(techy music playing) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here at the CUBE, we're in our Palo Alto Studios for a CUBE Conversation. You know, it's kind of when we get a break, we're not at a show. It's a little bit quieter, a little calmer situation so we can have a little bit different kinds of conversations and we're excited to have our next guest and talk about a really important piece of this whole cloud thing, which is not only do you need to turn things on, but you need to also turn them off and that's what gets people in trouble, I think, on the cost comparison. We're joined by Krishna Subramanian, she is the co-founder and COO of Komprise, welcome. >> Thank you, thanks for having me on the show. >> Absolutely, so just real briefly for people that aren't familiar, just give them kind of the overview of Komprise. >> Komprise is the only solution that provides analytics and data management in a single package and the reason we started the company is because customers told us that they're literally drowning in data these days. As data for print continues to grow, a lot of it is in unstructured data and data, you know, what's unique about it is that you never just keep one copy of data because if your data is lost, like if your child's first year birthday picture is lost you wouldn't like that, right? >> Jeff: Do not bring that kind of stuff up in an interview. (laughs) We don't want to talk about lost photographs or broken RAID boxes, that's another conversation, but yes, you do not want to lose those pictures. >> So, you keep multiple copies. >> Right, right. >> And that's what businesses do. They usually keep a DR copy, a few backup copies of their data, so if you have 100 terabytes of data you probably have three to four copies of it, that's 400 terabytes and if 70% of that data hasn't been touched in over six months 280 of your 400 terabytes is being actively managed for no reason. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And Komprise analyzes and finds all that data for you and shows you how much you can save by managing it at lower cost, then it actually moves and archives and reduces the cost of managing that data so you can save 70% or more on your storage. >> Right, so there's a couple components to that that you talked about. So, break it down a little bit more. One is how actively is the data managed, how hot is the data, you know, what type of storage the data is based on, its importance, its relevance and how often you're accessing it. So, one of the big problems, if I heard you right, is you guys figure out what stuff is being managed that way, as active, high value, sitting on flash, paying lots of money, that doesn't need to be. >> That's exactly right, we find that all the cold data on your current storage... We show you how much more you're spending to manage that data than you need to. >> So, how do you do that in an environment where, you know, that data is obviously connected to applications, that data might be in my data center, it could be Amazon or could be at GCP, how do you do that without interfering with my active applications on that data, because even though some of it might be ready for cold storage there might be some of it, obviously, that isn't. So, how do you manage that without impacting my operations? >> That's a great question, because really, you know, data management is like a good housekeeper. You should never know that the housekeeper is there, they should never get in the way of what you're doing, but they keep your house clean, right? And that's kind of what Komprise does for your data, and how do we do that? Well, we do that by being adaptive. So, Komprise connects to your storage just through open protocols. So, we don't make any changes to your environment and our software automatically slows itself down and runs in the background to not interfere with anything active on your storage. So, we are like a good partner to your storage. You don't even know we're there, we're invisible to all the active work and yet we're giving all these important analytics and when we move the data, all the data looks like it's still there, so it's fully transparent. >> Okay, you touched on a couple things. So, one is how do you sit there without impacting it? I think you said you partner with all the big data, or excuse me, all the big storage providers. >> Krishna: Yes. >> You partner with all the three big cloud providers, just won an award at re:Invent, congratulations. >> Krishna: Thank you. >> So, how do you do that, where does your software sit, does it sit in the data center or does it sit at Amazon and how does it interact with other management tools that I might already have in place? >> That's a great question, so Komprise runs as a hybrid cloud service, and essentially there is a console that's running in the cloud, but the actual analysis and data movement is done by virtual machines that are running at the customer's site and you literally just point our virtual machine at any storage you have and we work through standard protocols, through NFS, SMB CIFS, and REST S3, so whether you have NetApp storage or EMC storage or Windows File Servers or Hitachi NAS or you're putting data on Amazon or Azure or Google or an object storage, it doesn't actually matter. Komprise works with all those environments because we are working through open standards, and because we're adaptive we're automatically running in the background, so it's working through open standards and it's non-intrusive. >> Okay, and then if you designate that some percentage of this storage does not need to be in the high, expensive environment, you actually go to the next step and you actually help manage it and move it, so how does that impact my other kind of data management procedures? >> Yes, so it's a great question. So, most of the time you would probably have some DR copy and some backups running on your hot storage, on your flash storage, say, and you don't want to change that and you don't want users to point anywhere else, so what Komprise does is it takes the cold data from all that storage and when it moves that data it's fully transparent. The moved data looks like it's still there on that storage, it's just that the footprint is reduced now, so for 100MB file you just have a one kilobyte link on that storage, and we don't use any stub files, we don't put any agents on the storage, so we don't make any changes to your active environment. It's fully transparent, users and applications think all the data is still there, but the data is now sitting in something lower cost and it's dynamically managed through open standards, just like you and I are talking now and I don't need a translator between us because we both understand English. >> Jeff: Right. >> But maybe if I were speaking Japanese you might need a translator, right? >> Jeff: I would, yeah. (laughs) Yes. >> Krishna: That was just a guess, I didn't know. So, that's kind of how we do it, we work through the open standards and in the past solutions were... We didn't do that, they would have a proprietary protocol and that's why they could only work with some storage and not all, and they would get in the way of all the access. >> But do I want it to look like it looked before if in fact it's ready to be retired into cold storage or Glacier or whatever, because I would imagine there's a reason and I don't know that I necessarily want the app to have access. I would imagine my access and availability of stuff that's in cold storage is very different kind of profile than the hot stuff. >> It depends, you know, sometimes some data you may want to truly archive and never be able to see it live. Like, maybe you're putting it in Glacier, and you can control how the data looks, but sometimes you don't want to interrupt what the applications are doing. You want to just go to a lower cost of storage, like an object storage on-premise. >> Right. >> But you still want the data accessible because you don't want a vague user and application behavior. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so give us a little bit more information on the company. So, you've been around for three years. We talked a little bit before we turned the cameras on, you know, kind of how many people do you have, how many customers, how many rounds of funding have you guys raised? >> Komprise is growing rapidly. We have about 60 people, we have a headquarters in Campbell, California, we also have offices in Bangalore, India. We just hired a new VP of worldwide sales and we're putting field sales teams in different regions, we have over 60 customers worldwide. Our customer base is growing rapidly. Just this last quarter we added about four times the number of customers, and we're seeing customers all the way from general mix and healthcare to big insurance and financial services companies, anywhere where there's data, you know. Universities, all the major research universities are our customers and government institutions, you know, state and local governments, et cetera. So, these are all good markets for us. >> Right, and you said it's a services, like a SAS model, so you charge based on how much data that's under management. >> Yeah, we charge for all the data that's under management and it's a fraction of what you pay to store the data, so our cost is like less than half a penny a gig a month. >> Right, it's pretty interesting, you know, we just got back from AWS re:Invent as well, over 40,000 people, it's bananas. But this whole kind of rent versus buy conversation is really interesting to me, and again, I always go back to Netflix. If anybody uses a massive amount of storage and a massive amount of network and computing where they own like, I don't know, 50% of the Friday night internet traffic, right, in the States is Netflix and they're still on Amazon. I think what's really interesting is that if you... The flexibility of the cloud to be able to turn things on really easily is important, but I think what people often forget is it's also you need to turn it off and so much activity around better managing your investment and the resources at Amazon to use what you need when you need it, but don't pay for what you don't need when you don't, and that seems to be, you know, something that you guys are right in line with and consistent with. >> Yeah, I think that's actually a good way to put it. Yeah, don't pay for data when you don't need to, right? You can still have it but you don't need to pay for it. >> Right, well Krishna, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to stop by and give us the story on Komprise. >> Yeah, thank you very much, thanks for having me. >> All right, pleasure, she's Krishna, I'm Jeff, you're watching the CUBE. We're at Palo Alto Studios, CUBE Conversation, we'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (techy music playing)