show that. I think now we, you know, we added physical last year, we added tape support, we've really got all of the major applications covered at this point. I think that conversation, we've checked the box, right? So today's conversations are about what's next, how much more deeply will you integrate with Nutanix? >>How can I use Nutanix to then manage my data in the cloud and bring it back again? And can haikus support that or will it distract me? And you know, the simple answer is it will support that completely because it's so natively integrated. You know. And again, I think when you choose a platform at this stage, and this is something we've seen again and again and again, people do not want a second silo, right? In order to, you know, run their backup and recovery. You know, customers who are choosing Nutanix or choosing any platform want to run that platform and they want to make that one holistic experience. You know, they want to reduce the training required and they want to make sure they get the most out of their investment. So we're where I think two or three years ago, Stu, when we first met, everybody was trying new things, right? It was sort of, there were all these new platforms and it was all very exciting. I think now people are doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on the platforms they fundamentally believe in. And we're thrilled about that because we support those platforms and we'll continue to do so. >>Great. Excellent little. Simon, thank you so much for coming on the cube. It was a real pleasure talking to you and it's been great. Yes, no, absolutely. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. That wraps up two brilliant days in Copenhagen at the Bella center at Nutanix dot. Next. Thank you so much for joining us and we hope to see you next time.

(big band music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Your file was so big, it might be very useful, but now it is gone. Oh wait, we're not talking about those type of haikus. Happy to welcome to the program the new CEO of HYCU. That's H-Y-C-U. Simon Taylor, the rebranded company, formerly Comtrade, I'm Stu Miniman with Keith Townsend. Simon, great to see you. >> Great to see you as always. >> Yeah so I've corked a quick Google search. Give me some technology things. I believe it's actually like a former V expert, that friend of mine had it in his deep archive, he's got all these things about Windows and the like. So let's start there. We've had you on the program, when it was Comtrade, explain the HYKU, the name and how it fits with the other company, everything like that. >> Absolutely, so a huge shift since the last time we all spoke. As you might remember, Comtrade Software was a data protection, a mondering company, but it was part of a larger organization. We spun it out of Comtrade Group and rebranded as a new company, HYKU. HYKU stands for Hyper Converge Uptime and, really, the way we came up with the name is we were thinking about the fact that we sell data protection for the hyper-converger Enterprise Cloud. More specifically, purposed-filled backup recovery for Nutanix. And when we think about hyper-converger, what are we really doing? We're taking enormous amounts of data and we're simplifying it down to a nice, small elegant package, much like the Japanese poem, haiku. So we leveraged that name, haiku, and then create HYCU, Hyper-converged Up-time. >> Yeah and if you kept the Enterprise Cloud and everything like that, it would've been a much longer word. (laughing) >> Absolutely right. >> Alright, but let's speak to, Comtrade and now HYCU's been working with Nutanix for a lot, tell us what you're hearing from your customers, what's shaping the market, what's it like being in this ecosystem? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we found it to be absolutely wonderful. HYCU, Inc. now, is really the world's only purpose-built backup recovery product for Nutanix. We've got about 350 employees in five different countries. And we launched about eight months ago, our very own backup and recovery product for Nutanix. When we thought about what kind of product we wanted to build as our own stand-alone company, we knew it had to be in hyper-converged, we knew that Nutanix was the industry leader and we'd had so much respect for Nutanix and for their leadership for so many years, as you remember. We had brought the monitoring scompact for Nutanix to market about three years ago, and we thought our real legacy has been in the data protection space. We've been working with companies all across the world for 25 years, from an engineering perspective, supporting the development of blue-chip data protection products, and we thought what better than to build our own back-up recovery product? And if we're going to do that, we should do it for the industry leader in hyperconvergion Enterprise Cloud which is Nutanix. So when we thought about what it would take to build an HCI backup and recovery product, we said, you know what, we don't want to be the platform. Nutanix, in our opinion, is the platform. And they've got snapshots and cloning and replication built in to their product. So we said, rather than creating another beast, another platform, another silo, let's leverage the elegance of Nutanix and let's add to it application awareness, let's add to it all of the various different cataloging, and application support that would be required to actually provide a complete data protection solution to Nutanix customers. It's been wonderful, and in just eight months, we're now in 22 countries around the world. >> So, 350 people, this is a crowded space. There's a lot of start-ups, there's a lot of established companies, why Nutanix? The focus is for such a large company, what's the total addressable market for the product, and what's the attraction amongst Nutanix customers? >> Those are great questions, Keith. And absolutely, I think this is the question on everybody's mind, how big can Nutanix really get? In our eyes, you can guess the correlarity for us. We believe where Nutanix are where VMware were a decade ago, and that they're going to keep going. I think we've heard it from the Nutanix Executive Team, you know, they want to be a three billion dollar company, et cetera, and I think they're going to hit it. I think they're going to absolutely just grow and grow and grow and really be the platform of the future. So from our perspective, this is the most crowded space in technology and a very difficult place to penetrate. I would certainly not recommend anyone building a sort of plain vanilla backup solution and saying, "Hey, here we are." I just don't think it will work. But when you look at Nutanix, and you look at the evolution of data protection, starting with Unex, there was a solution for that, Windows, there was a very relevant solution for that, virtualization, another backup and recovery product. Now we're in Cloud and Enterprise Cloud, and there's a couple of new vendors that have appeared on the market, and they're all sort of saying the same thing, which is it's all about the application, it's all about integration, and gosh, it's got to be very usable. It's got to be Next-Gen and it's got to be focused on the consumer. It's got to be something that people want to use, that really has that simplicity and that elegance. The core difference is that, unlike some of the other HCI backup vendors, we've focused almost entirely on building it for Nutanix, which means that we can leverage the power of their platform and make our customers more successful. In terms of total adjustable market, what we wanted to do was say to customers, "You only should have one data protection solution "for your environment." So what we did is we added a V80P integration, so you can actually backup and recover not only Nutanix data but all of your Legacy VMware data as well through HYCU, okay? But we only market it to Nutanix customers, so what that enables us to do is to provide unified data protection solutions for Nutanix customers which helps them to more quickly migrate customers and workloads to new Nutanix bosses. >> So as far as that support for Legacy workloads, we talked to quite a few Nutanix customers and they're in a mixed environment where a percentage of the workload's on Nutanix, a percentage of the workload's are outside of Nutanix, so does that support, extend not only-- >> Both. >> From the virtual machines, but physical machines outside of the Nutanix scope? >> Sure, so we're at V3.0 right now. We've been out for about eight months. In our latest release we've added VSX supports, you can backup all of your Legacy infrastructure. We are adding physical and Q4 this year as well. So you're really looking at a comprehensive Enterprise-ready HCI Enterprise Cloud solution that leverages the power of Nutanix to make their customers more successful than ever before. >> Okay, great, so VMware and HV today, Bare Metal coming to the future. Let's talk about that Cloud piece bit. Nutanix partnerships in putting their environment into AWS, Microsoft, of course, Google, really, so all the backup players are talking about how they fit in this multi-Cloud world, so how does HYCU fit? >> Yeah. You know what we did, we actually repurposed HYCU, and we launched our own Google Cloud services backup product. It's in the Google Cloud Services Store, you can download it and you can actually leverage that as well. But I see that as the precursor. I think we, on the HYCU team, all see that as the precursor to Zy. We love what Nutanix is doing with Google on Zy. We think that's going to be a real game changer for them. And what we wanted to make sure is that we really understood the concepts behind it so that when they start launching workloads on Zy, we're right there, ready with Zy integration. >> So give us some hero numbers. What are some of the big features that you guys offer Nutanix customers that other data protection companies can't do? >> Sure. So one of the key things, Keith, is that from a Nutanix perspective, we actually integrate right at the storage level, so we're not going at the hypervisor level, and what that means is that we avoid something called VM-stung. So when we think about customers who are trying to recover their data, in a traditional hypervisor environment where you're backing up at the hypervisor level, you're going to see that VM-stung, you're going to see things freeze up a little bit when you're doing the recovery. By backing up and recovering directly from the storage level, we avoid that entire process. The second thing that we've done is we've actually patented application awareness. Now this is great thing, we leveraged it in the monitoring tools, Stu's going to remember that, and we brought that back in a totally new form for the data protection. What we do is we actually look inside the virtual machines, we can see what applications are there, we reconstruct them ourselves, and that enables self-service recovery on the part of the Nutanix Abna. So now when Nutanix Abna can say I want to restore a sequel, I want to restore exchange, I want to get an email back, they can do all of that themselves right from the solution. >> Alright, Simon, last thing I want to cover is what feedback are you hearing from the show here? What are the customers excited about? You've been to quite a few of these also, what's your wrap-up of the show? >> I think this is by far the most successful Nutanix event ever, and I think it's been a wonderful scale-up approach for everyone here. I think we're starting to see a lot more in the Federal space, certainly, we're starting to see a lot more, for both Nutanix and HYCU, kind of across the larger enterprises, and I think what people are starting to see is that they can actually move entire environments to Nutanix. And I think more and more workloads are shifting faster than ever before and these guys have just really found scale. That's been a terrific thing to see and obviously fantastic for our business as well. >> Alright. Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU, pleasure to catch up with you as always. We'll be back with lots more programming here from Nutanix .NEXT 2018 for Keith Townsend, Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (light electronic music)