>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018 presented by siliconANGLE. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is siliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. It's the 12th year of the event, the fifth year we've actually had theCUBE here. Dave Vellante, my boss, was here the first year. Every other year, I've been kind of manning it solo. Great community here, I talked to a lot of users and really looking at, you know, some of the transitions that are happening in the industry. This event is all about virtualization and Cloud, and to help me put an exclamation point on everything we've been looking at here, and what's happening in the industry, happen to welcome back to the program Rob Strechay who is the SVP of product at Zerto, someone I've known for longer than I even realize, and you know, been on the program many times, But first time since you've been at Zerto. >> Yeah, first time since I was at Hewlett-Packer Enterprise. So, I'm glad to join you guys here, and great event, glad to be able to get down here today. >> You know, Zerto, company we've known for many years. I happen to know one of the earliest investors in the company, and you know, when I look at two of the biggest industry shows, when you talk about Virtualization and Cloud, it's VMworld and it's Amazon's Reinvent show. >> Right. And, I remember like the first or second year we did Amazon Reinvent, the Zerto booth was like right behind us, and so your company that really spans that gammon, helping customers with that, so I want to get your viewpoint, you talked about why people come here, but what are you hearing from the users? What are some of the big challenges they're facing, and how are they looking to manage some of those transitions? >> Yeah, I think it's really critical to have events like this that are, you know, a lot of different vendors that are here because I think when we see a number of companies going out and looking, and I was with a customer down in New York City yesterday, the software for FinTac. And what they were looking at is, how do we leverage multi-cloud? It becomes very important. They're looking at, it's not going to just be Amazon, it's not just going to be Azure, it's not going to be VMC on AWUS, they're looking at how they're going to have a multi-cloud strategy. And I think that when, what we're hearing from customers is there's a lot of confusion in the market, and I think that's why this program and others are really great at cutting through what is real, what's not real, how do you look for the ability to have that data mobility between clouds but with security. Especially today's like Privacy Day, you know, on the 25th, so, you know, you start to look at it and go, hey, security's a big thing, and a big theme from what people were saying here today too. >> Yeah, and one of the user interviews I really loved today talked about one of the biggest challenges he saw, he said, gosh, security, think about the Intel discussion there, what's that going to mean? And he actually said, performance issue actually doesn't fit, isn't a big deal for him from an architectural standpoint. Security? Oh my gosh, he's in healthcare. (laughs) If he's in violation, or if patient information gets out there, you know, this is the kind of things that put companies out of business. >> Absolutely, yeah, and I think that's what we're hearing. I mean, especially yesterday, it was okay, how do you layer encryption on top of your solution? How do you utilize the different types of secure transfers? How do you make sure the data is secure? There's a lot about that resiliency of the data, and making sure you can get it back, and it's immutable for that matter. >> Yeah, one of the things when we talk to customers, it's funny, in the industry we're always arguing as to what's the right terminology? It's like, I still get to have a company that said they had a convergence problem that they were trying to fix, and also it's like, hyper-cloud, multi-cloud, no, they have a Cloud strategy. And yes, they're using sass, yes, they're using public Cloud, and yes, almost everybody's got something in their data center. How do we get our arms around it? How do I have the services that work with me wherever I am, whether that's data protection, security, replications. So where's Zetro fit in that discussion, and how are customers doing at getting their arms around these challenges? >> So I think a lot of when I'm out talking to the CIO's and the VP's of infrastructure and having those conversations, a lot of what we help them understand is here's where you need to go, and here's the choices you need to make. Are you going to use Azure? Do you have an EA with Microsoft? Because you've probably been paying for Azure credits that you're not using, so start there. It's simple, it cost you nothing extra. Get your feet wet, dip your feet in there. We see a lot of customers of ours that use DR's as a service as the first stepping stone to getting into the Cloud. It's a nice, easy way in, they can get their feet wet, they can test out the performance, the security, they can do user acceptance testing without actually having to go there. They can also get a realistic view of the cost. I think that was talked about earlier today too. With some of the Amazon stuff is that really, you have to understand the cost. It's not the same as owning it on Prime. But then again you're not having the on Prime anymore, so if you can get away with that, when we see people taking strategies, a lot of it is data center consolidation, but maybe now I'm down from six data centers to two. And I still need to have that third copy. Where do I put that third copy? Do I put it at another data center? Do I go to a manage service provider, cloud service provider, or do I go to the public cloud? So, what we try to do is offer them a platform, the Zerto platform, that can actually take them to all those different places. We can take them there and bring them back. Yes, people use use for DR, but really that data mobility and the data flexibility really helps them stay away from the vendor lock-in as well. >> What are you hearing from customers when they talk about vendor lock in? There's very few companies out there that do a good job at being, it's like, oh, the VM ware, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, we can actually help you across the board there. >> Rob: Yeah. >> How much is lock-in a concern, and how do you as a software company stay agnostic and still fit into all of those environments? >> Yeah, the staying agnostic is really tough because some people are nicer than others, you know, to work with, and you know you try to not pick your favorites, but a the same time, we let our customers drive us to where they are going. I think that when we started to look at the bigger picture, people start out, you know, Amazon's the 800 pound gorilla in the space, everyone tries Amazon first. Maybe they didn't like or have the experience they thought they would, it was a lot more work than they thought it was going to be, so they start to look at other options. So when we started out, in 2014 we've been shipping our to Amazon, DR to Amazon part of our platform. Now, over the last year, we've added in the go-to and go-back from Azure, and we'll soon release the next iteration of that next month that will take even further among and across those different platforms. And I think to your point, it's a how can we give our customers choice? If you want to use a manage service provider, such as an IBM where they're based on Cloud foundation from VMWare, you can use that. If you want to then go from there to Amazon, our product will actually enable you to do that. And I think that's what we can do is look at our customers, and they've, luckily enough, driven us to this heterogeneous cloud environment. >> I want to get your comment on something. When people talk about compute moving to a more utility model, but it's not the way utility was where if I'm getting energy, as a consumer, from one place or another, I don't care whether it's wind, solar, or coal, nuclear, because I'm just getting it. When I look at Cloud computing, even infrastructure's a service. There's things that need to happen. When I talk to most software companies, it's yes, I'm going to support across the board, but there's special integration. There's things that I can do to make Amazon better, Azure better, Google better, and it's all a little bit different, and even with things like cooper netties, it's not homonogizing IT. The big problem we see out there is IT is a heterogeneous mess. There's never killing anything, it's all add this and add this, and now we've got a bad episode of Hoarders. >> Yes. (laughing) >> Is what we got, so I'm curious from a customer standpoint and from a product standpoint, maybe you know you could talk a little bit about that. >> I think our customers have been very clear to us that's simplicity, and I think that's what you're getting at is that simplicity is job one for us. If we're not being simple about what we do, and we're not really trying to make it all that one platform, we're not doing our job. We're doing a disservice our customers. So our Azure product looks identical to our AWS looks identical to our IBM looks identical to one of my other cloud service provider's products. Looks the same as your on Prime VMWare to VMWare or VMWare to HyperV for that matter. I think that part of it is that we've taken an approach that, exactly that. We got to be heterogeneous, but we've got to make it all look the same and be the same user experience. So, I think what we as an industry can do better is really focusing on user experience and single platform to help across these because like you said, we have a customer, he uses both AWS and Azure. And he was on of our first customers on AWS and one of our first customers using our Azure product. He said that certain Linux systems actually run better on Azure than they did on Amazon, and that surprised him. But he was able to go up and test them out, put them up there, felt them over, and do them in a test bubble, and see how well they ran, and I think to your exact point it's that was a surprise to him, and I think it's that your mileage will vary with the different clouds, and being able to go there and test on them is very important 'cause you're going to find that, like he did, he's a smaller company, it's a refabrics manufacturer, TenCate, they really focused on having that multicloud strategy because for them, they didn't want to have all their eggs in one basket either, but they found that certain applications ran better on Azure, certain ran better on AWS, so they're going to have that multicloud strategy. >> Alright, Rob, help bring us home. What brings Zerto to an event like this, kind of user groups in general, to VTUG specifically? >> Yeah, so the VTUG, we've been a long term supporter of this, I think since pretty much the founding of the founding of the company, so one of the reasons is a lot of out customers come to... So, we want to support them getting more knowledge out there, obviously we get to reach more customers and more potential customers, but at the same time, it's about the community and building that community. We look for more, in fact, we're starting to do even local user groups of our own. We've seen that the user groups have fallen off, and in particular around disaster recovery, in the IT resiliency, there's really no place to go. You had ISACA, you had different organizations for certifications, but really, that community where I can go and understand what are my peers doing, and get that group learning is so important, and that's why we've been a long term supporter of this. >> Alright, well Rob Strechay, really appreciate you helping me wrap up, put an exclamation point on what's going on here at the show as well as in the industry are all the major changes happening, virtualization and Cloud. Make sure to check out TheCUBE.net for all of our coverage. We have a huge line up of 2018 events. Feel free to reach out to the team. As always, I'm really to get on Twitter, I'm just @stu, @-S-T-U, and thank you so much of watching, I'm Stu Miniman, and you've been watching theCUBE. (techno music)