(big band music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Your file was so big, it might be very useful, but now it is gone. Oh wait, we're not talking about those type of haikus. Happy to welcome to the program the new CEO of HYCU. That's H-Y-C-U. Simon Taylor, the rebranded company, formerly Comtrade, I'm Stu Miniman with Keith Townsend. Simon, great to see you. >> Great to see you as always. >> Yeah so I've corked a quick Google search. Give me some technology things. I believe it's actually like a former V expert, that friend of mine had it in his deep archive, he's got all these things about Windows and the like. So let's start there. We've had you on the program, when it was Comtrade, explain the HYKU, the name and how it fits with the other company, everything like that. >> Absolutely, so a huge shift since the last time we all spoke. As you might remember, Comtrade Software was a data protection, a mondering company, but it was part of a larger organization. We spun it out of Comtrade Group and rebranded as a new company, HYKU. HYKU stands for Hyper Converge Uptime and, really, the way we came up with the name is we were thinking about the fact that we sell data protection for the hyper-converger Enterprise Cloud. More specifically, purposed-filled backup recovery for Nutanix. And when we think about hyper-converger, what are we really doing? We're taking enormous amounts of data and we're simplifying it down to a nice, small elegant package, much like the Japanese poem, haiku. So we leveraged that name, haiku, and then create HYCU, Hyper-converged Up-time. >> Yeah and if you kept the Enterprise Cloud and everything like that, it would've been a much longer word. (laughing) >> Absolutely right. >> Alright, but let's speak to, Comtrade and now HYCU's been working with Nutanix for a lot, tell us what you're hearing from your customers, what's shaping the market, what's it like being in this ecosystem? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we found it to be absolutely wonderful. HYCU, Inc. now, is really the world's only purpose-built backup recovery product for Nutanix. We've got about 350 employees in five different countries. And we launched about eight months ago, our very own backup and recovery product for Nutanix. When we thought about what kind of product we wanted to build as our own stand-alone company, we knew it had to be in hyper-converged, we knew that Nutanix was the industry leader and we'd had so much respect for Nutanix and for their leadership for so many years, as you remember. We had brought the monitoring scompact for Nutanix to market about three years ago, and we thought our real legacy has been in the data protection space. We've been working with companies all across the world for 25 years, from an engineering perspective, supporting the development of blue-chip data protection products, and we thought what better than to build our own back-up recovery product? And if we're going to do that, we should do it for the industry leader in hyperconvergion Enterprise Cloud which is Nutanix. So when we thought about what it would take to build an HCI backup and recovery product, we said, you know what, we don't want to be the platform. Nutanix, in our opinion, is the platform. And they've got snapshots and cloning and replication built in to their product. So we said, rather than creating another beast, another platform, another silo, let's leverage the elegance of Nutanix and let's add to it application awareness, let's add to it all of the various different cataloging, and application support that would be required to actually provide a complete data protection solution to Nutanix customers. It's been wonderful, and in just eight months, we're now in 22 countries around the world. >> So, 350 people, this is a crowded space. There's a lot of start-ups, there's a lot of established companies, why Nutanix? The focus is for such a large company, what's the total addressable market for the product, and what's the attraction amongst Nutanix customers? >> Those are great questions, Keith. And absolutely, I think this is the question on everybody's mind, how big can Nutanix really get? In our eyes, you can guess the correlarity for us. We believe where Nutanix are where VMware were a decade ago, and that they're going to keep going. I think we've heard it from the Nutanix Executive Team, you know, they want to be a three billion dollar company, et cetera, and I think they're going to hit it. I think they're going to absolutely just grow and grow and grow and really be the platform of the future. So from our perspective, this is the most crowded space in technology and a very difficult place to penetrate. I would certainly not recommend anyone building a sort of plain vanilla backup solution and saying, "Hey, here we are." I just don't think it will work. But when you look at Nutanix, and you look at the evolution of data protection, starting with Unex, there was a solution for that, Windows, there was a very relevant solution for that, virtualization, another backup and recovery product. Now we're in Cloud and Enterprise Cloud, and there's a couple of new vendors that have appeared on the market, and they're all sort of saying the same thing, which is it's all about the application, it's all about integration, and gosh, it's got to be very usable. It's got to be Next-Gen and it's got to be focused on the consumer. It's got to be something that people want to use, that really has that simplicity and that elegance. The core difference is that, unlike some of the other HCI backup vendors, we've focused almost entirely on building it for Nutanix, which means that we can leverage the power of their platform and make our customers more successful. In terms of total adjustable market, what we wanted to do was say to customers, "You only should have one data protection solution "for your environment." So what we did is we added a V80P integration, so you can actually backup and recover not only Nutanix data but all of your Legacy VMware data as well through HYCU, okay? But we only market it to Nutanix customers, so what that enables us to do is to provide unified data protection solutions for Nutanix customers which helps them to more quickly migrate customers and workloads to new Nutanix bosses. >> So as far as that support for Legacy workloads, we talked to quite a few Nutanix customers and they're in a mixed environment where a percentage of the workload's on Nutanix, a percentage of the workload's are outside of Nutanix, so does that support, extend not only-- >> Both. >> From the virtual machines, but physical machines outside of the Nutanix scope? >> Sure, so we're at V3.0 right now. We've been out for about eight months. In our latest release we've added VSX supports, you can backup all of your Legacy infrastructure. We are adding physical and Q4 this year as well. So you're really looking at a comprehensive Enterprise-ready HCI Enterprise Cloud solution that leverages the power of Nutanix to make their customers more successful than ever before. >> Okay, great, so VMware and HV today, Bare Metal coming to the future. Let's talk about that Cloud piece bit. Nutanix partnerships in putting their environment into AWS, Microsoft, of course, Google, really, so all the backup players are talking about how they fit in this multi-Cloud world, so how does HYCU fit? >> Yeah. You know what we did, we actually repurposed HYCU, and we launched our own Google Cloud services backup product. It's in the Google Cloud Services Store, you can download it and you can actually leverage that as well. But I see that as the precursor. I think we, on the HYCU team, all see that as the precursor to Zy. We love what Nutanix is doing with Google on Zy. We think that's going to be a real game changer for them. And what we wanted to make sure is that we really understood the concepts behind it so that when they start launching workloads on Zy, we're right there, ready with Zy integration. >> So give us some hero numbers. What are some of the big features that you guys offer Nutanix customers that other data protection companies can't do? >> Sure. So one of the key things, Keith, is that from a Nutanix perspective, we actually integrate right at the storage level, so we're not going at the hypervisor level, and what that means is that we avoid something called VM-stung. So when we think about customers who are trying to recover their data, in a traditional hypervisor environment where you're backing up at the hypervisor level, you're going to see that VM-stung, you're going to see things freeze up a little bit when you're doing the recovery. By backing up and recovering directly from the storage level, we avoid that entire process. The second thing that we've done is we've actually patented application awareness. Now this is great thing, we leveraged it in the monitoring tools, Stu's going to remember that, and we brought that back in a totally new form for the data protection. What we do is we actually look inside the virtual machines, we can see what applications are there, we reconstruct them ourselves, and that enables self-service recovery on the part of the Nutanix Abna. So now when Nutanix Abna can say I want to restore a sequel, I want to restore exchange, I want to get an email back, they can do all of that themselves right from the solution. >> Alright, Simon, last thing I want to cover is what feedback are you hearing from the show here? What are the customers excited about? You've been to quite a few of these also, what's your wrap-up of the show? >> I think this is by far the most successful Nutanix event ever, and I think it's been a wonderful scale-up approach for everyone here. I think we're starting to see a lot more in the Federal space, certainly, we're starting to see a lot more, for both Nutanix and HYCU, kind of across the larger enterprises, and I think what people are starting to see is that they can actually move entire environments to Nutanix. And I think more and more workloads are shifting faster than ever before and these guys have just really found scale. That's been a terrific thing to see and obviously fantastic for our business as well. >> Alright. Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU, pleasure to catch up with you as always. We'll be back with lots more programming here from Nutanix .NEXT 2018 for Keith Townsend, Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (light electronic music)