>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special presentation of CUBE Conversation here from our Boston area studio. Welcome back to the program from ClearSky Data, Ellen Rubin the CEO and Laz Vekiarides who is the CTO. Laz and Ellen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Us too, nice to be back. >> Hi, thanks for having us. >> All right, so, always good to talk to a local company, we talked about technology, I was actually in the Seaport district earlier, recently, and you know there's a lot happening in this space, as we know, it doesn't all happen, in Seattle for the cloud, Silicon Valley for all the VCs, so Ellen I've been speaking with your company since its early days-- >> Stealth mode, yeah. >> Stealth mode. First time I met you in person was at the Amazon reinvent shows, so still one of the focal points of the cloud and everything that happening there. But give us the update, you've got some new fundings, some new partnerships, tell us what's happening with ClearSky. >> Absolutely, I'm really happy to be back. So yeah, we've been, last night been building this company together, we started in 2013 with the, you know, sitting in a room with a white board but the company has really been actively funded and kind of building customers and our service offering since 2014. And we've just seen a tremendous amount of growth especially in the last year. So we're excited to be able to share that we are raising a 20 million funding round, and it includes some new investors, strategic investors as well as some of our existing investors from General Catalyst and Highland and Polaris. So it's very important for us but it's also great for our customers because it gives us a chance now to be in more places and have more people on our team to really grow and add to the support the operation of what we're doing. So that's kind of part A. And we're really looking forward to doing that. We've added a head of our sales organization, our chief revenue officer, Roger Cummings, and so we've really kind of filled out our team and our growing as a company overall. So that's kind of part A. >> So yeah congratulations on the numbers. The other piece, I think back to the first discussions we had when you talked about living in lots of environments and how do you help customers, there was somebody that you're partnering with now that I believe came up in that first discussion because they've got one of the largest global foot print on the planet that I'm aware of. >> Indeed, so yeah, also today we're announcing our partnership with Equinex and we've actually been working, we've been talking with Equinex since we were in stealth mode and we've been working with them over the past several years already in a couple of locations. And we can talk in a lot of detail about sort of where the great alignment fit is, but the news for us is that we're now gonna be able to really expand the reach of our service across the rest of the United States. So we're gonna triple the number of locations, and we're gonna be basically anywhere our customers need us to be, as you know we are a metro-based service so it's very important from a latency and access that we be in more locations. And we see it as basically a great jumping off for filling out the initial vision of being across United States and now it's starting to expand that side. >> Yes that's great. Laz, let's pull you in here. If you look at the data piece of it, we understand that latency is clearly important. That's the conversation we've had back in the storage world for a long time. Data has gravity, it's tough to move it, and having some locality is super important. So what are your, for people who aren't as familiar with the company, just give us the thumbnail, architecturally, and tell us what you've been seeing update wise, from a technology standpoint. >> Sure, so, our technology is really metro-based network, so we deliver caching services on the edge to make all of the resources, specifically the data management resources that are far away appear as if they're nearby. Now one of the problem is, as you know with the cloud, is that they are only in certain locations. So unless your nation is in Virginia or you happen to be in the Pacific Northwest, you have a latency problem. And so as a result, some certain types of applications aren't gonna work well. What we've built is really an edge-based data management network. We provide high performance file and block services. To systems at the edge that leverage the cloud for their back ends. And so as a result, you get all of the economics of the cloud and the flexibility that you get with those type of services. But you get the experience of enterprise class functionality and capability's and it's nearby. So you don't miss any of the things that you are kind of used to. >> All right, Laz I want you to help explain something, when you say edge, what does that mean to you and your customers because there are server providers edges, there are kind of the IO key end devices edges, there are some things in between there, so what specifically are you helping with? >> So this is true it's actually really interesting. So we have a very specific definition of edge, we call it the data center edge. And hence our alignment with Equinix, they are in this metro facilities when you look at our architecture we're either putting an edge appliance either in an Equinix facility or in a customer's facility and then tethering that into the Equinix facility. So that last hundred or so miles around an Equinix facility is our edge and that is gonna be our definition now. That could change over time, just like everything else in the cloud changes, because we basically have built software that can run in any type of Linux environment with some monocom activity but in our current market push, our edge is really the data center edge. >> Okay, Ellen I love that that really fit in into the discussions I've been having a lot over the last year or so. People talk about hybrid cloud when they talk about multicloud. It's, they're using lots of SAS, they're usually using more than one public cloud provider and then they have their own resources, and their data center often times has a rack in Equinix and leveraging things like direct connect from Amazon, the equivalent for Google and Microsoft, or expanding those definitions. Bring us inside what are you hearing from customers. I love to hear what you can share about specific customers or in general what's the need that they have and where you fit in into all of it. >> Yeah, no, you're totally on point for what we see everyday which is we deal with medium and large enterprises. So our customers are in health care, they're in financial services, they're in legal services and also in managed service providers now as a newer market for us. So we have customers that include companies like Partners HealthCare, Mass General Hospital, Nuance Communications. We've just added Unitas Global as a managed service provider. Special Olympics is a customer and some regional hedge firms and law services, like Miles and Stockbridge. So what you can kind of see is that we have this really nice set of experiences that are not just what is Facebook doing or what is Stage3 doing but we kind of have a broad range of what CIO and heads of IT are really struggling with. And it's exactly what you're saying which is the edge to a customer very much depends on how they're thinking about where their application are gonna run, and our philosophy is don't worry about it, we've got you covered, your data is gonna be high performance, low latency, you're totally protected and you can access it from wherever you need to. But for a lot of customers honestly we've seen everything. I won't embarrass anybody specifically but there are still some kind of scary, old data centers out there. There are server closets that are acting as data centers. People still have things in their buildings. And then you've got everything to like world class, Equinix, Colo, that is in Ashburn, or whatever. And then people are obviously trying to adapt multiple shades and flavors of public clouds. And I was just out at a customer's yesterday where the CIO was talking to us about the fact that they have grown through a tremendous amount of acquisition. So they've got one of everything. And then the cloud for them was a bunch of people did a bunch of things in Amazon five years ago. Then they decided to standardize on Azure. They don't really know why they standardize on Azure. And they realized that that was not actually answer for all their problems and then they started to think about how Google might actually be a much better fit because of some of the analytics works they're trying to do, and by the way they've got data centers all over the world. That is a very typical scenario that we see everyday and for the customers hedging their bets and not being locked into anything is really, really important to them, because the application keep evolving and new things are getting in some ways built for the cloud, but sometimes the edge actually is still critical, right? In terms of where the actual physical source systems are. >> Yeah, so, I would say the elephant in the room is that kind of how do I get my arms around this multi cloud environment and there's not one company that's gonna solve all of these issues. I've had everything-- >> And even if they did, would you really put everything in one cloud? Probably you wouldn't? >> Right, but it's the, okay, I've got all of these clouds out there and all of these things, I have licensing issues I have to worry about, I have identity management I have to worry about, there's the overall management of it. And it seems primarily it's the networking piece that you're helping with, maybe explain a little bit more, Laz it probably comes to you as to that elephant there, it's ClearSky data, we solve your networking challenge for multicloud and it's more than just that. >> Right, so, it's sometimes embarrassingly I actually started my career in the networking space and so a lot-- >> It's okay, I did, too, it's a training. >> So when Ellen and I started talking about what we wanted to do, we were really focused on networking. Maybe I had enough of storage. And so a lot of what we discovered was that the network is an extremely sort of undersold part of the overall cloud strategy of any company. If you really want to go to the cloud this is really about moving huge amount of data back and forth from these locations. And so we've built a very, very high performance one-hub network from our pops right to all of the various regions of the public clouds. So what this basically means for our customers is that they don't have to worry about the internet, they don't have to worry about the security that they need to set up in order to get into the cloud, and the amount of throughput that we can get through is really astonishing. So we've really built a system that can maximize this network pipes. So even our smallest customers can move in excess of 20 terabytes a day back and forward from the cloud. So this becomes a really really interesting solution if you have a lot of source system or you have a lot of data to move. We can outrun that Amazon truck. >> So I want you to, I think back five years ago, I heard Equinix, some of the other large data centers, they were like, "Oh we're just gonna give you "a cloud market place and there'll be all these services "and if you need to access something, we'll just be able to "throw a 10 gig wire between somebody's connections." It sounded really good but it sounds like you're helping fill a gap. Maybe explain what that is. >> Well so most of the networking pieces are actually very expensive, very complicated to set up, first of all. So you also have port charges and all sorts of high availability issues that you need to resolve with each one of the clouds. Additionally, although they are sort of on demand, you're not using all those bandwidths all the time and you don't know when you're gonna need it. What we've done on the network is to make it possible for you to utilize 40 gigabytes of throughput, our 40 gigabytes of throughput, into the clouds pretty much whenever you need it. So for example, latency from Boston to Amazon niche, for us 11 milliseconds. For most people if they don't have direct connect at some exuberant price they're gonna end up experiencing in the hundreds of milliseconds if they're going over the internet. So that and the bandwidth guarantee is you think you have a one gigabyte internet connection but that's not really what all the elements along your path are gonna provide you. So there's a lot of variability and we make that all go away we make the management go away, the security issues go away, and so it's totally seamless. You just need to connect into our network with our edge, it's as if the cloud really isn't there. And if you need to access your resources in the cloud, we can bring your data to EC2 and you can connect instances to it. So the whole process of moving things back and forth is so seamless and transparent, you don't just manage it. It's all sort of a byproduct of the architecture. >> I was just gonna add, Equinix invested early and bet early on becoming a cloud hub. This idea of having a cloud exchange and a lot of the other services that are plugged in, is a tremendous value to customers. But what we do see is that there is still a lot of customers out there and I'm sure this will persist for a while where there's still even yet further distributed last mile issues, and customers are moving into Equinix and Colocation sites for all the benefits that they bring and we take full advantage of that and help drive that from our side. But we also see that there are things that are just not moving and need to stay put and it's either because of legacy reasons, compliance reasons, they don't want to invest to re-platform things. There are a lot of reasons that are out there and because we both come from the enterprise infrastructure world, that does not scare us. So we understand that what you have to do is you have to meet the customers where they live, right? And you have to make it easy and accessible and as Laz has described in kind of a turn key situation where however your application wants to run and be best situated, we're gonna make sure that your data is available to you. >> Yeah you bring out some great points there. A line I used many times recently is there was the promise that cloud was going to be simple and cheap and it turned out to be neither of those. What do you see some of the biggest challenges, Ellen, we start with you maybe, what are your customers facing, what do you excited about that's actually made progress the last few years, and what do we still need to do as an industry as a whole? >> Well I always have to say this and of course it makes me just feel completely so old but I've been in the clouds since 2008, right? My last company's cloud switch was kind of that early, okay, there's a thing it's called the cloud, it happens to be Amazon but there'll be other clouds too. So you have to say fast-forwarding 10 years, a lot of really good progress has been made and it is for sure the case that now when you talk to enterprise customers and to the CIOs they're in the cloud, they've adopted the cloud, the cloud is in their mental picture of where things are gonna be, they've accepted the fact that they have developer groups are already in the cloud and have been for a very long time and it's part of their portfolio now, to make sure it's protected and highly available and compliant. So I think that is progress. The best thing that ever happened was, I don't have to convince people the cloud is more secure than what they're doing on Prem, because everybody kinda knows that, so that's good news. We don't have to have that conversation 20 times again et cetera. But what I do see that's surprising to me is that still some of the fundamental problems are still problems. Getting my data into the cloud. You think, c'mon we've got lots of solutions, tools, and toolkits and stuff like that. But it's still a very major problem. Networking of course still being a key issue for customers. I don't want to rollout a bunch of new lines, I don't want to have to hire a snowmobile, I don't want to- you know, rebuild everything form scratch. So that is still I think shows up more than I would have guessed. Right now what we see is there's a lot of focus on operational things, in terms of how to optimize what turned out to be the high cost of the cloud. Every one of our customers knows if that pull data back from the cloud that's not good. So they've learned that, they've found that out and they were kind of a little surprised the first time the bill came in and it was really high. So this idea of having tools that allow optimization of using the cloud more cost-effectively and figuring out which cloud is going to be more cost-effective based on the access patterns. There's more awareness of it but there's still a lot of struggling with that. >> Laz, would love your comments on that. >> Well there are, the whole notion of cost-optimization is deeply embedded in our technology. Every time we have a conversation with a customer the first thing they ask, they ask about egress fees, is it really just the same price no matter how much I use it? And they think about all these different, like things about IOPS for example. Because the cloud providers have sort of indoctrinated the market to think about what their IOPS needs are. In order to get them to the appropriate price point. So there's a lot of optimization there, that I still don't think that the customers really got. How many people really understand how many IOPS a particular application really needs? And how many should I buy and if I buy the wrong number oh my god everything is messed up. So the ability to solve those types of problems for people. In a way that it becomes a non-issue is still. Certainly we're doing it for storage but there are all sorts of issues just like that for compute, there are all sorts of issues like that for networking as well. So anyone who's trying to build an application on top of this platform really needs to think about those things. Thankfully our customers don't have to worry about a whole slew of things because we've actually arbitrized out all of the unusual aspects of terrace of network providers versus cloud providers, access fees and transaction fees et cetera. Anyone whose doing this need to think about this in a very analytical way, which I don't think IT has been used to up until now. They overbuy as you know, and they continue to overbuy and as long as there's no complaints about performance, and there's no complaints about excesses in cost everything is fine. That's not how the cloud works. I think we're getting to the point now where any serious move to the cloud now is going to require a lot more thinking and a lot more analysis. There's still a mentality that the cloud is cheaper, and then when people try it, they quickly realize "Oh my god look at this bill." And it's forever, it's not like you can just shut everything off. It's every month. It's not just like you spent forty thousand dollars in a month and you can shut it off. So it's a difficult problem and I don't think IT's prepared, in general. >> I think one of the things we've seen at ClearSky over the last several years is the willingness that customers have to use the cloud for data protection. I think when we started it was sort of, you know, everything's going to the cloud, the whole thing. Damn the torpedoes full speed ahead, right? I think a lot of what people are actually doing is archival back-up DR, those are comfortable, state of the industry is sort of there should be a connection between the, wherever the Prem is for the customer and then out to the cloud for things that are longer tail kinds of things. The problem is, what if you have to pull the data back? So these are thing we think about everyday. >> Right, Ellen want to give me the final word, 20 million dollar phrase, the partnership with Equinex that's going to increase availability. What's this mean to your customers and to the company ClearSky as we look forward. >> Well I think one of the things that's true about the fact that we are a network centric kind of company is that the power of the network is in how many access points you have. So what this means is that customers who are national, and then global will have more opportunity now to be able to access things with ClearSky. And to grow and expand with us, which is great. We've seen tremendous expansion business this year. Really like a huge percentage has already expanded at least once if not multiple times with us. And that begs a lot of questions, well that's great you're here with us in this metro how do we get across the rest of our locations. So I think that's very valuable and also obviously from our side making sure we can handle the care and support that our customers are expecting. We're fully managed 24 by 7. So the bar is high, right? This is not the, here's a toolkit in the cloud go figure it out, this is we take care of everything we're SLAU and that's it. And obviously the customer wants to see that scale. >> Well Ellen and Laz, congratulations on all the progress you've made and always great to catch up with you on all the updates. >> Great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> Alright and thank you so much for watching and be sure to check out The Cube .net for all of our coverage including. We're at all the cloud shows. Huge show at Amazon Reinvent at the end of November be sure to tune into that and everything else. Feel free to reach out if you've got questions for our team or teams that you'd like us to cover other events we should be at. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the CUBE.