(gentle music) (background chattering) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we are running one of the largest, most important hybrid events in the technology business. We've got two live sets here in Las Vegas, along with our two studios back home. And I'm absolutely delighted to have two fantastic guests with me. I'm joined by Stephen Manley, Chief Technology Officer from Druva. Stephen, welcome. >> Thanks, great to be here. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. >> I know. >> CUBE alumni. >> Love theCUBE. >> Along with Jake Burns, Enterprise Strategist from AWS, which I think stands for Amazon Web Services. >> You are correct, thank you. >> Fantastic, so the first question to you Jake is, well, first welcome, again, enterprise strategist, what does that mean exactly? >> Yeah, so- >> What do you do? (laughing) >> We're a team of former CIOs and CTOs who have all spent most of our time as customers and have all had large-scale success digitally transforming our organizations using the AWS Cloud. And now we work for AWS and we advise and work with some of our largest customers, share what worked for us, what didn't, and help them with the beginning stages of their cloud journey. >> Fantastic. >> And, Dave. Dave, you got to ask him, in the last year how many customers have you met? >> Oh, in the past year, I'm averaging about 150 to 200 different customers per year. >> Nice. >> So in the past three years, it's about 550. >> Nice. So can you remember all their names? Or do you do a lot of, "Hey, buddy. Hey, Sport." >> Jake: It's a lot harder with the masks on. >> Yes. >> But I recognize faces better than I remember the names. >> And Stephen, tell us about Druva. >> Yeah, so Druva, we are a SaaS data protection company. We built the first data resiliency cloud. So think of this as you might have data in endpoints, your data center, in AWS, in SaaS applications, and we're really shifting the discussion from, it's not just about backing it up, it's not just about protecting it anymore. It's about how do you recover it? how do you make sure your data is always on, always available to you? And that's really where we're trying to take the conversation. Is making sure that your data is there when you need it. >> And to be clear, this isn't just about resiliency for data that's in the cloud? This is also- >> Everywhere. >> on-premises? IT as well? >> On-premises, you might have VMs, you might have NAS servers, you might have Oracle databases on-prem, again, you might have endpoints. You might have Salesforce data, all of it. We want to make sure all your data's available to you. >> So let's focus on the relationship between Druva and AWS for a minute. It's always interesting to hear about success stories. Let's talk about inhibitors. What are the things that keep the two of you up at night? What are some of the things that... You talked about former CIOs and CTOs, CTOs like Stephen, you're working with existing CIOs and CTOs in all sorts of organizations, what are the things that are preventing them from leveraging cloud as well as they could be? Stephen, start with you on that. >> Yeah, I'll say the first thing is everybody right now is terrified of Ransomware, right? I met a CIO last night and he said, "My entire agenda for 2021, and now 2022 is security, security, security." And everyone is just searching for solutions to say, "How can I make sure that my environment is secure? How can I make sure my data is secure? Especially from these pretty much ubiquitous Ransomware attacks, because until I get that taken care of, it's really hard for me to get on these cloud transformation journeys." And so a lot of the discussion we have with them is, again, Druva in combination with AWS can actually help solve that Ransomware challenge for you so that instead of thinking it as, "Do one, and then you can do the cloud transformation." Let's put those two together, right? But for me, that's the number one thing, is people are just worried about how they're going to deal with security. >> So they're worried, but Jake, isn't it true, we'll do a little perimysium here. (laughing) Tell me the truth. >> All right. >> Isn't that the case that some people still think that effectively their money is safer under their mattress than in a bank? In other words, "I feel safer with on-prem IT than I do having it in some cloud somewhere." Are we still facing that sort of cultural divide between reality and perception? >> Yeah, there's definitely an education, widespread education effort going on right now. Training and certification, which AWS has a lot of experience with and has fantastic courses I went through when I was a customer, my team went through when we were a customer, we were able to get up-skilled very quickly. That fear of the unknown really the way to solve it is through information, through knowing how the cloud works. And it was so funny, I was just having a conversation right before this with an executive team of one of our largest customers and they were talking about how their CSO was dead set against the cloud and then one day did a complete 180. And we're seeing this all the time. When they realize what the cloud is, all the compliance and controls that we have, all of the redundancy that we have, all the benefits of being in the cloud. Then it seems to be like, there's just a moment where it clicks and then people become strong advocates. So there is still a lot of work to do in that area, but we find that people get it very quickly. >> Yeah, Stephen, you've had a long and illustrious career, I say that seriously. >> Stephen: There you go. >> And so you're living that bridging the divide between the old world of on-premises IT and cloud. What are you seeing in that regard in terms of where people's emotions are? >> Oh yeah, and that transformation that Jake talks about, I see it all the time where I'll sit down with a customer and it is exactly that, "Well, I have this on an appliance and because that appliance is under my control, I feel safer." And then we start talking about what the real threats are, that, let's face it Ransomware can come through your environment and it gets in anywhere and it can spread everywhere. And internal threats, internal bad actors, they can get at your appliances. And it very quickly shifts that conversation from, "Oh my gosh, how am I going to maintain all this? I have to do security patching, and upgrades, and I've got to watch everything." And Druva a sort of sits and says, "One of the great things that we had because we're built natively on AWS, a lot of the problems I worried about back when I built appliances are gone. I don't have to worry about capacity planning because AWS always gives me more. I don't have to worry about provisioning new equipment because it just automatically scales for me. I don't have to worry about a lot of the networking challenges that I used to have to worry about because it's built into the environment." And so a lot of what we talked to them about is, by taking these sort of daily routine things off the table, you can actually focus on the higher level value. You can focus on making your environment more secure because you're not just doing the basic blocking and tackling 'cause that's being done for you. And that really gets people sort of across that chasm. >> So you talk about basic block and tackle, in the keynote today, it was mentioned that there are 475 different types of instances within AWS. That gave me a little jolt to the heart because I was thinking back to Steve Jobs saying, "We can only have three of everything." And so sometimes with choice and with flexibility comes complexity. How does Druva manage the potential complexity that exists in the AWS space? How do you take what's best from AWS and deliver it to Druva customers to achieve what they want to achieve? >> Yeah, I think for us, that's really the benefit of being a SaaS provider is, we've designed a system from the ground up for AWS. And so, whether you're talking about the different storage types, where you've got S3, you've got Glacier, you've got Glacier Deep Archive. You have all the different instance types. You have different container services, ECS, EKS, there's all these choices. And frankly, it's something that we've spent a lot of time working on. And honestly, tons of people like Jake inside of AWS willing to help us. We characterize our workload and then they walk us through what's sort of the best practices so that we can deliver an end to end solution for the customer. So that, for our customers, it's just one simple cost, right? How much data are you storing? That's it, right? All the things happening in the background we take care of. And we take care of because we have AWS helping us design and implement this the best possible way. >> And so Jake, with all of the customer conversations that you've had, I'm sure we can guess what some of the themes have been over the last year or two with the pandemic and with things related to security. What are some of the other conversations that you're having with customers that people might not expect? >> Yeah. >> Based on what's going on? >> I think the biggest thing that would be surprising to most people is that vast majority of our conversations are about culture and about people, not about technology. We've gotten to a point where, and I've said this for a number of years, there's never been a better time to move to cloud, but that just keeps being more and more true as time goes on, as the technology gets more mature and as we have more and more examples of people who are very successful doing it. But like you said earlier, there are still some people who are used to the old way of doing things. So it's really largely an education issue, it's a culture issue. It's getting people to wrap their heads around this new way of doing things. And once they see that they get very excited about it. We very rarely see people who are kind of neutral about it. The very, very beginning stages, sometimes they're fearful. When they learn what it is they get very excited and they get very enthusiastic. And my advice to customers is to get your team excited and enthusiastic as early as possible, and they'll solve all of those process and technology problems very quickly and very easily. >> Now what are you seeing in terms of any skill gaps or skill divides? We, coming from a background where we're bridging the divide between sort of the legacy world and cloud. You have IT practitioners that have been doing this stuff for a long time. >> Right. >> That either need to move into the future or not. >> Right. >> Or you need to hire new people. Are there any challenges there in terms of finding the skill sets you need versus training up existing people? >> Yeah, so this is something I talk about a lot, and you do have a choice between hiring and trying to use the people you have and get them up skilled. I strongly favor the second. For one, it's very difficult to hire for cloud skills because it's in such high demand right now, but you use that to your advantage. And by training your staff, it's one of the kind of carrots you can use to get them excited about it. "You learn this, you will be valuable in the marketplace." And when you frame it that way, they get very excited to learn. And when you combine the training with the firsthand experience and give them opportunities to use it, and this could be everyone in the organization, it doesn't have to be like your engineering team or your infrastructure team. I had people in the help desk that learned how to become cloud engineers. When you give them that opportunity, and you give them the tools to do it, and the opportunity to use it with the training, it tends to be a much easier recipe for success. And then your problem becomes retention. But like I say, you're going to have either the problem of hiring or, retention, or you're going to have the problem of having people who don't have enough skills. I'd rather have the problem of retention. And if you have that capability of up-skilling people, then you don't really need to worry about it because there's more people all the time that are becoming more and more skilled. The other thing is, it's a lot easier to overlay cloud skills on top of people who already know your organization and your applications, than bring in new people- >> Sure. >> who have cloud skills, try to retain them and then teach them how your organization works. So there's a lot of advantages to using the people that you have, and the training is a lot easier than people think. >> So who were the people in those organizations that are making the decision to go with Druva? >> [Stephen} Right. >> And who are the people in organizations who are then managing Druva environments moving forward? Do you need a PhD in Druva- (laughing) >> Stephen: Right. >> to be able to manage an environment like that? >> I'll tell you one of the things that I talk to a lot of customers about that are going through sort of that, "How do I up skill?" Is, the first thing we try to remind them is, don't just about what you did on-premises, and then say, "And we're going to do the exact same thing in cloud." Because that is usually a path to either frustration or failure. "I had a physical appliance, I'm going to run a virtual appliance." That's not usually the right answer. So a lot of times we spend time walking them through, "Here's how you think differently. Again, cloud is dynamically scalable. You want something that breaks apart those limits. Cloud gives you 475 options, which means you have purchasing power that you never had as a company that you can have so many different options in front of you." So think of these not as how you thought of your on-premises environment, but think of it as a new way of doing things. And so what we find is the people who tend to be most attracted to Druva are those customers who are saying, "I'm spending too much time, effort, and money on my data protection environment." Which basically is everybody. Nobody wakes up and says, "I wish I could spend more time and money doing backup." And then in terms of who runs it, what we find is it often gets absorbed in sort of a cloud administrator task, right? Where they're looking more broadly across the organization. It's not just about backup, it's backup, it's disaster recovery, it's security, it's compliance because they're looking at the data as opposed to the infrastructure at that point. And that's where they can really start to grow their careers and have a lot bigger impact inside their companies. >> So I can tell that you're an awesome guy to have at a party, because you'll talk about all the risks that we face. >> Absolutely! >> Talking about data center fire drills, you're literally talking about fires and drills at that point. >> You got it. >> But so what's on the horizon for Druva? What are the things that you... When you look out into the future, in the area of resiliency, what are some of the things that you're thinking about? >> There's a couple of things for me. I think one of them, again, Ransomware is everywhere. And so many people right now are still focused on just, "Can I get a clean copy? Can I get a safe copy?" That's built into Druva. So, we're beyond that. The real focus for me is, how do we streamline your recovery process? Because for so many customers, they make this assumption that a Ransomware recovery is just like a disaster recovery. And it's not, it's not as if you just had a system outage. Someone has invaded your environment and you need to make sure that the data, the environment is clean before you recover. You're going to want clean sandboxes to play around with things before you put it in, you're going to need to work with your legal team. So a lot of what we're working with is helping them orchestrate at larger scale. I think the other area that gets really interesting is this notion of autonomous, right? We talk about self-driving cars. Again, nobody wants to spend time tuning and managing their backup environment. So as Druva moves forward it's, "How can we just do this automatically for you?" Again, we're built in the cloud, everything scales automatically. You as a customer shouldn't have to be doing anything. You shouldn't be babysitting this. Let us take care of it for you. So for me, those are the really two big things. It's cybersecurity, that full end to end recovery, and it's around the autonomous protection. >> So Jake, a reality check, anything that he just said that sounds like... (laughing) sounds out of line based on your experience talking to customers in the last year? >> Jake: No, I agree with that. And I think we're touching on something that's really powerful here, because you kind of alluded to the choice that people have in AWS and we're creating new services all the time and new features all the time, right? So these are building blocks that companies can use. And there's a lot of builders at a lot of companies that get very excited to see all these building blocks, and it's about using the right tool for the job. So by giving you more choices, we're giving you more of an opportunity to find the exact fit for the workload you have. But if you just want it to work, then we have this partner of ecosystems. Druva being one of our... My personal favorites (laughing) >> Love you , Jake. >> that build on AWS, use these very resilient, very secure building blocks to build something that's turnkey for a customer. So I think it's a great marriage and it benefits customers ultimately. So it makes us happy. >> All right, well 2022 we expect this gentlemen here to see at least 300 customers to meet his goal. That's what we're expecting from you, Jake. >> All right, I'm on it. >> Thanks to all for joining us here at theCUBE's, continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021, I almost said 2022, live from Las Vegas. Stay tuned for much more from the leader in hybrid technology event programming, theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE. Presenting: Big Data Silicon Valley. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, we're here live at San Jose for Big Data SV, Big Data Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE. We're here with two great guests, Jaspreet Singh, founder and CEO of Druva, and Jake Burns, VP of Cloud Services of Live Nation Entertainment. Welcome to theCUBE, so what's going on with Cloud? Apps are out there, backup, recovery, what's going on? >> So, we went all in with AWS, and late 2015 and through 2016 we moved all of our corporate infrastructure into AWS, and I think we're a little bit unique in that situation, so in terms of our posture, we're 100% Cloud. >> John: Jaspreet, what's going on with you guys in the Cloud, because we've talked about this before, with a lot of the apps in the cloud, backup is really important. What's the key thing that you guys are doing together with Live Nation? >> Sure, so I think the notion of data is now pretty much everywhere. The data is captured, controlled in data center, now it's getting decentralized into getting into apps and ecosystems, and softwares and services deployed either at the edge or in the Cloud. As the data gets more and more decentralized, the notion of data management, bead backup, BD discovery. Anything has to get more and more centralized. And we strongly believe the epicenter of this whole data management has to move to Cloud. So, Druva is a size based provider for data management. And we work with Live Nation to predict the apps not just in the data center. But, also at the edge and also the Cloud data center. The applications deployed in the Cloud, be it Live Nation or Ticketmaster. >> And what are some of the workloads you guys are backing up? That's with Druva. >> Yeah so, it's pretty much all corporate, IT applications. You know, typical things you'd find in any IT shop really. So, you know, we have our financial systems and we have some of our smaller ticketing systems and you know, corporate websites. Things of that nature. So, it's like we have 120 applications that are running and it's just really kind of one of everything. >> We were talking before we came on camera about the history of computing and the Cloud has obviously changed the game. How would you compare the Cloud as a trend relative to operationalizing the role of data and obviously GDPR, Ransomware. These are things that now with the perimeter gone. There's worries. So now, how do you guys look at the Cloud? So Jake, I will start with you. If you can compare and contrast, where we have come from and where we are going. Role of the Cloud. Significant primary, expanding. How would you compare that? And how would you talk to someone who says Hey I'm still in the data center world? What's going on with Cloud? >> Well, yeah, it's significant and it's expanding, both. And you know, it's really transforming the way we do business. So you know just from a high level, things like shortening the time to market for applications, going from three to six months just to get a proof of concept started to today, you know, in the Cloud. Being able to innovate really by trying things trying to... we try 20 different things, decide what works, what doesn't work. And at very low cost. So, it allows us to really do things that just weren't possible before. So, also, we we move more quickly because, you know, we're not afraid of making mistakes. If we provision infrastructure and we don't get it right the first time, we just change it. You know, that's something that we would just never be able to do previously in the data center. So to answer your question, everything is different. >> And as a service model's been kind of key. Is the consumption on your end different like I mean radically different? Like give an example of like how much time would be saved or taken to use other the traditional approaches. >> Oh for sure. You know, in the role of IT has completely changed because you know, instead of worrying about nuts and bolts and servers and storage arrays and data centers. You know, we could really focus on the things that are important to the business. You know, those things delivering results for the business. So, bringing value, bringing applications online and trying things that are going to help you know, us do business rather than focusing on all the minutiae. All that stuff's now been outsourced to Cloud providers. So, really, we kind of have a similar head count and staff. But, we are focused on things that bring value rather than things that are just kind of frivolous. >> Jaspreet, you guys have been very successful startup growing rapidly. The Cloud been a good friend that trend is your friend with the Cloud. >> What's different operationally that you guys are tapping into? What's that tail wind for Druva that's making you guys successful? And is it the ease of use? Is it the ease of consumption? Is it the tech? What's the secret to success with Druva? >> Sure, so, we believe cloud is a very big business transformation trend more than a technology trend. It's how you consumer service with a fixed SLA, with a fixed service agreement across the globe. So, it's ease of consumption. It's simplicity of views. It's orchestration. It's cost control. All those things. So, our promise to our customers is the complexity of data management, backups, archives, data production, which is a risk mitigation project. You know, can be completely abstracted by a simple service. For example, you know, Live Nation consumers, consumer drove a service through Amazon Marketplace. So, think about consuming a critical service like data management through simplicity of marketplace, pay as you go, as you consume the service. Across the globe. In the US, in Australia, and Europe. And also, helps the vendors like us to innovate better. Because we have a control environment to understand how different customers are using the service and be able to orchestrate better security pusher, better threat prevention, better cost control. DevOps. So, it improves the pusher of the service being offered and helps the customer consumer. >> You both are industry veterans by today's standards unless you're like 24 doing some of the cryptocurrency stuff that, you know, doesn't know the old IT baggage. How would you guys view the multi-Cloud conversation? Because we hear that all the time. Multi-Cloud has come up so many times. What does it mean? Jake, what does multi-Cloud actually mean? Is it the same workload across multiple Clouds? Is it the fact that there is multiple Clouds? Certainly, there will be multiple Clouds? But, so, help us digest what that even means these days. >> Yeah, that's a great question and it's a really interesting topic. Multi-Cloud is one of those things where, you know, there's so many benefits to using more than one Cloud provider. But, there are also a lot of pitfalls. So, people really underestimate the difference in the technology and the complexity of managing the technology when you change Cloud providers. I'm talking primarily about infrastructure service providers like Amazon web services. So, you know, I think there's a lot of good reasons to be multi-Cloud to get the best features out of different providers, to not have, you know, the risk of having all your data in one place with one vendor. But, you know, it needs to be done in such a way where you don't take that hit in overhead and complexity and you know, I think that's kind of a prohibitive barrier for most enterprises. >> And what are the big pitfalls that you see? Is it mainly underestimating the stack complexity between them or is it more of just operational questions? I mean what is the pitfalls that you've observed? >> Yeah, so, moving from like a typical IT data center environment to public Cloud provider like AWS. You're essentially asking all your technical staff to start speaking in a new language. Now if you were to introduce a second Cloud provider to that environment, now you're asking them to learn a third language as well. And that's a lot to ask. So, you really have two scenarios where you can make that work today without using a third party. And that's ask all of your staff to know both and that's just not feasible. Or have two tech teams. One for each Cloud platform. That's really not something businesses want to do. So, I think the real answer is to rely on a third party that can come in and abstract one of those Cloud complexities Well, one of those Cloud providers out. So, you don't have to directly manage it. And in that way, you can get the benefit of being multi-Cloud, that data protection of being multi-Cloud. But, not have to introduce that complexity to your environment. >> To provide some abstraction layer. Some sort of software approach. >> Yeah, like for example, if you have your primary systems in AWS, and you use a software like Druva Phoenix to backup your data and you put that data into a second Cloud provider. You don't have to an account with that second Cloud provider. You don't have to have the risk of associating without a complexity associated without that is I think is a very >> And that's where you're looking for differentiation. We look at venues, say hey don't make me work harder. >> Right. >> And add new staff. Solve the problem. >> Yeah, it's all about solving problems right? And that's why we're doing this. >> So, Druva talk about this thing. Because we talked about it earlier about To me we could be oh we're on Azure. Well, they have Office 365 of course they're going to have Microsoft. A lot of people have a lot going on and AWS. So, maybe we're not there at the world where you can actually use provision across Clouds, the same workload, It would be nice to have that someday if it was seamless. But, I think that's might be the nirvana. But at the end of the day, an enterprise might have Office 365 and some Azure. But, I got some mostly Amazon over here I'm doing a lot of development on and doing a DevOps, and I'm on-prim. How do you talk to that? Because that's like you got to backup Office 365, you got to do the on-prim thing, you got to do the Amazon thing. How do you guys solve that problem? What's the conversation? >> Absolutely. I think over time we believe best of breed will win. So, people will deploy different type of cloud for different workloads. Pete's has hosted IaaS or platform like PaaS. When they do that, when they host multiple services, softwares to deploy services. I think its hard to control where the data will go. What we can orchestrate or anybody can orchestrate is the centralizing the data management part of it. So, Druva has the best pusher, has the best coverage across multiple heterogeneous Cloud breed. You know. Services like Office 365, Box, or Saleforce or B platforms like S3 or Dynono DB through our product called Apollo or hosted platforms like what Live Nation is using through our Phoenix product line. So getting the breadth of coverage, consistency of policies on a single platform is what will make enterprises adopt what's best out there without worrying about how you build abstraction for data management. >> Jake, what's the biggest thing you see people who are moving to the Cloud for the first time? What are they struggling with? Is it the idea that there's no perimeter? Is it staff training? I mean what are some of the as people move from Test Dev and or start to put in production the Cloud? What are some of the critical things they should think about? >> Yeah, there are so many of them. But first, really, its just getting buy in, you know, from your technical staff because, you know, in an enterprise environment you bring in a Cloud provider it's very easily framed to hold as if we're just being outsourced right? So, I think getting past that barrier first and really getting through to folks and letting them know that really this is good for you. This is not bad for you. You're going to be learning a new skill, very valuable skill, and you're going to be more effective at your job. So, I think that's the first thing. After that, once you start moving to the Cloud, then, the thing that becomes apparent very quickly is cost control. So, you know, the thing with public Cloud is you know, before you had this really kind of narrow range of what IT could cost. Now with the traditional data center, now we have this huge range. And yes, it can be cheaper than it was before. But, it can also be far more expensive than it was before. >> So, service is sprawled or just not paying attention? Both? >> Well, you essentially you're giving your engineers a blank check. So, you need to have some governance and, you know, you really need to think about things that you didn't have to think about before. You're paying for consumption. So, you really have to watch your consumption. >> So, take me thorough the mental model of D duplication in the Cloud. Because I'm trying to like visualize it or grok it a little bit. Okay, so, the Cloud is out there, data's everywhere. And do I move the compute to the data? How does the backup and recovery and data management work? And does D Doup change with Cloud? Because some people think I got my D Doup already and I'm on premise. I've been doing these old solutions. How does D Doup specifically change in the Cloud or does it? >> I know scale changes. You're looking at, you know, the best D Doup systems, if you look historically, you know, were 100 terabyte, 200 terabyte, Dedup indexes, data domain. The scale changes, you know, customers expect massive scale in Cloud. Our largest customer had 10 perabyte in a single Dedup index. It's 100x scale difference compared to what traditional systems could do. Number two, you could create a quality of service which is not really bound by a fixed, you know, algorithm like variable lent or whatever. So, you can optimize a Dedup very clearly for the right workload. The right Dedup for the right workload. So, you may Dedup off of 365 differently than your VMware instances, compared to your Oracle databases or your Endpoint workload. So, it helps you that as a service business model helps you create a custom, tailored solution for the right data. And bring the scale. We don't have the complexity of scale. But, to get the benefit of scale. All, you know, simply managing the cloud. >> Jake, what's it like working with Druve? What's the benefit that they bring to you guys? >> Yeah, so, specifically around backups for our enterprise systems, you know, that's a difficult challenge to solve natively in the Cloud. Especially if you're going to be limited to using Cloud native tools. So, it's really it's a really perfect use case for a third party provider. You know, people don't think about this much but in the old days, in the data center, you know, our backups went offsite into a vault. They were on tapes. It was very difficult for us to lose those or for them to be erased accidentally or even intentionally. Once you go into the Cloud, especially if you're all in with the Cloud, like we are. Everything is easier. And so, accidents are easier also. You know, deleting your data is easier. So, you know, what we really want and what a lot of enterprises want. >> And security too is a potential >> Absolutely, yeah. And so, what we want is we want to get some of that benefit, you know, back that we had from that inefficiency that we had beforehand. We love all the benefits of the Cloud. But, we want to have our data protected also. So, this is a great role for a company like Druva to come in and offer a product like Phoenix and say, you know, we're going to handle we're going to handle your backups for you essentially. So, you're going to put it in a safe place. We're going to secure it for you. And we're going to make sure it's secure for you. And doing it software is a service like Druva does with Phoenix. I think is the absolute right way to go. It's exactly what you need. >> Well, congratulations Jake Burns, Vice President in Cloud services. >> Thank you. >> At Live Nation entertainment. Jaspreet Singh, CEO of Druva, great to have you on. Congratulations on your success. >> Thank you. >> Inside the tornado called Cloud computing. A lot more stuff coming. More CUBE coverage coming up after this short break. Be right back. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this special Cube conversation with a practitioner, a real-world enterprise journey to the Cloud. I'm here with Jake Burns, who's the Vice President of Cloud Services at Live Nation Entertainment, in from L.A. Jake, thanks for coming in to our Marlborough Studio, appreciate you having in. >> I'm glad to be here. >> So tell me about your role. >> So, I'm head of cloud services for Live Nation, and what that means is, me and my team are in charge of infrastructure for IT, including cloud infrastructure, as well as the move to the cloud, which we completed early 2017, enterprise messaging, which includes e-corporate email, DNS, database services, and storage management. >> So, recent journey. How did it start? Was it a top-down push, did you go to management and say, "Hey, we got to do this," describe that dynamic. >> Yeah, so it started off as kind of a bottom-up push. >> Dave: Really? >> For a number of years I've been really wanting to get us involved in public cloud, at least in some level. But, it really didn't hit critical mass until our CEO, late 2015, had a mandate that we're going to move 100% to cloud, and modernize all of IT. And that's when we really hit the ground running. >> Why did, from a bottom-up standpoint, why did you guys want to do that? Was it because cloud's cool, that's where all the action is, the developers want to be there, or was it something else? >> We spent a lot of time managing infrastructure and data centers, and it's just not part of our core business. We wanted to focus more on satisfying the business, and providing value to the business. And, our time could be better spent really helping solve their problems, rather than deal with hardware and systems. Another thing is just business agility in general. If we want to stand up a new system, the typical lifecycle could be three to six months, just to get an application up and running. With cloud, we can do that in days, weeks, worst case. So, being able to respond quickly to business needs is something that's really important to us, and we saw with public cloud that we could do that a lot more efficiently. >> And when you think about the early cloud days, the rhetoric was all about agility, and it actually, that really was the main business benefit. You guys of course saved a lot of money too, and I want to get into that, but how did you get started? It must have been, kind of a little nervous, like the first time you jumped off a high cliff or something. Right, because you have an existing business to run, and yet you're going to migrate everything. Migrate's like this evil word, so how did you get started? >> For us, we realized very early on that this was a big technology change for us, and it was going to require new skills that we didn't have, so the first thing we did, was we really just got training across the board. We brought trainers from AWS to our offices, and we did every training program that they offered. Got the certifications. And made sure that we really understood what we were dealing with before we got started. So that was really step number one. >> And how did that go? Were they really supportive? Everybody says AWS, really not hands-on, they just send me an email. How did that go? >> In the beginning, there's resistance. Just like all projects like this, people are concerned they're going to lose their jobs. >> Dave: Resistance from your guys. >> Oh, yeah, yeah- >> Not the AWS people, they were- >> Oh, no, of course, right. No no, our guys, before they really understand the situation, it looks like we're being outsourced. We're moving all of our infrastructure. This is our job. We're managing hardware, we're managing servers, we're managing data centers, and all that stuff's going to go away, so what are we going to do, right? So, really, even before the training, the priority for me was to get people to understand that this is not something that's a danger for your career. Quite the contrary. This is going to make you more valuable. You're going to get trained on this technology. You're going to get real world experience, moving a Fortune 500 company to the cloud, and at the end of this, someone is going to need to maintain it. So not only will you have job security, but you're probably not going to care about job security at the end of this, because you're going to be so valuable in the marketplace. >> So, we're all in sales, aren't we? So you had to sell them a little bit on the concept, but then they responded positively, it sounds like. >> Yeah, and part of that is because it's the truth. I was telling them the truth, so it was an easy sell. But it's a very important component of any cloud migration project like this. If you don't have support from your people, it's not going to succeed. >> Okay, so you get through the training. Your guys are onboard, you have alignment there, and then take us through sort of the journey. How long did it take, what were some of the challenges that you faced? >> The target was 12 months to move everything, and we're talking about 668 servers, 118 applications, including Oracle, SAP, some really things that are not trivial to move to the cloud. We were able to move 90% of everything in 12 months, and then the long tail took an additional five months, so that's 17 months in total to move everything. >> And that long tail, was that the Oracle apps? >> Yeah, so our strategy was to move the easy stuff first, as we learned, because we learned along the way. We really didn't know what we were doing when we started. By the end of the project, we knew exactly how to do the project. >> Easy stuff like messaging? >> Like single server applications that are running supported software, where we have a business stakeholder that's cooperative. >> Dave: Web stuff? >> Yeah, like internal stuff, like our monitoring systems, things that we completely control. >> Dave: Things that were under the control of IT, didn't involve a lot of politics, and ... >> Jake: Exactly. >> Learn there, okay. >> Right, so the idea was, get real world experience moving live production systems on the easy stuff, and it kind of builds up our skillset, but at the same time it builds forward momentum, which is critical for a project like this. There's a lot of people that are just waiting for the first failure to kind of put a stop to the whole thing, right? There's a lot of skepticism as to whether this can even be accomplished or not. So, getting, I truly believe a key component for a project like this is to get momentum on your side early on, and the way you do that is by attacking the easy problems first, and then get progressively more difficult as you go along. And so at the end, you end up with the most difficult applications to move, but at that point, you have full buy in from everyone because you've been successful so far, and you and your team are practiced and accomplished, and have the skillsets necessary through moving all the more easy stuff before that. >> Okay, and just a quick aside, I have to ask. So, Oracle is kind of using licensing as a weapon, especially, there's this, I call it urinary Olympics, sorry, with Oracle and AWS. You may not have visibility on it, if you don't we can move on, but was that a concern? >> Absolutely, yeah. So this was a major problem that we've had to deal with, and Oracle doesn't make it easy. They don't necessarily want their customers moving to AWS. So, that was part of the challenge. Part of the challenge was, how do we move this without having to pay more in licensing? And what it really comes down to, is you have to make your Oracle databases run more efficiently in AWS, in order to lower the core count, which is what the licensing is based on, in order to keep your costs neutral, because Oracle will charge you double for your database, per processor, in the cloud in AWS than they will on prem. So, really the only way around that, besides negotiating with Oracle if you're able to do that, if you're not able to do that, then your only option is to make it run twice as efficiently from a processor standpoint. >> Thank you for sharing that with our audience. We've written a lot about ways to reduce your core count. Ways to make IO optimized, and if you can do that, you can actually save a lot of money. Maybe we'll have you back on at Reinvent, and we can talk more about that. But so, back to your story here. You got a huge budget to do this, right? Big bag of money to say, go move to AWS? >> Unfortunately, we didn't have that luxury. So, we run very lean. So we had essentially a flat budget, 2016, when we did the majority of these moves. So we just had to find a way to do it without spending money. And so, it was a bit of a juggling act. We were decommissioning systems in the data center, and canceling support contracts, so we were able to kind of use some of that money and repurpose some of that money for moving to AWS, but we really didn't have a budget for hiring consultants, or to buy expensive software, or anything like that. So, what we had to do was, basically become the consultants, to do the cloud migration. And so, that's where that training comes into play. So by training the team, and getting them up to speed, and essentially creating cloud engineers, we were able to be internal consultants to the business, perform the move internally at a very low cost. >> All within that sort of 12/17 month timeframe, you were able to affect that skills transition. >> Right, so we were simultaneously maintaining the old infrastructure, moving the infrastructure to AWS, and maintaining the infrastructure in AWS. So there were a lot of long hours. >> I'll bet. That's weekends. >> But, we were enthusiastic about doing it. Everyone was very excited once we got going, and so people were willing to do it. You talk about the people challenges. I think we've addressed that a little bit anyway. What were some of the other challenges? You got a reasonably sized application portfolio, you got data, you got your backup systems. What were some of the challenges that you faced, and how did you address them? >> Yeah, so that's a great question. One thing that people don't realize is that AWS isn't necessarily designed for enterprise applications. It's getting a lot better. But, there are some things where it just doesn't fit automatically. So, one area where that's especially true is with storage. AWS has a fantastic storage offering, especially with S3, their object storage. But unfortunately, most enterprise applications, they can't utilize. Legacy enterprise applications won't utilize object stores, they want block storage. >> They don't want get put, they want block storage, okay. >> Yeah exactly. And then the block storage in AWS is different than the block storage than what you're used to in the data center, typically. So, kind of allowing these applications, like Oracle, to work on AWS's block storage can be a challenge. It can be expensive, and there can be some risk there, just because of the way that it works. So, this is where using a third party makes sense. This is one of the rare circumstances where I think using a third party makes sense. We found a company called Actifio that does virtual storage in AWS, and one of the great things about this product is it essentially mimics the way that the old storage worked in our old environment, in our data center. So the application continued to function. So we're able to take snapshots, we're able to clone environments, we're able to do all of these things that we are not able to do in AWS natively, with the Actifio product. And it saved us a lot of money, and allowed us to avoid a lot of having to change our workflows to get around some of the delays with doing snapshots and stuff natively. >> And is your strategy to have this sort of hybrid approach between on prem and public cloud, or multiple public clouds? Is that part of the strategy, and how does this capability fit into that? >> Yeah, it's a great question. Our initial strategy was 100% going all in with AWS, and officially that's still our strategy. I am a proponent of multi-cloud in certain circumstances. For example, disaster recovery and backups, I think it makes sense, if your 100% in the cloud, to have a second cloud provider to hold your backup data, just so you don't have everything in one place. I think, for the same reason, hybrid cloud makes a lot of sense. And I think also hybrid cloud makes a lot of sense, just because not all applications are a good fit for a public cloud, and Oracle, SAP, would be two of those examples. Now we were forced to move everything to AWS, and it was a fun challenge, and we were able to accomplish that. But doing it over again, if we had the option of doing hybrid cloud, there may be a couple applications that I would say keep it on prem, because it just works better that way. >> And, can you double click on the storage virtualization capability that you talked about. Kind of how does that work, and how do you have to ... Were there any kind of things that you had to do to prepare for that? Any sort of out of scope expectations that customers should be aware of? >> With Actifio it's a pretty turnkey solution. So, there's a little bit of a learning curve, but there's a learning curve with using the AWS native tools as well. So I would say probably less of a learning curve if you use a product like Actifio, because it's more familiar to the people that are already working on these systems. So if you have existing staff, and they're used to doing things in the data center, and they're used to doing things with traditional enterprise storage, the Actifio tools is going to look a bit more familiar than the AWS tools. So, there's a learning curve either way, but I would say look at a product like Actifio if you're an enterprise trying to do this. >> So what was the business impact of using Actifio? Then I want to ask you about the whole move to AWS. Did it speed the time to deployment for AWS? Did it help you cut cost? What was the business impact? >> Unfortunately, we didn't become aware of this product until after we had moved. So, we're in the process now of replacing some of our storage devices with virtual storage with Actifio. But I wish we had found this product sooner. I advise anyone who's new at this, anyone who's doing a migration, to leverage something like this to actually move their data, because it's a much more efficient way to do it. So, if I could go back in time, I would do that. >> What would have been the business impact? Is this time and money? >> Yeah, time and money, for sure. So, the moving of the data is one of the biggest challenges that you're going to have moving to cloud. We had a petabyte of data that we had to move, and that's no small task to get that moved in 12 months. So, any tool that you can use that can make that more efficient, is going to shorten the amount of time you're going to be doing the migration. And, consequently, shorten the amount of money that you spend doing the migration. Also it would have saved us a lot of time, because now we're going back and having to change things, and put things under Actifio. If we would have done it like that to begin with, we wouldn't have to spend that effort after the fact. >> Why does Actifio make it more efficient? Is it data reduction? Is it automation? >> So essentially the biggest benefit is that it allows you to not have duplicates of your data. So, if you have a dozen or so copies of your database, for different types of environments, test, UAT, dev, etc., and you're duplicating those, and storing each one of those separately, you're going to pay for each one of those separately, and have to manage each one of those separately. If you're able to use virtual storage, then you really have one copy of the data, or however many copies of data you really need to be protected, and the rest of those can be virtual copies. And those don't cost you anything from a storage point of view. The other benefit is, if you want to clone an environment, or copy an environment, or take a snapshot of an environment, it can happen instantaneously, rather than wait for the hours or days that it would take to copy a large dataset. >> So it becomes the single point of control, with a catalog, and give you visibility over all your data, and your copies, and allows you to manage that, is that correct? >> Yeah, and the management becomes a lot easier, because you have software that's keeping track of your snapshots, and keeping track of all your copies of data, rather than try to track that all manually. >> Okay. Let's bring it back to the big AWS picture. So you move to the cloud. What was the business impact of that? You mentioned agility. Did you save money? How much? Maybe give us some visibility on that. >> Because we're so cost conscious, saving money was a priority. I don't think it's necessarily something to expect, especially initially, if you're an enterprise moving to the cloud. Cost shouldn't be the driver. Agility should be the driver. But, in our case, we were able to achieve 18% reduction in TCO, on year one. And, that's just because we were just very focused on cost. We're very cost sensitive, and it's very important for us to be efficient, and to not spend money unnecessarily. I know that's a priority for everyone, but it's a top priority for us. And so, my point is it can be done. You can move to the cloud. You can move 100% to public cloud if you're an enterprise, and you could make it cost neutral, or even favorable. It is possible. >> So you hear a lot of stuff in the press about how the cloud is very expensive. You could actually do it cheaper on prem. Based on your experience, you don't buy that. >> Well, I wouldn't say that's false. You can, in a lot of circumstances, do it cheaper on prem. It really depends on the workload. So I mentioned earlier that I think hybrid is probably the right approach for most people. So just because we're saving money by going 100% cloud, doesn't mean we wouldn't save more money if we went hybrid cloud, and put the more expensive things that run in cloud, on prem. So, because it's pay for what you use, the things that you very heavily utilize, those are good candidates to keep on prem. The things that are more bursty, those are the things that are better candidates to put in the cloud. The easiest things, candidates to put in the cloud, are disaster recovery and backups, those are no-brainers. DR because that's only something you need to scale up when you use it. So anything that you need to scale up when you use it, or anything that scales up and down, those are the best candidates for cloud. >> Okay, now I understand you're kind of an expert at cutting the AWS utility bill. Maybe you could give us some advice on how to do that, and how'd you learn how to do that? >> Yeah, so that's kind of my area of focus now, is now that we're in the cloud, getting those costs reduced as much as possible. So, there's a lot of ways to do this, but I like to keep it simple, and attack the things that have the biggest impact first. So, people like fancy solutions, but it's really simple. The biggest thing you can do is delete things you're not using. You're paying for consumption, so find things that are not being used, and simply delete them. After that, then find things that are oversized, and right-size them. And then, another big thing is, in the cloud, you have such an easy access to spin things up. To take snapshots of data, to copy data, and it's the classic problem in IT, where everyone requests what they want, and they never tell you when they're done with it. So, it needs to be a full-time effort, to be actively looking for resources that are unused. Snapshots that are no longer needed, volumes that are no longer needed, instances that are no longer needed, and be cleaning those things up on a continuous basis. I find that that's a large percentage of what my team does now, and that's one of the things that keeps our costs in line. >> That's interesting. We always talk here about GRS, getting rid of stuff. Not only did you get rid of a bunch of stuff when you moved in the cloud, you said 600 servers, you got rid of unused capacity, you got rid of a bunch of data, which must have made your general counsel happy, but you're now actively continuing to get rid of stuff. Like you said, it's volumes, it's snaps, and so the things, now you're in the cloud, that GRS mentality is sort of ingrained. >> It has to be. I think that anyone who's in the cloud for some time is going to realize this. You're going to have inflation of costs, simply by doing nothing. So, just to keep your cost neutral, you're going to have to be deleting things on a continuous basis. Now if you want your costs to go down, that's even more difficult. You have to be more aggressive with it. But, just as it's easier to spin things up in the cloud, the good news is it's easier to keep track of what you have, and find things that can be deleted in the cloud, because you don't have to go in the data center and track things down. Everything is virtual. It all can be automated. It's all done, it can be scripted. So, everything's easier. Spinning things up's easier. Cleaning things up is easier, you just have to make it a priority, and make sure it gets done. >> So, some of the financial people in our audience might be listening and saying, "Eh, you know, okay, year one. Roughly 20% savings. It's not that exciting." But we haven't quantified the sort of other business impacts in terms of agility, and that's a harder thing to quantify, but it's early days for you still. Do you expect to get on that S curve, and really start to see a major business impact, beyond that 17, 18%? >> That's a great question. That 18% reduction in TCO, that's just infrastructure costs, so that's not taking into account things like how long does it take for us to spin up an application, and what does that cost the business, that delay? We're not taking that into account. How about the opportunity cost of, we want to try something, but it's too expensive because we've got to buy servers, and we got to hire people to build the application, and install the operating system, all that kind of stuff. Those opportunity costs, they're not captured either. Now, we can try as many things as we want, very inexpensively, and only keep the things that work. So I think there's a lot of hidden cost savings, a lot of hidden value that's very difficult to capture. But, we certainly have those benefits, even if we're not articulating it, and counting it very well, the business feels it, and it's certainly a superior level of service. >> Well it's kind of like when we first got email. Nobody really quantified it, but the productivity impact was enormous. Or the first local area network that you ever installed, and the collaboration that that brought, it's one of those things that's, it's probably telephone numbers, but it's hard to quantify, right? You said the business people see it. Do the finance people see it as well, and are they supportive of this? >> Yeah, it takes a while I think for the non-technical teams to catch up, and really get to where we're at in terms of an understanding of what we're dealing with at this point. So, they're starting to see it. But, all the financial models have to change. All the budgeting needs to change. There's a lot of things that, beyond IT, this kind of transformation affects, and those processes have to change, and those processes generally change more slowly. So procurement needs to change, finance needs to change, security needs to change. Everything really, it's a new world. And once they catch up and kind of really grasp what we're dealing with, I think the whole business is going to be transformed. >> So two last questions. You talked about maybe things you'd do differently. Maybe some advice. But let's focus clearly on advice to your colleagues that are trying to do something similar, get to the cloud, what would you tell them? >> Invest in your people. Focus on cost savings day one. Don't look at doing that after the fact. And don't get too caught up in all the fancy methodologies, and fancy tools. Everybody's going to try to sell you something. Everybody's going to try to tell you they have the best way to do it. But, in general, those things are just going to add complexity to your project. I say keep it simple, keep it lean. Leverage your own people. Because at the end of the day, somebody's going to have to support this environment as well, and if you're relying too much on outside help, then they're not going to be there when it's all said and done. So, consider the endgame. Consider the end state, and how you're going to support that, because it's one thing to be successful migrating to the cloud, but then you have a whole new set of challenges after that. And you're going to have to live with that moving forward. And, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's a great thing. But it's something different, and you're going to have to be prepared for that. >> Own it. >> Jake: Own it. >> Yeah, okay. And then, last question, just sort of what's next for you guys? You're just sort of getting started here. You've made a tremendous amount of progress in a year and a half. What's next? Where do you want to take this thing? >> Like I said, right now we're really focused on cost optimization. I think that, like you alluded to earlier, the cloud could be very expensive. The range of how much it can cost is, it's amazing, right? So, this is uncharted territory. We don't know how expensive it should be, how cheap it should be. We just now that we can affect that, to a large degree. So I'm interested in seeing to what degree we can affect that, and I want to see how efficient we can make this. 18% favorable TCO is one thing. Let's see if we can get 30% or 40%. So, really I'm focused on optimizing for cost, security, which is a whole new world in the cloud, and going from there. >> Jake Burns, awesome having you on. Thanks very much for your insights. >> Jake: My pleasure. >> Really appreciate your time. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the Silicon ANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this Cube conversation, eliminating barriers to enterprise multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is all the rage, all the buzz, it appears to be here and now David Chang is here, he's the Senior Vice President of Products and Co-Founder of Actifio and AppIQ, welcome back to The Cube, good to see you again. >> It's a pleasure to be here, thank you very much. >> You are very welcome, so eight years ago, you guys started this journey, the cloud was kind of new a little experimental, maybe put some stuff in the cloud and see what happens and then boom, all of a sudden it is become mainstream, your thoughts. >> Yeah it's been quite of a journey, I think when we initially started, we were focused around, all about making enterprise as efficient as possible, right. In the old traditional enterprise IT model, that resulted in net savings in terms of reduction to hardware, software, and so on and so forth. But in the cloud, now you're in a completely brand new category in terms of you're being charged on a per use basis. So all the technology we build out over the years just has a direct correlation to this new model of consumption that the cloud is enabling everybody to do. >> So if you think about when you started, platforms were really all mostly on prim, the definition of those platforms has really changed, it's sort of shifted from whether it's a server manufacturer or a storage type or maybe a networking type to the big cloud players, Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure, Oracle's got a cloud, IBM's got a cloud, you see the China clouds emerge. How were you able, well first of all is that sort of an accurate view? That you guys had this sort of platform agnostic approach to your business and that platform has shifted. >> No that's absolutely true, I think we kind of walked into this by accident, because of some of the architectural advantages we kind of built into our infrastructure from the beginning. But, over the last eight years or so, our customer initially asked us how could we, Actifio, help them to enable them to go from a traditional IT to a private cloud type implementation. So we had a lot of traction in terms of the MSP's and private cloud implementations and that's where I would say four, five years ago, even now I would say we had a lot of traction and a lot of customers that came to Actifio for us to help them in that endeavor. But within the last four or five years we definitely see an acceleration of extending that infrastructure as a service platform from on-premise traditional IT to private cloud infrastructure now into the public cloud. So all the capability we kind of built, really applied very nicely to this new platform agnostic model regardless of where you want to go. >> Can we dig into that capability a little bit? What is it about your architecture, kind of your secret sauce, that makes you multi-lingual and maybe in this case, allows you to go from a world that is largely on prim, or managed hosted services, to one that's massive public cloud scale? >> If you think about it, the only thing that's constant as you move your application from IT, to private cloud, to public cloud, is the application, right. So from the beginning we had this very tight application focus, everything we do is from an application perspective. That really enabled us to play nicely, in terms of these platform shifts, from these one location to another, and fundamentally decouple the application and its data from the infrastructure. So now this normalization of this infrastructure really enabled our customer to make that switch very easily. >> So talk more about that, how do you do that, is it software code, is it architecture, give us some understanding. >> I think it's the approach that we take in terms of supporting of a lot of these data management and copy data functions. And it's really looking at the application data set as the entity that we want to focus on. And focusing on enabling the application as the entity that we add value. So what I mean by that is, if you look at a traditional Oracle database, say if you want to move that from a traditional, let's say an AIX type of environment into a Linux environment for your private infrastructure, so we really fundamentally decouple that application and enable you to very quickly migrate that information from that AIX infrastructure into a Linux environment. Then once that's done, our capability in terms, it's all software if you really, really enable us to kind of have a very efficient incremental tap to that database, and then move that information incrementally into the cloud. And once you're into the cloud, you can now make multiple virtual copies if you will, all consuming sort of the same amount of resources. So you have a drastic reduction in the capacity needed to do that. >> So it's your ability to essentially jailbreak the data from the siloed infrastructure, is that right? >> That's right, and I think four, five years ago we realized that cloud, the public cloud would be an infrastructure that we need to support in depth. So the engineering group has been looking at, for an application consumed cloud natively you have to understand a lot of new technology and new terminologies and new capability. Things like object storage, for example, is not something that a traditional application can consume readily, if you will, without going back and rewriting a lot of those applications. With Actifio, we enable our customers to not having to go back and retro-fit and rewrite these applications but be able to consume these new cloud technologies natively, so they can reap the value immediately versus having to go back and retro-fit their applications. >> One of the practitioners that we had on, of course very recently, Jake Burns was saying that even in AWS, the block storage really isn't kind of enterprise ready, friendly. I want to ask you a question about, if you think about the on-prim, you know block storage players that you guys eight years ago understood that you had to be compatible with, I'll use that term. Whether it was EMC, or Netapp, or IBM, or HP or whatever it was, were those block storage sort of interfaces, the entries and the exits all very similar and is it harder in the cloud or is it actually easier in the cloud, 'cause it's all sort of the API driven economy? I wonder if you could give us some insight there? >> I would say the foundation layer is much easier on the cloud. So as Jake was mentioning before, you don't have to order the hardware, hardware gets here, so the agility of this picture improves drastically when you move to the cloud. However, some of the cons of that, is a lot of the advanced features that you used to get on premise with these enterprise infrastructures, are no longer available on the public infrastructure. So in many ways, many of our customers, as they move into the cloud, a lot of the IT operational staff have to deal with a reduction in terms of capabilities or availability or time it takes to make that data, in terms of cloning and so on and so forth. So that's sort of, I think the challenges many of our customer are facing and that's where Actifio can help you with. >> Can we talk about this notion of rewriting apps, because in IT, if you have to rewrite the app, you got to freeze the code, if you freeze the code then you're enduring all this risk, you know if you have to freeze the code for N number of months, that's N number of months you can't keep up with your competition. So am I correct that your customers are not having to rewrite their apps, because of your ability to isolate sort of the data model? >> That's right >> And maybe you could talk about that a little bit and what impact it's had on your customer base. >> Yeah as you know, in the cloud, the economic is per use, and in the cloud the type of capacity you have to deal with tend to be in multiple categories, you have the EBS of the world which is relatively expensive compared with the object storage. So if you take just lift and ship, you enterprise the application model into the cloud where a lot, I would say most of your application data, is stored EBS, then you're not really fully utilizing the economics of the cloud. So how do you make effective use, in terms of minimizing the elastic block service on Amazon, versus the object storage capability that you have available. That is I think a difficult topic for a lot of the traditional enterprise applications doing the lift and ship, where you have to essentially go back and rewrite those applications to take advantage of the cloud native capability for you to really drive that availability and cost to the new level that you were expecting. >> So I've been in this storage business a long time, and I'm somewhat embarrassed to ask this question, but I have an architect here, a technologist, I'll ask you. When you think about block storage in the cloud, an EBS in particular, that was not Amazon's first announcement, did they announce that because they realized that they need to accommodate, you know block storage, to get more people from the enterprise or is there something specific about block storage that is here to stay forever? Another way of asking that is, can we run these applications on object storage? Is that the direction, thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I think it's going to be a hybrid model, right. So what Actifio really enables our customer to do, is not really running your production on object storage, but a lot of the secondary sort of data cloning, data analytics, and DR type of use case, you can shift, I would say, reduce your usage of EBS block storage to object storage. So we think that's the low hanging fruit that enable our customer to move to the cloud faster, cheaper, and with better capabilities. I think longer term as our customers start to develop applications that's native to the cloud, it's probably more efficient for you to consume some of these cloud native capability directly, but we're talking about a lot of time and resources that not all organizations will be able to afford to a high percentage of their applications moving to-- >> So new applications might be rewritten to take advantage of object storage and what about things like performance or latency and recovery et cetera, do you see the block storage world being able to get there? To actually compete effectively with, or the object to compete effectively with block or is that? >> We believe so, because if you look at object storage it's now proven over the last, I would say six, seven years, it's the most scalable storage that's available to the industry period, right. That scalability also enable you to reduce any hot spots that you may have from a performance perspective. So what Actifio's engineering group has done, is really leverage that capability, the ability for you to fully utilize the full bandwidth of that entire object storage, and having multi-parallel streams of access into that. So the way we look at object storage, it's just another access protocol, if you think about it, you have block storage, you have iSCSI, Fibre Channel, you have NFS access protocols. Object is simply another protocol that enables you to have persistent storage. And what Actifio has done is really leverage the performance and scalability characteristic of this object storage to have our customers, in terms of realizing value from day one. >> Is it true to your DNA, you don't really care whatever the customer chooses you're going to support it? If the whole world goes object, great no problem. If the world stays mixed. >> I think for the foreseeable future, it's going to be a mix environment, but as Jake was mentioning before, it's all about optimization in terms of capability and cost. And object storage is a key piece of that equation we can really enable you to kind of tweak that knob to exactly what you're looking for. >> When customers make a move to the cloud, it's a migration, any migration is risky, how does Actifio generally, and your product specifically, reduce that risk? >> I think it's all about keeping it simple, right, so the ability for you to kind of lift and ship your applications without having to go back to rewrite, that's a huge value proposition, or a huge reduction in terms of risk that you can achieve in your environment. The ability for us, for Actifio to tap your into your enterprise IT existing production environment without a lot of sort of dangerous or latency effect, is a huge value we can bring to the table as well. Because Actifio from day one, is designed to be very efficient in terms of tapping your applications data while it's running, while it's in production, right. So the ability for us to incrementally do that and move that information into the cloud effectively for you to do that migration process, can drastically reduce your risk if you will. >> Let's talk about cost a little bit. We heard a lot from Jake about cost, in theory anyway, you guys can help optimize, not in theory, in actuality, you can help me get rid of stuff I always say. Talk about the optimization angle, how have your customers taken advantage of that, we heard from Jake, you have some other favorite examples you can maybe share with us David? >> Yeah so I think one of the key things, instead of doing, for example, if on a traditional IT perspective you want to keep data for a long time, you typically employ deduplication technology, right. Dedup technology typically works really well if you own the entire asset and you have sort of big servers, big number of cores, big memories, and so on and so forth. When you actually do a lift and ship of that technology, into the cloud environment, all of a sudden your price tag, in terms of what you charge on a monthly basis goes through the roof, because now every CPU cycle and every IO you generate to do that deduplication, now becomes very expensive, you're essentially charged on a per use basis into the cloud. So what Actifio has done, is really enable our customers to eliminate a lot of the cost in terms in doing that, in doing a lift and ship into the cloud, by enabling you to use leverage object storage directly without having to employ these expensive deduplication technology there as well, so that's one example. >> I want to talk about digital transformation a little bit, it's the buzzword, we go to a lot of conferences and every time you hear, oh digital transformation, Uber, Airbnb, you know blah, blah, blah. We tend to have these detailed storage discussions and product discussions, and it seems like it's really far away, but I want to run something by you and see if you can respond. Digital means data, right, if it's not data it's not digital, you guys are in the data business, we'd observe that the big digital players, the big internet players, their data driven, your conference upcoming, we're going to talk about that, it's called data driven, what does that mean? It means that data is at the heart of your enterprise and humans, human expertise is sort of surrounds that, but it's foundational is the data, most companies in the enterprise, human expertise is at the center and data's in silos and bolted on all over the place. You guys in a big way are a silo buster, you allow me to have sort of a comprehensive view of my virtual data store. Are you seeing that in your customer base, can you help enterprises who are scared to death that they're going to get disrupted, cross that digital divide and close the gap with the disrupters? >> Absolutely, so Actifio does not do AI for example, but what we really do is unlock the data you already have in your environment so it's absolutely free to be, so you can run analytics, you can run analytics on demand whether it's on your primary IT infrastructure, in a private data center, or in a public cloud. So by, if you think about it some of the biggest challenge our customer have in terms of going digital, is how do I fundamentally uncouple or decouple my data from the infrastructure that I'm running, right. Once I have that detachment of that data from my underlying infrastructure, now I'm free to move that information to anywhere I want, in terms of make use of that information, or to run analytics, to actually run a lot of the advanced algorithms that you could monetize that information for your business. So that acceleration or the agility we provide and the reduction of the number of copies for all these use cases, is at the center of what we can do for you for that use case. >> Or even move code, bring code to that data wherever it lives, because I may not want to move petabyte of data around, is that right? >> That's right. >> Okay, so data driven, so you can't be data driven unless you put data at the core of your enterprise, that's part of what you guys do. The conference is June 5th and 6th, it's called Data Driven, it's at the Fontainebleau in Miami. We did a Cube gig there a couple years ago, it was fantastic. Tell us about the event and what people can expect. >> We're very excited about the event, it's a really an industry wide event, we have many customers or many partners within the community coming in and sharing with the entire sort of industry around some of the best practices in terms of monetization of the data you already have, some of the best practices in terms of making the data self-service, some of the best practice in terms of leveraging sort of the best economics in terms of the private or public cloud to make effective use of that information. So we're very excited and like to see everyone there in June. >> Great David thanks so much for coming back in The Cube, really a pleasure, congratulations on all the success and good luck in June. >> Thank you very much, pleasure to be here. >> Thanks for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante, from our East Coast studios, we'll see you next time.