>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering ZertoCON 2018, brought to you by Zerto. >> This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillin, we're on the ground here in Boston for ZertoCON 2018 The third ZertoCON, and with me is a gentleman who has been to all the ZertoCONs as well as many years before that, Gil Levonai, the Chief Marketing Officer at Zerto, welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me here. >> You were one of the first people at Zerto I understand, way back in the day >> Yeah, yeah I'm kind of like ground zero type person here in Zerto, I managed back then the product team and the marketing team. Then we grew bigger and bigger And now I own all of the marketing for Zerto. >> So how do you feel coming to a conference like this with all these people here, you've got big name keynote speakers, having joined the company as one of the earliest employees, what does that feel like? >> It's like, I have three teenagers, so I know what it means to be proud of your child, it's a very proud moment, okay. Because really, I think the caliber of customers we see here in the conference, first there's the quantity of customers, et cetera, but also the caliber of customers, the caliber of discussion that's happening here, is really, it really makes me proud. And knowing that this company started a few years ago from, just like any other startup, a very small company, and now we're really making a dent in the industry, and changing and making customers successful, is really really proud. >> Your first user conference is a milestone of sorts isn't it? >> Yeah, two years ago it was really like having a child now it's like we've gotten into a rhythm we know what we're doing now, we know what the conference looks like and we know what it means. But, just like with children, the older they get, the bigger the challenges. Same thing, the bigger the conference gets, different challenges, and it's a always hectic few weeks. >> But very valuable because you come here and you have a chance to talk to customers nonstop really for three days, what are you hearing from them? What are the trends that are emerging to you from the conversations you're having out there? >> So with, going back to why I was hired to Zerto, as one of the first few people, is actually a good example of that. Because I was hired because I was actually a marketing and product management guy, hired in Zerto before we actually wrote our first line of code. Why? Because we want to make sure that we talk to customers and we get their feedback and we get our guidelines in what we should be doing, back in that day. So from that point on, we always are doing the same thing, we're listening to our customers. that's kind of like a key DNA for Zerto. So this conference is an amazing place to do that, to really hear from our customers what are there challenges, we had our Customer Advisor Board, we had our Partner Advisor Board here, but also everybody hallway conversation with the customers is the same thing. What do you need to do, what are you trying to do that you're not capable of doing? And that's where we actually understand the trends and the marketing. We have John and people like that, that analyze, are amazing but there's nothing like an unbiased conversation with a customer and understanding their needs. And what we see, is really two major aspects. And kind of like as you've mentioned in the skin. One, the delays are totally different. It's really, really, really unacceptable to be down, or to lose data, done. No industry can do that, no type of customer, no size of customer, it doesn't matter if you're retail, if you're airline, or if you're banking. >> Paul: Five nines isn't enough anymore. >> People, we all have phones, we used to always on, and everything needs to be always on. So that drives the whole narrative of guys, I can't tell you hey I'm going to recover from two hours ago, it's not enough anymore, okay. The second thing is they are all facing a lot of complexities in kind of like the changing infrastructure. They all want to move to cloud, we hear about continuing, we hear about the cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud. And it's all really coming from the right reasons, it's coming from trying to change their business models. It's coming from trying to change their cost structure. But it introduce so much complexity, so between these two, they just need to really rethink the way they're doing what they're doing. In terms of data protection, mobility, et cetera, and that's where we came to this kind of like high-resilience platform concept, from the needs of the market. >> So we see customers, they want more flexibility, they want to use multiple clouds, they want hybrid clouds, they want to shift workloads around seamlessly, all of this has risk, and resilience in an environment like that is challenging. What is Zerto going to do to make that more seamless for them? >> I think resilience is double challenging. It's challenging because, really to be successful, you can't only be kind of resilient to hey how am I addressing bad things have happened. You need to be resilient to the fact that, you changing your business is part of your business now, okay. And how am I effectively change my business, run forward, run fast, while I'm not leaving behind any gaps, or anything that hey, I might get struck by some bad luck, or intentional cyber thing, okay and lose my business, and that happens also. You'll see major companies that have big impacts on their business because of events like that. So, the key to doing that, is really, to A, simplify the way you protect everything, and really move to what we call continuous protection, and that's from a product perspective, but think about it from a meta doz perspective. You need to have the ability to always recover anytime, anywhere, whatever you need, realistically, whenever you need it. It's the only way possible, and only technologies that are, we started from, we're coming from the high-end of the market to this much wider market. Because we're coming from protecting huge Oracle databases, with huge change rates, which seconds of our bills, okay. That's our DNA, that's what we know to now take that into entire kind of like IT, say you need that IT to be available wherever you need it, and you need to be able to protect it at any point in time, and move everything around between clouds as you say, and that's where our contacts are messaging the market. You need to be able to do that, our platform is the way to do that. But that's the only way you can actually, not only survive what's going on, but also thrive in this environment. >> Now that's because you have a converged platform, and the time is right, I hear Zerto executives saying the time is right for convergence, why is that? >> It's when you see the market, look today at any player in the back of the R-space website, all say the same thing. Why are all, everybody's saying the same thing. Everybody's saying the same thing, because everybody's trying to sell the same thing. Everybody's trying to set all of these business cases okay. And some don't fully converge, or they do it doesn't matter, the fact of the matter is, from a customer perspective, if you look at any vendor today in this space, all of them are trying to provide all of these services. So that's where we see, hey, this is what's happening. And the customers are also telling us, guys, we are using, we just heard it on stage now, we are using Zerto instead of our backup. Why? Because in the short-term retention you're giving us a much better solution. So we see from the customers that they're saying hey, I want less systems, I want one place where I go, and I can mobilize, I can protect, I can recover, I have compliance, I have ransomware protection, all of that in one place, so the market is really telling us convergence is happening right there. And that's where I kind of like, we believe we have the best DNA in the base for technology to provide that converged solution, because eventually it's about the atomic engine of how are you doing your protection, and I think we have the best avenue there. But if you look at, everybody's the same, talking the convergence game. >> Well so where is backup going long-term, does eventually does backup disappear, or does everything become continuous? >> Not in a million years, literally, okay no pun intended. Because everybody, the legal holds, the compliance >> Paul: Retention schedules. >> The act of backing up your data, your application, that's not going away, that's going to stay. We believe that there is a shift that needs to take place in the market that we're leading is, what do I, what does short-term backup mean, okay. 'Cause short-term backup is really, kind of like the same thing today as recovering from once more, it's the same thing as mobilizing an application. And that needs to be continuous, and then you need one platform that can also take care of your long-term, you know months years, depending on what industry you're in, regulated backups. I just talked to a large customer of ours last night, in our break party, he said, hey I'm doing 14 days, and I don't care about anything after that. I'm in an unregulated industry, and I do what's good for my business, and for my business, 14 days is good. I don't really need anything, I sometime have some more copies later, but that's it. So the actual uses of backup depends on the industry. But it's not going away, there's no question that the use case of backup is staying, we think that the way technology, the technology that drives that should change. >> As we're talking today, we 're two days out from the implementation of GDPR in the European Union, does this have an impact on your business? >> Oh a major impact, first of all, we're a company, number one, I don't know if you know but, >> International company. >> Yes, and we work globally, we have offices and places in Europe, and customers in Europe, and operations in Europe, so all of that. We're marketing, you know our marketing guy, we're marketing in Europe. We actually had a session here in the conference, a joint session by our corporate council, and some customers talking about the GDPR, because it's actually a joint project in Zerto, from all sides, to say okay, what do we do with the GDPR. So us as a company, that's number one. Second thing is for our customers. There's a number of things, that you know, for example, take a look at knowing where your data is. Which is part of GDPR, we had helped by identifying exactly where is your data, where is your back up data, where is your application data, et cetera. There's lots of kind of like, we believe there's going to be more and less compliance kind of like related things that we converge for GDPR, but also you know there's like the rights to be forgotten, what does that mean about backups. Do I need to now go open all my backups >> Paul: Still open. >> So if you can see, and again, not me but we have people that go down, for example, the right to be forgotten is one of the less stronger rights. Because I think even the regulator understood, it's a bit hard to forget someone from you know, do I need to open my backup from like five years, and delete something, that's going to be a huge cost. So there's definitely going to be implications, and I think time will tell where this is going, in terms of like what are the bigger implications. >> No shortage of agendas for Zerto going forward, that's for sure. >> Gil: Oh no shortage, no. >> Gil Levonai thank you very much for joining us, Chief Marketing Officer at Zerto. >> Thank you very very much, >> We will be right back, I'm Paul Gillin, this is theCUBE. >> Gil: Thank you very much. (upbeat music)