(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the International Women's Showcase for 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm pleased to welcome Nancy Wong, the general manager of Data Protection and Governance at AWS to the program. Nancy, it's great to have you. >> Thanks so much for having me Lisa, and you know, I really hope that this is hopefully the last year that we'll be celebrating International Women's Day all virtually. >> I agree. I agree. Well, we're going in that right direction globally. So let's cross our fingers. Talk to me a little bit about your role at AWS and what you do there. >> Sure. So as a GM of AWS Data Protection and Governance, a lot of, we tackle quite a few problems that our biggest customers face, right? When they think about, "How do I manage my data?" Right. Especially in this digital world. And speaking of the pandemic, how much data has been generated by consumers, by devices, by systems, by servers? How do you protect all of that data? Right. Especially we hear about cyber crime, cyber attacks. Right. Data breaches. It's really important to make sure that all of our customers have a coherent strategy around not just management, right, but also protection and really how you govern your data. Right. And there's just so many awesome conversations that my team and I have had lately with CSOs or chief technology officers on this topic, as it evolves. >> Data protection is so critical. It's one of my favorite topics to talk about, cybersecurity as well. Talk to me about what it means though if we keep this at a bit of a different level to be an operator within the the big ecosystem that is AWS. >> Yeah. And that's actually one of the the favorite aspects of my role. Right. Which is, you know, I get to innovate every day on behalf of my customers. For example, I love having one-on-one dialogues. I love having architecture conversations where we brainstorm. Right. And so those type of conversations help inform how we deliver and develop products. And so in an operator role, right, for the the women in the audience today, is it really gives you that perspective into not just how, what type of products do you want to build that delight your customers but also from an engineering. Right. And a bottom line perspective of, well how do you make this happen? Right. How do you fund this? And how do you plan out your development milestones? >> What are, tell me a little bit about your background and then what makes women in technology such an important initiative for you to stand behind? >> Absolutely. So I'm so proud today to see that the number of women or the percentage of women enrolled at engineering curriculums just continue to rise. Right. And especially as someone who went through an engineering degree in her undergraduate studies, that was not always the case. Right. So oftentimes, you know, I would look around the classroom and be the only woman on the lab bench or only woman in a CS classroom. And so when you have roles in tech, specifically, that require an undergraduate degree in computer science or a degree in engineering, that helps to, or that only serves to really reduce the population of eligible candidates. Right. Who then, if you look at that pool of eligible candidates who then you can invest and accelerate through the career ladder to become leaders in tech, well that's where you may end up with a representation issue. Right. And that's why we have, for example, so few women leaders in tech that we can look up to as role models. And that's really the problem or the gap that I'm very passionate about solving. And also, Lisa, I'm really excited to tell you a little bit more about advancing women in tech, which is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that I started to tackle this exact problem. >> Talk to me about that, cause it's one of the things that you bring up is, you know, we always say when we're having conversations like this, we can't be what we can't see. We need to be able to see those female leaders. To your point, there aren't a ton in comparison to the male leaders. So talk to me about advancing women in technology, why you founded this, and what you guys are accomplishing. >> Absolutely. So it's been such a personal journey as well. Just starting this organization called Advancing Women In Tech because I started it in 2017. Right. So when I really was, you know, just starting out as a product manager, I was at another big tech company at the time. And what I really realized, right, is looking around you know, I had so many, for example, bosses, managers, peer leaders, who were really invested in growing me as a product manager and growing my tech and career. And this is right after I'd made the transition from the federal government into big tech. What that said though, looking around, there weren't that many women tech leaders that I could look up to, or get coffee, or just have a mentoring conversation. And quickly I realized, well, it's not so much that women can't do it. Right. It's the fact that we're not advancing enough women into leadership roles. And so really we have to look at why that is. Right. And we, you know, from a personal perspective, one contribution towards that angle is upskilling. Right. So if you think about what skills one needs as one climbs a career ladder, whether that's your first people management role, or your first manager manager's role, or obviously for bigger leaders when they start managing thousands, tens of thousands of individuals, well all of that requires different skills. And so learning those skills about how to manage people, how to motivate your teams effectively, super, super important. And of course on the other side, and one that I'm, you know, near to dear to me is that of mentorship and executive sponsorship because you can have all the skills in the world, right. And especially with digital learning and AWIT is very involved with Coursera and AWS in producing and making those resources readily available and accessible. Well, if you don't have those opportunities, if you don't have mentors and sponsors who are well to push you or give you a step ladder to those roles, well you're still not going to get there. Right. And so, that's why actually, if you look at the AWIT mission, it's really those two pillars working very closely together to help advance women into leadership roles. >> The idea of mentorship and sponsorship is so critical. And I think a lot of people don't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor. How do you define that difference and how do you bring them into the organization so that they can be mentors and sponsors? >> Yeah, absolutely. And there's, you know, these two terms are often used today so interchangeably that I do get a lot of questions around, well, what is the difference? Right. And how does, let's say a mentor become a sponsor? So, maybe just taking a few steps back, right. When you have let's say questions around compensation or, "Hey I have some job offers, which ones do I consider?" And you ask someone a question or advice, well that person's likely your mentor. Right? And typically a mentor is someone who you can ask those questions on a repeated basis. Who's very accessible to you. Well, a sponsor takes that a few steps forward in the sense that they are sponsoring you into a role or into a project or initiative that you on your own may not be able to achieve. And by doing so, I think what really differentiates a sponsor from a mentor is that the sponsor will actually put their own reputation on the line. Right. They're using their own political capital in order to make sure that you get into that role, you get into that room. Right. And that's why it's so key, for example, especially if you have that relationship already with a person who's your mentor, you're able to ask questions or advice from, to convert them into a sponsor so that you can accelerate your career. >> Great definition, description, and great recommendations for converting mentors to sponsors. You know, I only learned the difference about a mentor and a sponsor a few years ago at another women in tech event that I was hosting. And I thought, "It's brilliant. It makes perfect sense." We need more people to understand the difference, the synergies, and how to promote mentors to sponsors. Talk to me now about advancing women in tech plus the power of AWS. How are they helping this nonprofit to really accelerate? >> Sure. So from an organization perspective, right, there's many women, for example, across the the tech companies who are part of Advancing Women In Tech, obviously Amazon of course as an employee has a very large community within who's part of AWIT. But we also have members across the tech industry from startups to VC firms to of course, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix. You name it. With that said, you know, what AWS has done with AWIT is actually very special in the sense that if you go to the Coursera platform, coursera.org/awit you can see our two Coursera specializations. Four courses each that go through the real world product management fundamentals. Or the business side, the technical skills, and even interviewing for mid-career product management roles. And the second specialization, which I'm super excited to share today, is actually geared towards getting folks ramped up and prepared to successfully pass the Cloud Practitioner's Exam, which is one of the industry recognized standards about understanding the AWS Cloud and being functional in the AWS Cloud. This summer, of course, and I'm sharing kind of a sneak peek announcement that I'll be making tomorrow with the University of Pennsylvania, is that we're kicking off a program for the masters of CIS program, or the Computer Information Systems Master students, to actually go through this Coursera specialization, which is produced by AWIT, sponsored by AWS, and AWS Training and Certifications has so generously donated exam vouchers for these students so that they can then go on and be certified in the AWS Cloud. So that's one just really cool collaboration that we are doing between AWS and AWIT to get more qualified folks in the door in tech jobs, and hopefully at jobs in AWS. >> That's a great collaboration. What are some of the goals in terms of metrics, the number of women that you want to get into the program and complete the program? What are some of those on your radar? >> Absolutely. So one of the reasons, of course, that the Master's of CIS Program, the University of Pennsylvania caught my eye, not withstanding, I graduated from there, but also that just the statistics of women enrolled. Right. So what's really notable about this program is it's entirely online, which as a university creating a Master's degree fully online, well, it takes a ton of resources from the university, from the faculty. And what's really special about these students is that they're already full-time adult professionals, which means that they're working a full-time job, they might be taking care of family obligations, and they're still finding time to advance themselves, to acquire a Master's degree in CS. And best of all, 42% of these students are women. Right. And so that's a number that is multiples of what we're finding in engineering curriculums today. And so my theory is, well if you go to a student population that is over 40%, 42 to be exact percent women, and enable these women to be certified in AWS Cloud, to have direct interview prep and mentorship from AWS software development leaders, well, that greatly increases their chances of getting a full-time role, right, at AWS. Right. At which then we can help them advance their careers to further and further roles in software development. >> So is this curriculum also open to women who aren't currently in tech to be able to open the door for them to get into tech and STEM fields? >> Absolutely. And so in my bad and remiss in mentioning, which is students of this Master's in CS Program are actually students not from tech already. So they're not in a tech field. And they did not have a degree in CS or even engineering as part of their undergraduate studies. So it's truly folks who are outside of tech, that are 42% women, that we're getting into the tech industry with this collaboration between AWS, AWIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. >> That's outstanding to get them in from completely different fields into tech. >> Absolutely. >> How do you help women have the confidence to say, "I want to try this." Cause if we think about every company today is a tech company. It's a data company. It has to be to be competitive. You know, the pandemic taught us that everything we're able to do online and digitally, for example, but how do you help women get the confidence to say, "Okay, I'm going to go from a completely different field into tech." >> Absolutely. So if we, you know, define tech of course as big tech or, you know, now the main companies, right, I myself made that transition, which is why it is a topic near and dear to me because I can personally speak to my journey because I didn't start my career out in tech. Right. Yes. I studied engineering. But with that said, my first full-time job out of college was with the federal government because I wanted to go and build healthdata.gov, right, which gave folks a lot of access to the healthcare data, roles, right, that existed within the U.S. government and the CMS, NIH, you know, CDC, so on and so forth. But that was quite a big change from then taking a product management job at Google. Right. And so how did I make that change? Well, a lot of it came from, you know, the mentors that I had. Right. What I call my personal board of directors who gave me that confidence. And sure, I mean even today, I still have imposter syndrome where, you know, I think, "Am I good enough." Right. "Should I be leading this organization," right, "of data protection and governance." But I think what it boils down to is, you know, inner confidence. Right. And goes back to those two pillars of having the right skills and also the right mentors and sponsors who are willing to help sponsor you into those opportunities and help sponsor you to success. >> Absolutely. Great advice and recommendations. Thanks for sharing your background, Nancy, it's outstanding to see where you started to where you are now and also to what you're enabling for so many other females to get into tech with the AWIT program combined with AWS and UPenn. Exciting stuff. Can't wait to talk to you next year to see where you guys go from here. >> Absolutely Lisa. And what I'm really looking forward to sharing with you next year is the personal testimonials of other women who have gone through the AWIT, the AWS, the UPenn Program and have gotten their tech jobs and also promotions. >> That sounds like a great thing to look forward to. I'm looking forward to that. Nancy, thanks so much for your time and the insight that you shared. >> Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. >> My pleasure. For Nancy Wong, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the International Women's Showcase 2022. (upbeat music)

>>Ly from San Diego, California at the cube covering to clock in cloud native con brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem Marsh. >>Welcome back. This is the cube live coverage three days wall to wall coverage of CubeCon cloud native con in San Diego. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost for these three days is John Troyer. And welcome to the program. First of all, from the keynote stage, Heather Kirksey, who is the vice president of community and ecosystem development with the Linux foundation for CNCF part of Linux foundation and from some of the technology behind the scenes joining her, Sandy Pennys are the SVP of strategic engagement at attorney. Thank you so much for joining us. Right. So Heather, this was a really cool demo with a lot of things going beyond the scene. Uh, if people actually go watch an interview we did yesterday, uh, with, uh, the people at red hat talk about, uh, it's a good thing. It was cloud native because there was a brownout cower was lost, had to rebuild the entire thing. Um, and everybody up on stage, you know, the next day, didn't know anything the wiser. So, uh, you know, really cool pot on stage. Uh, you know, talking about 5g global engagement, China mobile, uh, other banks. I like, um, I'm sorry, other mobile providers, uh, like from Canada and from Europe involved in this. Um, give us a little bit of the, the, the foundation view as to, you know, how something like this comes together and how you get participation from, you know, the technology providers, the telco providers. Uh, you know, it takes, it takes a village. >>First of all, you have to be slightly mad. Um, but I mean that's, that's really kind of the premise of open source, right? Is that people come together and they build things together. And so we done some demos in the past, um, where we looked at sort of, you know, the, the modernization of the central office. And so we had had some, you know, some tea, you know, some tapes of folks that had been building things. And then we, you know, we sent out a call basically to the community and said, yeah, we'd like to do another one. And what we're going to try to do is full five G full called native, if you're interested in joining, yo come on. And so it just ended up that basically 15 organizations said, yes, that sounds like something that we would like to prove out. And 80 volunteers across those organizations ended up working on it. >>My understanding was about four months, uh, to, to put all the pieces together, bring us, bring us through kinda, you know, how the stack gets built and. >>Yeah, well I mean, so amongst some of the issues where you have five G itself is fairly new. So we, we started with sort of the complexities of getting equipment, you know, and getting five G radio. You know, we had a partner in China who had a 5g handset that then wanted us to indemnify, you know, all of these things. Uh, to the extent that like we as a nonprofit didn't feel comfortable signing the agreement. So it was, you know, it started actually just, I mean, this was so cutting edge with in terms of the five G aspect that getting equipment was challenging. Um, yeah. And that's before you even get to sort of the challenges of building the stack. So, um, so, you know, it started kind of figuring out what pieces started building things, um, you know, found some yo gaps in Coobernetti's around supporting the, the, the sophistication of networking that we have to do. Um, so we figured out how to work around it for the demo, but what we want to do is start upstreaming some, um, some changes into, into some of the projects there. >>All right, so San Deepa, your company's one of the providers inside here. So tell us what, what drew you into it and how it is living on that bleeding edge was something like five. >>Well, it's, it's absolutely thrilling living on that leading edge. It's exciting, you know, lots of risks. But the payoff yesterday was fantastic. Be able to complete that call on stage. You know, from our perspective, we were invited in fairly early on into the project. Uh, and we're, we're thrilled to be part of it. And as once we understood the scope and what everyone's trying to do, we realized like we're providing the, the SD wan for this project, connecting the public cloud, the private cloud, and we're deploying, uh, using containers, Kubernetes. And we are able to bring the entire thing together by creating one virtual network so that it's seamless and all the underlying infrastructure, that layer, layer two, layer one, the underlay is just completely invisible to be able to transport that call, to do the signaling, to do everything that needs to be done. >>So for us to become part of this project was really powerful for one, for us to just, uh, just work with some of the companies that were there, like the Linux foundation and tell the Nobel all the other big name players that were out there. And so that was, that was amazing. An amazing experience. But then the community itself that came together, like the people that we met, we met them all at the show. It's all phone calls, we met them all at the show and it really is a community filled with love and a real drive and desire, uh, to build something new and different. Right. Sprinkled with a bit of crazy. >>Yeah. >>Well, so I mean this is a, is a great example of how the Linux foundation can be a catalyst here. I mean one of the Linux foundation is so broad, the CNCF is so broad and you're operating in many domains in this being, you know, bringing the telecom world together, being one of them. But I don't know, can you maybe just talk a little bit about the ecosystem and the unique challenges of, I mean there are some times open source approaches that are a little more strongly opinionated. Like this is going to be our, this is, this is what we're working on. This is going to be our stack. This is the projects in our stack. CNCF has a obviously a, a well documented and open, uh, process around bringing projects in and projects graduating. How does that make your >>life harder? >> Yeah. Well, I mostly focus on our networking projects and working with the telecom industry. And yeah, I mean Telekom definitely likes to be opinionated, you know, I mean that's, that's kind of, and our soul. Um, and so that is also is useful because really at the end of the day, interoperability for the type of scale that telecom operators has is very important. Right? It's um, yeah, some of the cloud providers, right? It's up to the people who want to run on them to like work with their API APIs. But the, the telecom operators, they're using all these applications to provide services to their customers so they have a business need to make sure everything really works end to end. And so there's actually an initiative right now between, um, the LF networking projects and the GSM, uh, where we're really trying to, not to prescriptively, because we do also understand that that doesn't know, you're not going to get the exact same pieces of software that worked for every single operator's network or business, but with a lot more sort of UPenn opinion around, you know, what should the cloud platforms, whether they are VM based or container based, what do they look like and how can we start doing things like compliance and verification programs around commercial implementations, whether it is the underlying platform or whether it's the applications on top. >>And so that's the thing that, you know, we're, we're working on right now because at the end of the day, we're really needing to help them accelerate their, their deployments and, um, get that agility. That's the promise of. >>So, Heather, I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier that there were some gaps in Coobernetti's speak to how fast the community rallied around to, you know, allow this, uh, solution to go forward. >>Yeah. So, um, I'll, I mean basically this is what happens when you get a bunch of engineers together, you know, for the demo itself, we weren't going to fork or make our own sort of changes Kubernetes. So we, we did some things to, to tie things together. Probably you've seen SD when I see Rampart. But yeah, one of the, one of the big issues is just being able to expose multiple interfaces. Um, which, you know, in a service writer network you have multiple interfaces, right? Um, fi six support is another big issue. And so being able to expose those natively in Kubernetes or natively just using cloud native, it's something that we're still working on. Um, there, there are a couple of projects that are looking at that um, network service mesh. Uh, you know, maybe there's some different CNI who are beginning to think through that problem. Um, none of them were quite there. So yeah, we didn't want to start forking and writing pseudo Kubernetes code. Um, so we kinda just use some of the tools and the players in place to work around that. But we, what we would love is to upstream that code and to main line. Sure. >>Yeah. So Sandy would love to hear a little bit more about how SD wind fits in the entire multicloud discussion. Um, we were, we had a pop here in San Diego. There's a lab in Montreal and then there is a, a lab in France and we use public, uh, a combination of, uh, the Alibaba cloud in North America and in Europe. And what we had to do is we had to create a way for the phones to reach each other. So we had to do this initial signaling where you do the request and you have to get to all of the different pods to make the, to make the request. So what we did is we put our, um, containers and all the, in all the cloud providers and also in the labs and we were able to create that private network. And that was what allowed for the call signaling to happen. >>And for the actual call to actually be completed from one to handset to the other. Cindy, you're uh, uh, you talked about community, you know, you're an engineer, a stye in our eyes, a word is SDN when a word, I suppose they usually hear more on an enterprise side of the show. Right. And, uh, you know, talk with lots of folks who provide, you know, in, in that space. This is a little bit different, right? As you, I don't know if you've had a chance to wander either in the sessions or on the floor, kind of curious. There is some, a little bit of networking out there, a little bit networking, security and a couple of other, certainly some service mesh stuff. Right. I don't know. What are your thoughts about how this is growing up on the, in this open source world? It's, listen, it's growing up very fast, right? >>That's, that's 100% sure. I mean, the show is, is, is growing like leaps and bounds every year. It's insane. And that, that, that debt, that performance yesterday was in front of, I don't know how many thousands of people, but I mean that was huge and it was amazing. Um, and you're right, you know, normally when you're thinking about this kind of stuff, you're not necessarily thinking about the networking, but at the end of the day, you know, Kubernetes is a platform or a tool. SD wan is a tool. Um, and if you take all of these tools and put them together, you can actually build something wonderful, right? And that's what we did in this project here. We were able to deliver a 5g call and you know, run it everywhere. So I think what's important in the community, even though this is really primarily a developer event and developer show, you are seeing some edge people here, you are seeing some networking people here and people are the awareness of, Oh wait, you know, we need edge and we need networking to actually build, you know, commercializable platforms or products, right. Is, it's that awareness that's just, I think this year at least is really starting to come out. And I think next year it's going to be even more prevalent and you're going to the show me evolve, you know? And that's why where I kind of see it going. >>Yeah. I mean, I think application developers and general tend to think networking is amazing. It just happens to be, they're sort of like plumbing and power. Um, but to actually deliver it is a fairly complicated challenge and it's part of the reason we want to do the demo yesterday was actually to kind of show some of the challenges and to kind of show what it takes to set up a mobile network. So the F we're going to use Kubernetes to do that. They, you know, the developers here would have a little bit more understanding so that when we were like, we need, you know, we need multiple interfaces or we need to be able to address things in a certain way. They, they, they have a better understanding of why so they can help us from the telecom industry, uh, design and build it out. >>Yeah. I guess the last thing is we've had the cube of the open source summit. We've been to the open networking summit. Uh, you know, when you get off the stage, you put, you know, there's so many different open source projects that Dan just give us a view as to how they span across all of these communities to make sure that we don't end up with a lot of fragmented things. How does everything kind of pull together in the networking? All right, so, so many projects across so many sources, how does, how does Linux foundation make sure that we don't just end up with, you know, siloed, uh, you know, places? >>Well, yeah, to be, to be honest, it's a little bit of a challenge because sometimes the reason that we end up with multiple projects serving what looks like similar needs is because there are different technical approaches. And so might be one will work better than the other. I mean, that's kind of the idea of open source that people can try different things. Um, and, uh, we just try to help people have more, less of a not invented here sort of mindset that if there's a good reason, uh, to try a different approach, go for it. And let's see what, what takes root and what flowers. Um, but you know, also other people are doing things, so just because you're not aware of them. So we, you know, there's a lot of stuff around education and, um, sharing of information that we try to do that, that helps with that. But I mean, yeah. >>Heather, Cindy, thank you so much for joining us regulations on, on the demo. A lot of hard work. >>Thank you. I just have to tell you, I feel as though a thousand pound weight has been lifted off my shoulders out, but it was extraordinarily fun to do actually. >>It was fun. Thank you for John Troyer. I'm Stu Miniman getting towards the end of our three days wall-to-wall coverage. They're running for the tee shirts that are left, but we've got a couple more interviews. Thank you for watching the queue.

>> 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. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by Sai Mukundan. He is the Director of Product Management, Cloud Solutions at Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks, Rebecca, thanks. So nice to have you guys here at the Cohesity booth. >> And thank you for hosting us, I should say, yes. >> Absolutely, it's been wonderful. >> So we already had you colleague Lynn Lucas on this morning, she was terrific. And she gave us a high level vision of the news. Why don't you break it down for us. Explain to our viewers exactly what Cohesity was announcing here at Ignite. >> Sure. So, broadly speaking, we announced three things this morning. The first one, we've seen a lot of customers, Optic Office 365, in fact, that's one of the first or initial use cases of how they adopt Microsoft's solutions more off as a service. So the ability to now backup and recover old 365 has come up quite a bit in our customer conversations. So we announced a solution that will be available shortly, so customers can leverage the same Cohesity platform that we had up until now to also backup and recover old 365. So that was number one. Number two was around Azure Databox. So, this is a relatively new offering from Azure. It was up until now, it was in preview, and now it's going GA. So the fact that we can now integrate with Azure Databox as a means for customers to move data from on-premise to Azure, a great initial seeding for long term retention. And the fact that we integrate seamlessly with that, that was the second piece of the news. And then the third one is really around a hybrid Cloud message in the margin. Really, hybrid, I know-- Stu, you like to refer to it more as it's an operational model. It's not about what the Cloud is but it's more of an operation model. And in that model, customers are always looking to leverage it for disaster recovery purposes. And their ability to fade over to Azure and then bring it back on-premise, fade back, that capability is the third underpinning of the announcement this morning. >> And Sai, one of the challenges that we have is, if we look at Cloud and say it's an operating model. Well, the challenge we have is it really is a multi-cloud world. If you look especially here in the Microsoft ecosystem, absolutely, start with Office 365. Microsoft pushed a lot of customers to the SAS model. I have my data center, I'm probably modernizing things there, and then I have the public cloud. Well, when I look at my data, I want to be able to manage and interact and leverage my data no matter where it lives. So, that's where-- I said Microsoft lives in all those places, and it sounds like your integrations are going to help customers span and get their arms around their data and leverage their data no matter where it lives. >> Yeah, I particularly like the use of the word span, because as you may know, we call our underlying distributor file system the spanifest. (laughing) Right? So the idea is that it spans on-premise Cloud, and your point, multi-cloud as well. So the ability to use the same platform, and that's really what drives customers today. When you look at what are the three aspects of our solution that they like, I would say one is the scale ability. The fact that they can start small and then scale as their environment grows, that's important. The second is around, everything plays around automation, API driven, API first architecture, right. And the fact that we are policy based, API driven really really resonates with them. And the third one is the simplicity and ease of management. I mean, you can build all these solutions, but at the end of the day, it has to be simple for customers to consume. And that's something that really resonates with prospects, partners, and customers we talk to. >> Sai, wondering on the Azure Databox, if you could help unpack that a little. We have some Microsoft guests on, Jeffery Snover walked us through. There's a couple of different versions of them. Some are for data movement, some of them there will be really kind of edge, compute, and AI capabilities there. Which ones do Cohesity use, what do you see is the use cases that you'll be playing in? >> Sure, so before I go into the solution and the use case. I think one of the key aspects of why that announcement is important for us, is it also shows the kind of engagement and close technology partnership that we have established with Microsoft, Azure, right. The fact that we are one of their launch partners, both during the preview and now in the GA timeframe. It's important for both customers and partners, because that gives them a good, sort of, understanding that we are there in establishing thought leadership. We are there in working closely with Microsoft in this case, along with other technology partners out there. Just coming back to the solution itself, there are a couple of flavors of Databox. So the one that we have done extensive integration with is Databox. There's another version offered, which is called the Databox Edge, which also has Compute in it. But the idea here, the use case is really around when customers are looking at Cohesity, there is backup and recovery that they can do from on-premise. But Azure and Azure Blob Storage in particular becomes a seamless extension for long term retention. Now, there are a few customers, and I can relate to several who asked, "Hey, I have a large enough "data set that needs to be seeded initially." And obviously the network becomes a bottle neck in that case. So with Databox, the ability to now transfer the data into your on-prem, like you get the Databox shipped to your on-premise, get it loaded, true Cohesity. Seamlessly get it hydrated in our Azure account, and from that point on we only send the changes or the incremental data. So that is really appealing to both customers, as well as partners who are really engaged in these migration projects in some cases. >> I'm really interesting what you're talking about with the thought leadership and your approach to partnerships, because Microsoft selecting Cohesity as a partner, it's a real stamp of approval for Cohesity, a real validation that this company's for real. How do you then think about who you will partner with? Particularly if the company is, say, only five years old or pretty new to the space or maybe not as well known. >> I think one of the things that Mohit Aron, and he's a pioneer in the spirit systems and is the founder of Cohesity. One of the things that he established, right from the get go is the ability for the product to scale, scale on-premise, but also that the Cloud has to be very seamless. It's a natural extension of what the architecture is intended to do or achieve. And so that kind of made it easier for us on the product team to figure out who is it that we need to partner with. Azure is obviously a leader in that space, particularly over the last few years. I want to go back to something that was mentioned in the keynote yesterday. It's not a know it all, but it's a learn it all, right. The learning that we have had as we have grown Cohesity and the product has grown and as we acquired customers and talked to prospects is they want to work with the likes of Microsoft Azure, leverage the infrastructure that they have to offer. So we started there. We said if customers are asking for it, we do it and we learn along with them on why and what the use cases are. And it started with, going back to my earlier comment, long term retention. And now, as an extension to that, with the hybrid cloud where not only storage, but leveraging disks, leveraging Azure Compute, that's now become an extension of what we started off with. And so we have Azure DataPlatform Cloud Edition, which is Cohesity running on Azure. So I would say how we made the decision in this case, A. the product and the foundation really set that for us, but B., more importantly, the customers really asking for it and asking for that integration made it easier for us to determine that, hey we absolutely need to partner with the cloud renders. >> Sai, I'd like to build off of that, the customers and what they're asking for. This is a very large ecosystem here. To be honest, we know that Azure, Microsoft is a big player in Cloud, when I look at this show, Azure's a piece of the overall discussion. So, I was a little surprised. Not that we're hearing more about Azure here, but, it's because if you look at just order magnitude, how many customers Microsoft has on Windows and Office, obviously that's going to dwarf customer adopts in general. Where are your customers when the talk about Cloud adoption, your customers? Do you find them more in a Windows customers in their own data center versus Azure? What are your customers doing and adoption of Cohesity Cloud products in general? >> So if you look at the typical on ramp of customers, more often than not, at least I would say over the last couple of years, our customers have typically started with the on-premise. Because their immediate pain point was the platform can do a lot of things. Customers are always looking to also solve that immediate pain point while looking into the future. So the immediate pain point was really around how do I make my backup and data protection systems, first of all, simple, efficient, and less fragmentation. And while I'm doing that, how can I then potentially invest in the platform that is capable of doing more. And that's something that Cohesity offered in the on-premise world. And as a natural extension to that, as both from the bottoms up, as storage admins and backup admins started looking at leveraging Cloud or Azure in particular for as an extension of their storage infrastructure, as well as from the top down. You know, more of like the business decision makers and the CIOs driving that mandate of, hey, I want you to think about Cloud first and have that mindset. I think it really appealed to them. Because now they could start leveraging Azure Blob, again, back to that long term retention, legal hold, compliance standpoint. And then building off of that, building off of that to do test dev. We have a great feature, it's called Cloud Spend. The ability to take some of the on-premise infrastructure. And your earlier questions too, we have seen customers both VMware, Windows Hyper-v environments. Believe it or not, some customers still have physical systems. And the fact that Cohesity can take care of all that in the on-prem world, while seamlessly helping them adopt Cloud is really the kind of customers that we have seen in this journey that we have taken along with our customers and partners. >> Well this is theCUBE's first time at Ignite. I know you're relatively new to Ignite. >> I'm even surprised about that. I would think you guys would have made a number of appearances, but I'm glad it's the first time and it's at the Cohesity booth, so wonderful. >> We're so excited, but what are some of the things you're going to take back with you from this conference? >> I think for me, this conference, as has any other such conference in particular, it's really the excitement. You go back and you reflect on the last three, four days you spend here, and it's about all the great conversations that we have had with customers, prospects, and partners. Secondly, we heard a session earlier this morning, a Cohesity session, we had Brown University join us. And then there's going to be another one tomorrow. We're going to have UPenn and HKS. We are working on your alma mater Cornell, by the way, Stu. So we'll get them soon. >> Excellent, excellent. Go Big Red. >> So the fact that we have all these sessions and some really great attendance. And attendance from folks who are yet to embrace the Cohesity solutions. So it's great for us to get our message out. >> Getting the word out. >> Get our word out there. And I would say the last thing for us is also showcasing to Microsoft here in particular, the fact that we have this big presence here and the excitement it's having is a great message to the Microsoft executives and the leadership team that we work with as well to show more love, we already have enough that we get attention from them. But this is more of a validation for them to say there's more that we should be doing and could be doing with Cohesity. So I think those are probably the three things I'll walk away with and build on what we learned from Ignite here. >> Excellent, well thank you so much, Sai, for coming on the show. It was great having you here. >> Thanks, likewise. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more at theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft's Ignite in just a little bit. (techno music)