(energetic music) >> Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Lynn Lucas. She is the CMO of Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on the program, Lynn. >> Oh, just so excited to be here with you guys and host you in the Cohesity booth for the first time at Microsoft Ignite. >> It's been a lot of fun. There's a lot of buzz around here, and it's fun to be right, to be your neighbor. Exactly. >> Great. >> So today, there's been a lot of news, some new exciting announcements of integrations with Microsoft. I wonder if you can walk our viewers a little bit through what Cohesity announced today. >> Absolutely. So, we have been partners with Microsoft for some time, and today, we announced extensions to our capabilities with Microsoft Azure and Office 365. So Cohesity now extends data protection and backup for Office 365, including granular recovery of mailboxes and granular search for discovery purposes. We also have extended our integration with the Azure data box, and we also are increasing our DR capabilities for our customers with Azure so we now have fail back from the Azure Cloud for disaster recovery purposes. So, just continuing to see tremendous growth, hundreds of Microsoft customers with Cohesity, and these new capabilities are going to expand the possibilities for them. >> Lynn, it's an interesting conversation these days 'cause, you know, in our research, and we've talked about this, data's at the center of everything, and the challenge for customers is data's everywhere. You look here at the Microsoft show, well, I've got all my traditional stuff, I've got my SaaS stuff, my PubliCloud stuff, now Edge with the data box things there. Microsoft plays across there, and it sounds like Cohesity is playing in all of these areas, too. >> Absolutely, and I thought, you know, Sacha did such a good job in the keynote yesterday of really laying out the imperative for digital transformation, data being at the heart of it, but also laying out one of the key challenges which he pointed out, which is the data silos. And, I think Cohesity is right smack in the center of that conversation because we've always been about consolidating secondary data silos. And, you know, our partnership with Microsoft, really, I think, reinforces what they've been talking about, which is also a hybrid strategy that the bulk of customers that we talk to see that their data is going to be on premise, it's going to be in the cloud, and increasingly, it's goinna at the Edge, and we span all of those locations to create this one operating environment so that things like the new open data initiative, I think, will be much easier for customers because they won't be wondering, well, is my data all in one place to be operated on? >> So, talk about the problem of the data silos, because, as you said, it's one of the biggest challenges that companies face today. They are data rich and yet, this data's here and this data's here. Can you describe a little bit about what kind of problems this is for companies, and why this matters? >> So, I think it's just something folks are starting to really get a handle on. As I talked to individual folks here at the show, you'd be surprised at how many aren't even really sure, maybe, how many islands they have, you know, so, even mapping where is all my data, I think, is a capability that many organizations are still getting their arms around. And the challenge, of course, is that in today's world, it's very expensive to move large data sets, and so you want to bring compute to the data, which is what a hyper-convergence in Cohesity is about. And, when you look at the imperatives at the board level, the CEO level, they increasingly see that data becomes really the true competitive advantage for most organizations, and yet, if they can't operate or bring compute to that data and do something with it, they're really at a handicap. We call, you know, some of the newer companies are kind of data-centric or data natives, the Air BNB's, the, maybe, Netflixes of the world, not everyone aspires to be them. As well, not everyone has the resources that those companies may have had or just stay short period of time. Most organizations have the benefit of years of data. We want to level the playing field and allow them to become competitive with their data by providing that single foundation. >> Yeah, Lynn, it's a big show here. They said thirty thousand people and a really diverse ecosystem. What really surprised me is the spectrum of customers that you have here. I mean, we know Microsoft has a long history in higher education. We spoke to one of your customers, Brown University, and of course, long history they have with Microsoft. What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers, maybe, what's different at this show than some of the other, cloud and kind of younger shows that we might go to. This show's been around about almost thirty years now, so. >> Yeah, you know, isn't it, you know, I hate to give our ages but, I think we've been doing this for a while now, right? And Microsoft has been part of the IT ecosystem in a major way, and it's great to see the vibrancy here and how they're talking about AI and ML and moving forward with it. You know, what strikes me here is that a lot of the organizations here are now really understanding the pragmatism of having a hybrid strategy of what makes sense in the cloud as well as what may continue to be on prem for them. I think we complement that well. I'm really excited, too, about the idea that we are going to be using machine learning to be doing a lot more that humans simply can't keep up with in terms of the data growth and then doing something productive with that. And I think that's a conversation that we're just tapping the surface of here at this show. >> Yeah, you've said something that really resonated with me. You know, we have people that have been in the industry a while and, I look at you, your founder, Mohit, and this isn't his first rodeo. He'd been looking at data back from a couple of generations of solutions, and people are very excited. Machine learning, as you said, we used to talk about automation and intelligence around this environment. Now, I lived in the storage industry for quite a while, and we've talked about it but it feels more real when I talk to the architects and the people building this stuff. They are just so excited about what we will be able to do today that we talked about a decade or so ago but now really can make reality for customers. >> No, absolutely, and I think, you know, we have our own investment in that. Helios, which we announced just last month, you know, provides that machine learning capability because what we hear from our customers is what they love is the ability to have simplicity because, let's face it, IT environments continue to grow in complexity. They're looking for ways to subtract that complexity so they can apply their talents to solving the primary mission, as I call it, of their organization, whether that be public sector or private sector, adoing that in a simpler way. You know, look, one of the great stories that one of our customers is talking about here is how Cohesity helped him with a standard thing that most IT organizations have, which is, we're going to do a power shut down and we've got to perform a DR failover, and this particular organization, University of Pennsylvania Annenberg, had a set of twelve websites which, the professors and the students rely on, and it was going to take them literally almost a month to try to move them, and they didn't have that kind of time, and with Cohesity, with our DR capabilities, he was able to do that literally with a few clicks, kept the community of professors and students happy, and didn't spend, more importantly, twenty days trying to rebuild websites for a standard IT event, right? That's the kind of real life story in terms of what IT gets back that they can invest in other more important focus areas for their business. >> Well, for their business and also, just for their lives giving people their time back, their weekends back, their time at night >> Weekends and nights, right? >> With their families, yeah. >> We all need that. >> Satya Nadella is such a proponent of an improving workplace productivity, even five percent, he says, can make this big difference. Can you talk a little bit about how you view that workplace productivity at Cohesity and your approach to giving people either time to concentrate on more value for their companies or just their lives? >> So, again, a super story that we have from another customer that is here at Microsoft, and is an Azure customer, and a Cohesity customer. HKS, one of the world's most respected architectural firms, designed AT&T Stadium, there's a new major pediatric hospital going in in Dubai. They operate in ninety-four countries with remote designers and architects, and because of their inefficient backup processes and archive processes, they literally were having their associates have to work weekends as well as losing time on their projects, and time is money, and they, you know, in some cases, are penalized if they don't make certain dates. And so, I think, these are really pragmatic examples. On average here, pulling some of the folks here, I've heard that they can get a day a week back, sometimes for their administrator who now doesn't have to do repetitive manual tasks anymore. >> One of the things we always love digging into is, you talk about people's jobs and some of the new careers that are happening. We talked to one guest earlier this week. He said, if you're a customer and you learn Azure as what you're doing, like, you're resume is gold. We've talked to, and the really early Edge, like site reliability engineering, he said, don't put SRE on your resume or every recruiter will be calling you up and you won't even be able to answer your phone. Cohesity, you're doing a bit of hiring also. Maybe you could talk about- >> We are! >> What are you seeing from customers and what are you looking for internally? >> We have tremendous good fortune, we grew three hundred percent in revenues year over year, we're hiring in our RTP offices, in our San Jose, in India, around the globe. You know, we look for the best and the brightest, a lot of engineering talent, marketing talent as well, really, across the board but, you know, I think to the point you just made for the IT folks that are here, looking forward as to how you are going to help your business with your data infrastructure or data flows throughout their organization is, to me, where some of the career movement is happening when you hear the talk about how important it is to so many aspects of the business. >> And what are the sort of challenges that you're having with hiring, or are you? I mean, you're a red hot company, but, are you finding it difficult to find the kind of skills, the kind of talent that you want? I mean, what is, what's the candidate pool like? >> You know, so, I think what's really interesting, we are red hot, we have a lot of applicants so, I'd say, in general, no, we're very blessed that way. I think, though, more businesses, including ours, are finding it's difficult to get, say, those data scientists, right? Some of these also front end or back end developers, you know, it's not just the technical companies that are recruiting for that anymore. It's not just the Cohesitys and the Microsofts that are looking for that talent, but it's now also the Netflixes or, you know, the eBays, et cetera, right? They are all looking for the type of talent that we are and so, in general, I think that this bodes well for young people or folks really anywhere in their career watching about, thinking about, where the talent needs are, and there's a lot of activity and interest in people with those kinds of skills. >> You know, let me just follow up on that. So, Cohesity is a Silicon Valley-based company but, as you mentioned, you've got an RTP location. We've seen quite a lot of Silicon Valley-based companies that are starting to do a lot more hiring outside 'cause it's, I'm going to be honest, really expensive to live in the valley these days. So, any commentary on that dynamic? >> Well, you know, I think you're in Boston, not the lowest cost market either in the country. >> True, it's true! >> Yeah, you know, I think with a lot of the technology that's out there, you know, people don't have to be co-located, and we certainly also look to develop and invest in other communities around the globe, so we're not looking solely in San Jose but also in RTP, we've got headquarters in Europe as well as, of course, in India. So we look for talent everywhere, and, my own personal team, you know, I have folks basically around the US as well as across parts of the globe because talent, in many cases, is what matters and where you are physically, you know, some of the great technology that's out there can help break down those barriers of time and distance. >> Finally, this conference, it's thirty thousand people from five thousand different companies around the world. What is going to be, I mean, we're only on day two, but, what's been your big take-away so far? What's the vibe you're getting here at Ignite? >> You know, the vibe has been one of energy, of excitement. I've talked to a lot of folks from around the globe. I've been actually, pretty amazed at some of the people from different countries around the globe that are here, which is fantastic to see that draw in, and I feel like there's a general sense of excitement that technology and what Microsoft's doing can help solve some of the bigger challenges that are here, in the world, and for their own businesses, and we really look forward to Cohesity helping them lay that great data infrastructure foundation, consolidate their silos and help them build a foundation for, you know, doing more with their data. >> Great. Lynn Lucas, thank you so much for coming on theCube. It was great, great talking to you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite and theCube's live coverage coming up in just a little bit. (electronic music)