>> Announcer: From around the globe, It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020, our 11th year covering VMworld, the global experience, so we get to be able to pull in the community from around the globe. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, but a new role. Jill Stelfox, she is the chairman and CEO at Panzura. Jill, so nice to see you. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, Jill, so first, before we get into kind of what you're bringing to Panzura and the direction, we're here at VMworld. Panzura is a longtime partner of VMware. Why don't you just give us the update as to VMware and Panzura and how you support customers together? >> Yeah, so most of our deployments of Panzura actually run on VMware, whether it's on-prem or at the closest cloud location. So we work really closely in our hundreds and hundreds of deployments across the world. >> Wonderful, and for most of our audience, if they're not familiar with Panzura, of course, it's very high performance, really look at that cloud file system. Is that how it's positioned on your website? Bring us as to what brought you to Panzura, and what that means to the organization now that you're chairman and CEO. >> Yeah, so about five months ago now, we purchased the company from the current set of investors. We saw a really interesting technology here, and the ability to grow quite quickly, which, honestly, it's come true in the last few months, and Panzura is more than just a file system. It is a piece of fabric that allows you to put files in a really high performance way into the cloud, and collaborate across the globe, and who knew that five months ago when we bought the company, literally we bought the company a few days before California closed for COVID, and so this is the moment where file storage and collaboration is absolutely key, so great timing for us from that perspective. >> Yeah, absolutely. We've had so many conversations with companies as they have to really move fast, to be able to exist in the, I guess we call it the new abnormal, Jill. Help us maybe, if you've got a customer example of what's bringing the customers to Panzura, especially right now when there's acceleration of cloud, it's the theme we see, and the keynote here at VMworld and beyond, but what is it that differentiates Panzura and brings customers to you? >> Yeah, so we work, for example, with one of the largest banks in the world that took a legacy wire transfer application and put it out into the cloud, because they had no way of managing both the volume of transactions and the breadth worldwide that they needed in order to manage that application, and it would have taken years to rewrite that in a cloud native app, and putting it on Panzura works great. We also work with architecture firms, some of the largest in the world, where they're able to collaborate on building buildings all from home, which is pretty amazing, and then I would say the last, and maybe the coolest, is what we do in entertainment. We work with a large majority of the gaming companies, and they use Panzura to run all their files and collaborate on those really large games where they can code across the world, and then in the case, we just announced a partnership with the New Orleans Saints, where we're taking all their game day footage, and making it available to all their constituents quite quickly, and the big difference in all of those examples from other solutions, and what we do at Panzura, is that in other solutions, you have to duplicate that data across the world. We don't. We provide one single file, one single source, that's kept securely all the time and available all the time. >> Jill, help us understand how this fits into the cloud environment. So we talked about your VMware connection. I know Panzura is in the AWS marketplace, lots of discussions, AWS, Azure, even Oracle Cloud as to how it fits there. When I think about storing things in cloud, there's some of that just global replication that can happen, or how it can access it. Help us understand really the added value that Panzura has, and why that's important for that New Orleans Saints example that you talked about. >> Yeah, so one of the great things about the way that we handle data is you don't have to duplicate it. We just do snapshots, and it's there and available when you need it. The really important thing about putting this much data, very large files in the cloud, is you need to be able to manage your costs and also where you put it. So let's talk about cost for a second. Being able to have a solution that automatically manages cash versus S3 and longterm storage, that's one of our key, we have 34 patents or something like that. It's one of our main claims to fame is that we can absolutely do that, and that reduces the costs longterm of your storage in the cloud. That's one of the big deals. The other is look, AWS, pick Google, pick Azure. You likely are using more than one cloud, and we have a full hybrid solution. It can mirror what you have going on within your cloud or across clouds, which is perfect. >> Yep, maybe it would help if you dig in a little bit there. When people talk about hybrid cloud, they talk about multicloud. Often the red herring gets thrown out of portability. When we're talking about large data sets, we know we're not moving it. I mean, AWS has the big boxes they can ship you, or have a truck come to your facility to move it, but most customers, wherever you create your data, you tend to want to keep it there, but it's managing my data and fitting across these hybrid environments, or I'll have my data application in one cloud, I'll have a transactional application in another cloud. What are you seeing from your customers out there? How are they dealing and managing this overall cloud environment that they end up with? >> Yeah, it's actually really interesting, because I think the expectations from users day to day is that the cloud works exactly like your laptop or desktop would work in your office environment where you can seamlessly go between an Outlook 365 to a Dropbox. Each of those are on different cloud environments. They're different in terms of how they work, but from a user perspective, you want no latency and immediate access to your data. Well, the cloud doesn't really work like that, and so you need something like Panzura to be the system in the middle, the fabric in the middle that connects all those things together, so that when you want to reach for your big CAD drawing, and pull that, it's going to pull just as quickly as an email from Office 365, and you, as the user, don't need to know whether you pulled that out of cash, because it's a file that's used quite often, or whether it was over on S3 and in longterm storage, or longterm or cheaper storage in the cloud, and I think it's interesting, because a lot of people, we, by the way, work with a lot of customers that do move their data around. They have petabytes and petabytes of data, and they do move it around based on cost and availability, and we can do it all in the background, and as a user, you would see no degradation in legacy or in latency, and you would see no legacy data gone missing, which is kind of cool. >> Jill, it really sounds, David Floyer on the Wikibon team, writes about the hybrid and multicloud environments, and he says we've got these planes. So if you think of the networking planes, people in VMware will say that the vision that Nicera originally had, and MSX has, is that interconnective issue for the networking piece. It sounds like you're doing very much the same thing on the data layer to be able to sit on top of the storage, but provide some consistency in books. I know Panzura has been around for a while. Are there certain use cases that are kind of bubbling to the top? You mentioned things like collaboration, being something that, of course, is very active here in 2020, but if there's some of the, a couple of use cases that bubble up for you as to key things that customers are driving forward today. >> Yeah, I would say two main use cases in the last five months. One is, there is, sadly, dealing with a global pandemic isn't enough. We're getting ransomware at a higher level, and if you've got Panzura, and the way in which we take snapshots and we store your data, you can have a ransomware attack, and we've seen it with a number of our clients during COVID. You simply, in minutes, re-install a snapshot, and off you go. You didn't lose a thing and you can completely ignore ransomware, which has been really great for the folks that have had that installed. The second is the need to collaborate at the bitter end, people's houses. So this is one of the great things about working with VMware is we can put a VM certainly on-prem, but we can put it in your nearest cloud. So, for example, let's say you're using AWS, but the closest place to a particular group of people's home is a Google area. Fine, put it in Google. It won't matter for our deployment, and so you can get those files really quickly at the very edge, and being able to deploy it on VMware just makes it even faster, so. >> All right, Jill, as you said, you've been on for five months. What should we be looking at from Panzura through the rest of 2020? Give us a little bit as to your vision, and what we should expect to see. >> The company is growing really quickly. We've invested a ton of money in our sales partners and customers. So since I've been here, we've literally grown our revenue about 65%, and so that's been super fun. Also, we're investing heavily in R&D, and you're going to see some fun things coming from us on the R&D front about how to really support this data services layer that's coming, and the kinds of information that we all need to get about what's going on in the cloud and our ever-important data, so excited about that. >> Wonderful, we always love VMworld's one of those times where people go through the show floor, and they're like, "Okay, wait." You're hiring, what positions you have, any key things that people should be looking for? If you say, "Hey," what are you looking for when it comes to new talent for Panzura? >> Yeah, so one of the best things about, by the way, new talent for Panzura is that we use Panzura to run our company, and so you can work anywhere in the world, or live anywhere in the world, and work for us, and we're looking for development talent at all levels. We're looking for sales help at all levels, and honestly, there are some internal roles as well, so you can definitely come to our website and see all of those. We're very excited about the growth and hires. >> Always good to see that growth. Jill, why don't you give us a final takeaway that you want people to have about Panzura, what you're seeing from VMware customers these days, and help us get the final takeaways? >> Yeah, so what we enjoy about Panzura and VMware is really being able to deploy some of the largest companies in the world, whether it's federal government, or a very large worldwide enterprise, and if you are looking for a common fabric that allows you to deploy across clouds, we are your choice. >> Jill, thank you so much for catching up. We need to bring you back. Jeff Frick's going to want to talk to you more about the technology and football. Glad to see that you're still plugged in with those as we knew you were. Jill Stelfox, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Stay tuned for more coverage from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Manhattan, it's the Cube, covering AWS Summit, New York City, 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> And you are watching the Cube. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls. We're at the Javits Center, here, Midtown Manhattan, for the AWS Summit. We're continuing our coverage here live on the Cube. We'll broadcast outlet of the silicon angle tv platform, and we're joined now by Anuj Dutia, who is Senior Manager of Product and New Business at Verizon. Anuj, it's good to see you today, sir. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> You bet, absolutely. Now, you have a partnership in the works with AWS. I know you had an announcement today, of sorts. Also, adding a little more flavor to that, I want you to tell us a little bit about that announcement, and the significance of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. We're really observing the industry's, our customers are the biggest, Fortune 500 customer's enterprises, they're moving their vote close to AWS. So, once they move their vote close to AWS, they want us to connect to their applications, our networks to connect to their applications in a seamless way. They want to make sure that the end user experience, the application experience, when the application's under AWS, is seamless. So, what we're trying to do is we're trying to make sure we instantiate the workshop appliances in AWS, so that we're able to give them internet connectivity. So, we have a service offer, which is across the platforms. You know, we have our private cloud, we have AWS, we have the end CPE devices. For our customers, they want to have hybrid environment. They want to make sure that they are able to connect with each of these business applications with the best user experience. So, that's what we are enabling them to do with this service. >> I'm wondering if you could help clarify for us, because those of us that have watched a while, I mean, I remember when Verizon bought Terremark recently, I know you're still working through some of the details, but people still come to me and say oh, you're talking to Verizon, I hear they're selling off all their data centers. So, of course, that's kind of the headlines when you dig in to what you were talking about, the hybrid solutions, lots of partners. What is the role of cloud in Verizon, and what are some of those important solutions you're putting together? >> Sure, so we have our own offering, you know, which is the hosted network services. It's an open stack, base back form that we have around the world, but we're not in the business of, we want the customers to be connected, so we're in the business of networks. So, if our customers are moving on to a public cloud, or a private cloud, or their own data centers, we want to enable them to have that internet connectivity, and make sure they're able to take advantage of the application that we're routing, as well as the transport diversity. You know, we have a product called Secure Cloud Interconnect, or Direct Connect in AWS terms, which is one of the transports that will be used their high priority applications, and internet for another one. So, basically, we want to make sure we are able to give them the advantage of the through transports, as well as enabling them to have the best experience. So, regardless of what deployment they have, to your question, we want to make sure we are their partners in enabling them to do that. >> Yeah, the open stack solution, I mean, that's really building NFV, so what you care about is delivering services to the end user, correct? >> Correct, correct. So, we do have a concept of white boxes, or genetic platforms on the CP side. So, if I'm an enterprise with 5000 stores, as an example. I want to deploy these lightweight white boxes around the country, and then haul all the traffic to my private data center, to AWS, to other cloud providers. We will be able to do that, and with this partnership, we will be able to get them closer to their applications within AWS, that's the whole plan of action. >> Yeah, all of the carriers, including Verizon, have lots of edge deployments, that's been one of the hottest topics. Does that fit in with what you're doing with Amazon? Maybe you can, you know, what does Edge mean to kind of your business unit, your customers? What's important there? >> Absolutely, absolutely. As far as Edge is concerned, right? There is a thick Edge, and there is a thin Edge. When you say a thick Edge, you want to have all the applications, network applications, routing, firewall, you name it, everything to be sitting in the Edge. If I'm a bank, I may need that, but if I'm a retailer, I may not. I may say, no, I want to have my security applications in the cloud. The cloud could be our private cloud, it could be customers' cloud, or it could be AWS. We will enable to connect those Edge devices, the thicker version, or thinner version, to each of these cloud locations, so that it's a seamless connectivity for the enterprises. So, our strength is in the virtualization, and in the network connectivity. But all focused on the network. That's our whole use case, and we want to make sure if a customer walks in to our door with these different hybrid deployments, we're able to support them without any exceptions. >> We talked a lot so far about what you do, or the goals or the mission that you have, put it on the other side of the fence, from a customer expectation, and from a customer demand. How has that changed? >> That's a good question. So, what we've seen is our customers have a lot of options. We are not in the business of telling them where their applications should reside, where their business applications should reside. Now, if, as an organization, if they've decided to move their critical applications to AWS, or have them in their private data centers, so they are coming to us, customers are coming to us and telling us, we want, what is our business goal? Our business goal is to have, when my employee tries to reach my HR application, it should be seamless. It should not matter whether I host it in my data center, yours, AWS, or on the Edge. They don't care, they want to have access to those four top applications, or 40 top applications all the time. So, we've seen customers coming in and saying, and telling us, we're not asking you where to host the business apps, we have already made a decision, we are going to host it in these four clouds. One of them definitely being AWS. And we're like, okay, we will enable you, you just tell us what kind of connectivity you guys need, where do you want to host it, and with AWS being their key data center for hosting their business applications, now we have an automated, orchestrated way. So, you have your 5000 devices, with a click of a button, we'll instantiate something on AWS for you. That way, you're able to connect to all of your business applications seamlessly. So, with the demand that, going back to your question, the demand that we're seeing is hey, we want to have a variety of deployment models, we don't want to be locked down, we don't want to spend a whole lot on our data centers, we like the AWS solution, so we're going to have our business apps hosted at AWS, but at the same time, we want to make sure everything is connected for our users, and there is no latency that they experience. Customers are still having a lot of challenges about kind of getting their arms around this whole multi cloud environment, and networking a lot of times is kind of networking security and management sit at kind of the top of the challenges there. How would you rate how we're doing as an industry, how have we moved the ball forward, and what do we still need to do, to be able to make this seamless, manageable, much easier going forward? >> It's a great question. We come across these customers all the time, right? They see a bunch of PowerPoint presentations and advertisements, in all the different forms, and they think that they think that they're able to do that all by themselves, and have the cost efficiency. The key challenge is the key know how, and connecting it with the whole end to end network, as well as applications. So, what we bring to the table is exactly that. We partner with AWS and other cloud providers, but AWS being the biggest one, we try to make sure we are, get them the fully orchestrated solution. So, our whole solution is we're enabling, in this service, right, we're enabling Cisco and Viptela solutions on AWS. So, our whole value prop with them is you place an order with Verizon, we take care of making sure you're connected to AWS, seamlessly, with the appliance of your choice, which in this case happens to be Cisco, Viptela solutions, and the reliable network from Verizon, but completely automated and orchestrated. What we've been observing is customers go down the DIY path, and that's absolutely fair, sometimes they succeed, but most often they come back and say I don't know how to make it work end to end. I'm able to do this little piece part, have done my dev opps here, so it works, but when I move my production load, I don't know what to do. And, that's the value of this partnership, that we're looking to provide that seamless experience to our customers. >> And also, we've been talking a lot about enterprise, but that market is mostly small and midsize. I mean, which one do you think sells the wind in it's sails right now? I mean, or is it apples and oranges, because they have different concerns, different levels and different options? >> That's an interesting question. They are apples and oranges, at least in my opinion, and I'll tell you why. Because the needs for the top Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 companies, is very different from a dentist's office or a lawyer's office. But, there is a middle line. The middle line is, what if I'm a coffee shop with 8000 stores? Am I on this side, or that side? Because, each of these 8000 stores are like small businesses, if you will, but as a company I'm a tier one, so I have my own needs from a corporate network standpoint. So, what we're trying to do is we're trying to make sure we take advantage of our partnership with AWS, where we are saying we're able to enable you if you are moving your production workloads anyway. But, if that's something you want to scale, then probably you've got to have a hybrid deployment and we make that happen for you. But, to your question, right? I do think they're apples and oranges, because their needs are very different. The need for the application availability for an enterprise, but a big tier one enterprise, is way higher than, say a dentist's office. If Outlook 365, Office 365 doesn't work for a dentist office for an hour, who cares? But, if it doesn't work for a big. >> Just don't let your dentist hear you say that. Be careful. >> All right. >> Everybody buy your dentist, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> All right, Anuj, thanks for being with us. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> We appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> Good luck down the road. >> Thanks >> Anuj Dutia from Verizon joining us here on the Cube. We continue live from New York City. AWS Summit. Back in a bit.