>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Reinvent 2017, presented by AWS, intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Well, welcome back. We're live here in Las Vegas at Reinvent. AWS putting on it's annual show, and you might notice the volume's gone up a little bit around here. Well, it's 5 o'clock reception time here, so the show floor has a little different vibe to it, you might say, right now. Justin Warren, John Walls, you kind of feel it, don't you, right now? >> Oh yeah, there is an energy just sort of vibrating around. I can feel the energy lifting as the booze starts to flow some more. >> Energy's a good way to put it. >> Yeah. >> Right. We're with W. Curtis Preston, who is the chief technical architect at Druva, and Curtis, thanks for being with us. >> Glad to be here. >> Do you feel a vibe, too? >> I feel the vibe. I feel the vibe standing out in the big line to get in here. >> Yeah, in here. >> And now we're in here, it's yeah, it's a lot of people. >> By the way, for those of you at home not familiar, you were named, this year, on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list, 175. >> Hey. >> Quite an honor. >> I assume you're talking about Druva, not me personally. >> Well, yeah, Druva, not you. Although maybe you did, I don't know. >> Yeah, I don't think. >> But that's quite an accomplishment, though. And quite an honor for the company. I mean, tell a little bit about that, about that process, and what do you think that means? What's that stamp of approval for what you guys are doing? >> Well, I think it's just, you know, like a lot of those lists, it's a recognition of the position that we're holding, right? I mean, Druva historically is really well known for their protection of endpoints and SaaS applications. They're expanding into data center and Cloud protection, but I think they're absolutely recognized as the leader in the protection of endpoints. >> Okay, so characterize the Cloud work you guys are doing. Like you said, this is a new move for you, I mean relatively new move, but the market's driving that way, right? >> Yeah. >> People starting to nod their head, and they're thinking, yep, this is where we need to be. >> Yeah, yep. >> So, what has been your strategy then, as far as facilitating what's no longer a trend, it's a way of life. >> Yeah, so I'd say first off, we are definitely unlike a lot of other players. We are a Cloud first company, in that, it's not a strategy, it's a way of life, so our entire application is built in and for the cloud, and by that I mean that it takes advantage of everything that the Cloud offers, right? And when you look at specifically AWS, a lot of backup software products use, well, they all use some kind of database, some kind of catalog to keep track of all the backups. And all of those catalogs, all of those databases, whether it's SQL Server or Db2 or Oracle, they all have scalability limits. We chose to use DynamoDB, which is an incredibly scalable no-SQL database. It's built and available in Amazon as a service, and then all of our products all run in Amazon, right? And so, we can scale both up and down to meet the requirements of a customer. So if we get a new customer. We had a customer that I can't mention by name, but they're a large company that started out with what we consider a small installation of about 10,000 laptops. And that was nice. And then it went well. And then there was a ransomware scare, and so they said, you know what, we're gonna go ahead and do everything. And so suddenly we needed to do 10 times as many laptops. Well, because of the way AWS is, we could scale both the database, the compute, and the storage all instantly to meet the demands of that client. And then once that's done, scale it back down to get back to a state of normal, right? So, for us the Cloud is sort of the core of who we are, and then the only expansion for us is actually protecting the Cloud. So, we've always used the Cloud as our destination, but now our newest offering, Apollo, actually is designed to protect starting with AWS and then expanding into the rest of the Amazon, well, I should say starting with EC2, and then eventually expanding into the rest of the AWS world. >> All right, so, with the tradition of endpoint protection and... >> You're gonna have to speak up, it's really loud in here. >> It's really loud, I'll make sure I'm yelling. So with the heritage that you've got of backing up endpoints and being able to protect endpoints, and now you're moving to protect Cloud workloads, as you say, you've got this Cloud heritage, but you're now looking at protecting workloads that live in the Cloud, what are some of the things that Druva's bringing from that endpoint knowledge that applies to those Cloud type workloads? >> Well I think the idea is that, you know, one of the things about the Cloud, people sort of view, I think there's steps of people using AWS, right? They sort of experiment, and they try out this and that, but once somebody really understands like we did, the things you can do when you can scale your VMs instantly and limitlessly, and your storage and your compute and your databases, once they go down that route, I think the fact that we, it's not necessarily the history of the endpoint itself, but the infrastructure that we built in order to protect those endpoints is already totally scalable and ready to meet the needs of however big of a workload that you'll put in AWS. >> Yeah, I often like to say that Cloud is a state of mind, so if you've already got that state of mind that I want to run my workloads in a Cloud-like way, well I want to be able to protect them in a Cloud-like way, and it sounds like that's really what you're trying to nail there. >> Yeah, and it's a big, because any like, I can look out and see multiple backup products available, and there's a lot of good backup products here. And any of them can run in the cloud, right? You can create a Linux VM or a Windows VM and install your backup software, but it's not going to magically become more scalable because you're running it in Amazon, right? So, designing the product for Amazon and that scalable way of doing things, that's why we talk about being Cloud native. >> Yeah, so how are you attracting customers who would have traditionally thought of you as an endpoint company. It's like, now you're actually saying, look we have these different offerings. So how are you starting to talk to those different kind of customers. How are you finding them and what is it that you're finding resonates with them as compared to some of the other options that they might have? >> Yeah, so as you probably know, I've been in the backup space now for, quarter of a century... (clearing throat) >> Literally wrote the book. >> Literally wrote the book, right? It's on O'Reilly. (laughing) Oreilly.com. >> We'll give you a plug later. >> Don't worry. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Literally wrote the book. >> Yeah, one thing I can say, there's a couple of things I can say about backups in general, in the average data center. One is, everybody hates their backup software. Right? Like, nobody likes it because it's so hard, right? It's so hard to configure, and using disc as a mechanism instead of tape as a primary mechanism, it's made things better, but it hasn't really solved it, right? It's still this really difficult to manage. There's this massive amount of infrastructure that has to be put in place to do all of that. And because that's so hard and it's so error prone and you're invisible or you're in trouble. No one cares about the millions of backups you get right, only the one restore you got wrong. And so what that translates into is the other truth, which is nobody wants to be the backup guy, right? >> I mean the way I got my first job in backups 24 years ago was a guy named Ron Rodriguez did not want to be the backup guy. >> Curtis, you're it. >> Yeah, you're it. And I within two months, had my first major failure as the backup guy for a 35 billion dollar company, and I thought I was done, I thought I was fired, like so many other backup people, and somehow just accidentally I ended up staying, and so what happens is, it's so hard. So, to go to your question, well what if it was simple, right? The situation is, the current system's not scalable. You're always buying another media server, you're always buying another tape driver, you're always buying another dedupe box. You know, you're always out of something, right? I remember having to go to my boss and being out of tapes. This is, you know, back when tapes were a thing. And I remember saying, "hey, I'm out of tapes." and she was like, we don't have budget." She's like, "what are our choices?" and I go, well, I can stop the backups. She's like, "that's not funny." I'm like, "that's our choice." Right? >> I have so much capacity here. >> These are our choices, right? And so she gave me the tapes that I needed, right? And so it's not scalable, the current system. You're always in need of some piece. It's also super expensive, right? And it's super hard. So we try to be the opposite of that. We try to be scalable, simple, and you know save people money. Right? I know we have a 4S thing. >> It's right there on the tip of your tongue. >> It's right there on the tip of my tongue. But basically we try to be the opposite of everything that backups are. So the big thing is, it's way easier. Just put a piece of software and magic happens, right? And if you're large enough data center that you need to do what we call seeding, where you have to use sneakernet to get the data to us, we have a system for that. If you have a large enough system where the RTO is not going to be able to be met by a copy that's on the other side of the internet, then we have a caching appliance that goes onsite to provide fast recovery. So it's like it's super simple, way less expensive. And I do mean way less expensive. I've seen some TCOs where we compete against other companies, we're even less expensive than renewing what you have, let alone going and buying. >> John: Replacing. >> And replacing it with something, because that happens all the times. Because people are always swapping their backup software, because the problem has got to be the backup software. Right? And I think in the end, it is, right? But, it's because that core architecture, that core way we've done backups, has essentially stayed the same since before I started. All we did was we changed tape to disc, right? And we introduced dedupe, which was great, but there's this technology that we call dedupe, that is really hard when you do it on the backend. You know, there's a company here who makes a lot of money on selling those appliances, right? Except it's really hard to do that, and so it's really expensive to do that. And then you gotta pay for one here and you gotta pay for one over there. With us, you don't buy that. You just go straight to us, and then because we're in AWS, it's already in three locations, right? And it's already offsite. >> Well Curtis, they said 24 years ago it wasn't gonna last, but it did. You made it, congratulations. >> Thanks. >> We appreciate the time here. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for being here with us on theCUBE and onto 175th. Next year who knows where you're going, right? >> Who knows where we're going. >> Excellent, Curtis Preston, joining us here from Druva. Back with more live from Las Vegas. We are at Reinvent at AWS. Back with more in a bit.