>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at Dell EMC World 2017. This is our eighth year of coverage of formerly known as EMC World but is now Dell World. First year of the combined companies. Some say Dell bought EMC, some say EMC bought Dell. Either way, the merger and the acquisition, or combination, however you want to call it, certainly working out. This is Cube coverage of the first year. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Keith Townsend, CTO advisor. Our next guest is Tarun Thakur, co-Founder and CEO of Datos IO, big news and as well, Peter Smails, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, a former EMCer, been in the industry. Guys, congratulations, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, John. Thank you Keith. >> Thank you very much. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> Big bang news at the Dell-E, so tons of stories here. Obviously the big story is the combination, but you guys have some really amazing news. Funding, traction, give us the update on the hard news. >> Excellent, thank you, John. First, thank you guys. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. The last couple of weeks have been just amazing for us. Last week was all about product, which Peter is going to talk about. Our journey from our one portal to our two portals. That journey is all driven by customers and where the market is headed. But this week was all about enterprise adoption. It's a&bout enterprise activity. You have these two industry stallworths, 200 billion dollars of market cap, recognizing the value of what we have been-- >> John: And so the hard news is, what, Cisco and NetApp have invested? >> Cisco and Neuron Motor invested in Datos today. >> So this is a round of funding from corporate investors. Any VC's coming in as well, or-- >> Both, you know, the investors were already in the company, they claimed their ownership-- >> John: Okay, so they did their pro-rata. They re-upped. Okay so, new corporate investors, that's validation. >> Yes, yes, yes. >> Why are they investing? My masses wants to know, why the hell are they investing? Why don't they just do it themselves? >> Yeah, so you know, look, I think this looks very, very clear that this industry of the data management, or this industry of enterprise with option to the cloud is just massive-paced right now, right? The acceleration is at it's highest gear, so to speak, and we've been working with both those companies for the last few months. They recognize at fundamental level what we've built, like, the application-centric nature of the product, build it fundamentally for cloud ready applications, helping existing customers mobilize their applications to the cloud. You know, you have to-- we have, now, three year lead, into the space, right, and it's best to join forces. >> Well, we had our Cube conversation in our studio in Palo Alto too, and you kind of smiling then, certainly smiling now. The big funding, big fat financing, as they say, but you really kind of coy about not sharing the news to me, which I thought was cool, kept the secret, but you guys have shell-- >> Tarun: I had valid reasons. >> But, the cloud is certainly accelerating. You guys have the tiger by the tail. But, if you look at the VC funding landscape, we were saying yesterday on our opening that, it's a canary in a coal mine. It's a really leading indicator of what's going on in the marketplace. If you're a storage start-up, you're DOA. No one is funding that. They're re-pivoting always. You see, "I got scale out, scale up storage," pivot, pivot, pivot but all of these companies, data management, data backup, and protection are all booming. Massive up, Rubrik, Cohesity, billion dollar valuations. Why are these companies getting such big funding? Why are you guys being so-- Is cloud just creating massive scale for what was normally a white space? >> No, sir. The answer-- I'll go first. >> Go for it. I'll jump in. >> Because you come from this all most recently. (laughter) >> Look, John, there has been no innovation in the space of backup and recovery for the last three years. We've been still living in the world of four-wall data center media-server based architectures, and backup and recovery products that were truly return for tape architectures. That world ain't exist in this cloud world. There has been no innovation, and now you see complete replacing of good companies. Great follow up companies to be p6art of. All of us recognize the disruption of opportunity, and recognize what we all do for the next 10, 20 years. >> And I'll jump on that. So, if you net it out, there's really two things happening. You know, 70% of CIO's have a cloud-first strategy. So, enterprise, one of the reason we're here. Enterprises have a cloud-first strategy. They're moving to the cloud. They're doing two things. One, they're either building net, new applications in the cloud. Geo-distributed, highly scaled applications. You need a fundamentally different approach for protecting those applications. That's number one. Number two is those same customers are saying, "I want to move as many of my non-recovery workloads from my traditional four wall data center off prim. I want to leverage the cloud. I want to put my data where I want to put it when I want to put it there." There has not been any good solution to do that. So, for us, that's cloud data management. We're about protect. If you have stuff in the cloud, we'll protect it. If you want to move stuff to the cloud, from the cloud, within the cloud, that's mobility to us. That's what we do. Ultimately, this is why there's so much attention being paid to cloud data management, because everybody's moving to the cloud. The one thing we have heard consistently-- >> John: It never existed before, really. >> They're not taking traditional tools to the cloud, simply put. >> You know what, go to the website, I don't see anything about backup. I don't see anything about, you know, there's data protection, but in an enterprise, when we go to the cloud for the first time, a couple of things we figure out first. Backup is hard, because, you know, I can't point my data domain to S3, and backup S3 or some type of &object storage. I also find out that these traditional architectures within the data center just don't translate to the cloud. So, where are you guys at in the education cycle of the enterprise, and helping them understand the value of the application-centric model, and where do you need to go? >> Yeah, so... Keith, that's a good question. You actually hit the nail on the head. You have these proprietary backup appliances. We used to call data domain, really a PPB appliance. You have these media-server based architectures with the likes of Vericlass and Condor. Perfect for four walls, right, in the cloud geo-distributor applications, right? You look at those, sort, that scale, the application centricity, and we started, what we did in our strategy, we started with absolutely green field. What does that mean? That means the cloud-native applications, the non-relatable databases, right? The analytics, the IO key applications. So you go towards the use-case where the world and the customers are already thinking cloud-native. Coaching and training customers, as you rightly called, is a very hard journey. It is a crossing the chasm. It takes time. You need to start with earlier doctors, the innovators, who will then latch onto you and take you forward. So, our strategy of picking the space, which was completely green field ablution, couldn't have served us better. >> So, what's that next step after we've figured out backup, because we have to back the data up. Data management is way more than backup. Now, as I've blown away the limits of my data center, and I can access data from anywhere in the world, what have you helped customers understand that they can do with their applications and data, now that I can access it anywhere in the world? >> Tarun: Excellent question. >> Yeah, so, I can take that. So, to your point, if you look at protect-- our three pillars: protect, mobilize, monetize. You'll hear us say that over and over and over again. We started with protection. It's a business-critical use case. You cannot have a cloud-first strategy if you don't protect your data. Got it. Second piece around the mobility piece is, like you said, giving. What have we done by being application-centric data management? What do we do that nobody else does,6 is we enable you to, very intelligently and very efficiently, move data sets, in native format, where ever you want. To any cloud that you want. We don't normalize data. We don't change formats. So, for example, I'll give you one great example of application centricity. I have an on-prim workload. I want to run a query against that. Star, not Peter star. That resulting data said, "That's all I want to move to the cloud, "because I want to run BIA against it. "I want to do something that helps me "monetize my data in the cloud. "That data set, I want to move." One, you can run a query against that database. Two, we'll intelligently and efficiently only move that data, in native format. Spin it up in the cloud as metadata set. All your metadata's there. Do whatever you want to that data. When you're done, move it back if you want. Do whatever you want. So, essentially, we've eliminated any silos from a cloud standpoint. So what we've done is, we've given people complete cloud freedom to move what they want when they want, where they need to. That's the essence of what we've done. >> Let's talk about the monetize portion of-- cause, you guys have me curious. If I can move the data to the cloud natively, that's great. That's really value add, but on top of that, I need to figure out really tough problem, which is metadata. I have global data, worldwide. I have data scientists wanting to pound against that in a completely new way. Do you guys provide a new way to access this data other than my legacy tools? >> Absolutely, Keith. So I really hit on those two points in the statement you made. Moving data efficiently, Keith, is a very hard problem. What we have done by being, only protecting what you need to protect, why back up an entire database when you only care about a couple of tables? Remember, we're going from traditional monalithic architectures to micro-services in the cloud, right? DBAs and augments, they only care about couple of tables. I want to run a BI query against certain part of the data. What we have fundamentally done, to the first part of your question, move data very highly efficient, which is 10x dedup of what data domain could do. We have significantly modified to be protected around that decon. The second piece around metadata question. What we've really done, Keith, in our, sort of, scale-out elastic data protection, to the tune of elastic compute and elastic storage, you need to extend that to elastic data management, is your metadata catalog can't back up, at the end of the day hasn't catalog. The golden nugget. >> Right. >> That catalog used to be siloed. If I had 10 media servers, I had that catalog siloed around that. >> Keith: No value met. >> No value met. >> Correct. >> Our catalog log is now distributed, stretched across cloud boundaries. If I have a Datos running on prim, and a Datos running on Amazon, those are two instances of the same software, two nodes, the metadata catalog can see each other. You back up here. John can see that backup in the cloud. He can spin up his sequence already in the cloud. You couldn't do that past. You couldn't do that back in the old world. The golden nugget. You need to stretch your metadata catalog and you need to make it distribute it across cloud boundaries, which is fundamentally what-- >> What's the impact to the application developers, because now, are you freeing up-- What is the ultimate value to the customers? I mean you're basically freeing up the hassles for the app developer to say, "whatever?" Give us the bottom line. >> So, you know, absolutely John. Look, I'll give you a customer's real scenario, okay? A world's leading e-commerce platform where we go, and wife's go spend a lot of money buying clothes, so I'm just going to leave it at that, right? They are moving from a monolithic architecture, the Oracle DB2, to the cloud-native architecture. Application developers want to take their CICD. I'm writing new code, I want to bring new catalog items on the website. I want to test my code changes, and I want to go from the data, not two days ago, which was the old backup world, every day you bring a backup. Now they want what we call, to your question of we don't call it backup, what we call it versioning. I want a version one hour ago, because I want to test my code changes. I want to deploy those code changes on the e-commerce platform driving a billion dollars in revenue, so-- >> So you're enabling more and more coolness with the developer from a data, stale verses fresh data. I mean to certain levels, I mean not-- >> But I want to jump on that as well, because the thing that sometimes goes over looked is that, one of the things that the cloud has done that people sort of don't always acknowledge, is it's created, we've pushed the silo problem from on-prim to the cloud. Clouds don't talk to each other. You know, the notion of that. So the notion of the universal file system, such as the cloud, which some of the competitive landscape tries to-- >> John: Wait a minute. We're supposed to have multi-clouds. >> Yeah we're supposed to, but no. To your point, we do have multi-cloud. But its amazing how difficult it is to deal with that. So to your point-- >> In the future they might be talking to each other, but today they're not. >> But, but, and my point is that we enable you to do that. So, the ultimate value to the customer? I'm the marketing guy, yes, but the notion of cloud freedom is a direct business value to the customer-- >> John: So that's legit from your standpoint. Cloud freedom... >> Put it where you need to put it, when you want to put it there. Bring it back when you want to bring it back. So, from an app standpoint, a lot more flexibility. A lot more agility in terms of app development. From a cost standpoint, from an IT standpoint, I can dramatically reduce my cost, cause I can leverage the cloud versus having everything on prim. From an operational standpoint, I ensure everything's protected, so-- >> And we know cloud-native developers are very, like, they won't tolerate a lot of the old baggage and dogma of IT. >> Peter: Right, right. Are ya freakin' kidding me? >> Tarun: Well, well all-- >> Peter: That's actually, can I take that one? >> Tarun: Please, please. >> That's actually a good-- >> You see how fired up he is? >> I don't know how many hours we have to talk on The Cube because that's a fascinating topic. >> Just pause. Can I pause you for a second? >> Yes. >> That's only 30 days since he left EMC. (laughter) >> Alright, alright. Anyway, the point is, but the problem is new, but there is a persona, what I refer to as basically like a persona innovator's dilemma, that we're also helping address, because there's a convergence of personalities of people involved in the protection and management of data. So, to your point, we've been dealing with a lot of the new personas going after cloud-native data protection, but you're watching the organizations. The enterprises, they're going through it and they are rapidly transforming these personas. So, part of our jobs, to your education point earlier, is making sure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing,% and marrying those two different pieces. That's ultimately, and that's value to the customer, and we help drive that process. >> Well, Tarun and Peter, congratulations, and good to see the journey continuing to accelerate. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> Entrepreneurial journey, and we'll keep in touch. Love the name, Datos OS. We believe, and Wikibon believes, and they're firm on this, that the business value of data is ultimately going to be a major, major disruptor for business. Not necessarily technology, but having that data operating system, that Datos, as you call it, is going to be fundamental. Congratulations. >> Thank you, John. >> Just keep it live here at Dell EMC World 2017. More live coverage, stay with us. More after this short break. (upbeat music)