(energetic music playing) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here at the Silicon Ango Media Office in Palo Alto, happy to welcome back to the program Kiran Bhageshpur, who is the CEO of Igneous Systems. Kiron, great to see you. >> Great to see you again, Stu. >> Alright, so we've been really busy at theCUBE looking at so many big trends, and of course, really looking at kind of massively scalable distributed type of architectures are something we've been looking at, and something I know Igneous has been doing since the earliest days. But, the exact focus of what you've been working on, I think's changed a little bit since you first came out of Stealth and we've been looking at what your doing. So, why don't you bring our audience up to speed. >> Love to do that. It's not changed so much as expanded if you will. We launched, I believe I was here last, in October of last year, just as we were getting ready to launch. And, at that time, we launched the company and the platform, which the beginning services was object of the service, televert as a service and the enterprise data center. And, that was just the beginning. We've gone on since then, expanded the number of native services available, but really what we have done is built applications on top of that. So, the first application that we have developed and deployed at customers is backup and archive for massive file systems. So, we are talking about people who have terabytes of data, billions of files, spread across hundreds of systems. So, that's kind of been a pretty exciting thing, and it's a very unique set of challenges both for customers and for us to go forward. >> So, it's interesting, just step back for a second, object storage is something. If you talk to anybody that's a storage technologist they're like absolutely the way we need to architect things. But, usually we tend to get away from talking about object storage itself, and truly what do I do with it, what are those applications, what are those use cases. So, there's still object underneath it if I understand it right, it's just you're getting closer, moving up the stack a little bit, and getting closer to what your customers were asking for. >> Absolutely. The underlying infrastructure is still a collection of cloud services, not just object and S3, but a bunch of other services, which are very API compatible with the cloud, but, really, that doesn't matter because those are just tools. What matters is what are you doing with that, and what we are doing to begin with is really backup, archive, and discovery of massive files inside the enterprise. >> Alright, so there're some backup we've been doing for a long time, but backup has been broken. We were at the VM world show, there was a lot of buzz around some of the new companies, sometimes they called them secondary storage; you know, Rubric, Cohesity, Veem who everybody knows from the virtualization world, why don't you tell us are you part of kind of a similar wave? How do you kind of compare and contrast that to some of those other players? >> Great question. It's similar, but quite different. So, if you look at Rubric or Veem, for example, Veem really came about by doing tight integration with Veemware and doing a Veemware specific backup, which was the right technology, the right time for VMS and virtualization. Similarly, Rubric, and for that matter Cohesity, are really re-imagining data protection primarily for structured workflows, databases, physical servers, VMS, tightly integrating it and re-imagining how that feels from an experience point of view. We are really looking explicitly at unstructured data. This is data which lives on network devices from a net-app or a deliMC or a whole bunch of others and the content is really digital assets. It's data that could be media data, it could be microscopy imaging, it could be design data for a variety of work flows and this stuff continues to grow. It is monotonically increasing in every place, whether it is on premises or on the cloud or the edge, and protecting and managing this data is really a challenge and getting worse for customers. >> Yeah, the word that keeps coming up a lot is data. And, one of the things I know we've been excited about storage use to be about storing it. Now when we're talking about data, how do I leverage it? How do I get get value out of it? How do I discover different pieces of it? How have you been seeing these changes, your background you worked on some of the scale-out NASA solutions in the past, so how do we see kind of, unlocking the value of data? >> Yeah, you are absolutely right. If you go back 10 years ago, the real problem with how do I store all of this data, today there are plenty of solutions for ways you store data, especially on the primary teir, right? The challenge is really getting data from where it lives to where it's needed, whether it is backing it up or archiving it into the cloud. Being able to automatically discover things about it. Simple things like how is it growing, who is using it, how big is it, how much of it is what size of data? What about things you can infer about it by looking at the type of data it is. This is what now becomes valuable because if you look at the data sets and sizes, even modest size businesses today will have para bytes of data, billions of files, and that's challenging for any system system to go, sort of understand, unless you build it as a part of the platform. >> Okay, how about organizationally? Yah know, one of the other shifts we've seen is, you know, it used to be the storage administrator. How do I, how do I grow, how do I manage it, how do I have all of my protections and things set? A lot of the types of applications you are using are closer to the business, this is what runs the business. The business user needs to be involved. How are you setting your solution up to, you know, do what the business user needs? >> Great, yeah that's a good question. Today if you look at this data sets, this is not stuff that is an IT application. It's an end-user business focused application where they research in a life sciences world, or its designed in an electronic design world, right? And in all of these cases, essentially the end-user cares, because this data is critical to their daily working, working experience. Now, IT is clearly involved; it's a clear sort of partner of the business unit and actually operationalizing this data and making it easier to go consume. But now, it's really a joint thing, the final decision maker is always the end-user. In fact, we find ourselves in multiple places where we talk to IT, and talk to the IT teams. They get excited, but very quickly they bring in the end-users to make certain, whether the end-users are researchers or software developers, or even (mumbles) to make it so that they're comfortable with what we're talking about and they get really excited and that's sort of the starting point for our deployments. >> Yeah, we saw a similar dynamic between the business and the IT when we talked about cloud. And when I talked cloud I specifically mean public cloud and your customers, I have to imagine, they're all using public cloud in one way or another. Maybe, explain that dynamic how public cloud fits in with what your doing and how some of those IT and business people. >> Right. Look, cloud is simply the most disruptive trend in the last 10 years. In fact, you have to go back to Veemware, and Veemware's virtualization to see another trend of that magnitude. And all of our customers are embracing the cloud. They are wanting to go adopt cloud patterns, if you will. But the 180 over there massively challenged is around large data sets. Think about it, if you have terabytes of data that continues to grow, it's billion of files, it's spread across multiple geographies and dozens to hundreds of systems, it's a challenge to go leverage this in the cloud. So they're looking to ask, to be able to go chart the journey from all on premise, to a true hybrid world where they can use those cloud patterns much more effectively. >> Yah know I'm curious, and maybe it doesn't fit exactly for what Igneous is doing today. But, we've been talking about the data center versus the public cloud and a lot of those environments. I talked to some companies, that, you know, when I'm building those data legs, I'm doing that in the public cloud too. Then the discussion that's come up a lot in the past year, is Edge; so, IOT applications, we know we're going to have orders of magnitude more devices, and there's going to be a lot of data but the requirement for the data center versus the public cloud versus the Edge are very different. How does Igneous look at that? How are you having those discussions? Customers, how do they get their arms around all the various places of data?-- >> Right. You're absolutely right. The requirements are different, as in the public cloud is this massive hyper-scale, always available. The enterprise is a smaller version of that. And the Edge has a very different physical characteristics. But, what we believe is important is the same patterns, the same API's are available everywhere. And if you look at what the big public cloud providers are doing, Amazon with, you know, Snowball, and Green Grass, they're trying to go move their API's out and we completely embrace that trend. And, that's one of the reasons we built our platform to be API compatible with the cloud, with a variety of the cloud services. Because that means the services we run can run in the enterprise data center or in the public cloud or on the Edge all on a platform which is appropriate for the three. >> Yeah, and, to drill down to specifically, you say API compatible, that's S3, that's fully compatible. And do we have an API creep every cloud seems to have not only one API but many API's especially our friends at Amazon, what are you seeing out there, and what is the breath of offering they have today? >> Yeah, so, its SS3 is a constant storage leg is the obvious one, but the ones we did not talk about the last time were things like index store. So this is the equal of Amazon's dynamoDB, or Azure's table store the ability to go store a massive amount of index. But it's not just that. It's also the ability to go around compute, close to the data, which boils down to Cubanaties and containers. So all these three are part of our on the line platform. We don't talk about that to customers except after they become customers; we really focus on the application which is back up, archive, and discovery of all of their file data. >> Yeah, Kiran, take me inside the customers you are talking to; a lot of times we're like, I hear this term secondary storage out there and I worked on converge and hyper-converge stuff, you know, those terms are something that customers hear about after awhile, but they don't solve the problem. What, can you help translate for us, what's going on in your customers and why is secondary storage important to them? What's different than traditional back up, and how do you fit in? >> Right, so if you look at all of these guys, the data, the fundamental truth is data sets are growing and they are growing monotonically. Every year it is more. We've talked to folks where in the two years that we've spent as we were growing up as a company, they've sort of essentially had a 40 percent growth in their on search data sets, right? So then, the question is a couple of things. One, they clearly realize that not all of that stuff needs to live, or should live, on high performance, relatively expensive primary tiers. Right? That's the first set of piece. But the question is, how do you find out, what is active what is not active and how do you move it to the appropriate place; so this is sort of trend line and this is the patterns that they are living with. What we do is go in, very simply start off by saying, lets go find all of your filers, you know some of them, some of them you may not even know about, and let's go automatically back-up all of the data, and give you intelligence about all that. What is sort of simple intelligence. The intelligence could be how infrequently are these data sets changing, how frequently are parts of this data being accessed or modified by your applications. So that's sort of first part of this. And when this drives to is, not only does this reduce the cost of backup, which is really an insurance policy, it makes possible a bunch of intelligence about the data itself which is the beginnings of, sort of appropriately staging data on the right infrastructure. >> Alright. Kiran, you've had a number of customers since the early days talk to us a little bit about the journey you've been going on with them. How many of them have been pulling you towards the direction you are now going? What's their response been? To I guess what you call it, kind of storage as a service? >> Yeah, you know people love the whole concept of our offering as a service; initially when we talked of customers they kind of a little skeptical of our ability to go do this but they very quickly fall in love with that. It's pretty amazing. What's not to like about infrastructure that is inside your data center but that you do not have to manage at all? And when I say do not manage, people don't even look at things like drives or CPUs or network. That's not the world they live in. They live in the world of what's logically important to them, which if my backup's running, is my data being archived, how quickly is my data growing, who is accessing this data? And so on, and it goes to the next level, which is they don't have to go to manage things like software updates, just like you don't know what version of Gmail you're running or you do not know what version of S3 is being used in the cloud. Our customers don't know what version it is. Is it API level compatible or is it guarantee the services are not interrupted; and they absolutely love that aspect once they get used to it. We tell our customers, "You don't call us, we call you if there is an issue." And we're living up to that and they are pretty jazzed about that. >> Yeah, I love that. Kind of the version control thing is something we said is something, is cloud experience is actually what we want. (Mumbles) when we wrote true private cloud is exactly that; you don't know or care what version of Azure you're running, you assume that they're going to test that out and do that. Can you give us any kind of concrete examples, customers, love if you can share any names, but a lot of your customers are quite big, but what are the concrete results? What are they seeing, any good stories you can share? >> Yeah! So I give you an example of one of our largest customers, can't mention the name, but it is a large tech company in California. There's a lot of large tech companies in California-- (giggles) >> There's a bunch, yeah. >> Well, lets go through the South in California. And, these folks had an enormous amount of data. We started off by telling them, "Hey give us your most "complex systems, the ones that you are not able "to go back up today." And we started with their file systems, which were literally had this thing called file density, which is an enormous number of files in a relatively small amount of storage. So you're talking about a billion plus files and terabytes of data, and this is things that they had never been able to back up and we go off and we were able to go back it up and completely system protect. So, that's an example of a used case where we can go to a customer and allow them to accomplish what they cannot do today just from a basic back-up point of view. And, take it to the next level. In fact they did this great demo for their internal teams where they showed how easy it is to search through this data and essentially accomplish in seconds what typically, in their current world, takes hours to do. >> Okay, yeah, that's great. Yeah, sounds like you have some really good interesting, large companies there. Is that, what's the typical profile you see? Is it really companies that have specific challenges because they've got the massive scale? How far down does this scale? >> So. Uh, that's a common question that comes along. And the way I like to answer that is we are applicable to people with lots of data. It turns out it could be much smaller companies with lots of data, so we've got customers who are in the hundreds of people only world-wide, maybe two or three locations, but they are really looking at a multi-terabyte sized data problem. Similar data density problem. In fact, another one that we are working with has got 300 million files and a terabyte of data. How do you back it up? How do you go discover information about that? That's what we solve, and for these smaller companies which still have the problem, they are actually starting to find out about us and come to us. Which is really gratifying. >> Okay, well you seem pretty excited about it, about the space, what's exciting you the most about where we are today with the technology. >> The really sure is, people talk about data and they immediately go to databases, they talk about virtualization and physical servers. But that's not where the data lives. The data hasn't lived there for over a decade. And more and more of the data lives outside in files and object and there is this sort of ability to go understand that better, manage that better, protect that better and last but not least, provide intelligence to users because this data is something they care about. People are not keeping this because somebody else told them to; it is their life blood. It is their sort of livlihood, if you will, from a company point of view, and helping customers be able to go take that to the next level will bring this sort of cloud patterns to these used cases. That's pretty exciting. >> Yeah, absolutely! Want to sort of give you the final word. I hear this and I think about, you know, the whole wave of big data, what we're starting to talk about, you know, continuously with AI and ML really it is about unlocking data, so huge opportunities going forward. Any of the other trends outside what we've discussed already that you want to give us for a final word? >> You know, the last thing that I say is it is about data. It is about complete automation all across the, across the sky, weather it is storing, managing, or deriving intelligence and the reason you want to go automate all that stuff using intelligence in the software systems itself is simply because it's too large. There's no other way to go do it. And last, but not the least, all of the stuff has to be offered as a service because the cloud has gotten people really hooked on this sort of, comparatively, easy world of not having to go managing infrastructure. And I think those are the three things we should, we hold by. >> Alright, Kiran Bhageshpur, I really appreciate the update on Igneus systems. Absolutely customers dealing with massive amounts of data, how do I unlock the value of that without having to be down in the guts which has really been the history of storage. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (energetic music playing)