from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this cube conversation Michael Gray is here is the chief technology officer of Boston based thrive Michael good to see you coming on glad to be here so tell us about thrive what do you guys all about you know thrive started almost 20 years ago as a traditional managed service provider but really in the past four to five years transformed into a next generation managed service provider primarily now we're focusing on cybersecurity cloud hosting and public cloud hosting as well as disaster recovery so dig into that next generation yeah people use that term but what does it mean well the needs of our customers really changed over time before you could maybe simply roll out some antivirus and do some desktop management some server management but with the way some of the innovation is exploded in the cloud and the way application development has changed all of our businesses we've noticed that our customers have all kinds of new needs that includes much higher focus on cybersecurity these things can't be an after afterthought the other things with all the data that we see coming from our customers they may need a much higher level of performance than they ever did before from their their local hosting or or in the cloud so what Amazon Web Services came out you know 2006 timeframe every set up ms P's like drive they're in big trouble the exact opposite is happening for your business yeah yeah yeah you know why is that number one and number two how do you compete with the big cloud providers you know somebody like Amazon or even Azure those services are not easy to roll out you still need someone to understand what the businesses are and then translate those into technology solutions for us when someone starts asking how do I transform my business whether it be in the public cloud or the private cloud that's a tremendous opportunity to bring our knowledge and all of our engineering support to those customers to help them transform so I mean I I liken it to you know I could hire a plumber I could hire an electrician I could hire but I don't want to be the general contractor I'm happily happy to pay an expert at that who's got contacts deep expertise and and push the responsibility on them is that a fair analogy yeah I do think it is fair you know obviously it's a it's a much more technical environment than something like that so it's much more complicated you know the other thing is when we start to understand some of these business problems and pull the pieces apart we have a tremendous amount of expertise and experience where we can help those customers understand how to solve those business problems how to implement the technology and then how to be successful in whatever way they're trying to transform their business so you sort of touched on some of the trends in your business did talk more about your customers it's my understanding is it's mostly small and mid-sized customers is that correct you know there's far more mid-market than there ever were before I think people in the mid market are realizing that they do need to take some of these services outside their walls I notice a lot of mid-market customers that are focusing on their core business if you're a manufacturing company a biotech financial services company you can realize very quickly that you're not in the cloud hosting business and no matter how many people they hire grow your staff can be very difficult to actually be successful in these technologies despite all the different pieces that Amazon or Azure offers in the public cloud you still have to figure out how these systems work and how they apply to your business well to midsize companies and especially small companies they obviously aren't the resources that a large company has so you bring a lot of that infrastructure expertise along yeah and I think part of it is you know we have such a big exposure to a very large customer base so a problem that a customer may see that they think is maybe perhaps special to them we've solved that problem maybe hundreds of times and we can give them a lot of insight into how other companies of similar verticals have solved those problems you start out as sort of a local MSP and that have expanded over time yeah that's correct so we've expanded pretty rapidly over the past three to four years now we're we have five offices primarily in the East Coast and really started to help the mid-market who's now started to understand that they need to frankly outsource some of these solutions or get in business with a partner like us who can help them take those outside their walls and provide them a much higher level of service often at the end of the day the investments much lower for the customer so paint a picture of your your infrastructure what that look like yep so we have a data centers you know I have three primary data centers in New England the New Jersey New York area and then in the south all those data centers actually have infinite at storage which is you know something that I'm a huge fan of and one of the things that I like to offer in all of our data centers is I don't necessarily it doesn't matter to me geographically where the customer would like their workloads that's one of the things that the public cloud offers you can move resources around geographically depending maybe where your headquarters is or some of your branch offices we provide the same solutions at often a much higher performance level and we've extracted all the complications of where to put these so if a customer is in San Francisco and they'd like to dr2 New England not an issue but all of a sudden if they change their headquarters or maybe they do an acquisition and they need to change that footprint I can change that on the fly for them so and I've walked through many data centers of MSPs over the years yeah and ten years ago yeah you had one of everything yeah yeah compact server yeah yeah yes so I would imagine you had similar challenges you mentioned Infini debt yeah trying to essentially run your entire storage yeah yeah so we've um we've acquired several other MSPs over the past several years we had a lot of disparate storage platforms a lot of investments made some of them hung on to maybe for too long some of them you know were purchased for a specific business reason that might not be there anymore at this point we've standardized on Infini debt it's enabled our business to do a lot of new and innovative services so high performance storage replication similar to what you'd see in the public cloud but also we can support very complicated very data hungry clothes so you're sexually replacing so older storage systems with infinite at maybe you can describe the before and after you know frankly with with acquiring a lot of msps you name a storage platform we had it at some point through this standardization the the beauty of it is a consolidation so I can leverage the folks that manage our infinite at across the country all right so my TCO on something like this is is is really kind of amazing I can leverage a lot of experience with the defender that when I go in and need to do a data center consolidation I have some things that are knowns there's a lot of unknowns and acquisitions and all the due diligence in the world there's still going to be things that maybe not every detail has been figured out but when I roll out an infinite at I know I've solved one very foundational problem right out of the gate so and I want to come back on the TCO but before I do when I talk to people like you and I'm not a CTO but a lot of times I infer that people are comparing the the latest and greatest in this case infinite at yeah with what they had that's five six seven years old sure of course the TCO is the share that okay so I'm a push a little bit is is I presume you looked at infinite ad and other storage suppliers and I'm interested in what you found in those comparisons is it is it is it just great TCO relative to what you had that was five years old or is it real after the other yeah yeah so you know when it comes right down to it I've seen every marketing pitch for a storage platform you can possibly imagine I've seen every bullet list of features I've seen every we have proprietary technology that does X&Y you know eventually when you put it on the floor it's not everything that was in the sales process maybe there's something that was uncovered on a licensing side maybe the performance wasn't quite what someone said it would be the thing about infinite at is they've delivered on everything they've said in the sales process and you don't find that very often the other thing I need to mention too is that even post sale the discussion about the technology continues it's always a discussion about how the technology is built and how it enables you it's not we have a new feature coming on the roadmap that is gonna solve X&Y problem they've worked out the very foundational problems you know the other thing I do want to mention about Infini debt is being such a strong engineering company I know the best an engineer I can rely on them to make good engineering decisions so I want to ask you about performance because when I first saw infinite out you know we were on the on the flash bandwagon we got early on that yeah and these guys came in and said actually we can beat flash performance using our architecture and software and so forth yeah be like really so I'll ask you yeah have you found that from a performance standpoint so I have and you know I run into a lot of situations where there's technology leaders that are maybe buying into a specific brand name you know if we put X technology in I know for a fact that it's gonna beat the performance of an infinite at my approach with that is I have seen all the platforms and I agree there's a lot of great products out there high performance sit down and take a look at the way the technology has been built and have an open mind and you'll most likely be convinced that that technology is the right answer a lot of times I like to sit back and and say look I'm not gonna push any vendor any software partner any manufacturer on you take a step back and have an open mind of technology it'll make a big difference when you actually listen well I'm sure you've heard the sales pitches are you using those slow spinning business mic spinning discs or mechanical yeah yeah yeah yeah your experience has been and we've had Brian Carmody on yep yes of others yeah so then we have Moshe come in here yes Blaine that's sure and so but I always like to talk to the customer and get the affirmation yes yeah well again to me the the conversation with infinitive is always about engineering you know it's not a great deal of marketing first of course everybody does marketing that happens on a regular you have to do that to run a business but if you want to talk purely about how things have been designed that conversation often eclipses a lot of other marketing from other storage vendors so talk about your your how you spend your time yeah it's acting you know infrastructure roadmaps and so forth to get more sort of I got to get this stuff up and running today describe yeah you know we've set a path to build a very high performance nationwide cloud we are going up against the public cloud by the way I'm a public cloud partner right I do both we do hybrid hosting I want to give the customer the best of both worlds which may be a cliche but we really are aiming to get there that's one of my primary tasks is establishing a technology vision you know I can describe to a customer where our cloud is going and I can stand behind that with the public cloud we do have to Lou a little bit of reading the tea leaves so I I help people with trying to understand what you know maybe the public cloud vision might be but also how I fit together with that that public cloud with private cloud hosting and the other thing primary goal of mine is bringing in some of these different functions of IT so for instance high-performance cloud private cloud Plus cyber security I can bring those two together for you in a cohesive solution that that's what I spend a lot of my time so as you look out you know put on your your your binoculars maybe even your telescope big trend in one of the big trends is hyper-converged in bringing in storage compute and networking all together yep if I'm inferring correctly you're going for more of a Best of Breed approach yet and yet in you guys have the engineering expertise you have to do that can you can you talk about the philosophy there sure sure well one of the things that I like to do is just abstract some of these confusing and complicated conversations from our customers you know if we're gonna talk about SD win and make sure I have SD weigh in in my data center I can tell the customer I can give you that functionality and you don't have to worry about how these different pieces go together I'm happy to be transparent you know there's a lot of things in the public cloud that simply information you can't get I'm actually willing to share how those solutions that I built go together because I want people to see that transparent I want them to trust us so you know when when we go and start putting these together these are things where when the customer does have a question they want to drill in because they have concerns I can eliminate those very quickly you talking about private cloud earlier I want to come back to share and just so we always say on the cube bring the cloud experience to your data wherever it lives yeah it's all about that operating mom yep yeah so as you see tool chains like kubernetes yep yeah a cloud native stuff yeah come in you want to have that cloud experience you want to have yourselves a fantasy pass that on yep do you have customers yeah how do you look at that yeah what role does storage infrastructure playing to me and this is something that's primary to thrive focuses application enablement we're an application enablement company so if your application is best run in Azure and then we want to put it there a lot of times we'll find that just due to business problems or legacy technologies we have to build private clouds or even for security reasons we want to build private cloud or purely just because we're running into a lot of public cloud refugees you know they didn't realize a lot of the maybe incidental fees along the way actually climbed up to be a fairly big budget number so you know we want to really look at people's applications and enable them to be highly high-performance but also highly secure I want to come back to the TCO I said oh yeah sure when you do the total cost of ownership analysis yeah what you find is it really boils down to the to the labor yeah piece of yep and see I'm curious as to when you brought in Infini debt yeah what the business impact was you know economically yeah no there's other non TCO thing yeah more so was it the labor cost that got reduced did you redeploy those resources well actually Hardware first and foremost and you know this is going back many years but and and I think I would say this is true for any datacenter cloud provider the minute the phone rings and someone says my storage is slow we're losing money okay because we've had to pick up the if someone needs to address that we have eliminated all storage performance helpdesk issues it's now one thing I don't need to think about anymore we have we know that we can rely on our performance and we know we don't need to worry about that on a day to day basis and that is not in question now the other thing is really as we started to expand our infinite at footprint geographically we suddenly started to realize not only do we have this great foundation built but we can the leverage and invest when we made to do things that we couldn't do before maybe we could do them but they required another piece of technology maybe we could do them or they required some more licensing something like that but really when we started the standardization we did it for operational efficiency reasons and then suddenly realize that we had other opportunities here and I have to hand it to infinity they're actually the ones that helped us craft this story not only is this just a solid foundation but it's something you can build on top of so talk about the performance I want to ask you yeah I've had certainly Brian Carmody Craig Hobart and I have sat down and Craig actually made the statement you know the only bottleneck really is when the the system gets filled yeah you just dive in the architecture has that been your experience if this so reduced or eliminated traditional storage bottlenecks oh absolutely and you know I mentioned before that this is sort of formance is now becoming afterthought to me you know and a little bit the way we look at our storage platform is weet from a performance standpoint not a capacity standpoint we can throw whatever we want at the infinite at and sort of the running joke internally is it will just smile and say is that all you got you mean like mixed workload so you don't have to sort of tune each array for a particular workload yeah yeah and you know I can imagine as someone that might be listening to what I'm saying well hey come on you know they can't really be that good and I'm I'm telling you from seeing a day-to-day again you can just throw the workloads at it and it will do what it says it does you don't see that every day now as far as capacity goes you know they there's capacity on demand model which you know we're a huge fan of they also have some other models the flex model which is very useful for budgeting purposes what I will tell you is you have to sacrifice at least one floor tile for an affinity it's very off-putting at first on day one and I remember my reaction but again as I saying earlier when you start peeling back two pieces of the technology and why these things are and the different flexibility on the financial side you realize that this actually isn't a downside it's an upside so the asset leverage of that floor tile as well exactly also make a big deal about a petabyte yes Gail is it important to you or what kind of scale are we talking about in terms of if you can share yeah absolutely so you know we obviously have multiple petabytes of storage for thrive for our customers again you know when someone has a large data set if we were to say we cannot handle that we're gonna be out of business pretty quickly this is one of the things the infinite flexibility of the public cloud again if you consider the public cloud both our competition and our partner you know we need to be able to offer that same kind of electricity in that same kind of endless capacity and at this point although I don't have completely unless capacity I have a tremendous amount of options I have workloads I can move different places and again a lot of times now it's more about performance than it is capacity oh you gotta give me something okay something that you wanna that should be doing to make your life better yeah I mean I gotta tell you it solves so many problems that is actually hard to come up with and again I'm smiling here because I've been down this road with those storage providers I've been let down by other storage writers I guess the son degree I maybe I'm waiting for them to let me down but I don't think they're going to that's a really interesting part I think that I'm you know the new trees cloud which is something that's been added over time you know a public cloud interaction is something that is desperately needed in the storage space so I'm interested to see how that product grows if I'm gonna give you something you know but again these are enablement platforms these aren't you know we need to do a feature comparison between a cloud and a public cloud and a private cloud last question some gifts are stuff you're working on yes II always like the SCT oh is that question yeah you know one of the the really interesting things to me is that we're finally getting there with anomaly detection not only you know just pure we found one event that that went out somewhere that doesn't make sense but we're profiling user behavior now AI and machine learning has been one of the big items that we've been promised for years but a lot of times it was just a tag line I think a lot of things that are happening in the public cloud computing space around profiling users and being able to reduce the amount of noise in the security space I think we're finally here and I think you know in the next 12 to 18 months AI isn't gonna become a cool feature said it's going to become a standard of a lot of security products so applying machine intelligence to a lot of the data that you have a lot of metadata yeah infrastructure metadata yeah yeah and you know even if you take for instance you know I'll pull it back to our storage conversation earlier if there's a storage activity is some sort of activity that's outside the norm that actually could be a security incident itself so you know pulling in data feeds is something that we've conquered its what are you gonna do with it now and we needed some humans to be able to pull that off before I think AI and machine learning is finally at the point where it's not out of reach for your average customer it doesn't take someone with a data analytics degree or something like that we can now buy these kind of products off the shelf and and leverage them for a lot of value oh Michael you've been a great guest thanks so much if you're welcome back anytime all right happy to be here all right and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante in the cube we'll see you next time

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this special cube conversation we're gonna do a drill down into cybersecurity with the chief technology officer thrive Michael Gray Michael good to see you glad to be here so tell us a little bit about thrive yes so thrives really a next-generation mansur immense service provider have been in business for quite some time we've gone through it quite a bit of M&A over the past couple of years and really building ourselves into a much larger hemisphere being able to offer a lot of dedicated services that typically were out of reach for a smaller MSP so let's get right into it security has evolved quite dramatically in the past decade no longer is it just hacktivists with annoying malware yep yeah I'm talking you know big money yeah cybercrime yep and now of course nation-states yeah so talk a little bit about what's changed in in security just in terms of the attackers yeah yeah the money coming out of the attackers is actually larger than the entire illicit drug industry or market whatever you want to call that so they've the bad guys have kind of realized that the money to be made off of maybe hacking or phishing at this point far outweighs other activities that might have been been into before so your role as a security expert yeah lower the ROI sure sure so one of the best ways to lower the ROI is to increase the the denominator yeah cost yeah actually yep yeah getting through yeah what was that yeah I mean and by the way we have a tremendous amount of experience in dealing with different environments different kinds of attacks we have close to a thousand customers so I've seen a lot of different environments be attacked in a lot of different ways that kind of experience is something that we can bring as a service provider to our customers you know at this point too I think those of us in the IT industry have realized that it's not about just making sure that there's some software deployed and doing basics the belt-and-suspenders really matters now you not only need the traditional patching antivirus solutions but anomaly detection vulnerability management full visibility into all the traffic on the network these things are not something that maybe is reserved for the enterprise it is needed both in the mid market and the small business so it used to be focused on hardening the perimeter you know building a moat or digging a motor yeah so yeah yeah the Queen wants to leave her castle yeah that doesn't work anymore I have have you seen in your own business that investment shift from the perimeter or to other areas and what are those other areas absolutely and you know there is no perimeter anymore either fortunately or unfortunately I think for a lot of employees out there the fact that there's no perimeter we can work from a coffee shop now it's great a lot of people that I notice actually end up working from their phone at these at this point which is actually great now you know as far as how you solve that problem so typically you know I look at as let's wrap around a let's wrap a suit of armor around our end-users and then look at their applications so put these two pieces together figure out how to protect them but we also can't stop them from doing work so they've got to be able to get their jobs done they need to be secure and we need to make sure that we stay out of their way while providing that security so what is the biggest challenge for a security practitioner the stealthy viruses like Stuxnet or is it phishing I mean it sounds probably all of the above but maybe you could give us a sense yeah what I notice is you know primarily the most successful attacks are those based on social engineering you know and these are actually not sophisticated from a technology standpoint they are sophisticated from a psychology standpoint hideous yeah impersonations you know and there's a lot of influx into security education which I'm personally a huge fan of the interesting thing is that there's a statistic now that even if you do all the security awareness training that you possibly can there's still a 4% exposure there are people that are going to make a mistake security awareness trainings only going to take you so far and I think you know in the cyber security community the preach of defense-in-depth has been there forever you know making sure you have several layers several gates locks for people to get through at this point you know you can't necessarily ignore those points anymore you can't just say that we have that and then not act do them all so you know what I'm seeing now is that a lot of customers are finally understanding that these aren't nice-to-haves their necessities and that makes my job a little bit easier from an organizational standpoint what are your biggest challenges I hear from a lot of people that this they have so many incidents that they have difficulty prioritizing and understanding which ones they should focus on first based on they know the business impact yeah is that a problem for you how are you doing yeah the one thing I will say is I notice a lot of mid-market reaching for different technologies you know maybe they're reaching for a machine learning and anomalous detection in their data center well their problem is the end user in the branch office so what I notice is oftentimes we're forgetting about to do forgetting to do some of the basics you know and I mentioned belt-and-suspenders earlier are you doing the very foundational security items and that's a lot of times to where those kinds of solutions can be moved to a partner for a better service at a better investment point so you know you got to do those basics and then build up your stack now a lot of people what we run into is they don't even know where they are in the spec and that to me is something where when we can educate a customer and help them understand where they are and their security journey we can really start to protect them because they're not understanding what investments they need to make and what's going to work for them what's your security organization look like what's what's the regime yep so the sec ops team yes so you know to whom does that individual report describe that yes so security team is higher level what I would call analysts now we obviously have a very large amount of engineers that handle day-to-day security operations whether it be from analysis of anomalous traffic or all the way down to someone got a simple virus on their machine we've been doing that for years but again because we have such a breadth of engineers we can take teams of engineers and dedicate them to specific functions like security smaller providers that's very difficult to do often what they end up doing is maybe the engineer who was best at working with antivirus or best at working with firewalls they said oh you're our security engineer now as opposed to a security practice and as we've grown that's been something that's been personally very exciting to me to be able to build out a dedicated team of engineers that can set a goal and a vision and then execute on so do you have a you know I am the de facto C so I have a lot of background in security it absolutely interested me in a lot of our product development which I'm also a key member of that team is in cyber security so it's really to our advantage as an organization you know my my role as CTO may not be exactly just that one role and that's okay with me I like to get into different pieces of our business but again we can't have security be an afterthought to people you can't have someone who is talking about your high performance cloud who doesn't know how security works things are gonna fall apart very quickly so I have to say just an observation I mean I sensed a little defensive 'no syn your answer yeah it's an advantage oh absolutely and here's why is because you know a lot of times organizations say oh that's the security teams problem yeah and it's not the right regime for security is everybody's has to take responsibility so if the CTO was actually has some responsibility there that's an advantage to in my view anyway because more people are aligned yeah and focused on I really look at myself as someone that is not only protecting thrive as an organization but protecting our customers a lot of times when perhaps someone reaches out that is not doing what they should be on the security front a customer potential prospect is looking at maybe we need to improve our security posture I'll say does your senior leadership care about this problem are they interested in solving the problem it's gonna be very difficult as a business to raise that level of security unless the senior leaders are interested in solving it you know as someone who's a senior leader at thrive that that is you know sort of a key focus of mine and with our CEO okay now here's the hard question yes Erica on that to the end do you report you report the CIO the CEO oh I report to the CEO yeah and you know security is very much a prime conversation between he and I you know he will say you know this is something that we cannot take chances on and to me that's an enablement now that I know that it's a priority for him it was already a priority for me so do you have a CIO I know we do not okay so you're fact OCIO as well yeah that's correct I mean you know again because we've grown over times for acquisition you know pulling these pieces together is something that you know is an advantage to thrive because I can speak to these different issues and I can train our teams to speak to those issues as well our hosting team our cloud our cloud team understands compliance requirements not only for thrive but for our customers so we've used the combination of some of these needs internally to build an advantage for us so you've established the security as a CEO has visibility on that absolutely is it a board level issue absolutely absolutely so fry vis a sock to compliant and there are sock to controls that are sort of speak to the board visibility into security issues so I present to the board regularly on security strategy if there were any needs that we needed to go over it is primary to our board as well again this isn't something that's an afterthought it's a primary goal I want to make another observation yeah see if you can validate it or refute it I've observed it so 10 years ago I feel like there was a failure equals fire mentality yep insecurity that that and in fact the security team but sometimes it hide yeah but the bad news yeah I think there's been an awareness now that look it's gonna happen bad guys are going to get through its its those gates that they have to get yes the cost escalating that cost that that's our challenge yes our response mechanism yeah okey so yeah is that valid and if so how has your response mechanism evolved so we work on the principle of assume breach we're constantly looking around what if someone's in the network right now how would we know and when you have that mentality in the back of your head you can really start to think about where am I where are the gaps in my security organization now the other thing there is that when it comes to security and you start to look around at these different pieces you can now surface what if this happens you know there's a something the tabletop and security operations I'm sure you might be familiar sitting down and doing a tabletop exercise where you're assuming a breach especially with other people in the organization who not aren't part of the technical infrastructure it's very eye-opening you know and when I talk about a little bit of Education I actually put tabletop in that that group you know someone will say to me could this happen maybe the HR person say could this happen and when they ask me that question I know we've started to succeed in solving some of these problems because the answer is yeah it could very well may let's think about how we avoid that from happening to finish up on your question though response and remediation needs to be part of your security practice nothing is 100% there is no gate that cannot be broken through you mentioned earlier about nation states some of these nation states are committing real resources to break into companies and extract revenue out of them however they can so if you don't have remediation in response as part of your security infrastructure you really missing the boat because you cannot lock every door it's not possible you well you've seen the stats on how long it takes to identify an infiltration and sometimes I've seen up to a year yeah how is is data and analytics of doing that and do you expect that that number I think it already is dropping in the last couple of years yeah yeah expert Stampede yeah well the the question I I turn back on the customers can you tell me what's more normal in your environment do you know what normal looks like do you know that your users are maybe visiting websites in foreign countries whether they're malicious or not can you tell me what when I look at your web traffic or whatever I might be looking at from a Internet traffic perspective can you tell me what's typical because you if you can't start there it's gonna be very difficult to come along and remove noise and look at that so the thing I always start with is let's build a profile what's normal as quickly as possible we can't have six months to build a baseline but even a days is a decent baseline in two days and you can grow that over time so that's one of the biggest things is establishing normal and then be able to pick up on what that normal oh my oh this is very instructive thank you very much you go a tough job because as they say the bad guys only have to succeed once you know the one thing I will say is it's a little bit when it comes to ite it's one of the few areas where it is good guys and bad guys so a little bit there is a you know I I noticed a cooperation a collaboration of coming together not only between engineers but also customers and partners everybody has a clear goal they know what they don't want to happen and that's why you know I get very excited when we want to sit down and talk about security because there's a clear goal there's a clear need and something that we can solve and every now you see some of the bad guys flip yeah because they probably realized they could make more money legally and it's illegal yeah helping out the good guys yeah so yeah it's like the protagonist and catch me if you can hey there you go absolutely Frank every day I have a happy valley yeah so anyway Michael thanks very much thank you it really great to have you all right and thank you for watching this is Dave Volante in the cube we'll see you next time

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue Now, here's your host. Day Volonte. >> Hi, buddy. This is David Lantz. Welcome to this cube. Conversation with Dr Rico is the CMO of infinite out. It's still I still have a hard time saying that doctor or an engineer and I love having you on because we could talk storage. We could go deep and we could talk trends and marketing trends, too. But so welcome. Thanks for coming on my sled. So tell me what's new since the scale to win launch that you guys had. Tell me what you know. Is everything shipping Now What's the uptake been like with customers? And the reaction? Yeah, >> they're the reaction has been phenomenal. This, as you may recall, you were there. It was biggest launch in our history, which was fantastic. And the reaction has just been overwhelmingly positive, with customers with partners with analysts. Human scum cases with competitors is an interesting you know, we had a lot of things that were already shipping. They were an early customer release. There were a few things that we had started shipping in December on the things that we said we'd be coming in three Q. We G eight on time. So there, there now all generally available except the stuff that we talked about that would be available in 2020 which right now looks like it's on track. It's doing very, very well. >> So VM wear VM world eyes coming up later on this month, things are obviously changing. There was announcement recently that that VM wears gonna choir pivotal. So a little bit of financial engineering going on stock stock rose 77% on the day when the Dow dropped 800. So okay, the funny money. But things are changing in the V m where ecosystem you certainly saw we we This is our 10th year the M world. We go back and you hear Tod Nielsen back in the day, talk about for every dollar spent on a V M where lice and 15 was spent a Negro system, you know, we're kinda del izing vm wear now, which is sort of interesting, but I'm curious as to what you're seeing what that all means to you. I mean, still half a million 600,000 customers, you've got to be there you guys have great success at that show. So your thoughts what's going on? But VM world this year? Yeah, I >> kind of kind of loaded their first of all congratulations on the milestone. That's great. 10 years is super. Remember, probably seeing you with the 1st 1 there. Of course we knew each other longer. Uh, you know, and sure I get the incestuous, you know, money changing of hand there, I think I think it's it's good in one respect. You certainly CBM where, you know, making big inroads with VM wear on AWS. And this isn't now with Pivotal will be a good launching platform for Della's well, a svm where to be a little bit more in control of their own destiny. And it's certainly the way a lot of people are going. We're doing a lot of that ourselves. Not so much, in a sense. We don't have a cloud platform that we sell is a total encompassing platform. But of course, with new tricks cloud on big players and then certainly a large portion of our our customer base, our cloud service providers, they love our stuff. It helps them compete. It actually gives them in some respects, a competitive advantage, but VM world itself. Lots going on there. We have amplified our presence once again because VM where does represent a large portion of our customer base? So we're we're very proud of that. We're very proud to be a technology alliance partner of the M wears Andi. We're expecting to see a really good show in a really good cloud. A cloud crowd has they return back to their home base in San Francisco for us this year, it's It's gonna be a different experience. Were tellingme or of the software story, more of the portfolio story more about how you scare scale the win. We have a virtual presence this year, which is going to be very helpful in telling that story. Customers can come in and they can see more than just a ah box that in our world is really not important because it's for us. It's all about the software and stuff we do. We even in Booth Theater, we have some private meeting spaces well, to take people into a bigger, deeper drill down. But the virtual experience will allow them to touch and feel stuff that maybe they didn't get to do before, and that's gonna be kind of exciting as well. >> So you mentioned C S P s. We had Michael Gray thrive on a while back, and you know, he was saying that Look, he likes your product because it allows him to do other things. And don't worry about, you know, the old sort of tuning and managing and ableto re shift labor. I felt like that was an interesting discussion, primarily because you've got all these cloud service providers that everybody thought aws was just gonna kill. And if anything, it's elevated them. What are you seeing in the CSP space? Yeah, you know, >> Michael had a lot of interesting things to say that definitely love the fact that we enable multiple workloads without them having to do lots of cautious planning and re planning and shifting and shuffling. And we are seeing C S P is becoming more value. Add to a lot of businesses, especially the mid market and the smaller enterprise where people may want more than just infrastructure. You know, they don't they need that application level support and companies like thrive in some of our other really good customer, US signal and you know they're all capable of Flex Central's. Another one they're all capable of providing service is beyond the hardware they're capable of providing that application support the guidance and, in the case of Thrive, the cybersecurity guidance especial Really, which is really, really critical. So they're growing, and they're also, by the way, working with eight of us and Google and Azure to provide that capabilities well, when necessary. >> Well, that leads me to the sort of multi cloud discussion in our industry. We tend to have this alphabet soup of acronyms like another reason I like talking to you because we can kind of cut through that. And, you know, I love the marketing. I think marketing helps people understand what's going on differentiate. It gives you an indication of where the industry is going, and multi cloud is one of those things that I mean. I've kind of said it's a symptom of multi vendor and more so than a strategy. But increasingly it seems like it's becoming a strategy with customers, and you just gave an example of thrive working with multiple cloud vendors. Clearly, VM where wants to be in that business. What your thoughts on multi cloud and and hybrid. What does it mean for for infinite at What's your strategy there? You know, it's it's interesting because I >> just read an article the other day about you know, the definition of multi cloud on whether it's being abused and, you know, I I look at it as someone just trying to tell their story and give it. Give it some favor. I think at the end of the day, uh, every business is going to be talking to multiple platforms whether they want to or not. You know, there are many customers and companies out there, businesses who are in our customers who have gone the way of the cloud and repatriated. Certain things is they've they found that it it may work. It may not work, and there are many cloud providers who were trying to do things to accelerate migration of applications because they see that certain applications don't work. You know, we got one of the cloud providers buying Ah, now as provider, another one buying very recently, you know, an envy me based flash company to try to pick up those loose workloads where they might struggle today. But the end of the day everybody's going to be multiple. And whether it's because they're using cloud service is from from a software perspective or whether they just need to basically broker and maintain sort of that that independence so that they can maintain some cost control, availability, control, security, control and in some cases it will remain on premises. And some of things will be off just so they could get the applications closer to their end users. So you know what is multi Cloud? Multi Cloud really is just one of those terms that literally means what it says. It's your business running in multiple places. It doesn't have to necessarily be simultaneously by the same application. >> A big part of your value proposition is the simplicity. We've heard that from your customers, and you guys obviously push that out there. I want to ask you because you mentioned repatriation and you know, Cloud keeps growing like crazy. Sure, and the on prem not so much. You guys are smaller company. You're growing your stealing share, So yep. So maybe is that simplicity thing. Here's my question. So it's around automation. The cloud providers, generally an Amazon specifically have have driven automation. They've attacked the IittIe labor problem and they're able to charge for that on Dhe. So my question is, are you seeing that you're able to attack that labor problem in a similar sense and bring forth the value proposition to customers is Look, we can create a cloud like experience on Prem if you want MacLeod. Great. But if you want to stay on Prem, you're gonna get the benefit of being able to shift. Resource is two more strategic things and not have to worry about all this heavy, heavy lifting. You You seeing tangible evidence of that? >> We're seeing significant tangible evidence of that on and, you know, a couple of things. You know, you talk about growth, right? And I think when we did the launch, you know, only a few months ago we were at about 4.6 exabytes of capacity shipped. We just passed 5.1. That's some significant growth in in just a few months. It's like a 33% growth just from the same time last year, which is which is fairly significant. And of course, if you're familiar with the way we talk, you know you have an engineer is the head of marketing. We like to tell the truth. You know, we don't like to mask, do many things and confuse people. We don't like talking about effective storage because effective capacity doesn't really mean much to some people. So that's, you know, this is what we This is what we shipped and it's growing rapidly. And a lot of that is growing, in part because of the significance of the message and in part because of this need to control costs, contain costs and really operate in a more modern way. So get back to your comments about cloud and cloud operation. That's really what people want. People like the consumption model of cloud. They don't always like the cost on hidden costs. So simplifying that, but giving them the flexibility Thio have either an op X or cap ex that allows him to grow and shrink as they move workloads around. Because everybody grows even on Prem is growing. It's just, you know, it's the law of numbers, right? Cloud is growing, absolutely. But on Prem really is growing. And then the other thing I want is they want the operational flexibility. And that's what we talked about in our elastic data fabric. They don't like constantly having to re jigger and re balance workloads. Infinite box by itself. The platform of infinite Box takes away a lot of that mystery and magic, because it it kind of hides all of the complexity of that workload. And it, you know, we take the randomness out of the I o. I think maybe Craig Hibbert mentioned in his video is he was describing in detail how that happens. Remember Michael Gray talking about that as well, you know, So those those things come out in a single infinite box. But even if you said well, I still want to move my workload from, uh, you know this data center to an adjacent data center or perhaps a data center in another facility. Um, excuse me, Another city. So that's closer to the end user. Making that transparent to the applications is critically important. >> Yes, he talked about growth in about 1/2 a PETA bite. Sorry, half an exabyte in just a few months. A couple months? Really Right. That's that's growth. But I want to ask you about petabytes. Petabytes scales. Kind of key of companies that don't do that in a year day, eh? Exactly. So that's a petabytes scale. Is big party of marketing two questions? Why is that relevant? Or is that relevant to VM? Where customers? Why so and then, does it scare some people owe you? Asked a great question. >> It absolutely scared some people. And I know that there are some pundits out their industry pundits who who basically don't agree with our messaging. But this is this is the business problem that we we targeted the solve rate. Um, there are a lot of people out there who don't think they're petabytes scale yet because maybe they're individual applications aren't petabytes scale. But when you add it up, they get there and a lot of our customers are existing. Customers didn't start with infinite at at petabytes scale. They started a couple 100 terabytes, perhaps, but they're petabytes skill now. In fact, over 80% of the customers and systems that we have out there today or above the petty bite. We have customers that are in the tens of petabytes. We have customers that are in the hundreds of petabytes. They grow, they grow rapidly on. Why is that? Well, to two factors. Really. Number one, if you go back to. Probably when I first met you back when I had your hair, at least in quantity, way had way. Were kind of crusting that terabyte mark. Right? Right. And what was the problem? The problem was nobody could figure out how to deal with the performance. Nobody wanted to put that much risk on a single platform, so they couldn't deal with the availability. And they really didn't know how to deal with even the serviceability of that scale. So terabyte was a problem solved No, 25 years ago, and then things were rapidly from there. Now we're at the same juncture, just three orders of magnitude later. Right? >> Well, that's interesting, because, you know, you're right. People didn't want to put all all that capacity under an actuator that cost performance problems. They were concerned about, you know, just availability. And then two things happen so simultaneously, flash comes along. And, you know, you would say was put sort of a Band aid to some of the performance problems. Sure. And you guys came up with, like, this magic sauce to actually use spinning disc and get the same performance or better performance you would argue with flash. And so as a result, you were now able to do a lot Maur with the data, the concerns about that much date under the actuator somewhat attenuated because, I mean, you've got now so much data, you've got to do something that's almost that's flywheel effective. You've got tons of data machine intelligence and a I. Now, coming into the picture, you've got Cloud, which has been this huge tail when for the industry and for data creation in general. And so I see. You know, you see, like the I. D. C numbers and for forecasting growth of data and storage could be low. I mean, the curve could be bending, you know, kind of more than exponentially your thoughts on that. >> Yeah, it's an interesting, interesting observation. I think what it really comes down to is our storyline is math is greater than media, all right? And when you when you look at the flash being, you know, the panacea to performance it was just a step in the evolution, right? You go back and and say, spinning disc was the same solution to the performance problem 20 years ago. 25 years ago, even it was 5400 rpm discs and then very rapidly. Servers got faster. The interconnects got a little bit faster. They were still mostly differential. Scuzzy. There was 7200 rpm discs. And I promise you, by the way, that if you're running 5400 rpm desk, you install 7200 rpm. All yours performance problems will go away until the day you install it. And then it was 10,000 rpm discs and I was 15,000 rpm disc, and it still wasn't getting fast enough because, you know, you went to Fibre Channel One Gig Fibre channel and then to Geek Fibre, Channel four, Gig fibre, Channel eight, gig fibre channel. The unified connects got faster. The servers got faster. That was more cash on the servers. Then this thing came along, cuts called solid state disc. Right. And then it was it was SLC single layer cell technology. But don't worry about it's very expensive. Not a problem. You only need 4% of your application, right? Jerry? No, no, I'm sorry. percent. No, I'm sorry. 30%. What the heck? You know, M l c is now a little bit more reliable, so let's just make make it all slash. Right? So that was the end of the story, right? No. Servers continue to get faster. Uh, the media continue to get faster and denser, right? So now the interconnect isn't fast enough, So envy me. Is that the answer to life? The universe and everything? Well, wait. I got a better answer for your test. CIA storage class memory in parallel with that. By the way, there are some vendors out there who said that's still not fast enough. We want to put more d ram and the servers and do things in memory. We went in memory databases. I guarantee whatever you do from a media perspective on my personal guarantee to you, it's obsolete by the time you're up and running. By the time you get your applications migrated, configured and running with business value, it's already obsolete. Some vendors got something better coming out. The right answers. This stuff you talked about, the right answer is everything that you're doing for your business. APs. It's a it's a Mel. It's solving the problems in software and, you know, you said we use disc and make it fast. It's not despite itself, of course, right? It's D Bram. It's a lot of the Ram, which, by the way, is orders of magnitude faster than flash the NAND flash. And even if its ECM and still orders of magnitude faster than that, what we use the disk for today in the architecture is the cost factor. We take the random ization out in the flash and we take the >> end and in the in the diagram >> and we used the SAS in the back end to manage costs. But we use it in a way that it performs well, which is highly sequential, massively parallel. And we take full advantage of that Beck and Ben with to do that with that massive dear am front end. Our cash ratios are unparalleled in the industry and and we use it even more effectively that way. But if architecture already evolves, so if if SCM becomes more stable and becomes more cost effective, we can replace that that S S D layer with the cm. And if you know, if the economics of Q L C or something beyond that. Come down will replace the back end with that, do you? Do >> you ever look at what you're doing today as sort of a modern day symmetric. So I mean, a lot of things you just said. I mean, you've got a lot of memory. You've got a massive back end. You know, those were two of the characteristics of symmetric snow. Of course. Fast forward. Whatever. 30 years, right. But a lot of it was sort of intelligence and understanding. Sure. So how data works, is it Is it a fair sort of, or is it radically different? Well, in terms of mindset, I mean, I know the implementation is >> right, right? >> Yeah. I mean, it's not an unfair comparison. I mean, tiered storage was around before some metrics. Right? So it's certainly existed existed then, too. It was just at the time. It was a significant innovation course to layer at the time, right? A big cash front, ending some slower media and then taking advantage of the media on the back end. The big difference today is that if you look at what some metrics became through its Evolution's DMX and V Max and now Power Max. It's still tiered storage, you know, you still have some cash. That's that's for unending some faster media with power. Max, you're you're dealing now with us with an SS a back end. But what happened with those types of architectures is the tearing became more automated. But you're still moving information around. You're still moving Information from one said it This to another set of this leader in the cycle. You're still trying to promote things you know, to to the cash up front. We're doing it in real time. We're >> doing it by analyzing >> the data on the way it comes in. We're reassembling it again, taking the random ization out we're reassembling it and storing it across multiple disks in a way that it it increases our probability of pulling that information associated information back when we need it later. So there's there's no movement. Once its place, we don't have to replace it. You know it's already associated with other data that makes sense, and that gives us a lot of value. >> And secret sauce is the outcome of the secret sauce is you're able to very efficiently. Well, historically, you haven't been able to do a lot of garbage collection, a lot of data movement, and that just kills performance. There's >> really no garbage collection necessary in our in our world way. Also use very modern data structures or patents. Ah, lot of them on our neural cash Deal with the fact that we use a try data structure. So we're not using old fashioned hash tables and you know, l are you algorithms, You know it Sze very, very rapid traverse a ll of these trees >> and you're taking advantage of machine intelligence inside the software architecture. That really is some of the new innovation that really wasn't around to be able to take advantage of that 20 years ago. Maybe it was it was just not cost effective. Do the math was there, put it that the math of the mouth was there and >> there there There's been lots of evolutions of that over the years, a swell, but we continue to evolve and innovate. And, you know, one of the one of the cool things I think about working infinite at is is the multiple multiple generations of engineer where you've got people who understand that math they understand the real nuances of what it means to operate in a world of storage, which is quite a bit different than operating, saying networks or proceed be used because data integrity is paramount. There's lots of lots of things that go on there as well. But we also have younger generations, generations who like new challenges and like to re invent things so they find newer and greater ways to do things. >> This is exciting. So systems, thinkers and I mean server thinkers. I mean, people who understand, you know, systems designed it all the way through and and, you know, newbies who are super smart like you say, wanna learn and solve problems? Go back to the petabytes scale discussion, >> solve problems at petabytes scale, right? Even if the customer doesn't need that necessarily to solve that problem is critically important because even if you look at Les, just take, you know NFS, for example, most NFS systems deal with thousands of objects. Hundreds to thousands of objects are an F s. Implementation deals with billions, right? Do you need billions? How many applications you know that have billions of objects, But being able to do that in a way where performance doesn't degrade over time and also do it in a way where we say our nlm implementation isn't impacted by any any type of service events, we can take a note out, and it doesn't impact in ln There's no no degradation and performance. There's no impact or outage in service. All that's important. Even when you're dealing with smaller application sizes because they add up, they really do add up. He also brought up the point about, you know, density and actually intensity. Great. You know, back 25 years ago, when we were dealing with, you know, the first terabyte storage system, you know, how much how much stories did you have on your laptop? How much you have today, right? You know, you're probably more than a terabyte. They were laughing about putting things terabyte on the floor. And now you get more than a terabyte on your laptop. Things changing? >> Yeah. Um, I wanna ask you where you see the competition. We talked about all flash. We've had a long conversation, long, many conversations in the past about this, But you really, you know, the all flashy kind of described it as a Band Aid, essentially my words, but it was sort of a step function. Okay, great. Um, you have one company, really us who achieve escape velocity in that business in terms of pure But is that where you see in competition and you're seeing it from, you know, the hyper scale er's where you Yeah, you know, >> it's interesting. You know, you look at companies like, you know, we admire what they dio, especially with regard to marketing. They do a really good job of that. They also, um I have some really interesting ideas innovating the media, which is which is great. It helps us in the long run as well. Um, we just look at it as a component of our system, not these system, which makes it different. We don't really see the A f a. You know, the small scale a FAA is are the majority of our competition. We do run into them, but typically it the lower end of the opportunity. Even within the bigger companies that have competitors to those products, we run into them and smaller opportunities, not bigger opportunities where we run into them where there's a significant performance advantage as long as you don't mind the scale out approach to solving the problem. Unfortunately, when you're using a phase two skill out, you know you're putting all of the intelligence requirements on some poor storage administrator or system administrator to figure out what those where right, we take all of that away. So once it starts to scale, that's where we come in a plan. We don't see tons of competition there. Certainly, we're seeing competition from the clouds. And the competition from the clouds is more born of customer mandates and company mandates. Sometimes they I'm not quite sure that everybody knows why there who think to the cloud and we're problem they're trying to solve. But once they start to see a story that says, Hey, if the reasons are and you do understand those reasons, if the reasons are agility and financial flexibility and operational agility not as well as his acquisition agility, you know, we have answers to that and it starts to become a little bit more interesting and compelling. >> All right. One of the highlights of the M world each year is your dinner. Your customer I crashed in a couple of years ago when there were no other analysts there. And then last year again, it was in Vegas. Shows a nice steak house. This year we're in San Francisco, but But I had some great conversations with customers. I remember speaking to one customer about juxtaposing the sand thio to infinite debts platform. And you know the difference. The Sands taken off doing really well, but But he helped me understand the thinking from their standpoint of how they're applying it to solve problems and why v san wasn't a good fit. Your system was, um that was just one of many conversations last year had again other great conversations with customers. What do you do in this year? You have a customer dinner. We are? Yeah. We love to have you in and gave the invitation there. Yeah, the invitation. Is that definitely there? You know, a couple of >> years ago we didn't invite analysts, and you know what it was? It was a mistake. We and we learned that lesson into a large part. We credit you for for showing us how wrong we are. Our customers are very loyal. They're some of the most loyal in the industry. Don't take my word for it going. The gardener Pierre Insights and and look at our numbers compared to everybody else's any pick. Pick a vendor. We're at the top of the list with regard to not only the ratings but, more importantly, the customers willingness to recommend in every category, too. By the way, it's It's not just product quality and performance, and it's it's service support. It's easy doing business. It's an entirely different experience. So we love having the customers there, and the customers love having you there, too. They love having you and your appears in the industry there because they love learning from you and they love answering the questions and getting new insights. And we'd love to have you there. We're gonna be in the Mint this year. San Francisco meant not the not the current one that that's pretty coins, but the original historical site on duh. You know we have. We have invitations out thio to about 130 people because there's only so much room we have it at the event, but we're looking forward to a great time and a great meal and good conversation. >> That's great. Well, VM World is obviously one of the marquee events in our industry. It's the It's the fat middle of where the IittIe pro goes on dhe We're excited. Used to be Labor Day started the fall season. Now it's VM world. Well, Doc will see you out there. Thanks very much for your good to see you. All right. Excellent. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is day Volonte in the Cube will see you next time we'll see you at the M World 2019.