it's the cue now here's your host stool minimun hi this is Stu miniman with Wikibon with a special presentation of the cube here at the ribbon cutting at infinite at new briefing center in Waltham Massachusetts excited to have with me Brian Carmody who is the CTO of infinite at Brian thanks for joining me hey Stuart how you doing I'm doing great so we've talked to some of your team here got on the inside so here we're outside but we're going to be digging into some of the innards of what's going on in the industry so yeah Brian you know not much has been going on in the storage industry let me see in the last month we had the you know finalization of the largest kind of acquisition / merger in the industry of technology with Dell buying EMC and Newt annex just IP ode so you know when we've got the CTO we always want to kind of dig in you know what what's in your head what what are the big kind of mega trends that you're seeing and how's that impact what you're doing yeah so this was obviously it's been a crazy era of innovation for us I would even just looking back at the past two years you know 2016 or let's say 2015 was kind of the year that storage got fast it was the year that NAND flash at the knee of the adoption curve and every marketing person everywhere was hashtag AFA and then 2016 was kind of the year we think that storage got commoditized this was when software-defined in hyper converged technologies kind of hit the knee of the adoption curve it was capped just like 2015 was capped by the pure IPO 2016 was capped by the mechanics IPO telling is a really interesting question of what comes next like what's the next mountain that we're going to climb as an industry and we're hearing really interesting things from customers about what their priorities and what their challenges are so first off going into 2017 one of the really interesting phenomenon is that the requirements from traditional enterprise let's say a CTO of a bank that's building a next-generation data center versus a mega cloud provider those requirements are starting to converge so this idea that the cloud is one thing an enterprise is something else I think we're starting to kind of move past that obviously there's a huge trend still going on for compute heavy workloads to move off premise into into public clouds and kind of a net flow of storage heavy workloads tend to move on premise but I think we're at the point now where we're kind of reaching an equilibrium point between those two so that is certainly one trend another thing that we're hearing very much about is the the rise of new KPIs for measuring IT systems acquisition cost is still a big piece of the equation but new technologies are new new new metrics like power space and cooling are becoming very critically important because with the transition to the cloud even CIOs of very large fortune 500 companies their computations are often happening for the first time now in spaces where they are a tenant in someone else's get they are renting space or renting capacity so all this is putting a lot of pressure on systems designers to really focus on density of storage and density of computation and you know we see that this is contributing to the rise of a new class of storage technologies called hyper storage systems which are designed to to meet those goals all right so so Brian I'm I've tried to create different market categories before when I join Wikibon it was hyperscale invades the enterprise when people before were they were talking about hyper converged asthma much we talked about we called it server San actually because it was you know the benefits of ass and brought to the server but you know so you've got that term hyper in there is that hyper scales and hyper converge is it some other you know hyperness you know what what's what's the general idea you're trying to get food this new category it so let's take a look at kind of the existing commercially available technologies and it's kind of interesting to look at it and think about it on a two-dimensional axis of looking at the density and then the latency so you have the for example the traditional monoliths these are latency that's low enough for primary storage they do not tend to be very dense you know they're under a petabyte of storage per rack and that's where the industry began that's what a lot of us kind of cut our teeth on there being superseded by all-flash arrays these are higher density because they have data reduction technologies built-in natively into their data paths they have better latency so they're kind of moving up and to the right with respect to the monoliths but they come at a price they tend to be exceedingly expensive and relatively small systems then you have the SDS and the server storage and the scale out stuff they tend to be very close to the density of the monoliths again a half about half a petabyte to a petabyte per rack a regression on latency but they're being widely adopted because the costs are just so much better than the monoliths and the AFA is and that's the entire enterprise storage industry right in this area here now all the way down if you move to higher density you have systems like the Facebook open vault so this is you know an awesome open source storage system that I'm that Facebook developed it's the basis of haystack and f4 two of the largest storage systems in the world right now these are incredibly dense storage systems multiple petabytes per rack but they're very high latency they're used for cold data only and other things like Amazon glacier and whatnot are kind of all clustered down in that high latency but super dense so hyper storage is if you move around that two-dimensional chart is the upper right-hand quadrant it is storage technology that has the reliability of monoliths it has the cost structure the programmability and the the ability to run on any type of hardware that the SDS systems have but it has the density and the data center profile of the hyper scalar storage so this is completely uncharted territory this is where all of the R&D spend companies in like Google and Amazon everybody's racing to try to go figure this out and this is the kind of wild west where we operate we have a three year head start I'm a on-prem part of this but it's not going to last because this is you know it's the remaining uncharted territory in the industry really interesting so you've heard it first hyper storage definitely something I've been hearing for number of years is especially the big financial guys have been they've had hyperscale Envy is really what it was there like you know we spent huge amounts of budgets on IT you know we know our stuff how dare you know a bunch of retail guys basically you know come in here and think that they understand this space so it sounds like you're bringing some of that back to them um you know is infinite out the only ones you know you mentioned some of the you know kind of Google and Facebook are there anybody else that's kind of packaging this for the enterprise other than infinite at not yet so the sum of the of our competitors that are building their systems out of all flash technologies are moving in the right direction but their their media itself has to become a lot more dense and the cost has to drop significantly until they can be realistic plays and until then it's going to be differentiated by scale when you want to do petabyte scale stuff you do it with art with hyper storage architectures and one you want to be small and tight and fast you do it with a FAS but I think those lines will be blurred over time great so it sounds like you've got a clear differentiation compared to kind of just the the software-defined pieces don't deliver on you know some of the density that you're talking about or some of the high level performance when we start getting things like nvme i hear is going to be a game changer for the the hyperscale pieces do we start to see the blurring of lines between some of these architectures or is this something that you know two years from now you're going to say ok here's the last wave and here's the next wave yeah so I mean if you take a longer view instead of two years I mean if we if we look at a five and a ten year view this is all there is going forward there's hyperscale architectures or disaggregated architectures which are for compute heavy storage light workloads and then you have hyper storage which is for storage heavy compute neutral workloads and going forward if you take a 10-year window that's all there is out there well Brian I'm hoping we can do a whiteboard with you sometime in the future or maybe there'll be some kind of you know thesis on you know the kind of the hyperscale the hyper storage category but appreciate you here sharing it with our audience here I want to give you the final word as to kind of you know that the hard work that still needs to be done in the storage industry over the next few years go Patriots alright well we'll drop the mic there thank you brian says is so much for joining us and thank you for watching the cube

(upbeat music) >> Despite its 70 to $80 billion total available market, computer storage is like a small town, everybody knows everybody else. We say in the storage world, there are a hundred people, and 99 seats. Infinidat is a company that was founded in 2011 by storage legend, Moshe Yanai. The company is known for building products with rock solid availability, simplicity, and a passion for white glove service, and client satisfaction. Company went through a leadership change recently, in early this year, appointed industry vet, Phil Bullinger, as CEO. It's making more moves, bringing on longtime storage sales exec, Richard Bradbury, to run EMEA, and APJ Go-To-Market. And just recently appointed marketing maven, Eric Hertzog to be CMO. Hertzog has worked at numerous companies, ranging from startups that were acquired, two stints at IBM, and is SVP of product marketing and management at Storage Powerhouse, EMC, among others. Hertzog has been named CMO of the year as an OnCon Icon, and top 100 influencer in big data, AI, and also hybrid cloud, along with yours truly, if I may say so. Joining me today, is the newly minted CMO of Infinidat, Mr.Eric Hertzog. Good to see you, Eric, thanks for coming on. >> Dave, thank you very much. You know, we love being on theCUBE, and I am of course sporting my Infinidat logo wear already, even though I've only been on the job for two weeks. >> Dude, no Hawaiian shirt, okay. That's a pretty buttoned up company. >> Well, next time, I'll have a Hawaiian shirt, don't worry. >> Okay, so give us the backstory, how did this all come about? you know Phil, my 99 seat joke, but, how did it come about? Tell us that story. >> So, I have known Phil since the late 90s, when he was a VP at LSA of Engineering, and he had... I was working at a company called Milax, which was acquired by IBM. And we were doing a product for HP, and he was providing the subsystem, and we were providing the fiber to fiber, and fiber to SCSI array controllers back in the day. So I met him then, we kept in touch for years. And then when I was a senior VP at EMC, he started originally as VP of engineering for the EMC Isilon team. And then he became the general manager. So, while I didn't work for him, I worked with him, A, at LSA, and then again at EMC. So I just happened to congratulate him about some award he won, and he said "Hey Herzog, "we should talk, I have a CMO opening". So literally happened over LinkedIn discussion, where I reached out to him, and congratulate him, he said "Hey, I need a CMO, let's talk". So, the whole thing took about three weeks in all honesty. And that included interviewing with other members of his exec staff. >> That's awesome, that's right, he was running the Isilon division for awhile at the EMC. >> Right. >> You guys were there, and of course, you talk about Milax, LSA, there was a period of time where, you guys were making subsystems for everybody. So, you sort of saw the whole landscape. So, you got some serious storage history and chops. So, I want to ask you what attracted you to Infinidat. I mean, obviously they're a leader in the magic quadrant. We know about InfiniBox, and the petabyte scale, and the low latency, what are the... When you look at the market, you obviously you see it, you talk to everybody. What were the trends that were driving your decision to join Infinidat? >> Well, a couple of things. First of all, as you know, and you guys have talked about it on theCUBE, most CIOs don't know anything about storage, other than they know a guy got to spend money on it. So the Infinidat message of optimizing applications, workloads, and use cases with 100% guaranteed availability, unmatched reliability, the set and forget ease of use, which obviously AIOps is driving that, and overall IT operations management was very attractive. And then on top of that, the reality is, when you do that consolidation, which Infinidat can do, because of the performance that it has, you can dramatically free up rack, stack, power, floor, and operational manpower by literally getting rid of, tons and tons of arrays. There's one customer that they have, you actually... I found out when I got here, they took out a hundred arrays from EMC Hitachi. And that company now has 20 InfiniBoxes, and InfiniBox SSAs running the exact same workloads that used to be, well over a hundred subsystems from the other players. So, that's got a performance angle, a CapEx and OPEX angle, and then even a clean energy angle because reducing Watson slots. So, lots of different advantages there. And then I think from just a pure marketing perspective, as someone has said, they're the best kept secret to the storage industry. And so you need to, if you will, amp up the message, get it out. They've expanded the portfolio with the InfiniBox SSA, the InfiniGuard product, which is really optimized, not only as the PBA for backup perspective, and it works with all the backup vendors, but also, has an incredible play on data and cyber resilience with their capability of local logical air gapping, remote logical air gapping, and creating a clean room, if you will, a vault, so that you can then recover their review for malware ransomware before you do a full recovery. So it's got the right solutions, just that most people didn't know who they were. So, between the relationship with Phil, and the real opportunity that this company could skyrocket. In fact, we have 35 job openings right now, right now. >> Wow, okay, so yeah, I think it was Duplessy called them the best kept secret, he's not the only one. And so that brings us to you, and your mission because it's true, it is the best kept secret. You're a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant, but I mean, if you're not a leader in a Gartner magic quadrant, you're kind of nobody in storage. And so, but you got chops and block storage. You talked about the consolidation story, and I've talked to many folks in Infinidat about that. Ken Steinhardt rest his soul, Dr. Rico, good business friend, about, you know... So, that play and how you handle the whole blast radius. And that's always a great discussion, and Infinidat has proven that it can operate at very very high performance, low latency, petabyte scale. So how do you get the word out? What's your mission? >> Well, so we're going to do a couple of things. We're going to be very, very tied to the channel as you know, EMC, Dell EMC, and these are articles that have been in CRN, and other channel publications is pulling back from the channel, letting go of channel managers, and there's been a lot of conflict. So, we're going to embrace the channel. We already do well over 90% of our business within general globally. So, we're doing that. In fact, I am meeting, personally, next week with five different CEOs of channel partners. Of which, only one of them is doing business with Infinidat now. So, we want to expand our channel, and leverage the channel, take advantage of these changes in the channel. We are going to be increasing our presence in the public relations area. The work we do with all the industry analysts, not just in North America, but in Europe as well, and Asia. We're going to amp up, of course, our social media effort, both of us, of course, having been named some of the best social media guys in the world the last couple of years. So, we're going to open that up. And then, obviously, increase our demand generation activities as well. So, we're going to make sure that we leverage what we do, and deliver that message to the world. Deliver it to the partner base, so the partners can take advantage, and make good margin and revenue, but delivering products that really meet the needs of the customers while saving them dramatically on CapEx and OPEX. So, the partner wins, and the end user wins. And that's the best scenario you can do when you're leveraging the channel to help you grow your business. >> So you're not only just the marketing guy, I mean, you know product, you ran product management at very senior levels. So, you could... You're like a walking spec sheet, John Farrier says you could just rattle it off. Already impressed that how much you know about Infinidat, but when you joined EMC, it was almost like, there was too many products, right? When you joined IBM, even though it had a big portfolio, it's like it didn't have enough relevant products. And you had to sort of deal with that. How do you feel about the product portfolio at Infinidat? >> Well, for us, it's right in the perfect niche. Enterprise class, AI based software defined storage technologies that happens run on a hybrid array, an all flash array, has a variant that's really tuned towards modern data protection, including data and cyber resilience. So, with those three elements of the portfolio, which by the way, all have a common architecture. So while there are three different solutions, all common architecture. So if you know how to use the InfiniBox, you can easily use an InfiniGuard. You got an InfiniGuard, you can easily use an InfiniBox SSA. So the capability of doing that, helps reduce operational manpower and hence, of course, OPEX. So the story is strong technically, the story has a strong business tie in. So part of the thing you have to do in marketing these days. Yeah, we both been around. So you could just talk about IOPS, and latency, and bandwidth. And if the people didn't... If the CIO didn't know what that meant, so what? But the world has changed on the expenditure of infrastructure. If you don't have seamless integration with hybrid cloud, virtual environments and containers, which Infinidat can do all that, then you're not relevant from a CIO perspective. And obviously with many workloads moving to the cloud, you've got to have this infrastructure that supports core edge and cloud, the virtualization layer, and of course, the container layer across a hybrid environment. And we can do that with all three of these solutions. Yet, with a common underlying software defined storage architecture. So it makes the technical story very powerful. Then you turn that into business benefit, CapEX, OPEX, the operational manpower, unmatched availability, which is obviously a big deal these days, unmatched performance, everybody wants their SAP workload or their Oracle or Mongo Cassandra to be, instantaneous from the app perspective. Excuse me. And we can do that. And that's the kind of thing that... My job is to translate that from that technical value into the business value, that can be appreciated by the CIO, by the CSO, by the VP of software development, who then says to VP of industry, that Infinidat stuff, we actually need that for our SAP workload, or wow, for our overall corporate cybersecurity strategy, the CSO says, the key element of the storage part of that overall corporate cybersecurity strategy are those Infinidat guys with their great cyber and data resilience. And that's the kind of thing that my job, and my team's job to work on to get the market to understand and appreciate that business value that the underlying technology delivers. >> So the other thing, the interesting thing about Infinidat. This was always a source of spirited discussions over the years with business friends from Infinidat was the company figured out a way, it was formed in 2011, and at the time the strategy perfectly reasonable to say, okay, let's build a better box. And the way they approached that from a cost standpoint was you were able to get the most out of spinning disk. Everybody else was moving to flash, of course, floyers work a big flash, all flash data center, etc, etc. But Infinidat with its memory cache and its architecture, and its algorithms was able to figure out how to magically get equivalent or better performance in an all flash array out of a system that had a lot of spinning disks, which is I think unique. I mean, I know it's unique, very rare anyway. And so that was kind of interesting, but at the time it made sense, to go after a big market with a better mouse trap. Now, if I were starting a company today, I might take a different approach, I might try to build, a storage cloud or something like that. Or if I had a huge install base that I was trying to protect, and maybe go into that. But so what's the strategy? You still got huge share gain potentials for on-prem is that the vector? You mentioned hybrid cloud, what's the cloud strategy? Maybe you could summarize your thoughts on that? >> Sure, so the cloud strategy, is first of all, seamless integration to hybrid cloud environments. For example, we support Outpost as an example. Second thing, you'd be surprised at the number of cloud providers that actually use us as their backend, either for their primary storage, or for their secondary storage. So, we've got some of the largest hyperscalers in the world. For example, one of the Telcos has 150 Infiniboxes, InfiniBox SSAS and InfiniGuards. 150 running one of the largest Telcos on the planet. And a huge percentage of that is their corporate cloud effort where they're going in and saying, don't use Amazon or Azure, why don't you use us the giant Telco? So we've got that angle. We've got a ton of mid-sized cloud providers all over the world that their backup is our servers, or their primary storage that they offer is built on top of Infiniboxes or InfiniBox SSA. So, the cloud strategy is one to arm the hyperscalers, both big, medium, and small with what they need to provide the right end user services with the right outside SLAs. And the second thing is to have that hybrid cloud integration capability. For example, when I talked about InfiniGuard, we can do air gapping locally to give almost instantaneous recovery, but at the same time, if there's an earthquake in California or a tornado in Kansas City, or a tsunami in Singapore, you've got to have that remote air gapping capability, which InfiniGuard can do. Which of course, is essentially that logical air gap remote is basically a cloud strategy. So, we can do all of that. That's why it has a cloud strategy play. And again we have a number of public references in the cloud, US signal and others, where they talk about why they use the InfiniBox, and our technologies to offer their storage cloud services based on our platform. >> Okay, so I got to ask you, so you've mentioned earthquakes, a lot of earthquakes in California, dangerous place to live, US headquarters is in Waltham, we're going to pry you out of the Golden State? >> Let's see, I was born at Stanford hospital where my parents met when they were going there. I've never lived anywhere, but here. And of course, remember when I was working for EMC, I flew out every week, and I sort of lived at that Milford Courtyard Marriott. So I'll be out a lot, but I will not be moving, I'm a Silicon Valley guy, just like that old book, the Silicon Valley Guy from the old days, that's me. >> Yeah, the hotels in Waltham are a little better, but... So, what's your priority? Last question. What's the priority first 100 days? Where's your focus? >> Number one priority is team assessment and integration of the team across the other teams. One of the things I noticed about Infinidat, which is a little unusual, is there sometimes are silos and having done seven other small companies and startups, in a startup or a small company, you usually don't see that silo-ness, So we have to break down those walls. And by the way, we've been incredibly successful, even with the silos, imagine if everybody realized that business is a team sport. And so, we're going to do that, and do heavy levels of integration. We've already started to do an incredible outreach program to the press and to partners. We won a couple awards recently, we're up for two more awards in Europe, the SDC Awards, and one of the channel publications is going to give us an award next week. So yeah, we're amping up that sort of thing that we can leverage and extend. Both in the short term, but also, of course, across a longer term strategy. So, those are the things we're going to do first, and yeah, we're going to be rolling into, of course, 2022. So we've got a lot of work we're doing, as I mentioned, I'm meeting, five partners, CEOs, and only one of them is doing business with us now. So we want to get those partners to kick off January with us presenting at their sales kickoff, going "We are going with Infinidat "as one of our strong storage providers". So, we're doing all that upfront work in the first 100 days, so we can kick off Q1 with a real bang. >> Love the channel story, and you're a good guy to do that. And you mentioned the silos, correct me if I'm wrong, but Infinidat does a lot of business in overseas. A lot of business in Europe, obviously the affinity to the engineering, a lot of the engineering work that's going on in Israel, but that's by its very nature, stovepipe. Most startups start in the US, big market NFL cities, and then sort of go overseas. It's almost like Infinidat sort of simultaneously grew it's overseas business, and it's US business. >> Well, and we've got customers everywhere. We've got them in South Africa, all over Europe, Middle East. We have six very large customers in India, and a number of large customers in Japan. So we have a sales team all over the world. As you mentioned, our white glove service includes not only our field systems engineers, but we have a professional services group. We've actually written custom software for several customers. In fact, I was on the forecast meeting earlier today, and one of the comments that was made for someone who's going to give us a PO. So, the sales guy was saying, part of the reason we're getting the PO is we did some professional services work last quarter, and the CIO called and said, I can't believe it. And what CIO calls up a storage company these days, but the CIO called him and said "I can't believe the work you did. We're going to buy some more stuff this quarter". So that white glove service, our technical account managers to go along with the field sales SEs and this professional service is pretty unusual in a small company to have that level of, as you mentioned yourself, white glove service, when the company is so small. And that's been a real hidden gem for this company, and will continue to be so. >> Well, Eric, congratulations on the appointment, the new role, excited to see what you do, and how you craft the story, the strategy. And we've been following Infinidat since, sort of day zero and I really wish you the best. >> Great, well, thank you very much. Always appreciate theCUBE. And trust me, Dave, next time I will have my famous Hawaiian shirt. >> Ah, I can't wait. All right, thanks to Eric, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi everybody, This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. We've been following a company called Actifio for quite some time. Now they've really popularized the concept of copy data management. Really innovative Boston based Waltham based company. And with me Brian Regan who's the chief marketing officer and Paul Forte who's the newly minted chief revenue officer of Actifio. Guys great to see you. I wish we were face to face at your June event but this will have to do. >> You're welcome. >> Thanks Dave. >> You bet Dave. >> Yeah, so Brian you've been on theCUBE a bunch. I'm going to start with Paul if that's okay. Paul, let's talk a little bit about your background. You've done a number of stints at a variety of companies. Big companies like IBM and others as well. What attracted you to Actifio? >> Yes Dave I would say in all honesty, I've been a software guy and candidly a data specific leader for many many years. And so IT infrastructure particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for on and onwards there. And so Actifio was just smack dab in the middle of that. And so when I was looking for my next adventure I had an opportunity to meet with Ash our CEO and founder and describe and discuss kind of what Actifio was all about. And candidly, the number of connections that we had that were the same. There are a lot of OEM relationships with people that I actually worked with and for some that work for me historically. So it was almost this perfect world. And I'm a Boston guy so it is in my old backyard. And yeah it was a perfect match for what I was looking for. Which was really a small growth company that was trying to get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and could understand and articulate the value proposition. >> Well as we say in Boston, Paulie we got to get you back here. (laughs) >> I know (mumbles) so I'll pack my car. >> (laughs) Yeah. So Brian... >> For 25 years, I still got it. >> let's talk about the climate right now. I mean nobody expected this of course. And it's funny I saw Ash at an event in Boston last fall. We were talking like "Hey, what are you expecting for next year?" "Yeah a little bit of softening" but nobody expected this sort of black swan. But you guys I just got your press release. You put it out. You had a good quarter. You had a record first quarter. What's going on in the marketplace. How are you guys doing? >> Yeah, well I think that today more than ever businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis. And that data whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers, how they manage through their supply chain and frankly how they take care of their employees, is all very data centric. And so businesses that are protecting that data that are helping businesses get faster access to that data and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data. On premises, in the cloud and hybrid configuration. Those are the businesses that are really going to be top of a CIO's mind. I think RQ1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets and they are confident in Actifio as an important part of their data supply chain. >> Paul I want to come back to you. First of all I want to let people know you're an Ex-Army Ranger. So thank you for your service, that's awesome. >> You're welcome (mumbles). >> I was talking to Frank Slootman, I interviewed in the other day and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages and he says "Yeah I manage by a playbook". He's a situational manager and that's something that he learned in the military. Well it's weird. This is a situation. (Paul laughs) And that really is kind of how you're trained. And of course we've never seen anything like this but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before. So how you seeing organizations generally, Actifio specifically kind of manage through this crisis. What are some of the moves that you'are advising, recommending? Give us some insight there. >> Yeah, so it's really interesting. It's funny that you mentioned my military background. So I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day. That one of the things that they trained for in the military, is the eventuality of chaos. So when you do an exercise we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say okay you are now dead. And without that person being allowed to speak they take a knee and the (mumbles) unit has to go on. And so what happens is you learn by muscle memory like how to react in times of crisis and you know this is a classic example of leadership in crisis. And so it's just interesting. So to me you have a playbook. I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with the plan. I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson but one of my famous quotes was "Plan is good until somebody punches you in the face". (Dave laughs) >> That's the reality of what just happened to business across the globe. This is just a punch in the face. And so you've got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic. And from a leadership perspective, I think you can't lose your confidence. Right, so I've watched some of my friends and I've watched some other businesses cripple in the midst of this pandemic because they're afraid instead of looking at this. In my first commentary in our first staff meeting Brian, if I remember it was this, okay so what makes Actifio great in this environment? Not why is it not great? And so we didn't get scared. We jumped right into it. We adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter. And we took down deals. Honestly Dave we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy. It was insane, it was really fun. >> Okay, so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record quarter. It was really a broad based demand. >> Yeah, so if you dug underneath the covers you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter. We had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever. We had the largest contribution from our nano partners and our OEM partners ever. And we had the highest number ever. And so it was really a nice truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries. >> Interesting, you used the term opportunistic and I get right on. You obviously don't want to be chasing ambulances. At the same time, we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing and I'd like to get your feedback on this Brian. You're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer. You're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic. And I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency. You talked about digital initiatives, data center, transformations etc. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that, Brian. Did you do those things, how did you do those things? What kind of pace were you guys at? How did you do it remotely with everybody working from home? Give us some color on that. >> Sure, and if Ash, if he were here he would probably remind us that Actifio was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. So we have essentially been book ended by two black swans over the last decade. The lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit is as relevant today. Everything starts with cost containment and cost reduction. Hence in protection of the business and so CIOs in the midst of this shock to the system. I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital and critical initiatives and what is a "nice to have" and I'm going to hit pause on nice to have and invest entirely in the critical initiative. And the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working remotely. Getting people safe access to their systems and their applications and their data. And then ultimately it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals in the state actors. Unfortunately as we've seen in other times of crisis this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike, particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to really ensure the resiliency in their applications. So we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs, helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructural light manner. But also really emphasized the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected but you don't know when, instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is something that is incredibly valuable. >> So let's dig into cyber resiliency. So specifically what is Actifio doing for its customers from a product standpoint, capabilities, maybe it's part of the 10C announcement as well but can you give us some specifics on where you fit in. Let's take that use case, cyber resiliency? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's a stack of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency. At the lowest level, you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're infected. And so the ability to go back in time, test the recoverability of data, test the validity of the data is step one. Step two is once you found the clean point, being able to resume operations, being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase. And that's something that Actifio was founded on this notion of instant access to data. And then the third phase and this is really where our partnerships really shine is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk. You want to go back and clean that system. You want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it. And that's where our partnership with IBM for example, resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solutions which takes the Actifio platform and then wrappers in a complete manage services around it. So they can help the customer not only get their systems and applications back on their feet but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable ground. >> Okay, so that's interesting. So Paul was it kind of new adoptions? Was it increases from existing customers combination? Can you talk to that? >> Yeah, totally. So ironically to really come clean the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar to do with the metrics that we see historically. So the mix with mean our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics which candidly we were a little surprised by. We anticipated that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base. But candidly we had a really nice split which was great which meant that our value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it but also in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerate it or just continue down the path of adoption during the timeframe of COVID-19. Across industries I would say that again there were some industries I would say that pushed pause. And so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during this past period were the ones you would think of, right? So financial institutions primarily as well as some of the medical. So some of those transactions, healthcare and medical they accelerated along with financial institutions. And then I would say that we did have some industries that pushed pause. You can probably guess what some of those are. Among the majority of those were the ones that were dealing with the small and midsize businesses or consumer-facing businesses, things like retail and stuff like that. Well we typically do have a pretty nice resonance and a really nice value proposition but there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just pause. Like we're going to come back. But overall yeah the feedback was just in general. It felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal. As strange as that sounds. 'Cause I know speaking to a lot of my friends in peer companies, peer software companies, they didn't have that experience but we did pretty well. >> That's interesting, you're right. Certain industries, airlines, I'm interviewing a CIO of a major resort next week. Really interested to hear how they're dealing with this but those are obviously depressed and they've dialed everything down. But we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot, it didn't, it didn't buffer the decline in IT spending that were expected to be down maybe as much as 5% this year but it definitely offset it. What about Cloud? We're seeing elevated levels in Cloud demand. Guys have offerings there. What are you seeing in Cloud guys? >> Do you want to take it Brian? >> Yeah, I'll start and then Paul please weigh in. I think that the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the move to cloud that we've been we've been witnessing over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months. The projects that might have been on the 18 to 24 month roadmap have of all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year of our roadmap. But in terms of the wholesale everything moves to Cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate. I don't think we've seen that quite yet. I think that the world is still hybrid when it comes to Cloud. Although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the non-number one and number two Cloud providers but the rest of the hyper-scalers who are fighting for market shares because now they have an opportunity to perhaps, Google for example, a strategic partner of ours has a huge offering when it comes to enabling work from home and the remote work. So leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings, I think it gives them a wedge that the Amazon might not have for example. So it's an acceleration of interest but I think it's just a continuation of the trend that we've been seeing for years. >> Yeah, and I would add a little bit Dave. The IBM held their Think Conferences past week. I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate. They're one of our OEM partners and... >> Dave: Oh Yeah, we covered it. >> When our CEO presented his opening his opening remarks it was really about digital transformation and he really put it down to two things and said any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid Clouds or they're talking about AI and machine learning. And that's kind of it, right? And so every digital business is talking in one of those categories. And when I look to Q1 it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than as Brian talked about all of the cloud business which is some version of an acceleration. But outside of that the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity did so and those that did not just peeled back a little bit. But overall I would agree with IBM's assessment of the market that those are kind of the two hotspots and hybrid Cloud is hot and the good news is, we've got a nice value prop right in the middle of it. >> Yeah, Alvin Chris has talked about, and he has it, maybe not a thing but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call just in public statements that IBM must win the battle the architectural battle, the hybrid Cloud. And also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially, which is to mean those two things are great news for you guys, obviously Red Hat is the linchpin of that. I want to ask you guys about your conference, Data-Driven. So we were there last year it was a really great intimate event. Of course you can't have the physical events anymore. So you've pushed to September or you're going all digital? Give us the update on that Brian. >> We're eager to have theCube participate in our September event. So I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks, but also >> Dave: Awesome, love it. (Brian laughs) >> Exactly, so you can tell Frank to put that in there. So we've been participating in some of the other conferences most notably last week learning a lot and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics we're putting on the digital event. I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event one of the things that is first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on demand digital content particularly from a technology standpoint. Our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed. The digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly as many sessions as they might want. So I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content for the users of our technology. And then we're also eager to have as we've done with data driven in years past, our customers tell the story of how they're using data. And this year certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular how they use data during this incredible crisis and hopefully renewal from the crisis. >> Well one of my favorite interviews last year at your show was the guy from DraftKings. So hopefully they'll be back on and we'll have some football to talk about, well let's hope. >> Amen. >> I Want to end with just sort of this notion of we've been so tactical the last eight weeks. Right? You guys too I'm sure. Just making sure you're there for customers, making sure your employees are okay. But as we start to think about coming out of this into a Post-COVID Era and it looks like it's going to be with us for a while but we getting back to Quaseye opening. So I'm hearing hybrid is here to stay. We agree for sure. Cyber resiliency is very interesting. I think one of the things we've said is that companies may sub-optimize near term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and business resiliency in place. That's obviously something that is I think good news for you guys but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian you can bring us home. How do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the Post-COVID Era? >> Yeah, this is a really interesting topic for me. In fact I've had many discussions over the last couple of weeks with some of our investors as well as with our executive staff. And so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occured, for IT specifically at the enterprise level, it's about to go through a transformation, no different than we watched the transformation of SAS businesses when you basically replaced a cold calling sales person with an inside and inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and BDR. Because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of airplane ride or physical building to go through. And so that whole thing has been removed from the sales process. So it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that were going on, they happen to be online. However, way higher than what we can (mumbles), you coupled that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices. And I really think that those companies that embrace this new model, are going to find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way. And I do believe that the professional sales enterprise sales person of tomorrow is going to look different than it looks today. And so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and watching us learn together how we're going to buy, sell and market to each other in this post-COVID way. 'Cause the only thing I really do know it's just not going to be the way it used to be. What is it going to look like? I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet. But it's going to look different for sure. >> They're very, very thoughtful comments. And so Brian, you know our thinking is the differentiation in the war. Gets one in digital. How is that affecting your marketing and your things around that? >> We fortunately decided coming into 2020, our fiscal 21, that we were actually going to overweigh digital anyway. We felt that, it was far more effective, we were seeing far better conversion rates. We saw way better ROI in terms of very targeted additive digital campaigns or general purpose ABM type of efforts. So our strategy had essentially been set and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds into digital. So we have essentially a two pronged marketing attack, right now, which is digital creating inbounds and BDRs that are calling on those inbounds that are created digitally. And so it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events if and when they do actually back and spawn, how much we decide to actually go back into that. To some extent we've talked about this in the past Dave. The physical events and the sheer spectacle and the sheer audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through that was an unsustainable model. (laughs) And so I think this is hastening perhaps the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling customers what they need to know to help and assist their buying journey and their investigation journey into new technology. >> There in the IT world is hybrid. And I think the events world is also going to be hybrid. Intimate, they're going to live on but they're also going to have a major digital component to them. I'm very excited that there's a lot of learnings now in digital especially around events and by September, a lot of the bugs are going to be worked out. You know we've been going, feels like 24/7, but really excited to have you guys on. Thanks so much, really looking forward to working with you in September at Data-Driven. So guys thanks a lot for coming on theCUBE. >> Oh my gosh, thank you Dave. So nice to be here, Thank you. >> All right, stay safe. >> Thanks Dave, always a pleasure. You too. >> Thank you everybody, thank you. And thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] hi buddy this is Dave Volante and welcome to this cute conversation you know the we've been following a company called Activia for quite some time now they they've really popularized the concept of copy data management really innovative Boston based Waltham based company and with me Brian Regan who's the chief marketing officer and all 40 who's the newly minted chief revenue officer of actifi Oh guys great to see you I wish we were face to face that you're you're you're June event but this will have to do yeah you bet yeah so you know Brian you've been on the cube a bunch I'm gonna start with Paul if that's okay Paul you know just let's talk a little bit about your your background you've you've done a number of stance at a variety of companies you know big companies like IBM and others as well what attracted you to Activia in all honesty I've been a software guy and candidly a data specific leader for many many years and so IT infrastructure particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for fun on words there and and so Activia was just smack dab in the middle of that right and so when I was looking for my next adventure you know I had an opportunity to to meet with a shower CEO and Founder and describe and discuss kind of what activity was all about and candidly the the number of connections that we had that were the same a lot of our OEM relationships with people that I actually worked with and for and some that worked for me historically so it was almost this perfect world right and I'm a Boston guy so it was in my in my old backyard and it was just a perfect yeah it was a perfect match for what I was looking for which was really a small growth company that was trying to you know get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and understanding and articulate the value proposition well as we're saying in Boston Paulie we got to get you back here I know I pack my cock let's talk about the let's talk about the climate right now I mean nobody expected this of course I mean it's funny I was I saw ash and an event in in Boston last fall we were talking like hey what do you expected for next year yeah a little bit of softening but you know nobody expected this sort of Black Swan but you guys I just got your press release you put out you had a good you had a good quarter you had a record first quarter um what's going on in the marketplace how you guys doing yeah well I think that today more than than ever businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis and that data whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers how they manage through their supply chain and in frankly how they take care of their employees is all very data-centric and so businesses that are protecting that data that are helping businesses get faster access to that data and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data on-premises in the cloud and hybrid configuration those are the businesses that are really going to be top of a CIOs mind I think our q1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets in their confidence in ectopy Oh has an important part of their data supplied nopal I want to come back to you first of all your your other people know you're next you're next Army Ranger so thank you for your service that's awesome you know I was talking to Frank's lute man we interviewed me other day and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages and and he says the other managed by a playbook he's a situational manager and that's something that he learned in the military well this is weird this is a situation okay and that really is kind of how you're trained and and of course we've never seen anything like this but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before so how are you seeing organizations generally actifi Oh specifically going to manage through this process what are some of the moves that you're advising recommending give us some insight there yeah so I'm it's really interesting it's a it's funny that you mentioned my military background I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day that you know one of the things that they trained for in the military is the eventualities of chaos right and so when you when you do an exercise they we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say okay you're now dead and without that person being allowed to speak they take a knee and the unit has to go on and so what happens is you you learn by muscle memory like how to react in time suffice it or and you know this is a classic example of leadership and crisis and so um so it's just it's just interesting like so to me you have a playbook I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with a plan I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson but one of them one of my famous quotes was you know let you know plan is good until somebody punches you in the face that's the reality of what just happened the business across the globe is it just got punched in the face and so you got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic and from a leadership perspective I think you can't lose your confidence right so I've watched some of my friends and of what some other businesses crippled in the midst of this and I'm because they're afraid instead of instead of looking at this in my first commentary that our first staff meeting Brian if I remember it was this okay so what makes active feel great in disembark like not why is it not great right and so we didn't get scared we jumped right into it we you know we adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter and we just down here the honestly date we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy I mean so it was insane it was really fun okay so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record Porter is really a broad-based the demand yeah so if you you know if you dug underneath the covers you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter we had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever we had the largest contribution from our panel partners and our OEM partners ever and we had the highest number ever and so it was a it was really a nice truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries interesting I mean you use the term opportunistic and and I think you're right on I mean you obviously you don't want to be chasing ambulances at the same time you know we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing and I'd like to get your feedback on this Brian you you you're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer you're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic and and I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency you talked about digital initiatives you know data center transformations etc so maybe you could talk a little bit about that Brian did you do those things how did you do those things what kind of pace were you guys at how did you do it remotely with everybody working from home give us some color on that sure and you know Ashley if you were here you would probably remind us that Activia was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis so we we have essentially been bookended by two black swans over the last decade the and the lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit as as relevant today everything starts with cost containment in hospital and in protection of the business and so cio is in the midst of this shock to the system I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital critical initiatives and what is a nice to have and I'm going to pause on my step and invest entirely in the critical mission and the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working for remotely getting people safe access to their systems and their applications in their data and then ultimately it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals and state actors up unfortunately as we've seen in other times of crisis this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to to really ensure the resiliency their applications so we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructure light manner but also really emphasize the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected but you don't know when you know instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is incredibly valuable so so let's >> cyber resiliency so specifically what is aekta video doing for its customers from a product standpoint capabilities maybe it's part of the the 10 see announcement as well but but can you can you give us some specifics on where you fit in let's take that use case cyber resiliency yeah absolutely so I think there's there's a staff of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency at the lowest level you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're in fact and so the ability to go back in time test the recoverability of data test the validity of the data is step one step two is once you've found the clean point being able to resume operations being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase and that's something that Activia was founded on this notion of instant access to data and then the third phase and this is really where our partnerships really shine is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk you want to go back and clean that system you want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it and that's where our partnership with IBM freezing resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solution which takes the activity of platform and then rappers and a complete managed services around it so they can help the customer not only get their their systems and applications back on their feet but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable okay so so that's interesting so Paul Paul was it kind of new adoptions was it was it increases from existing customers kind of a combination and you talk to that yeah totally so like ironically to really come clean we are the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar through the metrics that we see historically so the mix need our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics which candidly we were a little surprised by we anticipated um that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base but candidly we had a really nice split which was great which meant that you know a value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it but also in in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerated or or just continue down the path of adoption during the time frame of Koba 19 across industries I would say that again um there was there were there were some industries I would say that pushed pause and so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during during this past period were the ones you would think of right so financial institutions primarily as well as some some of the medical so some of those transactions healthcare and medical they accelerated along with financial institutions and then I would say that that we did have some industries that push pause and you can probably guess what some of those are a majority of those were the ones that we're dealing with the small and mid-sized businesses or consumer facing businesses things like retail stuff like that where we typically do have a pretty nice residence in a really nice value proposition but there were there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just pause like we're going to come back but overall the yeah the feedback was just in general it felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal as strange as that sounds because I know speaking to a lot of my friends and gear companies your software companies they didn't have that experience but we did pretty well that's interesting I mean you're right I mean certain industries Airlines I'm interviewing a cio of major resort next week you know really interested to hear how they're you know dealing with this but those those are obviously depressed and they've dialed everything down but but we've we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot it didn't it didn't you know buffer the decline in IT spending that were expecting to be down you know maybe as much as 5% this year but it definitely offset it what about cloud we're seeing elevated levels in cloud demand guys you know have offerings there what are you seeing in cloud guys you want that yeah I'll start and then fall please please weigh in I think that'd be the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the MOOC table that we've been whipped over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months The Improv been on the you know 18 to 24 month road map have all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year but in terms of the wholesale you know everything moves to cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate I I don't think we've seen that quite yet I think the the world is still hybrid when it comes to cloud although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the the non number one or number two cloud providers but the rest of the hyper scalers who are fighting for market share because now they have an opportunity to perhaps google for example a strategic partner of ours has a you know a huge offering when it comes to enabling work home and remote work so leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings I think gives them a wedge that the you know Amazon might not have so this it's an acceleration of interest but I think it's just a continuation of the trend of seeing four years yeah and I would add a little bit if the you know IBM held their think conference this past week I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate there one of our OEM partners and oh yeah because you know when our the CEO presented his kind of opening his opening remarks it was really about digital transformation and he really he really kind of put it down to two things and said you know any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid cloud but they're talking about AI and machine learning and that's kind of it right and so every digital business is talking in one of those categories and so when I look 2q1 it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than as brian talked about all the cloud business which is some version of an acceleration but outside of that the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity didn't so and those that did not you know kind of just peeled back a little bit but overall I still I would agree with with ibm's assessment of the market that you know those are kind of the two hot spots and have a cloud is hot and the good news is we've got a nice guy operating Molloy yeah Arvind Krista talked about the the in and it has it maybe not I think but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call just in Publix Davis that IBM must win the battle the architectural battle the hybrid cloud and also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially which is submitted to me those those two things are great news for you guys obviously you know Red Hat is the linchpin of that I want to ask you guys about your your conference data-driven so we were there last year it was a great really great intimate event of course you know you hand up the physical events anymore so you've pushed to September you're going all digital would give us the update on on that program we're um we're eager to have the cube participate in our September event so I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks but awesome we love it we exactly so you can tell Frank to put that so we we've been participating in some of the other conferences I think most notably last week learning a lot and and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics for putting on a digital event I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event one of the things that is I think first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on-demand digital content particularly from a technology standpoint our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed the digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly as many sessions as they as they might so I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content or the users of our technology and then we're also eager to have as we've done with data driven in the years past our customers tell the story of how they're using data and this year certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular how they use data during this incredible you know crisis and and hopefully renewal from crisis well one of my favorite interviews last year your show is the the guys from draft King so hopefully they'll be back on it will have some football to talk about let's hope I mean I want it I want to end with just sort of this notion of you know we've been so tactical the last eight weeks right I'm you guys too I'm sure just making sure you're there for customers making sure your employees are ok but as we start to think about coming out of this you know into a post probe Adaro it looks like it's gonna be with us for a while but we're getting back the you know quasi opening so I'm hearing you know hybrid is here to stay we agree for sure cyber resiliency is very interesting I think you know one of the things we've said is that that companies may sub optimize near-term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and resilience business resiliency in place you know that's obviously something that is I think good news for you guys but but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian you can bring us home how do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the post ghovat era yeah so this is a really interesting topic for me in fact I've had many discussions over the last couple weeks with some of our investors as well as our executive staff and so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occurred for IT specifically at the enterprise level is about to go through a transformation no different than we watched the transformation of SAS businesses when you basically replace the cold-calling salesperson with an inside and you know inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and vdr because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of airplane ride or or physical building to go through and so like that that whole thing has been removed from the sales process and so it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that were going on they happen to be online however you couple that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices and and I really think that those companies that embrace this new model are gonna find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way and I do believe that the professional sales enterprise salesperson of tomorrow is gonna look at then it looks today and so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and and watching us learn together how we're gonna buy sell and market to each other in this post public way because I I'm the only thing I really do know it's just not gonna be the way it used to be what is it gonna look like I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet but it's gonna look different for sure they're very very thoughtful comments and so Brian you know our thinking is the differentiation and the war yes it gets one in digital how is that affecting you know sort of your marketing and your thing around that we we fortunately decided coming into 2020 our fiscal 21 that we were actually going to overweight digital anyway we felt that it was far more effective we were seeing far better conversion rates we saw you know way better ROI in terms of very targeted tentative digital campaigns or general-purpose ABM type of efforts so our strategy had essentially been set and and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds individually so you know we have essentially a two-pronged marketing you know attack Frank now which is you know digital creating inbounds and B DRS that are calling on those in bounds that are created digital and so it's a you know it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events if and when they do actually come back into form you know how much we decide to actually go back into that that been I think that you know to someone to some extent we've talked about this in the past II you know the physical events and the the sheer spectacle and this year you know audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through that was an unsustainable model and so I think this is this is hastening perhaps the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling telling customers what they need to know to help their an assist their buying journey in their investigation journey into a new technology I mean the IT world is hybrid and I think the events world is also going to be hybrid to me nice intimate events you know they're gonna live on but they're also gonna have a major digital component to them I'm very excited that you know we're a lot of learnings now in digital especially around events and by September the a lot of the the bugs are gonna be worked out you know we've been going to it so it feels like 24/7 but really excited to have you guys on thanks so much really looking forward to working with you in in September it's data-driven so guys thanks a lot for coming on the cube oh my gosh thank you Dave so nice it's so nice to be here thank you alright pleasure you did thank you everybody thank you and thanks for watching this is Dave Volante for the cube and we'll see you next time [Music]

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Stu Miniman. (techy music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Patrick Morley, who's the CEO of Carbon Black. Of course, recently announced acquisition by VMware of $2.1 billion. Patrick, thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, thanks for having me. >> All right. So, you know, we love digging into tech. There is no hotter space than security, you know? All the cybers are, you know, really exciting stuff, and even your company's Waltham-based. >> That's right. >> So actually a little closer to Boston than we are here in Marlborough, Massachusetts. When we had a green screen we used to kind of fake it with the skyline, but you know, the Boston area people know more than just Massachusetts Tech, but you know, a lot of, you know, great technology in Boston of course, you know? A lot of good technologies, a lot of good schools that have driven things. You have been CEO since 2007 and have seen quite a bit. You know, merger, Bit9 and Carbon Black many years ago, IPO, you know, not that long ago in the past, and now acquisition, as we said, for $2.1 billion. So, you know, give us a little bit of step back as to, you know, the journey, how we got here, and you know, what's it like to be kind of at the helm with your crew through, you know, all of those changes? >> Yep, well certainly very, very proud and very thankful to all of the customers that have been with us for many, many, many years. And as you said when you first started here, Boston is an awesome place for cybersecurity. I think I fits a bit of the personality on the East Coast, and if you just look at Boston in general there's a lot of great cybersecurity talent, a lot of great cybersecurity companies. And I'm extremely proud and grateful to all of my employees in Massachusetts who have built Carbon Black over the last number of years. And of course we have offices elsewhere across the globe, but Boston is, and Massachusetts is, where the companies roots really come from. And as you said, 2007 is when I joined the company. Obviously cyber was a very different world back then, and it's amazing if you just kind of roll back. In 2007, the idea of a CISO, of a chief information security officer, was still very new, and most companies we dealt with back then did not have a CISO, they had a network administrator or somebody, so that's all changed. If you look at security as a board-level issue, in 2007 there were certainly some areas of some sectors like the government where it had a lot of importance, but outside of that it did not have the same visibility as a strategic issue as it does now, it's been amazing. >> So much, you know, my background is networking and virtualization. I've spent a lot of time, you know, since 2007 looking at all the cloud world, and as I said, back in the early 2000s security was top of mind but often bottom of budget. You know, the network people, you know, back in the day it was like, "Can't you just lock the door," or you know, "Make sure the rack is secure," and you know, "Well we'll run things over Optical," and therefore we'll know if somebody splices into it from a networking standpoint. Today, as you stated, clearly it's a board-level discussion, CISOs, you know, rising power in the organization, and often dictating a lot of how the stack is built out there. >> Absolutely. >> So wow, bring us a little bit, you know, your portfolio. You know, security is not a thing. You know, any customer I talk to, they're like, you know, there is no such thing as a silver bullet in security. Most customers I talk to really think of security as a programmatic effort, so help us understand a little bit, you know, where Carbon Black fits today, and then we'll get into, you know, your, you know, broadened scope once you're going to be under VMware. >> Yeah, so the core founding idea behind Carbon Black was a simple one, which was that fundamentally the adversary was in a position where they eventually would figure out a way to get in, and if you fundamentally believe that then you do everything you can to stop the adversary, but you say, "I need telemetry. "I need data in order to understand what's happening across my environment in order to be able to see and stop the adversary." And so we began a journey to essentially be able to collect and analyze all the data that an adversary, that an attacker would touch in order to run their program, and you know, we always have equated it to essentially a movie camera that allows you to rewind the tape, and with all that data that we collect we can run tremendous analytics against that in order to be able to see and stop the adversary and understand what's happening across the environment. We essentially created a market that's now called EDR endpoint detection and response, and it's that simple idea of being able to understand and have situational analysis, situational visibility across the whole enterprise. We did that initially on-premise, so we did all that analytics, and each one of our customers' back-ends in their data center, and two years ago we began a journey to say, "Look, we want to do two things." One is we want to leverage that data to be able to provide more security capabilities across a platform, so let's revolutionize, continue to revolutionize cybersecurity by offering a cloud-based platform, we're going to move all of that analytics up into the cloud, all those capabilities up into the cloud, and offer a multi-tenant, cloud native SaaS platform, and over the last two years we've done that with multiple services now up on that cloud, with thousands of customers who are using it, and the benefits of the cloud are pretty straightforward, and they've revolutionized other industries, they're revolutionizing cyber right now. Certainly you can analyze data at a scale that's just not possible when that data's locked up in multiple customers, so that's one big change. Obviously-- >> Yeah, I just, to want to help unpack and tease out that data piece, because you know, we always hear out there it almost, you know, is a bit trite, you know, the importance of data. Data's the new oil, it's the rocket ship, but you know, the value of that data, how much of that is Carbon Black leveraging the data, how much can the customer themselves take advantage of that data, or you know, this isn't in a vacuum. There are other security products, other pieces of, you know, that vendor's stack that might be able to leverage that data. >> Yeah, well Carbon Black's cloud native platform, security platform, is built on a totally, it's totally open, so from an API basis, so you should, you should think about, our customers certainly think about it this way, as one, we're leveraging that data, we analyze a trillion security events a day, one trillion, just immense, and the benefit of that is if we see something across the globe that has a high risk score, that's known malware, that might be a new form of attack, that might be a living-off-the-land attack, all of our customers get the benefit of that analytic. So Carbon Black, we certainly leverage it, but in addition, the way we've built the platform, customers can get access to all the data from their enterprise, and they can correlate that data with other aspects of their security or their IT infrastructure in order to build a more holistic view across the entire enterprise, and we also have third party partners out there, managed security service providers and others, who also have access to that data for their customer set to be able to run analytics on it. So when we think about data, as you said, you know, as the oil of the new world, we need to leverage that data, but we also need, in this new world order, to give our partners and our customers the capabilities to do what they want with that data as well for their own data. >> Yeah, love that, especially if you're talking in that cloud native world it can't just be something that's locked up and only used in one environment. You know, we track the observability companies out there, you know, they have similar type of messaging. Of course data protection, you know, once there is that, you know, breach, you know, how do I recover from this information? So that ripple effect, and love, you know, openness, APIs, making sure that can be shared. You know, maybe not something that traditionally I'd heard from VMware when you talk about the openness and where they're doing maybe. I think there are a couple things you want to talk about Carbon Black, but why not get to the VMware piece, too? >> Yeah, I was just going to, on the cloud side, you know, the power of the cloud, obviously it's revolutionized other industries, and certainly one of it is the ability to provide analytics at scale. The other piece, which I already mentioned, is the network effect on my ability to see something somewhere across the globe and help millions of other customers across the globe when I see something, and the other piece is just my ability to deploy quickly and my ability to innovate quickly, because rather than having to deliver new software into each enterprise I can do that on my cloud native platform. So I think it positions the defender, the security teams around the globe where they can be more on the offensive than they've ever been before because suddenly I don't have to spend my time worrying about deployment mechanics or other pieces. I can focus on what I really want to do, which is I want to secure my environment, I want to be able to understand what the adversary might be doing. So we're real excited about what we've done over the last two years with our cloud platform. >> Okay, so the deal hasn't closed yet but it's announced that you will be leading up the cloud security group at VMware. Give us a little bit, you know, directionally, where's that heading, what will that mean? Of course we've tracked, you know, where VMware touches a lot of that environment, you know, with my background in networking I talked to the Nicira team before, and then through what's become a very successful NSX, Sanjay Poonen with the AirWatch acquisition and where they've gone. Of course I would expect that's the closest piece that you started out with the endpoint protection with that team, with the Workforce ONE. So explain kind of the security portfolio, and interesting, cloud security is the discussion because that's the newer piece of the Carbon Black portfolio. Help us understand how the whole, all the pieces fit together. >> Yeah, so first I'll just reiterate what you said, which is the transaction's not yet closed, so everything I'm talking about is pre-closed, and obviously post-close we'll have additional commentary about what everything will look like. But absolutely we are very, my team, my customers, we announced the transaction a little over a month ago. Everyone was really, really excited, and I think fundamentally they're excited because organizations understand what Carbon Black delivers today, and what we deliver are great security products, and increasingly the majority of those products are in the cloud. And VMware has a tremendous reputation in the industry for the technical capabilities, for the value that they provide to customers, and just for the breadth of the portfolio that they have. You mentioned a few of them, right? And many organizations and people think about VMware from a virtualization standpoint. But increasingly over the last few years they've dramatically expanded their portfolio, network virtualization, and the NSX, the Workspace ONE as well, which was based on the AirWatch acquisition they did. Those are big businesses today, and they're helping organizations transform their infrastructure, the way they manage devices, et cetera. And so Carbon Black, on the security side, we've been partnered with VMware for the last couple of years. We've had an opportunity to get to know each other quite well. We've had an opportunity to integrate in two key spots. One, we've integrated with their App D capabilities, which you can think about essentially as helping to protect and provide telemetry for what's happening inside of the virtualized environment. And then secondarily, we've also partnered with Workspace ONE as well, again more on the device side. Those are two natural points where security, building security intrinsically into that compute stack, we've seen with customer reaction, has a fundamental impact on being able to have security right there rather than having to bolt it on afterwards. >> Yeah, you walk into an interesting configuration. First of all, you know, as you said VMware not thought of as a security company per se, lots of products that absolutely fit in the security space and are there. When you look out, of course VMware, you know, primarily owned by Dell, there's Secureworks, there's RSA, those are well known security brands. You know, how, give us how you think of how all those pieces go together and kind of the trajectory of where things are headed. >> Yeah, well goal number one, once we close the transaction, goal number one is to do two things. One, we're going to continue to drive forward with the cloud roadmap that we have. It's an aggressive road map we've been innovating aggressively over the last couple of years and we're going to continue to do that within VMware. The second piece is obviously to maximize the opportunity to build security into the compute stack of VMware, so that when customers think about security they don't have to think about it as a separate piece, but it's already there at their fingertips. And then as you mentioned, so those are two big goals right there, and as you mentioned obviously Dell has a large portfolio. There's other security products within the Dell portfolio, and you know, when we think about that obviously over time we're already partnered with some of those. Secureworks, for example, has been a very close and valuable part of Carbon Black's for many years. You'll see us continue to partner. There's other parts of the Dell family where we have partnered in the past, not tightly, but I think we'll have the opportunity to do more as part of the Dell family. All of this means for customers more value, because rather than having to go and figure it out themselves we're going to be delivering it in conjunction with the solutions they're already using. >> All right, Patrick, I want to help you, have you address a schism I see in the marketplace when it comes to the messaging around security. When peers of mine went to the RSA conference this year they came back almost unanimously with two words, doom and gloom. >> (laughing) Right. >> In Boston this year Amazon held the inaugural re:Inforce, positioned itself as the, you know, cloud security conference for the industry. We covered that, you know, both of those shows with theCUBE, and Stephen Schmidt from AWS said the state of cloud security is strong. VMware, very much we hear from Pat, you know, we need to do over, security's broken. Friends of mine in the security industry, and Carbon Black's been around since 2002, is you know, come on, you know, it's not just another acquisition, it's going to be a point product. You know, yes we have work to do as a whole, but you know, saying we need a do over or it's broken is a between hyperbolic from my peers in the industry, so what is the state of the industry, is there traditional storage and cloud storage is all rainbows and unicorns, or you know, where do you see it today? Of course we know as an industry there's always work to do, but you know, how do you round that circle? >> Yeah, I would take it, and you're right, by the way, I hear all the same commentary, and I think we have to take a step back and just look at industry, the industry in general, look at security in general. We started the interview talking about well, what was the world like in security in 2007? Security has gone from, "Hey, it's a niche area over here "and we know it's important but don't talk to us," to super strategic, again, at a board level, at a company level, and so that rapid growth has driven a lot of funding into the environment, a lot of vendors, there's over 5,000 security vendors out there today, all competing. I don't know how CISOs and CIOs and practitioners really figure out who does what, it's very challenging, and at the same time you've got the adversary, this third party continuing to advance their attack types using new techniques. You've got ransomware, which is a huge industry now, driving billions of dollars, so you have all of that happening, and so in hyper growth environments like that you get a lot of vendors. The average enterprise security team has 75 different products, and so, and they have to stitch that together, so the fundamentals of what, the way you described it I think are accurate on both sides. One, security's broken, it is broken. We've got too many vendors and we're bolting it on, we got to fix that. VMware is in a position, partnered with Carbon Black, to do that I think really well. The second piece is that the cloud does allow us, I'm not sure about rainbows, but the cloud does allow us to change security fundamentally because of some of the characteristics that I described earlier, and if you take Carbon Black plus VMware, plus what VMware is doing to deliver across any cloud, any device, any application, I think we're in a really interesting spot to help customers get more value from their compute stack and from security. >> You know, one of the things that VMware has always done well is they play in multiple environments. Back in the early days of server ritualization, didn't matter what hardware, they would get that across. Their cloud strategy went through quite a few iterations, you know, Sanjay Poonen came on our program and said, you know, "vCloud Air, we failed. "We got it wrong, we did it," but today every cloud show I go to there's a VMware piece of that. They're partnering with AWS, with Azure, with Google, with Alibaba, with Oracle even-- (chuckling) And IBM recently. But still one of the critiques I have for VMware is VMware does good at managing their house, but security, customers, as you said, they've got 75 tools and they're going to have their VMware state, and they're going to have their native cloud pieces, and they're going to have their non-VMware environment. So how can, you know, once you're under VMware, you know, participate in that environment? Will you primarily be VMware environment and the VMware cloud environment, or will it be a broader cloud security strategy? >> Yeah, well I think certainly VMware has done an amazing job over the last few years of really pushing this any-cloud model, right? "Hey, no matter where your workloads "are going to be in a hybrid cloud environment," you know, "we're going to be there to help you," and more effectively, more efficiently, faster, better performance, strong ROI. And so if you look at Carbon Black's roots, and I mentioned this earlier, one of our core beliefs is that one vendor can't do it all. You have to build on an open, extensible API-based platform, and that's what we've done since the beginning of the company, and so you will not see Carbon Black change our philosophy. You know, we will continue to be very, very open, and I think, by the way, that reflects very much VMware's strategy as of late, which is an open strategy where they're playing with lots of providers in the marketplace. Again, the benefit of Carbon Black plus VMware on that platform is that for VMware infrastructure, their products, I think you're going to see out of the box security capabilities that are going to give advantage to customers, from ease of use, from the way that that security works, et cetera, and then we will continue to partner with other vendors out there across the market. >> All right, Patrick, we know, you mentioned how many different tools customers have to deal with. There are more new threats coming out, you know, every day. There's no way that a person or a team can keep up with all of this, so you know, is AI the answer? How are these technologies going to be able to allow our systems to be able to protect us better and update, you know, we haven't talked abut AI yet. I know it does fit in-- >> We have to talk about AI. (chuckling) >> So just to understand how you know, the systems and the software and the solutions are going to help enable teams to be able to keep up with, you know, the rapidly expanding and changing landscape in security. >> Yeah, AI is a tool, we use it, and just as I've mentioned cloud, right, along with the ability to analyze trillions of events on a daily basis, things like AI can play a very significant role in helping me to understand what's happening across very large corpuses of data, and so we use a lot of it, and that allows us to understand when there's an anomaly somewhere across the globe on some system, some endpoint or device, anywhere across the globe and then leverage that to help our other customers. So AI role is playing an important part. It will continue to play an important part. But AI leverages the data that we collect, so if you go back to where Carbon Black is today with all that data that we're analyzing, one of the really interesting things is VMware today has 70 million VMs. 60 million of those are on-prem, 10 million of them are on the cloud. Part of the benefit that Carbon Black gets from VMware is we're going to get all this additional telemetry that we're going to be able to, again, consume, leverage AI capabilities to help with the analysis of that, and again, provide more customer back to the value on seeing and stopping the adversary. That also extends to what VMware's doing on the device side with Workspace ONE, et cetera, so there's a lot of opportunity over the coming quarters and years to provide more value for customers in understanding what's happening across their environment because of all of the touchpoints we're going to have as part of the VMware compute stack. >> All right, Patrick, final thing, what does this mean for your customers? You know, I think back to, you know, not that long ago you did an IPO, you know? What would that mean for the growth, the investment into technology and growing the team. Now, you know, in industry parlance, you know, you had another exit and you will be part of VMware, so we might not get as much visibility into the specific revenues and the hiring that you're doing there, but what will this ultimately mean for Carbon Black's current and potential future customers? >> Yeah, so we have over 5,000 global customers out there today, and first and foremost it's going to mean more investment from a product roadmap standpoint. If you look at 2019, this year, the number one area of investment for Carbon Black was in R&D, and as we move forward, again post-close, our customers are going to see continued investment in the platform, in our cloud security platform, in order to ensure we continue to bring more capabilities to market. And then, as I said earlier, in conjunction with that do everything we can to integrate in with the VMware product portfolio, again, so that security's not bolted on but it's intrinsic to the compute stack, and so I think that's the biggest thing. I have had the opportunity to go out and speak to many customers over the last four weeks. Customer and partner reaction has been outstanding. They get it, they understand it, they understand that there's a better way and that's what we're going to be doing as part of VMware. >> Yeah, any surprising nuggets in the last month talking to the customers and partners more that you've learned? >> This is going to sound self-serving, but it's the truth. I will tell you that the VMware reputation out there is outstanding. I mean, and I had been surprised at how little I have to do to tell them why this makes so much sense. They get it, the majority of our customers get it. They understand the possibilities of what we can provide, and there's a level of excitement out there, again with our customers and partners. It's just, it's awesome. >> All right, Patrick Morley, CEO of Carbon Black. Thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. >> Stu, thanks. >> All right, lots of coverage, of course, through 2019 and gearing up for 2020 where we'll all have perfect hindsight, I'm sure. Check out thecube.net for the events we've been at, search where we're going to be, and please reach out if you have any questions. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (techy music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host Stu minimun hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to a special cube conversation here in our Boston area studio and health happy to welcome to the program someone we've known for a long time but actually first time on the program also a Boston area native I believe yes Jim and so it's Jim Sullivan who's the CEO of nwn Jim's thanks so much for joining us let's do it's great to be here watching you guys forever and first time and happy to be here so we've got a lot of shared history we both we overlapped a little bit at a company that some people might remember was EMC before it was the largest acquisition in tech history you've worked for a number of companies we've covered here on the cube XIV actifi oh and the like so tell us first you know nwn it's not a company that you know the vast majority of people are going to know of but you know good-sized company been around for a while Waltham based tell us tell us a little bit about what brought you to nwn thanks to yet nwn is a you know solution service provider been around 10 years hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues 1,300 customers and a lot of really incredible you know platform offering service offerings and so was really excited to be able to kind of get involved with the company and begin to look at we could do for the industry and for customers all right yeah you talk about it you know an area that that's transforming greatly I mean tech in general you know we say that the the only constant in industry is change when you talk about services you talk about platforms that means a lot of things to a lot of people maybe explain a little bit that the spaces that end everyone plays in and where some of the core capability of the company are sure so if you look at as you know this a lot of everything for you know digital transformation is around the end-user experience so we all want to have great access to you know voice video you know clean network the ability to kind of have this great experience to collaborate with customers so India nwn really the core offerings unified communications which has really always been a kind of core of the company the network's underpinning those communications along with a contact center collaboration security and so security really wraps around everything and then those are the core areas where we are but the core IP of the company is the platform that can manage all those environment you know as a self-service function that the customers use or that arts contacts and her team can kind of run okay so when I hear that the solutions that you're talking about the the thing that comes kind of front and center in the industry that I've been hearing about it's the CX it's the customer experience you know what is the ultimate end users how are they interacting with as well as the employees themselves you know if you've got people at the contact centers that are running things how are you making their jobs easier so you know how does that play into you know what you're seeing in the market and how nwn you know delivers offerings in that space so everything's really tied together whether you have a device a a phone system everything's gonna be tied into the network and required really high security so the the management platform that we have allows customers to have that ability to provision in a real secure fashion a device that we can kind of deliver and manage the right phone systems that we can also deliver and manage all tied into a really secure Network and it can be anywhere they want it can be you know private cloud hybrid cloud or hosted cloud is how we deliver it today yeah there's the cloud discussion that's going on right now I was at Enterprise Connect earlier this year and you know everything seemed to be you know cloud enable an AI infused underneath from a customer standpoint you know that they can get a little bit overwhelmed with some of the jargon that's get gets thrown out there so help explain a little bit you know what solutions what is nwn build you know how does it fit in with kind of you know big tech companies that they probably have relationships with and debut and has been part of the channel for many of these products there to talk a little bit about that mix overall we're gonna deliver a solution for the customer in those areas right so in a unified communications area or a network area security so and the solutions going to be required you know some hardware you know a lot of services which is our people and then most importantly this management platform which is going to be the management capability the business analytics the knowledge center that kind of pull off from everybody right so our focus is really delivering the solution delivering it you know kind of a solution as a service so the customer has the ability that it's not outsourcing it's not managed services but we're gonna be running the service but they have the ability to self provision interact with pulling all their own analytics all their own data on their own environment so it's a much more interactive relationship than kind of the old-school managed services of the past you know I I like that term solutions as a service because we've learned the the failings of just pure outsourcing it was like oh can I get my mess for Less well no no you don't want your mess what customers need is they need to be able to deploy something today and as the business changes adjust that and you can't have something that you have to throw over the wall and say oh hey can you do this oh yeah we'll get back to you in six months maybe and here's your new bill and how that changes in the cloud era I need to be able to deploy something today and stay flexible to be able to take advantage of new technologies new innovations as they come along how do your offerings help customers stay current and you know drive that innovation adoption right so a huge part of we talk about this in a lot of industries particularly our old kind of infrastructure of days and that everything becoming more software-defined is is really everywhere or cloud offerings really everywhere and with software these changes are happening so fast so the customer gets an environment that's stable and secure deployed and managed by us but as changes happen our team and our kind of best practices capabilities allows to interact with their end users so you kind of drive the adoption which a lot of time it's more getting and training and making sure the new practices sort of happened because the efficiencies gained are huge that's sort of one and then two is is it's beginning to get adopted you're beginning to kind of roll that out across the entire enterprise so the customer gets that end user experience which it helps with employee retention you know really helps with business ROI and ultimately the investments they made are now being used and they're getting what they want so it might be excellent you know lying quality with great business analytics in a secure environment but it goes back down to you know is the network being utilized all the software capabilities being deployed and managed and really what's the business outcome for the customer so these this world is very much less speeds and feeds or technology or all of that versus okay where's the customer stand today and where do they want to bring the business to and what business outcomes they looking to drive the adoption services you know ensures that they get the business outcomes all right Jim you know what what industries what geographies gives a little bit of kind of the scope and breadth of your team right so it's 1,300 customers more than half the customers are really large enterprises you know companies like eversource the other half of the business is sled state local education so Yale University really big customer state of California we manage over 200,000 endpoints over 400 agencies so really some huge scale but it really maps to a great balance in the business of sled and enterprise accounts okay and you talked about cloud you have some of your own data centers how do you play with some of the public cloud and customer environments what's right what's kind of that mix and what are you yeah so so today customers want to have like I don't think they quite care but they want to have fast deployments really agile environments consistent costs really effective and so for us we able to provide that because we can provide private cloud on-premise we can service any public cloud for these deployments and we also have three data centers where we can provide a cloud solution for them or hybrid clouds lifts and really mapping particularly the enterprise accounts as we know they're beginning to learn like all public clouds little scary you know but if you get into a fireman where you can have really a shop that has you know private clouds that delivers a hybrid cloud environment for them much more flexible much more agile for them it's been a perfect scenario where the predominance of our customers are deployed in a cloud scenario managed by us but in their data centers in our cloud as well yeah right I think a really good point their customers are still sorting out where everything goes and you've got to have flexibility to say okay it's not one or the other it's usually more of an and right in helping customers you know move through what I do in there and for us most of these environments are you know really mission-critical applications that are gonna be rolled out whether it's the voice systems which really kind of backing and the underpinning the whole the whole customer experience it might be device as a service so when we kind of talk about end user experience it starts with really the voice that devices it's got to be really secure which is becomes a kind of a compliance issue and a lot of this is all tied together into the network so the the big differentiator for it end WN is the ability that we can have the management portal that really manages all these five environments together into one seamless into one seamless platform that they can pull the data from okay so talked about you've got team you've got technology you've got really important you've got a lot of good customers seems like you have a good relationship nwn is going through a bit of a transformation here since you've been on board just a few months now I've had a chance to look at the website and the biggest thing for me is I'll tell you from the old one to the new one the new one is simpler I really kind of grasped much faster what any of the wnd does so maybe speak a little bit to you know what nwn of today how that's different from how we might have thought of nwn in the past sure nwn been around 10 years as nwn but they've been acquiring companies and really had has incredible employees great customers really loyal customers and big accounts that were strategic too but as we really went through kind of the assessment of what's really resonating with customers we were able to really focus all the offerings down to these five core offerings that we've been talking about and then really have the right investments around all the IP that we've developed and really wanted to put against those five offerings and then have the customer success teams be able to be organized around that so the company has really focused on where 95% of the business was the ability to really put all the wood behind the arrow you know for those environments and for our customers to really focus and that's about a 50 billion dollar market in the u.s. right so that focus area is a big space big opportunity for growth and a lot of it was in the predominance of our 1,300 customers they buy one or two of these offerings from us and now the ability to really expand that but so many of these customers are so happy we're gonna kind of take it in those industries we're in probably about five core industries to really kind of take it to their peer their peer companies and really expanded in that account-based marketing sort of kind of program okay so five specific offerings we've talked about a couple of them already unified communications as a service of course we talked about contact center we touched on device as a service you talked about some of the devices security and advanced technology solutions maybe start with security you know I think one of the you know you know most important topic being discussed I looking back at my career and you know 10 or 15 years ago security was what I would call top of mind bottom of budget all right and today it is often a board level discussion there are lots of dollars lots of investment lots of concern around security so what piece is the security market does nwn playing you know what we're what's good you know what what do you what are you creating and what are you working with the ecosystem and where do we need to go sure enough space so for unified communications for the 80s you know practice around the supporting network and device as a service our security offerings are for the environment right and a lot of it is where there's a lot of tools deployed but customers you know are really okay once something happens an incident happens they have a tool that identifies something that happens but a lot of the security will be really really mapping those environments that they have a secure platform but Incident Response is really where we're gonna really be doubling down on so something's happened in one of those environments what happened and then how do you respond to that that's going to be the big focus of what nwn it's been doing and kind of what will invest more in its really Incident Response okay great advanced technology solutions talk to us a little bit about that so a lot of the core the core expertise in the company for years has been around the network but then that really expanded with doing you know full you hosted unified communication so the company today can deploy any type of networking solutions for customers along with all the connectivity so the bandwidth you know any type of a next generation networks like 5g so all of that really tied together that you have the network you know the right connectivity to kind of get to the the right performance and then mapping it to the SL A's that have to go with the the offerings of unified communications and devices of service because everything's going to be inter intertwined and you think about any like collaboration technologies I mean how many times have we been in a meeting where a collaboration technologies not really working but the performance is not really there it's not that software it's something that was tied beneath that so nwn can really bridge the two together to have that the right networking capability the right connectivity so you're getting the fast connectivity right away of what really matters to the end user experience which is that collaboration system yeah you know we talked a little bit about innovation you know where where are your customers what's exciting you that's helping your customers move forward and you know where are those areas that were still struggling a little bit you know III think back you know I worked in the you know Telecom Unified Communication space you know back in the late 90s and you know by now we were supposed to have the flying cars with the ubiquitous video everywhere and well FaceTime you know and some some things have us there a little bit sure I use my you know my webcam way more than I did five or ten years ago but yeah maybe speak a little bit where were having success and where if we still need to go number one thing for me that I learned of one of the most unique assets that NW and has is the business analytics and data capability right so a lot of these environments have been deployed we've got all these multiple different vironment but what I learned of the nwn capability is we have every piece of data of all those different environments in every customer in every customer environment so we have the ability now with our portal and they've had the ability to do this it's really any type of function that the customer wants to learn more about in kind of an automated fashion that they can self provision this data themselves we have the data so it could be billing capabilities of really what what groups are being built it could be any type of compliance so what type of calls are being made and who's doing calls any type of productivity for call centers of what capabilities we have so I think the the the biggest thing to answer your question is one the nwn capability is all the business data that we have that maps across multiple industries to deliver best practices but people have been to plot deploying networks deploying devices deploying phone systems but never really having the intelligence of what you're gonna do with that data to drive the business forward and so one it's like got to have the end user experience be like that's like table stakes where the end user experience is great but now how the business use the data of how all those systems are working together to really bring forward like okay what business decisions do we make to move forward in terms of what's working what's not working and comes back to driving the right business outcomes alright so a lot a lot of effort in the last few months yeah focus and execution doing the relaunch here let's look forward a little bit Jim as you know six or twelve months from now as we look back what are some of the key KP at KP is how for those of us the outside do we know that nwn is executing and meeting you know where you want the company to go its 100% about customer satisfaction right so it's the as we continue to expand the offerings inside customers and then add new customers will be you know solely how we're going to manage the business and that's really where it's as customers do upgrades with us the the predominance of our customers is long-term contracts so as customers continue to do renewals and add new offerings and kind of new capabilities that we bring to the table and as they tell their peer companies which is people are really excited about being references for us then we'll continue to add more companies into the mix and more more customers and grow the 1302 mm great and you know for for potential customers out there there any of the kind of key things that you would call out that they said oh I've got this issue or I'm looking to do this kind of project I want to make sure to have nwn on my short list I see a couple areas right it's it's everyone is it's a 50 billion dollar market so everyone is dealing with unified communications issues right in terms of what decisions are gonna make were an expert in that space the device is a service you know really like we manage two hundred thousand endpoints with the state of California so that's a device of the service is really a space that not a lot of people are in a lot of people doing devices but really as an end end service not really you know strong you know kind of capability and then the security requirements are for everybody so I think for these solutions than to have the right service people the right network expertise so that that five areas is kind of the core space and I think the biggest thing that I would say to customers is everything's intertwined right so it's like you can have you know one person to talk about one if you don't really tie it all together that's where the challenges and the problems usually kind of come from and we're also really sizable Ike the companies you know you know a lot a lot of large customers but the companies hundreds of millions of dollars with a lot of forty's over the last 10 years yeah so Jim last thing talk about the team in the culture you know talk about what you you want to build on what NW always has and you know are you doing some hiring either here locally in the Boston area or you know in other geographic areas sure so companies Nate you know national company so we'll be hiring sales reps solution engineers nationally and really kind of continue to scale that out the service desk function that we have and really the customer success team is continuing to expand and really supporting the growth of the business and really kind of driving it so those are really the key areas the rest of the company that people are the people and the and the culture of the company are amazing the passion commitment to customer success people have been here a long time and so they have a lot of experience and a lot of kind of patch with the company so a lot of the changes we made all came from within side right so everyone really rallied to be like hey here the things were good at then we want to get great at and that sort of been kind of the big focus and we have really strong presence in in in the Carolinas all over the Northeast California Texas and so we're gonna really look to kind of connect all those geographies together to have one national you know kind of powerhouse player across the country all right Jim Sullivan thank you so much for the updates congratulations on the progress and look forward to watching the continued growth of NW thank great to be here all right and lots more coverage here as always on the cube net on to minimun and thank you for watching the Q

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, and welcome to a special presentation of CUBE Conversations here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program, it's been a little while, Brian Reagan who's the chief marketing officer at a local company, Actifio, we've been watching since the early days. Brian, so good to see you. >> Great to see you, Stu, thanks for having me in. >> All right, so Brian, you know, it comes as no surprise to you because you've worked on it in this industry for many years, but we've looked at our predictions at a Wikibon community. No matter which one of these big mega trends we're talking about, whether you're talking about machine learning, IOT, cloud, you know, data sits at the center of it and really is super critical. There's the old tried and true, "Data is the new oil," but bring us up to speed. You know, Actifio is a company that people probably started out as, you know, it's in this weird storage ecosystem today, but I think data's also at the center of your business. >> Absolutely, I mean, if you think just really simply about any business in the world, they have customers, they have partners, they have products, they have employees, all that's data and the problem with data these days is it just keeps getting big and when it's big it's slow. It's slow to use for application development, it's slow to use for insights and analytics. It's just slow to use if you want to move to the cloud. You know, Actifio has really been in business for nearly nine years now to help virtualize that data, make it more portable, make it easier to use for all those reasons to help drive those business, and that is our value proposition. You're right, we sort of started in that, "Are you a storage company?" We're storage agnostic and today we're cloud agnostic, it's about the data. >> Stu: Yeah, I mean, it's really... You're a software company, correct? >> We're a software company. >> So, you hit on a key thing that I've looked at for a while, is everybody is talking about how do I as a company, how do I become more agile, how to move faster. You know, CI-CD is kind of table stakes these days for so many companies. How does Actifio help companies prevent that storage from being an anchor weighing them down and slowing them down? >> Sure, sure, I mean, CI-CD is great and you can move at speed, as long as you're talking about very lightweight elements of an application, JSON files, the XML, all those lightweight application elements, you know, LOGIC. But when it comes to that big database sitting behind the scenes that's actually powering that application, that's the gravitational pull that slows CI-CD down. Typically that, we've seen it take 80% plus of the software development lifecycle just to stand up to those environments, so people make compromises, they subset it, they do all the crazy things to try and avoid the storage or infrastructure tax when it comes to setting up those environments. We can help bypass that, again, it's virtual data, so now we can start to port it, we can move it, we can parallelize it and we can get it ready for these developers through our automation and orchestration in minutes, as opposed to hours or days in many cases for the service levels. >> All right, so Brian, you mentioned developers there. Definitely kind of the infrastructure world has been like, "Oh, gosh, how do we do it "through the developers, how do we fit "in this whole world," you know, DevOps and like, infrastructure. A lot of times it's been oil and water. What are you hearing from your customers, how does that play into what they're doing? >> Yeah, I mean, developers for us are the consumers, right, they are the end users of that data and the infrastructure team or the operations or DBA teams are really the providers of that data and they have to stand it up. They have to stand up the infrastructure, they have to stand up the data, they have to do all the rolls, log rolls and the like, data prep, and so if we can help them really collapse that time to access the data, because it's always in its native format, prep the data so it's ready for use, and then parallelize it so that way we can actually do multiple test streams or multiple development streams or we can, you know, do those more agile scrum projects and get more done in a given calendar quarter. Now all of a sudden those consumers are happier because they're getting the data in its full state, more of it, more rapidly than they ever have, and the operations teams are happy because they don't have to buy more storage to do it, they can actually go on and do other projects instead of have to sit there and manually get data set for developers. >> One of the challenges we hear from customers these days is where they develop it and how they do that versus production, very different. A lot of times some things that we've been doing in my data center, some are in the public cloud, how does the whole where it lives fit into your environment. I know Actifio, you just had a big announcement around some of your cloud pieces. >> Sure, we just released our eighth major release of our software since our founding, and it was really probably, from an engineering time standpoint, the largest release since our first one and it was very cloud centric. Our starting point as a company was really to try and be infrastructure agnostic. Wherever you wanted to put your data from a storage or compute standpoint, we wanted to give you that freedom to do so. Now it's just as relevant in the cloud. You should be able to choose the cloud for the given workload or the given data payload. You know, don't have to get frozen into one or locked into one. Let you choose and then also, once you've chosen, giving you the freedom to actually port from cloud to cloud if need be because you might choose, whether it's economic arbitrage or whether it's just different paths, capabilities in different clouds suitable for different workloads. We want to give you that freedom. >> All right, but you know, public cloud, come on, it's supposed to be easy. They've got, you know, so many features. What's the gap, if I'm deploying, you know, choose your favorite public cloud whether AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle IBM, et cetera... >> Sure. >> What's the piece that Actifio delivers that's still needed by customers that's not kind of native? >> It just comes back to that data. Boy, it's always the data, it's always the can that gets kicked down the road because again, those lightweight elements of applications are so easy to move, and then we just get stuck with this big gravitational pull of data. And you know, the fallacy or the popular myth about public cloud is it's going to be easier and it's going to be cheaper, and it can be both and it can be both particularly when you can get the data in there and it's in a suitable state to actually use for these development analytics, all these different workload characteristics that, while it's stuck in non native format in its very large state, it's unusable in those clouds. >> Yeah, Brian, you meet with a lot of customers, you've been doing a lot of traveling recently. >> Brian: Yes. >> Any specific stories you can tell or kind of aggregate, what are they struggling with with cloud, what's working well with them. >> Yeah. >> Of course, how you're fitting into that. >> Yeah, you know, there's sort of three camps that I've seen over the last several weeks particularly. There's the camp that, whether it's regulatory pressures or just internal policy, they're not going to move but they still want to change their operating model to a cloud model, and so they're implementing and instrumenting their internal environments, their prior cloud to operate just like an Amazon or Azure or Google, but all behind the firewall. And they still need all of that capability for the data automation, they want their data on demand for those applications, they want self service, they want infrastructure as code, and they want to take advantage of Actifio to help power that internal cloud. That's camp one, and that's still a pretty hefty camp. Camp two is, you know, I would call more traditional companies who are not born in the cloud but have embraced the cloud and really want a fast on ramp to get their data into one or more public clouds so they can get out of the data center business, and they're using Actifio really as an on ramp first, but then once it gets into the cloud they're using the native data management capabilities that they can take advantage of in the public cloud so they can keep their agility moving at the speed of their VMs, at the speed of their lightweight components. And then the third camp, which has really been interesting to watch, is the born in the cloud guys, and really starting to realize that the native capabilities of these public clouds are very powerful, but they don't really take the place of traditional backup for example. There is no backup software native inside of AWS, an EBS snapshot is a great snapshot, it's not a backup though. You can't really use it as a time machine, and when you go region to region you do fulls, and so it becomes very heavy and very costly. So, Actifio can really play a role for even those native, born in the cloud applications to provide the enterprise class data management but in a public cloud. >> Brian, you know, bring us up to speed, kind of how do you characterize your customers, how many customers to do you have, how much of them are kind of the new class versus, "I've got my data center," kind of sitting on these things. >> Yep, well, since our founding we've really focused on that upper mid market and enterprise customer. We just crossed over the 3,000 customer mark at the end of the last quarter. We operate in 37 countries today, and I would say they run the gamut from the Fortune 50s to that sort of Fortune 10,000s, but they all have very common characteristics, you know. As you would expect, we thrive in environments where data is growing and growing fast, we thrive where data is regulated or under some sort of internal or external pressure around management, and we really thrive in environments and industries that are truly embracing this digital transformation. They know that, like you said, that data is the new oil, data is their best currency today, and in fact, CryptoData is currency, and so they're truly embracing that and they want to move faster and they want to move faster with the data that they have today. Whether they choose to do that on premise or in the cloud or in the cloud at some point in the time, they want the freedom to make that choice when it's right for their business. >> All right, Brian, personal question for you. You brought up digital transformations and today you're wearing a CMO hat. You've had a number of different roles, C-suite roles in the past, what is the changing role of of the CMO today, especially with that landscape of digital transformation? >> Right, yeah, it's fascinating to watch just the change of what my budget line items are aligned around. You know, I probably spend as much on software and other licensed models, SAS models, to support my business, to support my digital and inbound marketing efforts, to support my analytics efforts around what's working, what's not. How do I tune the best marketing mix to really cater to the changing role of a consumer of content, and then all of the contents indication and content marketing. So, you know, I... To some degree, I think part of the changing nature of a CMO is they have to be very technology... Or I should say technology aware, focused on the business outcomes but understanding how technology can play a role to really affect those business outcomes. In my case, whether that's increasing the exposure of the company, whether that's increasing the lead flow to our sales organization, whether that's making our different routes to market more optimized and enabled for higher velocity of sales. All of those things can be technology enabled today, so you have to be much more conscious about... It's almost like a CIO junior role inside of an enterprise. >> Yeah, really interesting, right. We've debated for years where will the IT budget be driven from, sounds like you've got an impact on that. I love the discussion you talked about, you know, kind of how technology's helping to transform businesses. Do you have any customer examples, customers that are just doing some cool stuff with technology that could kind of be useful? >> So, I'm going to use a company that would probably be the last industry you would expect me to bring up, but I think they're a fascinating use case. So, Waste Industries, they're in the trash disposal business, and the CIO has corrected me on numerous occasions, "It's okay to "say the word 'trash,'" and so we were talking. They used Actifio first to help them solve, you know, very classic, modernize my DR strategy, part of the business, but then they started to realize that the power of using that data for other purposes, to accelerate analytics, because it turns out in the trash disposal business they actually instrument a lot of things. They instrument their trucks, they instrument with sensors their canisters, they do route optimizations based on data that they're getting from all of these devices, so as this CIO is fond of saying, they're not in the internet things, they're in the internet of trash, and so they're using data to help them be a much more innovative and frankly optimized organization today, and then as they start to think about where the future of their business goes... Now that they're starting to become a data company they can start to really comprehend what does it look like with autonomous vehicles in trash disposal, what does it look like in terms of using different types of vehicles to do routes. Maybe even an Airbnb type of model or an Uber model where maybe it's not even just our people doing the routes, but it's other organizations so we can start to sell data, too, to help them become a greater part of our organization. Fascinating, you know, probably the company on the surface that you'd think would probably not be a data company at all, but I think it personifies where we are as an industry today. Every company is a data company and the companies that win in the market are the companies that truly embrace being a data company and taking advantage of that. >> Yeah, definitely not one I first would be thinking of. (laughs) All right, but last question I have for you, we're heading into 2018. >> Brian: Yes. >> What should we be looking for, you know, the brain of Actifio, people that are watching, what do we expect next year? >> So, I think, you know, very exciting year for us. As I mentioned, we just released this major software update. The customer adoption already has been tremendous. We see really the embracing the cloud, whether it's behind the firewall or embracing the public cloud, multi-cloud being a big theme for us. You know, I think that we have... A Gartner analyst said to me a few weeks back, he said, "You know, you've been around, "you're disruptive still, though, but you're proven, "and being disruptive and proven "is a really powerful thing," and so we feel like we've got a great punching weight in terms of market presence. We have amazing customers in every industry. We see this, you know, 2018 as a really great year to continue our scaling, continue to be a very profitable and growing organization, and really helping to meet the needs of some of these incredibly interesting use cases around data in the business. >> Wait, profitable and growing, you must be an east coast company. (laughs) >> Brian: That's right. >> All right, well, Waltham, Massachusetts. Appreciate having you on. >> Brian: Thank you, Stu. >> Especially a startup right down the road here from our east coast studios. Always good talking up and look forward to talking to you more next year. >> Next time. >> And thank you so much for watching us. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all of our interviews, all of our upcoming events, and hit us up if you have any questions. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techy music playing)

>> Announcer: Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering the IBM Machine Learning Launch Event, brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back to New York City, everybody. We're here at the Waldorf Astoria covering the IBM Machine Learning Launch Event, bringing machine learning to the IBM Z. Bryan Smith is here, he's the vice president of R&D and the CTO of Rocket Software, powering the path to digital transformation. Bryan, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, Rocket Software, Waltham, Mass. based, close to where we are, but a lot of people don't know about Rocket, so pretty large company, give us the background. >> It's been around for, this'll be our 27th year. Private company, we've been a partner of IBM's for the last 23 years. Almost all of that is in the mainframe space, or we focused on the mainframe space, I'll say. We have 1,300 employees, we call ourselves Rocketeers. It's spread around the world. We're really an R&D focused company. More than half the company is engineering, and it's spread across the world on every continent and most major countries. >> You're esstenially OEM-ing your tools as it were. Is that right, no direct sales force? >> About half, there are different lenses to look at this, but about half of our go-to-market is through IBM with IBM-labeled, IBM-branded products. We've always been, for the side of products, we've always been the R&D behind the products. The partnership, though, has really grown. It's more than just an R&D partnership now, now we're doing co-marketing, we're even doing some joint selling to serve IBM mainframe customers. The partnership has really grown over these last 23 years from just being the guys who write the code to doing much more. >> Okay, so how do you fit in this announcement. Machine learning on Z, where does Rocket fit? >> Part of the announcement today is a very important piece of technology that we developed. We call it data virtualization. Data virtualization is really enabling customers to open their mainframe to allow the data to be used in ways that it was never designed to be used. You might have these data structures that were designed 10, 20, even 30 years ago that were designed for a very specific application, but today they want to use it in a very different way, and so, the traditional path is to take that data and copy it, to ETL it someplace else they can get some new use or to build some new application. What data virtualization allows you to do is to leave that data in place but access it using APIs that developers want to use today. They want to use JSON access, for example, or they want to use SQL access. But they want to be able to do things like join across IMS, DB2, and VSAM all with a single query using an SQL statement. We can do that relational databases and non-relational databases. It gets us out of this mode of having to copy data into some other data store through this ETL process, access the data in place, we call it moving the applications or the analytics to the data versus moving the data to the analytics or to the applications. >> Okay, so in this specific case, and I have said several times today, as Stu has heard me, two years ago IBM had a big theme around the z13 bringing analytics and transactions together, this sort of extends that. Great, I've got this transaction data that lives behind a firewall somewhere. Why the mainframe, why now? >> Well, I would pull back to where I said where we see more companies and organizations wanting to move applications and analytics closer to the data. The data in many of these large companies, that core business-critical data is on the mainframe, and so, being able to do more real time analytics without having to look at old data is really important. There's this term data gravity. I love the visual that presents in my mind that you have these different masses, these different planets if you will, and the biggest, massivest planet in that solar system really is the data, and so, it's pulling the smaller satellites if you will into this planet or this star by way of gravity because data is, data's a new currency, data is what the companies are running on. We're helping in this announcement with being able to unlock and open up all mainframe data sources, even some non-mainframe data sources, and using things like Spark that's running on the platform, that's running on z/OS to access that data directly without having to write any special programming or any special code to get to all their data. >> And the preferred place to run all that data is on the mainframe obviously if you're a mainframe customer. One of the questions I guess people have is, okay, I get that, it's the transaction data that I'm getting access to, but if I'm bringing transaction and analytic data together a lot of times that analytic data might be in social media, it might be somewhere else not on the mainframe. How do envision customers dealing with that? Do you have tooling them to do that? >> We do, so this data virtualization solution that I'm talking about is one that is mainframe resident, but it can also access other data sources. It can access DB2 on Linux Windows, it can access Informix, it can access Cloudant, it can access Hadoop through IBM's BigInsights. Other feeds like Twitter, like other social media, it can pull that in. The case where you'd want to do that is where you're trying to take that data and integrate it with a massive amount of mainframe data. It's going to be much more highly performant by pulling this other small amount of data into, next to that core business data. >> I get the performance and I get the security of the mainframe, I like those two things, but what about the economics? >> Couple of things. One, IBM when they ported Spark to z/OS, they did it the right way. They leveraged the architecture, it wasn't just a simple port of recompiling a bunch of open source code from Apache, it was rewriting it to be highly performant on the Z architecture, taking advantage of specialty engines. We've done the same with the data virtualization component that goes along with that Spark on z/OS offering that also leverages the architecture. We actually have different binaries that we load depending on which architecture of the machine that we're running on, whether it be a z9, an EC12, or the big granddaddy of a z13. >> Bryan, can you speak the developers? I think about, you're talking about all this mobile and Spark and everything like that. There's got to be certain developers that are like, "Oh my gosh, there's mainframe stuff. "I don't know anything about that." How do you help bridge that gap between where it lives in the tools that they're using? >> The best example is talking about embracing this API economy. And so, developers really don't care where the stuff is at, they just want it to be easy to get to. They don't have to code up some specific interface or language to get to different types of data, right? IBM's done a great job with the z/OS Connect in opening up the mainframe to the API economy with ReSTful interfaces, and so with z/OS Connect combined with Rocket data virtualization, you can come through that z/OS Connect same path using all those same ReSTful interfaces pushing those APIs out to tools like Swagger, which the developers want to use, and not only can you get to the applications through z/OS Connect, but we're a service provider to z/OS Connect allowing them to also get to every piece of data using those same ReSTful APIs. >> If I heard you correctly, the developer doesn't need to even worry about that it's on mainframe or speak mainframe or anything like that, right? >> The goal is that they never do. That they simply see in their tool-set, again like Swagger, that they have data as well as different services that they can invoke using these very straightforward, simple ReSTful APIs. >> Can you speak to the customers you've talked to? You know, there's certain people out in the industry, I've had this conversation for a few years at IBM shows is there's some part of the market that are like, oh, well, the mainframe is this dusty old box sitting in a corner with nothing new, and my experience has been the containers and cool streaming and everything like that, oh well, you know, mainframe did virtualization and Linux and all these things really early, decades ago and is keeping up with a lot of these trends with these new type of technologies. What do you find in the customers that, how much are they driving forward on new technologies, looking for that new technology and being able to leverage the assets that they have? >> You asked a lot of questions there. The types of customers certainly financial and insurance are the big two, but that doesn't mean that we're limited and not going after retail and helping governments and manufacturing customers as well. What I find is talking with them that there's the folks who get it and the folks who don't, and the folks who get it are the ones who are saying, "Well, I want to be able "to embrace these new technologies," and they're taking things like open source, they're looking at Spark, for example, they're looking at Anaconda. Last week, we just announced at the Anaconda Conference, we stepped on stage with Continuum, IBM, and we, Rocket, stood up there talking about this partnership that we formed to create this ecosystem because the development world changes very, very rapidly. For a while, all the rage was JDBC, or all the rage was component broker, and so today it's Spark and Anaconda are really in the forefront of developers' minds. We're constantly moving to keep up with developers because that's where the action's happening. Again, they don't care where the data is housed as long as you can open that up. We've been playing with this concept that came up from some research firm called two-speed IT where you have maybe your core business that has been running for years, and it's designed to really be slow-moving, very high quality, it keeps everything running today, but they want to embrace some of their new technologies, they want to be able to roll out a brand-new app, and they want to be able to update that multiple times a week. And so, this two-speed IT says, you're kind of breaking 'em off into two separate teams. You don't have to take your existing infrastructure team and say, "You must embrace every Agile "and every DevOps type of methodology." What we're seeing customers be successful with is this two-speed IT where you can fracture these two, and now you need to create some nice integration between those two teams, so things like data virtualization really help with that. It opens up and allows the development teams to very quickly access those assets on the mainframe in this case while allowing those developers to very quickly crank out an application where quality is not that important, where being very quick to respond and doing lots of AB testing with customers is really critical. >> Waterfall still has its place. As a company that predominately, or maybe even exclusively is involved in mainframe, I'm struck by, it must've been 2008, 2009, Paul Maritz comes in and he says VMWare our vision is to build the software mainframe. And of course the world said, "Ah, that's, mainframe's dead," we've been hearing that forever. In many respects, I accredit the VMWare, they built sort of a form of software mainframe, but now you hear a lot of talk, Stu, about going back to bare metal. You don't hear that talk on the mainframe. Everything's virtualized, right, so it's kind of interesting to see, and IBM uses the language of private cloud. The mainframe's, we're joking, the original private cloud. My question is you're strategy as a company has been always focused on the mainframe and going forward I presume it's going to continue to do that. What's your outlook for that platform? >> We're not exclusively by the mainframe, by the way. We're not, we have a good mix. >> Okay, it's overstating that, then. It's half and half or whatever. You don't talk about it, 'cause you're a private company. >> Maybe a little more than half is mainframe-focused. >> Dave: Significant. >> It is significant. >> You've got a large of proportion of the company on mainframe, z/OS. >> So we're bullish on the mainframe. We continue to invest more every year. We invest, we increase our investment every year, and so in a software company, your investment is primarily people. We increase that by double digits every year. We have license revenue increases in the double digits every year. I don't know many other mainframe-based software companies that have that. But I think that comes back to the partnership that we have with IBM because we are more than just a technology partner. We work on strategic projects with IBM. IBM will oftentimes stand up and say Rocket is a strategic partner that works with us on hard problem-solving customers issues every day. We're bullish, we're investing more all the time. We're not backing away, we're not decreasing our interest or our bets on the mainframe. If anything, we're increasing them at a faster rate than we have in the past 10 years. >> And this trend of bringing analytics and transactions together is a huge mega-trend, I mean, why not do it on the mainframe? If the economics are there, which you're arguing that in many use cases they are, because of the value component as well, then the future looks pretty reasonable, wouldn't you say? >> I'd say it's very, very bright. At the Anaconda Conference last week, I was coming up with an analogy for these folks. It's just a bunch of data scientists, right, and during most of the breaks and the receptions, they were just asking questions, "Well, what is a mainframe? "I didn't know that we still had 'em, "and what do they do?" So it was fun to educate them on that. But I was trying to show them an analogy with data warehousing where, say that in the mid-'90s it was perfectly acceptable to have a separate data warehouse separate from your transaction system. You would copy all this data over into the data warehouse. That was the model, right, and then slowly it became more important that the analytics or the BI against that data warehouse was looking at more real time data. So then it became more efficiencies and how do we replicate this faster, and how do we get closer to, not looking at week-old data but day-old data? And so, I explained that to them and said the days of being able to do analytics against old data that's copied are going away. ETL, we're also bullish to say that ETL is dead. ETL's future is very bleak. There's no place for it. It had its time, but now it's done because with data virtualization you can access that data in place. I was telling these folks as they're talking about, these data scientists, as they're talking about how they look at their models, their first step is always ETL. And so I told them this story, I said ETL is dead, and they just look at me kind of strange. >> Dave: Now the first step is load. >> Yes, there you go, right, load it in there. But having access from these platforms directly to that data, you don't have to worry about any type of a delay. >> What you described, though, is still common architecture where you've got, let's say, a Z mainframe, it's got an InfiniBand pipe to some exit data warehouse or something like that, and so, IBM's vision was, okay, we can collapse that, we can simplify that, consolidate it. SAP with HANA has a similar vision, we can do that. I'm sure Oracle's got their vision. What gives you confidence in IBM's approach and legs going forward? >> Probably due to the advances that we see in z/OS itself where handling mixed workloads, which it's just been doing for many of the 50 years that it's been around, being able to prioritize different workloads, not only just at the CPU dispatching, but also at the memory usage, also at the IO, all the way down through the channel to the actual device. You don't see other operating systems that have that level of granularity for managing mixed workloads. >> In the security component, that's what to me is unique about this so-called private cloud, and I say, I was using that software mainframe example from VMWare in the past, and it got a good portion of the way there, but it couldn't get that last mile, which is, any workload, any application with the performance and security that you would expect. It's just never quite got there. I don't know if the pendulum is swinging, I don't know if that's the accurate way to say it, but it's certainly stabilized, wouldn't you say? >> There's certainly new eyes being opened every day to saying, wait a minute, I could do something different here. Muscle memory doesn't have to guide me in doing business the way I have been doing it before, and that's this muscle memory I'm talking about of this ETL piece. >> Right, well, and a large number of workloads in mainframe are running Linux, right, you got Anaconda, Spark, all these modern tools. The question you asked about developers was right on. If it's independent or transparent to developers, then who cares, that's the key. That's the key lever this day and age is the developer community. You know it well. >> That's right. Give 'em what they want. They're the customers, they're the infrastructure that's being built. >> Bryan, we'll give you the last word, bumper sticker on the event, Rocket Software, your partnership, whatever you choose. >> We're excited to be here, it's an exciting day to talk about machine learning on z/OS. I say we're bullish on the mainframe, we are, we're especially bullish on z/OS, and that's what this even today is all about. That's where the data is, that's where we need the analytics running, that's where we need the machine learning running, that's where we need to get the developers to access the data live. >> Excellent, Bryan, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. >> Bryan: Thank you. >> And keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from New York City. Be right back. (electronic keyboard music)