(energetic funk music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you remote from our Boston-area studio in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and really happy to welcome to the program, actually, from down the road from where I'm sitting, but testing our coast-to-coast live-to-air remote capabilities, of course, everybody is working from home or things like that, Rob Strechay, CUBE alumni and friend of the program. Rob, it's great to see you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me on. Really glad to help you guys out and get on here and talk about what's goin' on, 'cause this remote thing is definitely going to be the wave for the next month or two, at least. >> Yeah, so, Rob, you spend a lot of your time talking to companies about strategic planning and the first thing for you is, in the industry, sometimes we talk about these black swan events, the things that, you know, we had our plans in place, a lot of companies either had their 2020 sales kickoffs or were getting ready for them, and all of a sudden, basically, everything that you were planning for, let's stop and re-evaluate, because coronavirus stuff is hitting, economic conditions globally are being impacted. What's the first thing that you tell people when you're advising when something completely unexpected and far-reaching, that we might not have full information on, hits? >> Yeah, I think there is, it's a great way to target and say, "Okay, where can I trim the fat, "but at the same time, where do I not "want to over-rotate or panic?" And I think that's a big piece of it, is that you don't want to go and panic too much and say, "Hey, we have to throw everything out." I think there's an opportunity, and there's definitely opportunities, but if you're looking at the different verticals that are being hit by this, if you look at things like healthcare, we have HIMSS that's supposed to be going on this week that was canceled, and all of the medical professionals and IT professionals at those hospitals are pretty much on lockdown. So if you're selling into that vertical, maybe then it is time to panic a little bit, or find another vertical, or understand how you go cross-vertical, in a way. So you have to evaluate what's going on, but don't panic, don't over-react to these types of events. >> So, Rob, you've worked with a lot of companies that provide disaster recovery. In the IT space, it's, "How do I deal with a failure?" One of the things that I know a lot of companies look at is when things go wrong, when there is some natural disaster or, like what we're having today, is, "Do I jump in and say, 'Hey, we can offer things'?" You see a lot of the companies that are providing remote services, take your Google, Microsoft, Zooms, are, "Hey, here's a free tier that you're able to use," but how much do you jump on this as a marketer, or how much do you just say, "Hey, we're here for you, "if there's anything we can do to help there," but you don't want to be seen as ambulance chasing or trying to profit off of some widespread disasters? >> Yeah, I think that's exactly it. The ambulance chasing part, you have to use a little common sense when you're going into these, and I think that goes a long way. You don't want to be seen as ambulance chasing, and, for instance, some of the small- to medium-size companies I've been watching in the tech and talking to some of their teams, they're putting out information, saying, "Hey, we're still up." If they're shipping hardware, "Hey, we're "still within our lead times. "We've built out enough capacity prior to this "and we'll be able to ship within 14 days of an order." So, reassuring their customers that they can get the kit out to them. At the same time, they're saying, "Hey, here is "what we're seeing from our customers, "that, if you're having trouble even once we do "ship it, you don't have somebody on site "to take it in, so we can offer services "to help you with that. So, helping them do staff augmentation or do things in a different manner, I see that as not the ambulance chasing aspect of it. I think if you're marketing into it, it's a little tough when you say, "Hey, well, "I'm the best remote desktop thing going, "and everybody can work from home," and trying to say, "And by the way, you have to buy into this "particular tier to get your entire company going." I think, again, you can look at, how do you share, maybe, the pain or share a loss leader going in, and look to build that. If you have confidence in your product, you'll get them on board, and they'll continue to do this, and they'll continue to move forward with it, because, like you said, I don't think anybody was necessarily prepared for a quarantine of an entire country, like Italy, or something of that nature. >> Yeah, the remote work is definitely a very hot topic. That doesn't necessarily mean that today is the day to start the 5,000-person virtual desktop project. >> Exactly. >> Because we know how long these things have a lead time. Rob, I want to ask you, actually, when you talk to customers, you've spent a lot of time in your career talking to customers, one of the buzzwords we've had in the industry is digital transformation. One of the big outcomes of digital transformation is to be able to react and move fast and be more agile. So I just wanted to get your take on what you're hearing from customers, where, of course, it's a spectrum, but what they're doing, and is this something that they should they should put on hold, is it something is going to help them prepare for things that they weren't necessarily thinking about? >> I think it's the latter, right? I think you're really, I would push in on digital transformation at this point in time, because you're not going to know what's going to break until you get into these situations, and I would say that we've seen a couple in the financial industry as we've gone through the volatility in the markets where they've pushed in on digital transformation, or there are some startups that have really pushed in on doing things in a new way from the traditional financial services companies, and they've found out, hey, stuff is breaking, and they're going to pay some fines to the SEC. And some of the traditional ones that have their digital transformation projects, they've bumped into this same exact thing, where they were having outages. So it's not just the new startups, it's some of the older, more established players that are finding out that, hey, you don't know until you get into that war, you don't know until you engage that enemy, per se, as that black swan event, what's going to break. So push in, I would almost double down on it, and say, "Listen, this is going to be "the way that helps us smooth these out. "As we can distribute things out, "we don't have, necessarily, one data center "where everybody has to go to, "and now that entire county is locked down, "or there's the National Guard surrounding it "and you can't get to it." >> Yeah, Rob, I'm wondering if you have any commentary on just the general dispersion of the workforce. You've worked for a variety of sizes of company, you've been a remote worker, you've worked for companies where you're far separated from the headquarters. Any kind of tips or recommendations from your background that you'd have for people and today? >> Yeah, I think, again, for the people who haven't done it before, it is an adjustment. You actually find that you work more hours being at home than you would in a natural, an office. I think that also, how do you keep your sanity when you're really distant from people, and how do you keep that connection and that culture? I definitely think that these solutions, like Teams and Slack and what have you, and Zoom and Webex, have come a long way to help connect people, and I think it's really leveraging those tools around you to have that connection. And I think that we've seen some of the announcements of people about putting out guidelines of, "Hey, here's how we have a remote workforce." And I've seen, actually, more, and it's been a trend out on the West Coast for a little while, where their engineering teams, the dev teams, are very diverse and very disparate because you can't find everybody in the Valley anymore. So how, maybe some of the people are in Washington, maybe they're in Oregon, and California, you have some on the East Coast, or even over in the Ukraine, for instance. Trying to create events to bring everybody together, doing more outreach as an executive to the entire company, becomes critical because sharing of that information is what people want to understand. They want to feel connected back into what's going on at what they perceive as corporate. >> Yeah, so some great commentary there, Rob. Yeah, absolutely, we've seen plenty of the software companies out there that have not only tooling, but best practices on how to do this, as well as, through social media, I've seen a lot of blog posts, things on Twitter and the like, yeah, and some things that you don't think about as much. I'm not regularly a remote worker, but, right, make sure you take time to eat, make sure you've blocked out the hours that you're going to have meals with family. And something I always noticed is, "Oh my gosh, I might spend an entire day "like this on conference calls (Rob laughs) "or sitting and working," as opposed to, if you're in the office, you get up, you walk around, you talk to some people, and it's like, you need to make sure you stretch (laughs) a little bit-- >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Because otherwise, you can end up sitting for eight hours, and that's really not good. >> Rob: (laughs) Yeah, definitely need those mental breaks. >> Yeah, all right, Rob, I want to give you the final word. What's, let's kind of put beyond some of the things that are right in front of us right now, give you kind of an open technology space. What's interesting you out in the market here in the early parts of 2020? >> Yeah, I think there's a lot of very interesting things going on with AI, and I think people are finally starting to get past the hype of "AI this, AI that" and trying to look at what the use cases are behind AI, and how that's really going to help reinvent some of the technology that we have used. I kind of always say that everything old is new again. But I think there's going to be some great new tech coming out that will help enable these types of digital transformations, and I see a lot of new companies approaching AI and not just saying, "Hey, I'm an AI company," but, "Here's the use case that I'm really fulfilling." And I think that's showing some of the maturity, I think that's going to help as this artificial intelligence or machine learning really starts to push in and help people become more operationally efficient, so maybe then we can start to realize some more of cloud, and more of this, "Hey, I had this data center, "now I am moving everything to the cloud," versus, "Well, I'm going to move it, "but I'm going to lift and shift, "and I still have the operational legacy." >> Yeah, absolutely. If I can do a little compare and contrast, back in the big-data world, everybody used to always complain that we had the best minds in our business working on how we could optimize people clicking on an ad, (Rob laughs) and when I look at AI, there's a lot of tech for good out there, there's amazing outcomes, there's things that it can really be transformational. All right, Rob, I know that you've been doing a little bit more writing, you're posting on LinkedIn some of your strategy. If people want to learn more and keep an eye on what you're doing, what would you recommend? >> Yeah, I would say go onto my Twitter feed, @RealStrech, and-or go to my LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me there. It's Rob Strechay, you can find me there pretty easily. There's not many Strechays in the world. So feel free to connect with me and view my articles there, and really, this has been a lot of fun. >> All right, well, always good to get two boys from Parsippany, New Jersey, to get together, talk about technology, and share it with the community. Rob, great to catch up with you. >> Thanks, Stu, take care. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, everybody, and thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (energetic funk music)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston Massachusetts it's theCUBE covering ZertoCON 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillin. We're here in Boston for ZertoCON and with me is Rob Strechay. He's the Senior Vice President of Product for Zerto and Rob, I understand here you have one of the big items of news is Zerto 7 is being announced. Tell us about what's new in Zerto 7. >> Yeah, so we're announcing Zerto 7, it'll be out in Q1 of 2019. We're real excited because really it's the first time that the IT Resiliance Platform that we've put out will also include in the convergence of backup, disaster recovery and cloud mobility all into one singular platform. We've been building upon this platform for years. People have come to know us for continuous data protection and our journal-based data protection. And now we're extending that over time to give people a better view and better resiliancy across near-term and the long-term. >> Alright now I think of back up as being kind of table stakes in the resiliance game, but the backup features are actually new for you in this release. Is that right? >> Absolutely. What we've done is enhance what we had. We had some backup features in there already. We already got used for recovering for things like ransom-ware used in our journal level file recovery where people can go back like a DVR, a few seconds before they got hit. Be able to pull the file, folder, or entire virtual machine back and pull that out like if you were using a backup. In fact, much quicker our customers tell us than Legacy Backup. But table stakes is having enhanced indexing and search capabilities across all of your different platforms. Having dedicated workflows that are integrated into the current recovery workflows. Things of that nature, that really are in Zerto 7 that would take us to the next level. >> Now backup is a fairly painful process for most IT Admins though, what is Zerto doing to make that simpler? >> Yeah, I think the great thing is we have over 6,000 customers already that utilize us and trust us for data protection on a daily basis. We're extending those workflows to say okay, I need a weekly, a monthly, a quarterly, or a daily even and I want to keep that for a certain amount of time. Right now they would see maybe one day to 30 days back in what we call our Journal. And now we're extending that so they see the points in time beyond that and helps to simplify those workflows for those customers. Because, really the complexity comes from I have a media server, I have single points of failure, I have to worry about did I get that backup or not. The journal technology we have actually alleviates that. Plus, we've been doing this at scale for many years with many thousands of customers and we know that that's been one of the pain points for our customers around backup too. We didn't take this lightly to go further into this market. We thought that, really, the market was ripe for convergence of these products. >> Alright, now go one layer deeper on journaling. I mean that's a technology that's been around for a long time, but really not so much in the backup space. What are you doing that's different with your approach to journaling? >> Yeah, so we actually brought this out back in 2011, so we've been doing it for about seven years now. And we took a different approach to disaster recovery. Allows for a lot more granular recovery in seconds. So you have recovery point objectives that are very near and then you get quicker recovery time objectives, as well. So, a lot of this journaling technology was how do you have the right order fidelity of all of these systems as an application? Now doing that and saying okay I want to take a point in time and I want to keep it as my gold copy for three months because I have a business or a corporate mandate that says this is the retention periods that I have. Really brings together what we've been doing in journaling for years as we went from being the first to put out a hypervisor-based replication and journaling system. Then we took it to what they call the DR as a surface market when we took customers to public cloud in 2014 and back from public cloud in 2016 and now we really have any-to-any technology across those different platforms all using that same underlying journaling technology. But it does it in different ways in clouds versus say VMware's hypervisor. >> Now how do you coordinate the complexity of that environment? You've got customers who have some backup on prims, some backup in the cloud that maybe have multiple clouds. How do you coordinate all that backup? >> Yeah, I think it's been really one of the things we've been working on for some amount of time already. So they're starting to see the fruits of our labor about how you have a distributed, scalable system that automatically does that. So, we're not just a replication engine or just a journaling system, we actually embed the orchestration in automation into the system. That way it's wrapped in. It's kind of like having an engine and having the steering wheel at the same time. Then we wrap a nav system, which is our analytics product, around that to give people guidance on how to utilize it. So, to your point, we try to make it easy. In fact one of our pillars is it better be simple, like real simple, otherwise we don't ship it. >> There are a lot of vendors in the various aspects backup, DR market, how is Zerto differentiating itself? >> Yeah, I think that we're not doing backup. We're doing a completely different way of taking this. Backup has been done typically either with agents or with snapshot technology. Maybe you go back four hours in time if you get hit with ransom-ware. Because we already have and can see that data, in the journal, seconds of granularity. So say somebody's loading a database on a Friday night and doing an ETL into the database, of a terabyte of data. We'll see that terabyte go in and all those changes happen. You could actually utilize the journal after you've actually done the load so you can take a pre and a post copy of that. So I have before I made the changes and after I made the changes which really helps customers in a unique way. >> You get into some very large file sizes, I would imagine, when you're doing that many copies of data How do you manage the volumes? >> Yeah, we have some technology inside the product that is space efficient, uses things such as compression and other types of technology. For doing the backup and in Zerto 7 for long-term retention or secondary storage we're partnering with people like HPE and their StoreOnce product set. We have other partners of ours like Exit Grid here and their NFS enabled secondary storage. Plus we'll use some of the typical S3, SMB, as well as cloud-based as targets because we think that they have some of that built-in hardware and built-in technology that really does a better job of doing the compaction. We're not trying to be a purpose built appliance for everybody, we look at being a software company and leveraging those really good secondary storage devices and clouds as the targets. >> One of the themes of the conference we heard John Morency of Gartner talking about this morning was resilience and really moving beyond backup and disaster recovery to business resilience. How well are your customers taking to that message? >> It's amazing, I think that when I go out and talk to our customer CIOs and VPs of Infrastructure or even just to Sys Admins, they're looking for resiliancy. They're looking for a single product that can bring together backup, disaster recovery and that cloud mobility. I think, you heard one of our customers up on stage with Morency, Jamie from Takata, that really has embraced that. They're actually, kind of, I would say pushing the cutting edge of seven different cloud providers and utilizing us as that platform. >> Paul: By design seven different cloud providers. >> Yeah, by design and part of that is if you look at GVPR and all the different regulations across the world they have to deal with, it's easier for them. But they know that they utilizes us as an IT Resilience platform that enables them to go those different places. >> You mentioned ransom-ware earlier, have you seen the growth of ransom-ware continue or is that now slowing down finally being displaced by crypto-mining and some other. >> I think that it's always there. I think that it flares up from time to time. And it's not a, as Ziv, our CEO and Founder, said yesterday, it's not if you're going to get hit by ransom-ware, it's when. And I think that being resilient and having a resiliency in depth type of approach really is important for that as well. >> So, in the time that we've got left talk about the future. What's the road map for Zerto going forward the next couple of years? >> Yeah, so this year we're laying out the IT Resilience platform, building it out and continuing to build upon what we've done as we see and where we see a lot of our customers going. Containers are a big thing and we see that infusion of containers in our customer base is growing rapidly. So we'll be looking at some new approaches to that. And we think we're uniquely positioned based on our underlying technology to take advantage of that. Cloud-born apps are a big one, as well. But because we're already in the cloud working with Azure as one of our key partners and Amazon, as well, we get to see how these all come together. And we have a unique seat at the table for going forward. >> Rob, I can't let you go without asking you to stand up please and show the camera the official Zerto colors. If anyone is walking the walk here it's Rob Strechay wearing pants of the official Zerto color. Where do you find pants of that color? >> You can find them, the great thing is being in Massachusetts there's a lot of different companies that make Nantucket Red, which is not really Nantucket Red, it's more like a Fire Engine Red, but these in particular I had made for me for this conference this week, so. >> I figure you can find anything in the Boston area. >> Absolutely. >> Rob Strechay, thank you very much for joining us. >> Rob: Much appreciate it, thanks for having me on. >> I'm Paul Gillin, this is theCUBE. (tech music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018 presented by siliconANGLE. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is siliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. It's the 12th year of the event, the fifth year we've actually had theCUBE here. Dave Vellante, my boss, was here the first year. Every other year, I've been kind of manning it solo. Great community here, I talked to a lot of users and really looking at, you know, some of the transitions that are happening in the industry. This event is all about virtualization and Cloud, and to help me put an exclamation point on everything we've been looking at here, and what's happening in the industry, happen to welcome back to the program Rob Strechay who is the SVP of product at Zerto, someone I've known for longer than I even realize, and you know, been on the program many times, But first time since you've been at Zerto. >> Yeah, first time since I was at Hewlett-Packer Enterprise. So, I'm glad to join you guys here, and great event, glad to be able to get down here today. >> You know, Zerto, company we've known for many years. I happen to know one of the earliest investors in the company, and you know, when I look at two of the biggest industry shows, when you talk about Virtualization and Cloud, it's VMworld and it's Amazon's Reinvent show. >> Right. And, I remember like the first or second year we did Amazon Reinvent, the Zerto booth was like right behind us, and so your company that really spans that gammon, helping customers with that, so I want to get your viewpoint, you talked about why people come here, but what are you hearing from the users? What are some of the big challenges they're facing, and how are they looking to manage some of those transitions? >> Yeah, I think it's really critical to have events like this that are, you know, a lot of different vendors that are here because I think when we see a number of companies going out and looking, and I was with a customer down in New York City yesterday, the software for FinTac. And what they were looking at is, how do we leverage multi-cloud? It becomes very important. They're looking at, it's not going to just be Amazon, it's not just going to be Azure, it's not going to be VMC on AWUS, they're looking at how they're going to have a multi-cloud strategy. And I think that when, what we're hearing from customers is there's a lot of confusion in the market, and I think that's why this program and others are really great at cutting through what is real, what's not real, how do you look for the ability to have that data mobility between clouds but with security. Especially today's like Privacy Day, you know, on the 25th, so, you know, you start to look at it and go, hey, security's a big thing, and a big theme from what people were saying here today too. >> Yeah, and one of the user interviews I really loved today talked about one of the biggest challenges he saw, he said, gosh, security, think about the Intel discussion there, what's that going to mean? And he actually said, performance issue actually doesn't fit, isn't a big deal for him from an architectural standpoint. Security? Oh my gosh, he's in healthcare. (laughs) If he's in violation, or if patient information gets out there, you know, this is the kind of things that put companies out of business. >> Absolutely, yeah, and I think that's what we're hearing. I mean, especially yesterday, it was okay, how do you layer encryption on top of your solution? How do you utilize the different types of secure transfers? How do you make sure the data is secure? There's a lot about that resiliency of the data, and making sure you can get it back, and it's immutable for that matter. >> Yeah, one of the things when we talk to customers, it's funny, in the industry we're always arguing as to what's the right terminology? It's like, I still get to have a company that said they had a convergence problem that they were trying to fix, and also it's like, hyper-cloud, multi-cloud, no, they have a Cloud strategy. And yes, they're using sass, yes, they're using public Cloud, and yes, almost everybody's got something in their data center. How do we get our arms around it? How do I have the services that work with me wherever I am, whether that's data protection, security, replications. So where's Zetro fit in that discussion, and how are customers doing at getting their arms around these challenges? >> So I think a lot of when I'm out talking to the CIO's and the VP's of infrastructure and having those conversations, a lot of what we help them understand is here's where you need to go, and here's the choices you need to make. Are you going to use Azure? Do you have an EA with Microsoft? Because you've probably been paying for Azure credits that you're not using, so start there. It's simple, it cost you nothing extra. Get your feet wet, dip your feet in there. We see a lot of customers of ours that use DR's as a service as the first stepping stone to getting into the Cloud. It's a nice, easy way in, they can get their feet wet, they can test out the performance, the security, they can do user acceptance testing without actually having to go there. They can also get a realistic view of the cost. I think that was talked about earlier today too. With some of the Amazon stuff is that really, you have to understand the cost. It's not the same as owning it on Prime. But then again you're not having the on Prime anymore, so if you can get away with that, when we see people taking strategies, a lot of it is data center consolidation, but maybe now I'm down from six data centers to two. And I still need to have that third copy. Where do I put that third copy? Do I put it at another data center? Do I go to a manage service provider, cloud service provider, or do I go to the public cloud? So, what we try to do is offer them a platform, the Zerto platform, that can actually take them to all those different places. We can take them there and bring them back. Yes, people use use for DR, but really that data mobility and the data flexibility really helps them stay away from the vendor lock-in as well. >> What are you hearing from customers when they talk about vendor lock in? There's very few companies out there that do a good job at being, it's like, oh, the VM ware, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, we can actually help you across the board there. >> Rob: Yeah. >> How much is lock-in a concern, and how do you as a software company stay agnostic and still fit into all of those environments? >> Yeah, the staying agnostic is really tough because some people are nicer than others, you know, to work with, and you know you try to not pick your favorites, but a the same time, we let our customers drive us to where they are going. I think that when we started to look at the bigger picture, people start out, you know, Amazon's the 800 pound gorilla in the space, everyone tries Amazon first. Maybe they didn't like or have the experience they thought they would, it was a lot more work than they thought it was going to be, so they start to look at other options. So when we started out, in 2014 we've been shipping our to Amazon, DR to Amazon part of our platform. Now, over the last year, we've added in the go-to and go-back from Azure, and we'll soon release the next iteration of that next month that will take even further among and across those different platforms. And I think to your point, it's a how can we give our customers choice? If you want to use a manage service provider, such as an IBM where they're based on Cloud foundation from VMWare, you can use that. If you want to then go from there to Amazon, our product will actually enable you to do that. And I think that's what we can do is look at our customers, and they've, luckily enough, driven us to this heterogeneous cloud environment. >> I want to get your comment on something. When people talk about compute moving to a more utility model, but it's not the way utility was where if I'm getting energy, as a consumer, from one place or another, I don't care whether it's wind, solar, or coal, nuclear, because I'm just getting it. When I look at Cloud computing, even infrastructure's a service. There's things that need to happen. When I talk to most software companies, it's yes, I'm going to support across the board, but there's special integration. There's things that I can do to make Amazon better, Azure better, Google better, and it's all a little bit different, and even with things like cooper netties, it's not homonogizing IT. The big problem we see out there is IT is a heterogeneous mess. There's never killing anything, it's all add this and add this, and now we've got a bad episode of Hoarders. >> Yes. (laughing) >> Is what we got, so I'm curious from a customer standpoint and from a product standpoint, maybe you know you could talk a little bit about that. >> I think our customers have been very clear to us that's simplicity, and I think that's what you're getting at is that simplicity is job one for us. If we're not being simple about what we do, and we're not really trying to make it all that one platform, we're not doing our job. We're doing a disservice our customers. So our Azure product looks identical to our AWS looks identical to our IBM looks identical to one of my other cloud service provider's products. Looks the same as your on Prime VMWare to VMWare or VMWare to HyperV for that matter. I think that part of it is that we've taken an approach that, exactly that. We got to be heterogeneous, but we've got to make it all look the same and be the same user experience. So, I think what we as an industry can do better is really focusing on user experience and single platform to help across these because like you said, we have a customer, he uses both AWS and Azure. And he was on of our first customers on AWS and one of our first customers using our Azure product. He said that certain Linux systems actually run better on Azure than they did on Amazon, and that surprised him. But he was able to go up and test them out, put them up there, felt them over, and do them in a test bubble, and see how well they ran, and I think to your exact point it's that was a surprise to him, and I think it's that your mileage will vary with the different clouds, and being able to go there and test on them is very important 'cause you're going to find that, like he did, he's a smaller company, it's a refabrics manufacturer, TenCate, they really focused on having that multicloud strategy because for them, they didn't want to have all their eggs in one basket either, but they found that certain applications ran better on Azure, certain ran better on AWS, so they're going to have that multicloud strategy. >> Alright, Rob, help bring us home. What brings Zerto to an event like this, kind of user groups in general, to VTUG specifically? >> Yeah, so the VTUG, we've been a long term supporter of this, I think since pretty much the founding of the founding of the company, so one of the reasons is a lot of out customers come to... So, we want to support them getting more knowledge out there, obviously we get to reach more customers and more potential customers, but at the same time, it's about the community and building that community. We look for more, in fact, we're starting to do even local user groups of our own. We've seen that the user groups have fallen off, and in particular around disaster recovery, in the IT resiliency, there's really no place to go. You had ISACA, you had different organizations for certifications, but really, that community where I can go and understand what are my peers doing, and get that group learning is so important, and that's why we've been a long term supporter of this. >> Alright, well Rob Strechay, really appreciate you helping me wrap up, put an exclamation point on what's going on here at the show as well as in the industry are all the major changes happening, virtualization and Cloud. Make sure to check out TheCUBE.net for all of our coverage. We have a huge line up of 2018 events. Feel free to reach out to the team. As always, I'm really to get on Twitter, I'm just @stu, @-S-T-U, and thank you so much of watching, I'm Stu Miniman, and you've been watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(light music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm really pleased to announce a collaboration with Rob Strechay. He's a guest cube analyst, and we'll be working together to extract the signal from the noise. Rob is a long-time product pro, working at a number of firms including AWS, HP, HPE, NetApp, Snowplow. I did a stint as an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Rob, good to see you. Thanks for coming into our Marlboro Studios. >> Well, thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. >> I'm really excited about working with you. We've known each other for a long time. You've been in the Cube a bunch. You know, you're in between gigs, and I think we can have a lot of fun together. Covering events, covering trends. So. let's get into it. What's happening out there? We're sort of exited the isolation economy. Things were booming. Now, everybody's tapping the brakes. From your standpoint, what are you seeing out there? >> Yeah. I'm seeing that people are really looking how to get more out of their data. How they're bringing things together, how they're looking at the costs of Cloud, and understanding how are they building out their SaaS applications. And understanding that when they go in and actually start to use Cloud, it's not only just using the base services anymore. They're looking at, how do I use these platforms as a service? Some are easier than others, and they're trying to understand, how do I get more value out of that relationship with the Cloud? They're also consolidating the number of Clouds that they have, I would say to try to better optimize their spend, and getting better pricing for that matter. >> Are you seeing people unhook Clouds, or just reduce maybe certain Cloud activities and going maybe instead of 60/40 going 90/10? >> Correct. It's more like the 90/10 type of rule where they're starting to say, Hey I'm not going to get rid of Azure or AWS or Google. I'm going to move a portion of this over that I was using on this one service. Maybe I got a great two-year contract to start with on this platform as a service or a database as a service. I'm going to unhook from that and maybe go with an independent. Maybe with something like a Snowflake or a Databricks on top of another Cloud, so that I can consolidate down. But it also gives them more flexibility as well. >> In our last breaking analysis, Rob, we identified six factors that were reducing Cloud consumption. There were factors and customer tactics. And I want to get your take on this. So, some of the factors really, you got fewer mortgage originations. FinTech, obviously big Cloud user. Crypto, not as much activity there. Lower ad spending means less Cloud. And then one of 'em, which you kind of disagreed with was less, less analytics, you know, fewer... Less frequency of calculations. I'll come back to that. But then optimizing compute using Graviton or AMD instances moving to cheaper storage tiers. That of course makes sense. And then optimize pricing plans. Maybe going from On Demand, you know, to, you know, instead of pay by the drink, buy in volume. Okay. So, first of all, do those make sense to you with the exception? We'll come back and talk about the analytics piece. Is that what you're seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think so. I think that was pretty much dead on with what I'm seeing from customers and the ones that I go out and talk to. A lot of times they're trying to really monetize their, you know, understand how their business utilizes these Clouds. And, where their spend is going in those Clouds. Can they use, you know, lower tiers of storage? Do they really need the best processors? Do they need to be using Intel or can they get away with AMD or Graviton 2 or 3? Or do they need to move in? And, I think when you look at all of these Clouds, they always have pricing curves that are arcs from the newest to the oldest stuff. And you can play games with that. And understanding how you can actually lower your costs by looking at maybe some of the older generation. Maybe your application was written 10 years ago. You don't necessarily have to be on the best, newest processor for that application per se. >> So last, I want to come back to this whole analytics piece. Last June, I think it was June, Dev Ittycheria, who's the-- I call him Dev. Spelled Dev, pronounced Dave. (chuckles softly) Same pronunciation, different spelling. Dev Ittycheria, CEO of Mongo, on the earnings call. He was getting, you know, hit. Things were starting to get a little less visible in terms of, you know, the outlook. And people were pushing him like... Because you're in the Cloud, is it easier to dial down? And he said, because we're the document database, we support transaction applications. We're less discretionary than say, analytics. Well on the Snowflake earnings call, that same month or the month after, they were all over Slootman and Scarpelli. Oh, the Mongo CEO said that they're less discretionary than analytics. And Snowflake was an interesting comment. They basically said, look, we're the Cloud. You can dial it up, you can dial it down, but the area under the curve over a period of time is going to be the same, because they get their customers to commit. What do you say? You disagreed with the notion that people are running their calculations less frequently. Is that because they're trying to do a better job of targeting customers in near real time? What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, I think they're moving away from using people and more expensive marketing. Or, they're trying to figure out what's my Google ad spend, what's my Meta ad spend? And what they're trying to do is optimize that spend. So, what is the return on advertising, or the ROAS as they would say. And what they're looking to do is understand, okay, I have to collect these analytics that better understand where are these people coming from? How do they get to my site, to my store, to my whatever? And when they're using it, how do they they better move through that? What you're also seeing is that analytics is not only just for kind of the retail or financial services or things like that, but then they're also, you know, using that to make offers in those categories. When you move back to more, you know, take other companies that are building products and SaaS delivered products. They may actually go and use this analytics for making the product better. And one of the big reasons for that is maybe they're dialing back how many product managers they have. And they're looking to be more data driven about how they actually go and build the product out or enhance the product. So maybe they're, you know, an online video service and they want to understand why people are either using or not using the whiteboard inside the product. And they're collecting a lot of that product analytics in a big way so that they can go through that. And they're doing it in a constant manner. This first party type tracking within applications is growing rapidly by customers. >> So, let's talk about who wins in that. So, obviously the Cloud guys, AWS, Google and Azure. I want to come back and unpack that a little bit. Databricks and Snowflake, we reported on our last breaking analysis, it kind of on a collision course. You know, a couple years ago we were thinking, okay, AWS, Snowflake and Databricks, like perfect sandwich. And then of course they started to become more competitive. My sense is they still, you know, compliment each other in the field, right? But, you know, publicly, they've got bigger aspirations, they get big TAMs that they're going after. But it's interesting, the data shows that-- So, Snowflake was off the charts in terms of spending momentum and our EPR surveys. Our partner down in New York, they kind of came into line. They're both growing in terms of market presence. Databricks couldn't get to IPO. So, we don't have as much, you know, visibility on their financials. You know, Snowflake obviously highly transparent cause they're a public company. And then you got AWS, Google and Azure. And it seems like AWS appears to be more partner friendly. Microsoft, you know, depends on what market you're in. And Google wants to sell BigQuery. >> Yeah. >> So, what are you seeing in the public Cloud from a data platform perspective? >> Yeah. I think that was pretty astute in what you were talking about there, because I think of the three, Google is definitely I think a little bit behind in how they go to market with their partners. Azure's done a fantastic job of partnering with these companies to understand and even though they may have Synapse as their go-to and where they want people to go to do AI and ML. What they're looking at is, Hey, we're going to also be friendly with Snowflake. We're also going to be friendly with a Databricks. And I think that, Amazon has always been there because that's where the market has been for these developers. So, many, like Databricks' and the Snowflake's have gone there first because, you know, Databricks' case, they built out on top of S3 first. And going and using somebody's object layer other than AWS, was not as simple as you would think it would be. Moving between those. >> So, one of the financial meetups I said meetup, but the... It was either the CEO or the CFO. It was either Slootman or Scarpelli talking at, I don't know, Merrill Lynch or one of the other financial conferences said, I think it was probably their Q3 call. Snowflake said 80% of our business goes through Amazon. And he said to this audience, the next day we got a call from Microsoft. Hey, we got to do more. And, we know just from reading the financial statements that Snowflake is getting concessions from Amazon, they're buying in volume, they're renegotiating their contracts. Amazon gets it. You know, lower the price, people buy more. Long term, we're all going to make more money. Microsoft obviously wants to get into that game with Snowflake. They understand the momentum. They said Google, not so much. And I've had customers tell me that they wanted to use Google's AI with Snowflake, but they can't, they got to go to to BigQuery. So, honestly, I haven't like vetted that so. But, I think it's true. But nonetheless, it seems like Google's a little less friendly with the data platform providers. What do you think? >> Yeah, I would say so. I think this is a place that Google looks and wants to own. Is that now, are they doing the right things long term? I mean again, you know, you look at Google Analytics being you know, basically outlawed in five countries in the EU because of GDPR concerns, and compliance and governance of data. And I think people are looking at Google and BigQuery in general and saying, is it the best place for me to go? Is it going to be in the right places where I need it? Still, it's still one of the largest used databases out there just because it underpins a number of the Google services. So you almost get, like you were saying, forced into BigQuery sometimes, if you want to use the tech on top. >> You do strategy. >> Yeah. >> Right? You do strategy, you do messaging. Is it the right call by Google? I mean, it's not a-- I criticize Google sometimes. But, I'm not sure it's the wrong call to say, Hey, this is our ace in the hole. >> Yeah. >> We got to get people into BigQuery. Cause, first of all, BigQuery is a solid product. I mean it's Cloud native and it's, you know, by all, it gets high marks. So, why give the competition an advantage? Let's try to force people essentially into what is we think a great product and it is a great product. The flip side of that is, they're giving up some potential partner TAM and not treating the ecosystem as well as one of their major competitors. What do you do if you're in that position? >> Yeah, I think that that's a fantastic question. And the question I pose back to the companies I've worked with and worked for is, are you really looking to have vendor lock-in as your key differentiator to your service? And I think when you start to look at these companies that are moving away from BigQuery, moving to even, Databricks on top of GCS in Google, they're looking to say, okay, I can go there if I have to evacuate from GCP and go to another Cloud, I can stay on Databricks as a platform, for instance. So I think it's, people are looking at what platform as a service, database as a service they go and use. Because from a strategic perspective, they don't want that vendor locking. >> That's where Supercloud becomes interesting, right? Because, if I can run on Snowflake or Databricks, you know, across Clouds. Even Oracle, you know, they're getting into business with Microsoft. Let's talk about some of the Cloud players. So, the big three have reported. >> Right. >> We saw AWSs Cloud growth decelerated down to 20%, which is I think the lowest growth rate since they started to disclose public numbers. And they said they exited, sorry, they said January they grew at 15%. >> Yeah. >> Year on year. Now, they had some pretty tough compares. But nonetheless, 15%, wow. Azure, kind of mid thirties, and then Google, we had kind of low thirties. But, well behind in terms of size. And Google's losing probably almost $3 billion annually. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing by advocating and investing. What's happening with the Cloud? Is AWS just running into the law, large numbers? Do you think we can actually see a re-acceleration like we have in the past with AWS Cloud? Azure, we predicted is going to be 75% of AWS IAS revenues. You know, we try to estimate IAS. >> Yeah. >> Even though they don't share that with us. That's a huge milestone. You'd think-- There's some people who have, I think, Bob Evans predicted a while ago that Microsoft would surpass AWS in terms of size. You know, what do you think? >> Yeah, I think that Azure's going to keep to-- Keep growing at a pretty good clip. I think that for Azure, they still have really great account control, even though people like to hate Microsoft. The Microsoft sellers that are out there making those companies successful day after day have really done a good job of being in those accounts and helping people. I was recently over in the UK. And the UK market between AWS and Azure is pretty amazing, how much Azure there is. And it's growing within Europe in general. In the states, it's, you know, I think it's growing well. I think it's still growing, probably not as fast as it is outside the U.S. But, you go down to someplace like Australia, it's also Azure. You hear about Azure all the time. >> Why? Is that just because of the Microsoft's software state? It's just so convenient. >> I think it has to do with, you know, and you can go with the reasoning they don't break out, you know, Office 365 and all of that out of their numbers is because they have-- They're in all of these accounts because the office suite is so pervasive in there. So, they always have reasons to go back in and, oh by the way, you're on these old SQL licenses. Let us move you up here and we'll be able to-- We'll support you on the old version, you know, with security and all of these things. And be able to move you forward. So, they have a lot of, I guess you could say, levers to stay in those accounts and be interesting. At least as part of the Cloud estate. I think Amazon, you know, is hitting, you know, the large number. Laws of large numbers. But I think that they're also going through, and I think this was seen in the layoffs that they were making, that they're looking to understand and have profitability in more of those services that they have. You know, over 350 odd services that they have. And you know, as somebody who went there and helped to start yet a new one, while I was there. And finally, it went to beta back in September, you start to look at the fact that, that number of services, people, their own sellers don't even know all of their services. It's impossible to comprehend and sell that many things. So, I think what they're going through is really looking to rationalize a lot of what they're doing from a services perspective going forward. They're looking to focus on more profitable services and bringing those in. Because right now it's built like a layer cake where you have, you know, S3 EBS and EC2 on the bottom of the layer cake. And then maybe you have, you're using IAM, the authorization and authentication in there and you have all these different services. And then they call it EMR on top. And so, EMR has to pay for that entire layer cake just to go and compete against somebody like Mongo or something like that. So, you start to unwind the costs of that. Whereas Azure, went and they build basically ground up services for the most part. And Google kind of falls somewhere in between in how they build their-- They're a sort of layer cake type effect, but not as many layers I guess you could say. >> I feel like, you know, Amazon's trying to be a platform for the ecosystem. Yes, they have their own products and they're going to sell. And that's going to drive their profitability cause they don't have to split the pie. But, they're taking a piece of-- They're spinning the meter, as Ziyas Caravalo likes to say on every time Snowflake or Databricks or Mongo or Atlas is, you know, running on their system. They take a piece of the action. Now, Microsoft does that as well. But, you look at Microsoft and security, head-to-head competitors, for example, with a CrowdStrike or an Okta in identity. Whereas, it seems like at least for now, AWS is a more friendly place for the ecosystem. At the same time, you do a lot of business in Microsoft. >> Yeah. And I think that a lot of companies have always feared that Amazon would just throw, you know, bodies at it. And I think that people have come to the realization that a two pizza team, as Amazon would call it, is eight people. I think that's, you know, two slices per person. I'm a little bit fat, so I don't know if that's enough. But, you start to look at it and go, okay, if they're going to start out with eight engineers, if I'm a startup and they're part of my ecosystem, do I really fear them or should I really embrace them and try to partner closer with them? And I think the smart people and the smart companies are partnering with them because they're realizing, Amazon, unless they can see it to, you know, a hundred million, $500 million market, they're not going to throw eight to 16 people at a problem. I think when, you know, you could say, you could look at the elastic with OpenSearch and what they did there. And the licensing terms and the battle they went through. But they knew that Elastic had a huge market. Also, you had a number of ecosystem companies building on top of now OpenSearch, that are now domain on top of Amazon as well. So, I think Amazon's being pretty strategic in how they're doing it. I think some of the-- It'll be interesting. I think this year is a payout year for the cuts that they're making to some of the services internally to kind of, you know, how do we take the fat off some of those services that-- You know, you look at Alexa. I don't know how much revenue Alexa really generates for them. But it's a means to an end for a number of different other services and partners. >> What do you make of this ChatGPT? I mean, Microsoft obviously is playing that card. You want to, you want ChatGPT in the Cloud, come to Azure. Seems like AWS has to respond. And we know Google is, you know, sharpening its knives to come up with its response. >> Yeah, I mean Google just went and talked about Bard for the first time this week and they're in private preview or I guess they call it beta, but. Right at the moment to select, select AI users, which I have no idea what that means. But that's a very interesting way that they're marketing it out there. But, I think that Amazon will have to respond. I think they'll be more measured than say, what Google's doing with Bard and just throwing it out there to, hey, we're going into beta now. I think they'll look at it and see where do we go and how do we actually integrate this in? Because they do have a lot of components of AI and ML underneath the hood that other services use. And I think that, you know, they've learned from that. And I think that they've already done a good job. Especially for media and entertainment when you start to look at some of the ways that they use it for helping do graphics and helping to do drones. I think part of their buy of iRobot was the fact that iRobot was a big user of RoboMaker, which is using different models to train those robots to go around objects and things like that, so. >> Quick touch on Kubernetes, the whole DevOps World we just covered. The Cloud Native Foundation Security, CNCF. The security conference up in Seattle last week. First time they spun that out kind of like reinforced, you know, AWS spins out, reinforced from reinvent. Amsterdam's coming up soon, the CubeCon. What should we expect? What's hot in Cubeland? >> Yeah, I think, you know, Kubes, you're going to be looking at how OpenShift keeps growing and I think to that respect you get to see the momentum with people like Red Hat. You see others coming up and realizing how OpenShift has gone to market as being, like you were saying, partnering with those Clouds and really making it simple. I think the simplicity and the manageability of Kubernetes is going to be at the forefront. I think a lot of the investment is still going into, how do I bring observability and DevOps and AIOps and MLOps all together. And I think that's going to be a big place where people are going to be looking to see what comes out of CubeCon in Amsterdam. I think it's that manageability ease of use. >> Well Rob, I look forward to working with you on behalf of the whole Cube team. We're going to do more of these and go out to some shows extract the signal from the noise. Really appreciate you coming into our studio. >> Well, thank you for having me on. Really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome. All right, keep it right there, or thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. And we'll see you next time. (light music)