(upbeat techno music) >> From Union Square in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering PagerDuty Summit '18. Now, here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty summit in the Westin St. Francis, Union Square, San Francisco. We're excited to have our next guest, this guy likes to get into the weeds. We'll get some into the weeds, not too far in the weeds. Armon Dagar, he's a co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp. Armon, great to see you. >> Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. >> Absolutely, so you're just coming off your session so how did the session go? What did you guys cover? >> It's super good, I mean I think what we wanted to do was sort of take a broader look and not just talk too much just about monitoring and so the talk was really about zero trust networking. Sort of the what, the how, the why. >> Right, right, so that's very important topic. Did Bitcoin come up or blockchain? Or are you able to do zero trust with no blockchain? >> We were able to get through with no blockchain, thankfully I suppose. >> Right. >> But I think kind of the gist of it when we talk about, I think that the challenge is it's still sort of at that nascent point where people are like, okay, zero trust networking I've heard of it, I don't really know what it is or what mental category to put it in. So I think what we tried to do was sort not get too far in the weeds, as you know I tend to do but sort of start high level. >> Right, right. >> And say, what's the problem, right? And I think the problem is we live in this world today of traditional flat networks where, I have a castle and moat, right? I wrap my data center in four walls, all my traffic comes over a drawbridge, and you're either on the outside and you're bad and untrusted or your on the inside and you're good and trusted. And so what happens when a bad guy gets in, right? >> Right. >> It's sort of this all or nothing model, right? >> But now we know, the bad guys are going to get in, right? It's only a function of time, right? >> Right, and I think you see it with the Target breech, the Neiman Marcus breech, the Google breech, right? The list sort of goes on, right? It's like, Equifax, right? It's a bad idea to assume they never get in. (laughing) >> If you assume they get in, so then, if you know the bad guys are going to get in, you got to bake that security in all different levels of your applications, your data, all over the place. >> Exactly. >> So what are some of the things you guys covered in the session? >> So I think the core of it is really saying how do we get to a point where we don't trust our network, where we assume the attacker will get on the network and then what? How do you design around that assumption, right? And what you really have to do is push identity everywhere, right? So every application has to say, I'm a web server and I'm connecting to a database, and is this allowed, right? Is a web server allowed to talk to the database? And that's really the crux of what Google calls Beyond Crop, what other people call sort of zero trust networking, is this idea of identity based where I'm saying it's not IP one talking to IP two, it's web server talking to database. >> Right, right, because then you've got all the role and rules and everything associated at that identity level? >> Bingo, exactly. >> Yeah. >> Exactly, and I think what's made that very hard historically is when we say, what do you have at the network? You have IPs and ports. So how do we get to a point where we know one thing is a web server and one thing's a database, right? >> Right. >> And I think the crux of the challenge there, is kind of three pieces, right? You need application identity. You have to say this is a web server, this is a database. You need to distribute certificates to them and say, you get a certificate that says you're a web server, you get a certificate that says you're a database and you have to enforce that access, right? So everyone can't just randomly talk to each other. >> Right, well then what about context too, right? Because context is another piece that maybe somebody takes advantage of and has access to the identity but is using it in way or there's an interaction that's kind of atypical to what's expected behavior, it just doesn't make sense. So context really matters quite a bit as well. >> Yeah, you're super, super right and I think this is where it gets into not only do we need to assign identity to the applications but how do we tie that back into sort of rich access controls of who's allowed to do what, audit trails of, okay it seems odd, this web server that never connects to this database suddenly out of the blue doing so, why? >> Right, right. >> And do we need to react to it? Do we need to change the rule? Do we need to investigate what's going on? >> Right. >> But you're right. It's like, that context is important of what's expected versus what's unexpected. >> Right, then you have this other X factor called shared infrastructure and hybrid cloud and I've got apps running on AWS, I've got apps running at Google, I've got apps running at Microsoft, I got apps running in the database, I've got some dev here, I've got some prod here. You know that adds another little X factor to the zero trust. (laughing) >> Yeah, I think I aptly heard it called once, we have a service mess on our hands, right? (laughing) >> Right, right. >> We have this stuff so sort of sprawled everywhere now, how do we wrangle it? How do we get our hands around it? And so as much as I think service mess is a play on sort of the language, I think this is where that emerging category of service mesh does make sense. >> Right. >> It's really looking at that and saying, okay, I'm going to have stuff in private cloud, public cloud, maybe multiple public cloud providers, how do I treat all of that in a uniform way? I want to know what's running where. I want to have rules around who can talk to who. >> Right. >> And that's a big focus for us with Console, in terms of, how do we have a consistent way of knowing what's running where a consistent set of rules around who can talk to who. >> Right. >> And do it across all these hybrid environments, right? >> Right, right, but wait, don't buy it yet, there's more. (laughing) Because then I've got all the APIs right? So now you've got all this application integration, many of which are with cloud based applications. So now you've got that complexity and you're pulling all these bits and connections from different infrastructures, different applications, some in house, some outside, so how do you bring some organization to that madness? >> No, that's a super good question. If you ever want to role change, take a look at our marketing department, you've got this down. (laughing) You know, I would say what it comes down to a heterogeneity is going to be fundamental, right? You're going to have folks that are going to operate different tools, different technologies for whatever reasons, right? Might be a historical choice, might be just they have better relations with a particular vendor. So our view has been, how do you inter op with all these things? Part of it is focus on open source. Part of it is focus on API driven. Part of it is focused on you have to do API integrations with all these systems because you're never going to get sort of the end user to standardize everything on a single platform. >> Right, right. It's funny, we were at a show talking about RPA, robotic process automation, and they, they treat those processes as employees in the fact that they give them identities. >> Right. >> So they can manage them. You hire them, you turn 'em on, they work for you for a while and then you might want to turn them off after they're done whatever doing, that you've put them in place for. But literally they were treating them as an employee. >> Right. >> Treating them with like an employee lead identity that they could have all the assigned rules and restrictions to then let the RPA do what it was supposed to do. It's like interesting concept. >> Yeah, and I think it mirrors I think what we see in a lot of different spaces which is what we were maybe managing before was the sort of very physical thing. Maybe it was we called it Robot 1234, right? Or in the same way we might say, this is server at IP 1234. >> Right. >> On our network. And so we're managing this really physical unit, whether it's an IP, a machine, a serial number. How do we take up the level of abstraction and instead say, you know actually all of these machines, whether IP one, IP two, IP three, they're a web server and whether it's robots one, two or three, they're a door attach, right? >> Right, right. >> And so now we start talking about identity and it gives us this more powerful abstraction to sort of talk about these underlying bits. >> Right. >> And I think it sort of follows the history of everything, right? Which is like how do we add new layers of abstraction that let us manage the complexity that we have? >> Right, right, so it's interesting right in Ray Kurzweil's keynote earlier today, hopefully you saw that, he talked about, basically exponential curves and that's really what we're facing so the amount of data, the amount of complexity is only going to increase dramatically. We're trying to virtualize so much of this and abstract it away but then that adds a different layer of management. At the same time, you're going to have a lot more horsepower to work with on the compute side, so is it kind of like the old Wintel, I got a faster PC, it's getting eaten up by more windows? I mean, do you see the automation being able to keep up with kind of the increasing layers of abstraction? >> Yeah, I mean I think there's a grain of that. Are we losing, just because we're getting access to more resources are we using it more efficiently? I think there's some fairness in, with each layer of abstraction we're sort of introduction additional performance cost, sort of to reduce that, but I think overall what we might be doing is increasing the amount of compute tenfold, but adding a 5% additional management fee, so it's still, I think it's still net and net we're able to do much more productive work, go to much bigger scale but only if you have the right abstractions, right? And I think that's where this kind of stuff comes in is, okay great, I'm going to have 10 times as many machines, how do I deal with the fact that my current security model barely works at my current scale? How do I go to 10x the scale? Or if I'm pointing and clicking to provision a machine, how does that work when I'm going to manage a thousand machines, right? >> Yeah. >> You have to bring in additional tooling and automation and sort of think about it at the next higher level. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's all, all part of this process of adopting cloud and sort of getting that leverage. >> It's so interesting, just the whole scale discussion because at the end of the day, right, scale wins and there's a great interview with James Hamilton from AWS, and it's old, but he's talking about kind of scale and he talks about how many server that were sold in this whatever calendar year it was, versus how many mobile phones were sold and it's many ores of magnitude different and the fact that he's thinking in terms of these types of scales as opposed to, you know, which was a big number in the service sales side, but really the scale challenge introduced by these giant clouds and Facebook and the like really changed the game fundamentally in how do you manage these things. >> Totally, totally and I think that's been our view at HashiCorp, is that when you talk about about kinds of the tidal shift of infrastructure from on premise, relatively static VMware centric to AWS, plus Azure, plus Google, plus VMware, it's not just a change of, okay it's of one server here to one server there. It's like going from one server here to 50 servers that I'm changing at every other day rather than every other year, right? >> Right, right. >> And so it's this sort of order of magnitude of scale but also an order of magnitude in terms of sort of the rate of change as well. >> Right, right. >> And I think that puts downward pressure on how do I provision? How do I secure? How do I deploy applications? How do I secure all of this stuff, right? >> Right. >> I think ever layer of the infrastructure gets hit by this change. >> Right, right, alright so you're a smart guy. You're always looking forward. What are some of the things you're working on down the road? Big challenges that you're looking forward to tackling? >> Oh, okay, that's fun. I mean I think the biggest challenge is how do we get this stuff to be simpler for people to use? Because I think what we're going through is you get this sort of see-saw effect, right? Which is okay, we're getting access to all this new hardware, all this new compute, all these new APIs, but it's not getting simpler, right? >> Right, right. >> It's getting exponentially more complicated. >> Right, right. >> And so I think part of it is how do we go back to sort of looking at what's the core of drivers here? It's like, okay well we want to make it easier for people to deliver and deploy their applications, let's go back to sort of, in some sense, the drawing board, say how do we abstract all of these new goodies that we've been given but make it consumable and easy to learn? Because otherwise, you know, what's the point? It's like, here's a catalog of 50,000 things and no one knows how to use any of it. >> Right, right, right. (laughing) Yeah it's funny, I'm waiting for that next abstraction for AWS, instead of the big giant slide that Andy shows every year. (laughing) It's just that I just want to plug in and you figure out. >> Right. >> What connects on the backend. I can't even hardly read that stuff-- >> Maybe AI will save us. >> Let's hope so. Alright Armon, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and sitting down with us. >> My pleasure, thanks so much, Jeff. >> Alright, he's Armon, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at PagerDuty Summit in downtown San Francisco, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

(intense orchestral music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBEConversation, I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. I'm here with Erica Brescia, who's the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at Bitnami, it's the app store for the cloud, they do automated packaging, an application provider. Great to see you, CUBE alumni, great to have you in the studio, thanks for coming in. >> Great to be here, thanks for having me. >> So, so much going on, you've been to theCUBE multiple times, we see each other at conferences and, you made some time, thanks for comin' down, appreciate it. >> Yeah. >> So Bitnami's doing some great things, so give us the update, what's goin' on with the company? >> Sure. So we just launched our new offering called Stacksmith, which is our first enterprise offering that basically takes all the tooling that we've built to deliver the application catalog that we have onto all the major cloud vendors, and allows enterprise IT departments to package up their own applications, both for cloud and cloud-native platforms, as well as for whatever they're running in the enterprise today. So, it kind of meets them where they are, helps them automate the application packaging and maintenance in place today, and then sets them up to successfully move to the cloud and Kubernetes and containers over time. >> So it's kind of reverse of this journey to the cloud, you go to where the user, the customers are, help them put it together. >> And make the journey, really. So what we find is a lot of the more traditional orchestration and packaging tools just aren't well suited to cloud and containers in particular. And so enterprises are looking for new tools to help them solve current problems, which is: we need to support all these different platforms, we might have some things running internally in VMware, we're running some things on Amazon, maybe using cloud formation, and now they're trying to get to Kubernetes, and they're trying to figure out how they can do that without having a separate pipeline for everything, and that's the problem that Bitnami solves. >> Yeah, and that's been a bit, we've identified a product at Amazon, then, I want Azure, I want Google Cloud, I got to hire a different development team, different stacks. So there's kind of this problem with multi-cloud. How are you guys talkin' to customers about it? 'Cause this seems to be the hybrid cloud main problem today. It's like, okay I see the cloud, I understand I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff in the cloud, or cloud's going to be on-prem, and it's going to be in the cloud. How do I get ready for the cloud? That seems to be a number one question. >> Yeah, and I think what people are struggling with is, you know, there're a lot of companies out there, particularly in the cloud-native space, that just say: if you just rebuild everything, then your life will be so much better, right? But that's not really realistic for most companies. They need to be able to take what they have, and be able to package it in such a way that they get a lot of the benefits of the cloud and containers without completely re-architecting everything. Because, it might be practical for, say a new start up, or a company like Netflix or Spotify to do that, but lets face it, most companies are not that, most companies have too many demands on their IT and Ops teams already, hiring talent is hard even for the startups working at the forefront of Kubernetes, so, you really need tools that are approachable and solve current problems, but again, I think the key is, set you up for success in the future, and I think we help people kind of bridge the gap between what they're doing today and what they're doing in the future without trying to push them in one direction, which might not make sense for them. >> Yeah, in Netflix, and the Googles of the world, are potential future scenarios of what they might look like, but they got to take care of the current move from IT to cloud, get ready for it. >> Yeah, maybe, and you know, for a lot of these internal applications it doesn't make sense to completely re-architect and rewrite them, like the ROI isn't there, and there are companies out there that have thousands of Java or .NET applications that they just need to be able to move perhaps out of their data center, in many cases it's being shut down, and, onto cloud platforms and so we try to find that nice balance between helping you get the advantage of the automation of cloud without having to invest in re-architecting apps that just aren't worth re-architecting. >> Got to ask you Erica, we've had a couple conversations, I forget what you were founded, at Bitnami, you've had a great journey, a lot of things have changed. When did you guys found 2010, or 2011? >> So we started Bitnami in 2013. The company before Bitnami was Bitrock, and we went through YCombinator in 2013, and that's when we really started growing out the company. First around the app catalog that we deliver both via Bitnami.com as well as all the major cloud platforms, and that's allowed us to bootstrap the business up to this point. And then obviously we took all of the learnings and the technology from delivering 140 applications across 14 different platforms, native and cloud, and productize that in Stacksmith, so our enterprise users, you know, we have over a million deployments a month, but people have only been consuming the things that we build now they can use our tooling, that we've been building out over the years, to automate the packaging of their own applications. >> And it's, just to kind of put some color commentary around that time, it wasn't the most calm waters of the cloud world, massive growth, a lot of things have happened, so containers come to the scene with Docker and that becomes standardized, now you've got Kubernetes, you got service meshes right around the corner, kind of now it sets a perfect opportunity for you guys to bring customers to this app store concept, for you guys. >> Yeah, and we see this great, we call it kind of the great unbundling, right? Where apps used to be distributed with the operating system and they kind of were this one cohesive piece, and now, with Kubernetes and cloud APIs, the applications are very separate, and so there's kind of this new operating system coming together, which is the operating system of containers and Kubernetes and cloud, and it allows you to combine these different pieces in ways that you never could before. Before, you know, you would just go to your OS repo to pull in the app that you wanted. >> And you see the trends, I mean, Google has the SRE concept sight, reliability, engineer, the operators on the VMware side, dealing with VMs kind of all converging together. So I got to ask you, how does that impact your customers with your new Stacksmith offering, what's the impact to the customers? Is it ease of use, is it ease of deployment, what's the main value at? >> So, I think the most important thing is, as you said, there're all these new technologies coming out and there's also cloud formation on AWS, and there's ARM on Azure, and each cloud vendor is coming out with their own tooling and then, like you said, there's operators for Kubernetes. The advantage that you get with Bitnami is you don't have to understand the intricacies of how to package for all of those different platforms because we do that for you. We abstract away having to understand how to build a cloud formation template versus a helm chart helps that Kubernetes, you know, package manager essentially and we've been very involved in helping define and further that project. We're actually the top provider of the official helm charts. So we see a lot of promise there but, what's interesting about Bitnami is at the end of the day we're platform agnostic. And once you start using Bitnami and Stacksmith, you can very easily add support for other platforms. So we have a customer who started out on AWS, for example, they wanted to give a try to running some things on Azure, and they essentially just had to flip a switch, and then they get an ARM template, instead of-- >> What was your alternative to that? If they didn't do that, what would they have to do? >> They would have had to do it either manually, or find system specific tools for each platform, to do it. So, there's no other like singular tool chain that lets you build natively for all the different platforms and that's the key, we don't try to abstract away ARM or any of these other orchestration technologies by giving you some kind of layer on top of them. We just make it really easy to build for those technologies and also, to maintain those applications and templates over time, so this isn't point-in-time thing, we track all of the updates in everything that goes into that image or a set of images, and allow you to automatically rebuild and redeploy across any of those platforms you need to support. >> You guys have been very successful in the cloud, but also have scar tissue like everybody else that's been through the cloud wars. And now, as it starts to hit kind of an inflection point, how has cloud changed now, what are we seeing now in cloud versus, say 2014, 2015 timeframe? >> Oh boy. So, I think the most interesting thing is how quickly Azure in particular has evolved. If I had to pick one thing that has been incredibly impressive and important in the changing cloud landscape, it's, you know, you go back to 2014, it was pretty much all AWS all the time, right? And, Amazon isn't quite the Goliath it used to be anymore, I mean there's-- >> Well it's still pretty damn big. >> They're still huge. Yeah, absolutely, but I'll tell you what, the others are gaining a lot of ground, and they have really interesting and different advantages, right? Google will send all of their amazingly smart engineers in to help you architect applications, or move them over, I've heard a lot of workloads moving off of AWS onto Google because Google is giving them so much love and support and trying to attract those workloads over. But Azure's advantage is their ecosystem, right? They really understand partnering in a way that Amazons retail DNA just, it doesn't lend itself to that, and so, I think Microsoft's approach to building out a really great ecosystem around Azure, coupled with their huge field sales team, which Amazon has just been building, they've never had an enterprise sales team, is making things really interesting and creating, for us, a great dynamic in the market because we like to see a number of cloud vendors flourish. >> You're an arms dealer. >> Yeah exactly! (Erica laughs) >> Whatever you want, any cloud. >> I don't know if our CMO would want me to put it that way, but. (laughing) >> Dave Alante's favorite term, by the way. >> Sure. >> It's good to be an arms dealer, or be Switzerland, as they, to be more politically correct. >> Yeah, we go with Switzerland. >> Azure's interesting, I was just having conversation with Dave about this, because, you know, you've got, consumerization of IT, and digital transformation, have been the biggest buzz words in IT for the past decade. First it was consumerization of IT, now it's digital transformation. If you think about it Amazon and Google are really the consumer companies, Azure is an enterprise company with an ecosystem, so it's going to be very interesting to see if consumerization is the winning formula or is it digital transformation on the enterprise side? So you got to be, watching that pretty closely. Your thoughts? >> So, I would say on the consumerization of IT side, I mean that is absolutely happening, and, there, we could talk for hours probably on why that trend is here and why it's not going away, just, expectations in general have changed with the advent of iPhone and app stores and convenience across every aspect of our lives, so, I think even Microsoft gets that, and I don't think that the consumer DNA of those companies actually gives them a real edge in this case. What is interesting is, every company is starting to really focus on their app stores and their marketplace strategies, and trying to provide a frictionless buying experience. And there're a bunch of announcements coming, both on the AWS side, and the Azure side in particular, around things that they're doing to ease the enterprise buying process. >> Well we identified the three things, SAS business is table stakes, IOT is coming, connected devices, and then you've got the mobile. Those three things are on 20 year runs. Talking about Bitnami's update, you mentioned Stacksmith, you have some new stuff there, you guys are hiring, what's the ramp up, marketing, cash flow, top line revenues? Go ahead, share it. >> I'm not giving you all that. (both laughing) But, yeah it's a really exciting time for us, obviously bringing this enterprise product to market. We're gearing up to scale quite significantly, so, Bitnami's is kind of unusual in the Valley in that we're bootstrapped, and we're very heavily engineering driven. >> So no outside funding? >> A million dollars in total, which pretty much doesn't even count in Silicon Valley, and that was really just they had a number of individual folks involved in the company, when we went through YC. >> So no venturing? >> No, no institutional funding So, we are just getting ready to build out the whole go to market team around the Stacksmith product, which is very new in the market, just launched in the last couple months. >> So is it generally available? >> Oh yes! Generally available, customers, lots of great things to talk about, but, we don't have the full sales team in place. >> And what's the benefits of Stacksmith? What's the bottom line value proposition? >> It's really helping you to automate the packaging and maintenance of your applications, whether internal or external, you know, third-party commercial apps that you're using internally, and deploying them on any of the platforms that you need to support. >> App store for the cloud, I love that. So let's talk about what you're workin' on, one of the things I'm really impressed, first of all I'm really impressed with what you've done with Bitnami, I love it, love the bootstrap stories, we were bootstrapped as well in the run of SiliconANGLE. So it's great, in Silicon Valley, I think that's like the top tier player, if you can bootstrap it to economic visibility around scale, that's a success so congratulations. But you also have something exciting going on with venture investing. X factor, >> X factor, yep. >> This is super impressive. You raised a small little fund, X factor, investing in women entrepreneurs. Take a minute to explain what X factor is, do you have some news coming, another fund coming? >> Sure, yeah it's been very exciting, so, in the free free time that I really don't have, but this is such a good cause it's worth it. We put together a three million dollar fund, to invest a hundred thousand dollars in 30 different companies, with at least one female founder. And this actually was spun out of fly bridge, we have our token guys, we call 'em Chip Hazard, who's a career venture investor, who's doing a lot of interesting things. But, he basically led the charge with a woman named Anna Palmer, to put together a group of female founders, that's what really differentiates us, I think, from the rest of the market, who are operating their own companies, to invest in these very early stage female founded companies And, I think that gives us a really unique advantage in the market of venture, in that first we have an incredible pipeline and deal flow because, you know, we know these folks who are starting the companies. And we also have a unique perspective on the challenges of getting a new venture off the ground, and I think we can really be an ally to the entrepreneurs that we're funding, and helping them get that first bit of funding in the door, we typically help them with their series A rounds and beyond and they really see us as a peer and someone they can relate to and come to for advice, and so, I think it's a pretty unique value prop that we have as a VC fund. >> Operating experience brings a lot to the table, so, you want to get those first three steps goin', get that venture off the ground, trust. >> Yeah, and we have a very diverse range of experiences that we can bring to bare too, I mean some of us have deep infrastructure experience, some folks are on the consumer side, we've got a few East Coast people, a few West Coast people, a few people scattered in other areas. And we all have different areas of expertise, right? I'm pretty strong on the business development side, and I'm business model, SAS, enterprise software. Some of the other women are much more familiar with like distribution deals, or hardware deals, or other consumer businesses as well, so I think we have a really unique range of experiences and expertise that we can bring to bare in supporting our founders. >> And mentoring too, it's being there for, you know, don't give up! >> Yeah! And we've had founders go through things, and they'll call us at, one of our founders I was just on the phone with, and she was looking at changing her role within the company to take on more responsibility, and we had a great conversation around that, and that resulted in her becoming the COO, which was fantastic. Another founder was going through a difficult time where she and her co-founder were splitting up, and I was able to talk her through that. And we have a lot of those stories where, I think, you know, we have really been seen as an ally who can help founders get through those times, because we've been there, and we can empathize. And, it's an interesting dynamic because everybody knows that we're not going to invest in the next round, so there's never any posturing to make sure that they're still selling us on investing in the company. It's all about, once we're in, we're in, and we'll do anything we can do to help you scale successfully over time. >> And the key is get to that next round, or get a clear line of sight on visibility in the union economics or, scale. >> Exactly. >> Alright, so how much is going into the next funding? Can you talk about the amount, or? >> Yeah, so we're not raising yet, we're just about to start raising, we're going to be expanding the number of investment partners on the team, which is fantastic, and I'm really excited to bring some amazing new women on board, so, you know, for the women out there who are maybe interested in starting to learn a little more about venture and have raised funding and build their own companies, please send us an email: hello@xfactorventures the fund should be about 10 million dollars, is the current target. >> How is it structured? Are they structured as limited partners, general partners? How is it, so if someone comes on board, as you expand the partnership what does it look like? >> Sure, so, we all do invest our own money, but the fund has LPs just like any other fund, so there's a number of great folks who have backed up X factor. We do bring in some of our own folks along the way, you know, I had people that I know, who have invested in the fund and I'm sure that will be the case in the next one, but it's not like the fund is only funded by the investment partners, we have LPs like any other fund. >> But you guys are taking profits out of it, through the caring, right? So typical venture capital? >> It's typical venture capital, you know, it's a fairly small fund to start as we work through things, but we expect it to grow quite significantly over time. I'll tell you, without giving away too much, that we have quite grand ambitions for the long term. >> Alright, well let's keep in touch on the deal flow, congratulations on Bitnami, and, we'll see you at the cloud shows, Amazon, Microsoft Ignite, Google Next. >> Everywhere, yep, I'll be there. >> Erica, thanks for coming on and spending some time here on theCUBE. CUBEConversations here in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, you're watching CUBEConversations, thanks for watching. (intense orchestral music)

(light orchestral music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Cube Conversation here at the Palo Alto studios for theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We're here for some news analysis with Peter Smails, the CMO of Datos.IO D-a-t-o-s dot I-O. Hot new start up with some news. Peter was just here for a thought leader segment with Chris Cummings talking about the industry breakdown. But the news is hot, prior to re:Invent which you will be at? >> Absolutely. >> RecoverX is the product. 2.5, it's a release. So, you've got a point release on your core product. >> Correct. >> Welcome to this conversation. >> Thanks for having me. Yeah, we're excited to share the news. Big day for us. >> All right, so let's get into the hard news. You guys are announcing a point release of the latest product which is your core flagship, RecoverX. >> Correct. >> Love the name. Love the branding of the X in there. It reminds me of the iPhone, so makes me wanna buy one. But you know ... >> We can make that happen, John. >> You guys are the X Factor. So, we've been pretty bullish on what you guys are doing. Obviously, like the positioning. It's cloud. You're taking advantage of the growth in the cloud. What is this new product release? Why? What's the big deal? What's in it for the customer? >> So, I'll start with the news, and then we'll take a small step back and sort of talk about why exactly we're doing what we're doing. So, RecoverX 2.5 is the latest in our flagship RecoverX line. It's a cloud data management platform. And the market that we're going after and the market we're disrupting is the traditional data management space. The proliferation of modern applications-- >> John: Which includes which companies? >> So, the Veritas' of the world, the Commvault's of the world, the Dell EMC's of the world. Anybody that was in the traditional-- >> 20-year-old architected data backup and recovery software. >> You stole my fun fact. (laughs) But very fair point which is that the average age approximately of the leading backup and recovery software products is approximately 20 years. So, a lot's changed in the last 20 years, not the least of which has been this proliferation of modern applications, okay? Which are geo-distributed microservices oriented and the rapid proliferation of multicloud. That disrupts that traditional notion of data management specifically backup and recovery. That's what we're going after with RecoverX. RecoverX 2.5 is the most recent version. News on three fronts. One is on our advanced recovery, and we can double-click into those. But it's essentially all about giving you more data awareness, more granularity to what data you wanna recover and where you wanna put it, which becomes very important in the multicloud world. Number two is what we call data center aware backup and recovery. That's all about supporting geo-distributed application environments, which again, is the new normal in the cloud. And then number three is around enterprise hardening, specifically around security. So, it's all about us increased flexibility and new capabilities for the multicloud environment and continue to enterprise-harden the product. >> Okay, so you guys say significant upgrade. >> Peter: Yep. >> I wanna just look at that. I'm also pretty critical, and you know how I feel on this so don't take it personal, multicloud is not a real deal yet. It's in statement of value that customers are saying-- It's coming! But cloud is here today, regular cloud. So, multicloud ... Well, what is multicloud actually mean? I mean, I can have multiple clouds but I'm not actually moving workloads across clouds, yet. >> I disagree. >> Okay. >> I actually disagree. We have multiple customers. >> All right, debunk that. >> I will debunk that. Number one use case for RecoverX is backup and recovery. But with a twist of the fact that it's for these modern applications running these geo-distributed environments. Which means it's not about backing up my data center, it's about, I need to make a copy of my data but I wanna back it up in the cloud. I'm running my application natively in the cloud, so I want a backup in the cloud. I'm running my application in the cloud but I actually wanna backup from the cloud back to my private cloud. So, that in lies a backup and recovery, and operation recovery use case that involves multicloud. That's number one. Number two use case for RecoverX is what we talk about on data mobility. >> So, you have a different definition of multicloud. >> Sorry, what was your-- Our definition of multicloud is fundamentally a customer using multiple clouds, whether it be a private on-prem GCP, AWS, Oracle, any mix and match. >> I buy that. I buy that. Where I was getting critical of was a workload. >> Okay. >> I have a workload and I'm running it on Amazon. It's been architected for Amazon. Then I also wanna run that same workload on Azure and Google. >> Okay. >> Or Oracle or somewhere else. >> Yep. >> I have to re-engineer it (laughs) to move, and I can't share the data. So, to me what multicloud means, I can run it anywhere. My app anywhere. Backup is a little bit different. You're saying the cloud environments can be multiple environments for your solution. >> That is correct. >> So, you're looking at it from the other perspective. >> Correct. The way we define ourselves is application-centric data management. And what that essentially means is we don't care what the underlying infrastructure is. So, if you look at traditional backup and recovery products they're LUN-based. So, I'm going to backup my storage LUN. Or they're VM-based. And a lot of big companies made a lot of money doing that. The problem is they are no LUN's and VM's in hybrid cloud or multicloud environment. The only thing that's consistent across application, across cloud-environments is the data and the applications that are running. Where we focus is we're 100% application-centric. So, we integrate at the database level. The database is the foundation of any application you create. We integrate there, which makes us agnostic to the underlying infrastructure. We run, just as examples, we have customers running next generation applications on-prem. We have customers running next generation applications on AWS in GCP. Any permutation of the above, and to your point about back to the multicloud we've got organizations doing backup with us but then we also have organizations using us to take copies of their backup data and put them on whatever clouds they want for things like test and refresh. Or performance testing or business analytics. Whatever you might wanna do. >> So, you're pretty flexible. I like that. So, we talked before on other segments, and certainly even this morning about modern stacks. >> Yeah. >> Modern applications. This is the big to-do item for all CXOs and CIOs. I need a modern infrastructure. I need modern applications. I need modern developers. I need modern everything. Hyper, micro, ultra. >> Whatever buzz word you use. >> But you guys in this announcement have a couple key things I wanna just get more explanation on. One, advanced recovery, backup anywhere, recover anywhere, and you said enterprise-grade security is the third thing. >> Yep. >> So, let's just break them down one at a time. Advanced recovery for Datos 2.5, RecoverX 2.5. >> Yep. >> What is advanced recovery? >> It's very specifically about providing high levels of granularity for recovering your data, on two fronts. So, the use case is, again, backup. I need to recover data. But I don't wanna necessarily recover everything. I wanna get smarter about the data I wanna recover. Or it could be for non-operational use cases, which is I wanna spin up a copy of data to run test dev or to do performance testing on. What advanced recovery specifically means is number one, we've introduced the notion of queryble recovery. And what that means is that I can say things like star dot John star. And the results returning from that, because we're application-centric, and we integrated the database, we give you visibility to that. I wanna see everything star dot John star. Or I wanna recover data from a very specific row, in a very specific column. Or I want to mask data that I do not wanna be recovered and I don't want people to see. The implications of that are think about that from a performance standpoint. Now, I only recover the data I need. So, I'm very, very high levels of granularity based upon a query. So, I'm fast from an RTO standpoint. The second part of it is for non-operational requirements I only move the data that is select to that data set. And number three is it helps you with things like GDPR compliance and PII compliance because you can mask data. So, that's query-based recovery. That's number one. The second piece of advanced recovery is what we call incremental recovery. That is granular recovery based upon a time stamp. So, you can get within individual points in time. So, you can get to a very high level of granularity based upon time. So, it's all about visibility. It's your data and getting very granular in a smart way to what you wanna recover. So, if I kind of hear what you're saying, what you're saying is essentially you built in the operational effectiveness of being effective operationally. You know, time to backup recovery, all that good RTO stuff. Restoring stuff operationally >> Peter: Very quickly. >> very fast. >> Peter: In a smart way. >> So, there's a speed game there which is table stakes. But you're real value here is all these compliance nightmares that are coming down the pike, GDPR and others. There's gonna be more. >> Peter: Absolutely. I mean, it could be HIPPA, it could be GDPR, anything that involves-- >> Policy. >> Policies. Anything that requires, we're completely policy-driven. And you can create a policy to mask certain data based upon the criteria you wanna put in. So, it's all about-- >> So you're the best of performance, and you got some tunability. >> And it's all about being data aware. It's all about being data aware. So, that's what advanced recovery is. >> Okay, backup anywhere, recover anywhere. What does that mean? >> So, what that means is the old world of backup and recovery was I had a database running in my data center. And I would say database please take a snapshot of yourself so I can make a copy. The new world of cloud is that these microservices-based modern applications typically run, they're by definition distributed, And in many cases they run distributed across they're geo-distributed. So, what data center aware backup and recovery is, use a perfect example. We have a customer. They're running their eCommerce. So, leading online restaurant reservations company. They're running their eCommerce application on-prem, interestingly enough, but it's based on Cassandra distributed database. Excuse me, MongoDB. Sorry. They're running geo-distributed, sharded MongoDB clusters. Anybody in the traditional backup and recovery their head would explode when you say that. In the modern application world, that's a completely normal use case. They have a data center in the U.S. They have a data center in the U.K. What they want is they wanna be able to do local backup and recovery while maintaining complete global consistency of their data. So again, it's about recovery time ultimately but it's also being data aware and focusing only on the data that you need to backup and recovery. So, it's about performance but then it's also about compliance. It's about governance. That's what data center aware backup is. >> And that's a global phenomenon people are having with the GO. >> Absolutely. Yeah, you could be within country. It could be any number of different things that drive that. We can do it because we're data aware-- >> And that creates complexity for the customer. You guys can take that complexity away >> Correct. >> From the whole global, regional where the data can sit. >> Correct. I'd say two things actually. To give the customers credit, the customers building these apps or actually getting a lot smarter about what they're data is and where they're data is. >> So they expect this feature? >> Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I wouldn't call it table stakes cause we're the only kids on the block that can do it. But this is in direct response to our customers that are building these new apps. I wanna get into some of the environmental and customer drivers in a second. I wanna nail the last segment down. Cause I wanna unpack the whole why is this trend happening? What's the gestation period? What's the main enabler for you? But okay, final point on the significant announcements. My favorite topic enterprise-grade security. What the hell does that mean? First of all, from your standpoint the industry's trying to solve the same thing. Enterprise-grade security, what are you guys providing in this? >> Number one, it's basically security protocol. So, TLS and SSL. This is weed stuff. TLS, SSL, so secure protocol support. It's integration with LDAP. So, if organizations are running, primarily if they're running on-prem and they're running in an LDAP environment, we're support there. And then we've got Kerberos support for Kerberos authentication. So, it's all about just checking the boxes around the different security >> So, this is like in between >> and transport protocol. >> the toes, the details around compliance, identity management. >> Peter: Bingo. >> I mean we just had Centrify's CyberConnect conference, and you're seeing a lot of focus on identity. >> Absolutely. And the reason that that's sort of from a market standpoint the reason that these are very important now is because the applications that we're supporting these are not science experiments. These are eCommerce applications. These are core business applications that mainstream enterprises are running, and they need to be protected and they're bringing the true, classic enterprise security, authentication, authorization requirements to the table. >> Are you guys aligning with those features? Or is there anything significant in that section? >> From an enterprise security standpoint? It's primarily about we provide the support, so we integrate with all of those environments and we can check the boxes. Oh, absolutely TLS. Absolutely, we've got that box checked because-- >> So, you're not competing with other cybersecurity? >> No, this is purely we need to do this. This is part of our enterprise-- >> This is where you partner. >> Peter: Well, no. For these things it's literally just us providing the protocol support. So, LDAP's a good example. We support LDAP. So, we show up and if somebody's using my data management-- >> But you look at the other security solutions as a way to integrate with? >> Yeah. >> Not so much-- >> Absolutely, no. This has nothing to do with the competition. It's just supporting ... I mean Google has their own protocol, you know, security protocols, so we support those. So, does Amazon. >> I really don't want to go into the customer benefits. We'll let the folks go to the Datos website, d-a-t-o-s dot i-o is the website, if you wanna check out all their customer references. I don't wanna kind of drill on that. I kind of wanna really end this segment on the real core issue for me is reading the tea leaves. You guys are different. You're now kind of seeing some traction and some growth. You're a new kind of animal in the zoo, if you will. (Peter laughs) You've got a relevant product. Why is it happening now? And I'm trying to get to understanding Cloud Oss is enabling a lot of stuff. You guys are an effect of that, a data point of what the cloud is enabled as a venture. Everything that you're doing, the value you create is the function of the cloud. >> Yes. >> And how data is moving. Where's this coming from? Is it just recently? Is it a gestation period of a few years? Where did this come from? You mentioned some comparisons like Oracle. >> So, I'll answer that in sort of, we like to use history as our guide. So, I'll answer that both in macro terms, and then I'll answer it in micro terms. From a macro term standpoint, this is being driven by the proliferation of new data sources. It's the easiest way to look at it. So, if you let history be your guide. There was about a seven to eight year proliferation or gap between proliferation of Oracle as the primary traditional relational database data source and the advent of Veritas who really defined themselves as the defacto standard for traditional on-prem data center relational data management. You look at that same model, you'll look at the proliferation of VMware. In the late 90s, about a seven to eight year gestation with the rapid adoption of Veeam. You know the early days a lot of folks laughed at Veeam, like, "Who's gonna backup VMs? People aren't gonna use VMs in the enterprise. Now, you looked at Veeam, great company. They've done some really tremendous things carving out much more than a niche providing backup and recovery and availability in a VM-based environment. The exact same thing is happening now. If you go back six to seven years from now, you had the early adoption of the MongoDBs, the Cassandras, the Couches. More recently you've got a much faster acceleration around the DynamoDBs and the cloud databases. We're riding that same wave to support that. >> This is a side effect of the enabling of the growth of cloud. >> Yes. >> So, similar to what you did in VMware with VMs and database for Oracle you guys are taking it to the next level. >> These new data sources are completely driven by the fact that the cloud is enabling this completely distributed, far more agile, far more dynamic, far less expensive application deployment model, and a new way of providing data management is required. That's what we do. >> Yeah, I mean it's a function of maturity, one. As Jeff Rickard, General Manager of theCube, always says, when the industry moves to it's next point of failure, in this case failure is problem and you solve. So, the headaches that come from the awesomeness of the growth. >> Absolutely. And to answer that micro-wise briefly. So, that was the macro. The micro is the proliferation of, the movement from monolithic apps to microservices-based app, it's happening. And the cloud is what's enabling them. The move from traditional on-prem to hybrid cloud is absolutely happening. That's by definition the cloud. The third piece which is cloud-centric is the world's moving from a scale up world to an elastic-compute, elastic storage model. We call that the modern IT stack. Traditional backup and recovery, traditional data management doesn't work in the new modern IT stack. That's the market we're planning. That's the market we're disrupting is all that traditional stuff moving to the modern IT stack. >> Okay, Datos IO announcing a 2.5 release of RecoverX, their flagship product, their start up growing out of Los Gatos. Peter Smails here, the CMO. Where ya gonna be next? What's going on-- I know we're gonna see you re:Invent in a week in a half. >> Absolutely. So, we've got two stops. Well, actually the next stop on the tour is re:Invent. So, absolutely looking forward to being back on theCUBE at re:Invent. >> And the company feels good about those things are good. You've got good money in the bank. You're growing. >> We feel fantastic. It's fascinating to watch as things develop. The conversations we have now versus even six months ago. It's sort of the tipping point of people get it. You sort of explain, "Oh, yeah it's data management from modern applications. Are you deploying modern applications?" Absolutely. >> Share one example to end this segment on what you hear over and over again from customers that illuminates what you guys are about as a company, the DNA, the value preposition, and their impact on results and value for customers. >> So, I'll use a case study as an example. You know, we're the world's largest home improvement retailers. Old way, was they ran their multi-billion dollar eCommerce infrastructure. Running on IBM Db2 database. Running in their on-prem data center. They've moved their world. They're now running, they've re-architected their application. It's now completely microservices-based running on Cassandra, deployed 100% in Google cloud platform. And they did that because they wanted to be more agile. They wanted to be more flexible. It's a far more cost effective deployment model. They are all in on the cloud. And they needed a next generation backup and recovery data protection, data management solution which is exactly what we do. So, that's the value. Backup's not a new problem. People need to protect data and they need to be able to take better advantage of the data. >> All right, so here's the final, final question. I'm a customer watching this video. Bottom line maybe, I'm kind of hearing all this stuff. When do I call you? What are the signals? What are the little smoke signals I see in my organization burning? When do I need to call you guys, Datos? >> You should call Datos IO anytime, if you're doing anything with development of modern applications, number one. If you're doing anything with hybrid cloud you should call us. Because you're gonna need to reevaluate your overall data management strategy it's that simple. >> All right, Peter Smails, the CMO of Datos, one of the hot companies here in Silicon Valley, out of Los Gatos, California. Of course, we're in Palo Alto at theCube Studios. I'm John Furrier. This is theCUBE conversation. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)