>>from around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public sector. >>Right. Hello and welcome to the Cube. Virtual our coverage of aws reinvent 2020 with special coverage of the public sector experience. This is the day when we go through all the great conversations around public sector in context to reinvent great guest will for Justin, head of A W s ai and machine learning enablement and partnership with AWS Wilfred. Thanks for joining us. >>Thanks, John. Thanks for having me on. I'm pretty excited to be part of this cube interview. >>Well, I wish we could be in person, but with the pandemic, we gotta do the remote. But I want to get into some of the things you're working on. The A I m l Rapid Adoption Assistance Initiative eyes a big story. What is? What is it described what it is. >>So we launched this artificial intelligence slash machine learning rapid adoption assistance for all public sector partners who are part of the AP in network in September 2020. Onda. We launched this in response to the president's Executive water called the American Year Initiative. So the rapid adoption assistant what it provides us. It provides a direct scalable on automated mechanism for all the public sector partners to reach out to AWS experts within our team for assistance in building and deploying machine learning workloads on behalf of the agencies. So for all all the partners who are part off, this rapid adoption assistance will go through a journey with AWS with my team and they will go through three different faces. The first face will be the envisioning face. The second phase would be the enablement face on the third would be the bill face, as you know, in the envisioning face will dive deeply The use case, the problem that they're trying to solve. This is where we will talk about the algorithms and framework on. We will solidify the architecture er on validate the architecture er on following that will be an enablement face where we engage with the partners trained their technical team, meaning that it will be a hands on approach hands on on keyboard kind of approach where we trained them on machine learning stack On the third phase would be the bill face on the partners leverage the knowledge that they have gained through the enablement and envisioning face, and they start building on rolling out workloads on behalf of the agencies. So we will stay with them throughout the journey on We will doom or any kind of blockers be technical or business, so that's a quick overview off a more rapid adoption assistance program. >>It's funny talking to Swami over the years and watching every year at reinvent the A I. M L Portfolio. Dr Matt Wood is always doing something new. This year is no exception. Even Mawr Machine Learning and AI in the In the News on this rapid adoption assistant initiative sounds like it's an accelerant. Um, so I get all that, But I want to ask you, what problem does it solve for the customer? Or Amazon is because there's demand. There's too much demand. People wanna go faster. What problem does this initiative this rapid adoption of a I machine learning initiative solved? >>So as you know, John, artificial intelligence and related technologies like deep learning and machine learning can literally transform the way agencies operate. They can enable them to provide better services, quicker services and more secure services to the citizens of this country. And that's the reason the president released an executive water called American Initiative on it drives all the government agencies, specifically federal agencies, to promote artificial intelligence to protect and improve the security and economy of the nation. So if you think about it, the best way to achieve the goal is to enable the partners toe build workloads on behalf of agencies, because when it comes to public sector, most of the workloads are delivered by partners. So the problem that we face based on our interaction with the partners is that though the partners have been building a lot off applications with AWS for more than a decade, when it comes to artificial intelligence, they have very limited resources when it comes to deep learning and machine learning, right, like speech recognition, cognitive computing, national language frosting. So we wanted exactly address that. And that's the problem you're trying to solve by launching this rapid adoption assistance, which is nothing but a dry direct mechanism for partners to reach our creative, these experts to help them to build those kind of solutions for the government. >>You know, it's interesting because AI and machine learning it's a secret sauce for workload, especially modern workloads. You mentioned agencies and also public sector. You know, we've seen Certainly there's been pandemic a ton of focus on moving faster, right? So getting those APS out quickly ai drives a lot of that, so totally get it. Um, I think it's an accelerant great program. It just makes a lot of sense. And I know you guys have been going in tow by vertical and kind of having stage making all these other tools kind of be specialized within those verticals. So it makes a ton of sense. I get it, and it is a great, great initiative and solve the problem. The question I have is who gets access to this, right? Is it just agencies you mentioned? Is it all public sector? Could you just clarify who can apply to this program? >>Yes, it is a partner focused program. So all the existing partners, though it is going to affect the end agencies, were trying to help the agency's through the partners. So all the existing AP in partners who are part of the PSP program, we call it the public sector partner program can apply for this rapid adoption assistance. So you have been following John, you have been following AWS and AWS partners on a lot of partners have different kind of expertise on they. They show that by achieving a lot of competencies, right, it could be technical competencies like big data storage and security. Or it could be domain specific competencies like public safety education on government competency. But for a playing this program, the partners don't need to have any kind of competency, and all they have to have is they have to be part of the Amazon Partner Network on they have to be part of the public sector partner program. That is number one Second. It is open toe all partners, meaning that it is open toe. Both technology partners, as well as consulting partners Number three are playing is pretty simple, John, right? You can quickly search for a I M or rapid adoption assistance on a little pop up a page on a P network, the partners have to go on Phil pretty basic information about the workload, the problem that they're trying to solve the machine learning services that they're planning to use on a couple of other information, like contact information, and then our team reaches out to the partner on help them with the journey. >>So real. No other requirements are prerequisites. Just part of the partner program. >>Absolutely. It is meant for partners. And all you have to do is you have to be a part off 18 network, and you have to be a public sector apartment. >>Public sector partner makes sense. I mean, how you're gonna handle the demand. I'm sure the it's gonna be a tsunami of interest, because, I mean, why wouldn't someone take advantage of this? >>Yep. It is open to all kinds of partners because they have some kind of prerequisites, right? So that's what I'm trying to explain. It is open to all partners, but we have since it is open to existing partners, we kind of expect the partners toe understand the best practices off deploying a machine, learning workloads, or for that case, any kind of workload which should be scalable, land secure and resilient. So we're not going to touch? Yeah, >>Well, I wanna ask you what's what's the response been on this launch? Because, you know, I mean to me, it just makes it's just common sense. Why wouldn't someone take advantage of it? E. Whether responses partner or you have domain expertise or in a vertical just makes a lot of sense. You get access to the experts. >>The response has been great. As I said, the once you apply the journey takes six weeks, but already we just launched it. Probably close toe. Two months back in September 2nd week of September, it is almost, uh, almost two months, and we have more than 15 partners as part of this program on dykan name couple of partners say, for example, we worked with delight on We Are. We will be working on number of work clothes for the Indy agencies through delight. And there are other couple of number of other partners were making significant progress using this rapid adoption assistance that includes after associates attained ardent emcee on infinitive. So to answer your question, the response has been great so far. >>So what's the I So I gotta ask, you know, one of things I thought that Teresa Carlson about all the time in Sandy Carter is, you know, trying to get the accelerant get whether it's Fed ramp and getting certifications. I mean, you guys have done a great job of getting partners on board. Is there any kind of paperwork? What's the process? What should a partner expect to take advantage of that? I'm sure they'll be interest beyond just the launch. What's what's involved? What zit Web bases it check a form? Is that a lot of hoops to jump through? Explain what? What? The process >>is. Very interesting question. And it probably is a very important question from a part of perspective, right? So since it is offered for a peon partners, absolutely, they should have already gone through the AP in terms and conditions they should have. Already, a customer agreement or advanced partners might have enterprise agreement. So for utilizing this for leveraging this rapid adoption assistance program, absolutely. There's no paperwork involved. All they have to do is log into the Web form, fill up the basic information. It comes to us way, take it from there. So there is no hard requirements as long as you're part of the AP network. And as long as you're part of the PSP program, >>well, for great insight, congratulations on a great program. I think it's gonna be a smash hit. Who wouldn't wanna take? I know you guys a lot of goodness there with Amazon Cloud higher level services with a I machine learning people could bring it into the table. I know from a cybersecurity standpoint to just education the range of, um, workloads is gonna be phenomenal. Obviously military as well. Eso totally cool. Love it. Congratulations. Like my final question is, um, one about the partner. So I'm a partner. I like this. Say I'm a partner. I jump in Easy to get in. Walk me through What happens? I mean, I signed some paperwork. You check the boxes, I get involved, I get, like, a rep. Do I do things? Do I? What happens to me? Walk me down the path of execution. What's expectation of what will happen? >>I'll explain that in two parts, John. Right? One is from a partner journey perspective and then from AWS perspective. What? What we expect out off partners, right? So, from a experience perspective, as long as they fill out, fill out the web form on, fill out the basic information about the project that they're trying to work. It comes to us. The workflow is automated. All the information is captured on the information comes to my team on. We get back to the partners within three days, but the journey itself can take from 6 to 8 weeks because, as I mentioned during the envisioning case, we try to map the problem to the solution. But the enablement phases the second phase is where it can take anywhere from 2 to 3 weeks because, as I mentioned, we focused on the three layers of the machine learning stack for certain kind of partners. They might be interested in sage maker because they might want to build a custom machine learning model. But for some of the partners, they want the argument that existing applications using S. R or NLP or nL you so we can focus on the high level services. Or we can train them on stage makers so it can take anywhere between 2 to 3 weeks or 3 to 4 weeks. And finally, the build phase varies from partner to partner on the complexity of the work. Lord at that point were still involved with a partner, but the partner will be taking the lead on will be with them to remove any kid of Glaucus being technical or, uh, business couple of Yeah, well, I just >>want to say the word enablement in your title kind of speaks volumes. This isn't about enabling customers. >>It is all about enabling the in customers through partners. So we focus on enabling partners. They could be business big system integrators like Lockheed's or Raytheon's or Delight. Or it could be nimble in small partners. Or it could be a technology partner building an entire pass or SAS service on behalf of the government agencies. Right or that could help the comment agencies in different verticals. So we just enabled the in the agency's through the partners. And the focus of this program is all about partner enablement. >>Well, for just ahead of a does a i machine learning enablement in partnership, part of public sector with a W. S. This is our special coverage. Well, for thanks for coming on being a cube virtual guest. I wish we could be in person, but this year it's remote. This is the cube virtual. I'm John for a year. Host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thanks a lot, John.

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this cube conversation Michael Gray is here is the chief technology officer of Boston based thrive Michael good to see you coming on glad to be here so tell us about thrive what do you guys all about you know thrive started almost 20 years ago as a traditional managed service provider but really in the past four to five years transformed into a next generation managed service provider primarily now we're focusing on cybersecurity cloud hosting and public cloud hosting as well as disaster recovery so dig into that next generation yeah people use that term but what does it mean well the needs of our customers really changed over time before you could maybe simply roll out some antivirus and do some desktop management some server management but with the way some of the innovation is exploded in the cloud and the way application development has changed all of our businesses we've noticed that our customers have all kinds of new needs that includes much higher focus on cybersecurity these things can't be an after afterthought the other things with all the data that we see coming from our customers they may need a much higher level of performance than they ever did before from their their local hosting or or in the cloud so what Amazon Web Services came out you know 2006 timeframe every set up ms P's like drive they're in big trouble the exact opposite is happening for your business yeah yeah yeah you know why is that number one and number two how do you compete with the big cloud providers you know somebody like Amazon or even Azure those services are not easy to roll out you still need someone to understand what the businesses are and then translate those into technology solutions for us when someone starts asking how do I transform my business whether it be in the public cloud or the private cloud that's a tremendous opportunity to bring our knowledge and all of our engineering support to those customers to help them transform so I mean I I liken it to you know I could hire a plumber I could hire an electrician I could hire but I don't want to be the general contractor I'm happily happy to pay an expert at that who's got contacts deep expertise and and push the responsibility on them is that a fair analogy yeah I do think it is fair you know obviously it's a it's a much more technical environment than something like that so it's much more complicated you know the other thing is when we start to understand some of these business problems and pull the pieces apart we have a tremendous amount of expertise and experience where we can help those customers understand how to solve those business problems how to implement the technology and then how to be successful in whatever way they're trying to transform their business so you sort of touched on some of the trends in your business did talk more about your customers it's my understanding is it's mostly small and mid-sized customers is that correct you know there's far more mid-market than there ever were before I think people in the mid market are realizing that they do need to take some of these services outside their walls I notice a lot of mid-market customers that are focusing on their core business if you're a manufacturing company a biotech financial services company you can realize very quickly that you're not in the cloud hosting business and no matter how many people they hire grow your staff can be very difficult to actually be successful in these technologies despite all the different pieces that Amazon or Azure offers in the public cloud you still have to figure out how these systems work and how they apply to your business well to midsize companies and especially small companies they obviously aren't the resources that a large company has so you bring a lot of that infrastructure expertise along yeah and I think part of it is you know we have such a big exposure to a very large customer base so a problem that a customer may see that they think is maybe perhaps special to them we've solved that problem maybe hundreds of times and we can give them a lot of insight into how other companies of similar verticals have solved those problems you start out as sort of a local MSP and that have expanded over time yeah that's correct so we've expanded pretty rapidly over the past three to four years now we're we have five offices primarily in the East Coast and really started to help the mid-market who's now started to understand that they need to frankly outsource some of these solutions or get in business with a partner like us who can help them take those outside their walls and provide them a much higher level of service often at the end of the day the investments much lower for the customer so paint a picture of your your infrastructure what that look like yep so we have a data centers you know I have three primary data centers in New England the New Jersey New York area and then in the south all those data centers actually have infinite at storage which is you know something that I'm a huge fan of and one of the things that I like to offer in all of our data centers is I don't necessarily it doesn't matter to me geographically where the customer would like their workloads that's one of the things that the public cloud offers you can move resources around geographically depending maybe where your headquarters is or some of your branch offices we provide the same solutions at often a much higher performance level and we've extracted all the complications of where to put these so if a customer is in San Francisco and they'd like to dr2 New England not an issue but all of a sudden if they change their headquarters or maybe they do an acquisition and they need to change that footprint I can change that on the fly for them so and I've walked through many data centers of MSPs over the years yeah and ten years ago yeah you had one of everything yeah yeah compact server yeah yeah yes so I would imagine you had similar challenges you mentioned Infini debt yeah trying to essentially run your entire storage yeah yeah so we've um we've acquired several other MSPs over the past several years we had a lot of disparate storage platforms a lot of investments made some of them hung on to maybe for too long some of them you know were purchased for a specific business reason that might not be there anymore at this point we've standardized on Infini debt it's enabled our business to do a lot of new and innovative services so high performance storage replication similar to what you'd see in the public cloud but also we can support very complicated very data hungry clothes so you're sexually replacing so older storage systems with infinite at maybe you can describe the before and after you know frankly with with acquiring a lot of msps you name a storage platform we had it at some point through this standardization the the beauty of it is a consolidation so I can leverage the folks that manage our infinite at across the country all right so my TCO on something like this is is is really kind of amazing I can leverage a lot of experience with the defender that when I go in and need to do a data center consolidation I have some things that are knowns there's a lot of unknowns and acquisitions and all the due diligence in the world there's still going to be things that maybe not every detail has been figured out but when I roll out an infinite at I know I've solved one very foundational problem right out of the gate so and I want to come back on the TCO but before I do when I talk to people like you and I'm not a CTO but a lot of times I infer that people are comparing the the latest and greatest in this case infinite at yeah with what they had that's five six seven years old sure of course the TCO is the share that okay so I'm a push a little bit is is I presume you looked at infinite ad and other storage suppliers and I'm interested in what you found in those comparisons is it is it is it just great TCO relative to what you had that was five years old or is it real after the other yeah yeah so you know when it comes right down to it I've seen every marketing pitch for a storage platform you can possibly imagine I've seen every bullet list of features I've seen every we have proprietary technology that does X&Y you know eventually when you put it on the floor it's not everything that was in the sales process maybe there's something that was uncovered on a licensing side maybe the performance wasn't quite what someone said it would be the thing about infinite at is they've delivered on everything they've said in the sales process and you don't find that very often the other thing I need to mention too is that even post sale the discussion about the technology continues it's always a discussion about how the technology is built and how it enables you it's not we have a new feature coming on the roadmap that is gonna solve X&Y problem they've worked out the very foundational problems you know the other thing I do want to mention about Infini debt is being such a strong engineering company I know the best an engineer I can rely on them to make good engineering decisions so I want to ask you about performance because when I first saw infinite out you know we were on the on the flash bandwagon we got early on that yeah and these guys came in and said actually we can beat flash performance using our architecture and software and so forth yeah be like really so I'll ask you yeah have you found that from a performance standpoint so I have and you know I run into a lot of situations where there's technology leaders that are maybe buying into a specific brand name you know if we put X technology in I know for a fact that it's gonna beat the performance of an infinite at my approach with that is I have seen all the platforms and I agree there's a lot of great products out there high performance sit down and take a look at the way the technology has been built and have an open mind and you'll most likely be convinced that that technology is the right answer a lot of times I like to sit back and and say look I'm not gonna push any vendor any software partner any manufacturer on you take a step back and have an open mind of technology it'll make a big difference when you actually listen well I'm sure you've heard the sales pitches are you using those slow spinning business mic spinning discs or mechanical yeah yeah yeah yeah your experience has been and we've had Brian Carmody on yep yes of others yeah so then we have Moshe come in here yes Blaine that's sure and so but I always like to talk to the customer and get the affirmation yes yeah well again to me the the conversation with infinitive is always about engineering you know it's not a great deal of marketing first of course everybody does marketing that happens on a regular you have to do that to run a business but if you want to talk purely about how things have been designed that conversation often eclipses a lot of other marketing from other storage vendors so talk about your your how you spend your time yeah it's acting you know infrastructure roadmaps and so forth to get more sort of I got to get this stuff up and running today describe yeah you know we've set a path to build a very high performance nationwide cloud we are going up against the public cloud by the way I'm a public cloud partner right I do both we do hybrid hosting I want to give the customer the best of both worlds which may be a cliche but we really are aiming to get there that's one of my primary tasks is establishing a technology vision you know I can describe to a customer where our cloud is going and I can stand behind that with the public cloud we do have to Lou a little bit of reading the tea leaves so I I help people with trying to understand what you know maybe the public cloud vision might be but also how I fit together with that that public cloud with private cloud hosting and the other thing primary goal of mine is bringing in some of these different functions of IT so for instance high-performance cloud private cloud Plus cyber security I can bring those two together for you in a cohesive solution that that's what I spend a lot of my time so as you look out you know put on your your your binoculars maybe even your telescope big trend in one of the big trends is hyper-converged in bringing in storage compute and networking all together yep if I'm inferring correctly you're going for more of a Best of Breed approach yet and yet in you guys have the engineering expertise you have to do that can you can you talk about the philosophy there sure sure well one of the things that I like to do is just abstract some of these confusing and complicated conversations from our customers you know if we're gonna talk about SD win and make sure I have SD weigh in in my data center I can tell the customer I can give you that functionality and you don't have to worry about how these different pieces go together I'm happy to be transparent you know there's a lot of things in the public cloud that simply information you can't get I'm actually willing to share how those solutions that I built go together because I want people to see that transparent I want them to trust us so you know when when we go and start putting these together these are things where when the customer does have a question they want to drill in because they have concerns I can eliminate those very quickly you talking about private cloud earlier I want to come back to share and just so we always say on the cube bring the cloud experience to your data wherever it lives yeah it's all about that operating mom yep yeah so as you see tool chains like kubernetes yep yeah a cloud native stuff yeah come in you want to have that cloud experience you want to have yourselves a fantasy pass that on yep do you have customers yeah how do you look at that yeah what role does storage infrastructure playing to me and this is something that's primary to thrive focuses application enablement we're an application enablement company so if your application is best run in Azure and then we want to put it there a lot of times we'll find that just due to business problems or legacy technologies we have to build private clouds or even for security reasons we want to build private cloud or purely just because we're running into a lot of public cloud refugees you know they didn't realize a lot of the maybe incidental fees along the way actually climbed up to be a fairly big budget number so you know we want to really look at people's applications and enable them to be highly high-performance but also highly secure I want to come back to the TCO I said oh yeah sure when you do the total cost of ownership analysis yeah what you find is it really boils down to the to the labor yeah piece of yep and see I'm curious as to when you brought in Infini debt yeah what the business impact was you know economically yeah no there's other non TCO thing yeah more so was it the labor cost that got reduced did you redeploy those resources well actually Hardware first and foremost and you know this is going back many years but and and I think I would say this is true for any datacenter cloud provider the minute the phone rings and someone says my storage is slow we're losing money okay because we've had to pick up the if someone needs to address that we have eliminated all storage performance helpdesk issues it's now one thing I don't need to think about anymore we have we know that we can rely on our performance and we know we don't need to worry about that on a day to day basis and that is not in question now the other thing is really as we started to expand our infinite at footprint geographically we suddenly started to realize not only do we have this great foundation built but we can the leverage and invest when we made to do things that we couldn't do before maybe we could do them but they required another piece of technology maybe we could do them or they required some more licensing something like that but really when we started the standardization we did it for operational efficiency reasons and then suddenly realize that we had other opportunities here and I have to hand it to infinity they're actually the ones that helped us craft this story not only is this just a solid foundation but it's something you can build on top of so talk about the performance I want to ask you yeah I've had certainly Brian Carmody Craig Hobart and I have sat down and Craig actually made the statement you know the only bottleneck really is when the the system gets filled yeah you just dive in the architecture has that been your experience if this so reduced or eliminated traditional storage bottlenecks oh absolutely and you know I mentioned before that this is sort of formance is now becoming afterthought to me you know and a little bit the way we look at our storage platform is weet from a performance standpoint not a capacity standpoint we can throw whatever we want at the infinite at and sort of the running joke internally is it will just smile and say is that all you got you mean like mixed workload so you don't have to sort of tune each array for a particular workload yeah yeah and you know I can imagine as someone that might be listening to what I'm saying well hey come on you know they can't really be that good and I'm I'm telling you from seeing a day-to-day again you can just throw the workloads at it and it will do what it says it does you don't see that every day now as far as capacity goes you know they there's capacity on demand model which you know we're a huge fan of they also have some other models the flex model which is very useful for budgeting purposes what I will tell you is you have to sacrifice at least one floor tile for an affinity it's very off-putting at first on day one and I remember my reaction but again as I saying earlier when you start peeling back two pieces of the technology and why these things are and the different flexibility on the financial side you realize that this actually isn't a downside it's an upside so the asset leverage of that floor tile as well exactly also make a big deal about a petabyte yes Gail is it important to you or what kind of scale are we talking about in terms of if you can share yeah absolutely so you know we obviously have multiple petabytes of storage for thrive for our customers again you know when someone has a large data set if we were to say we cannot handle that we're gonna be out of business pretty quickly this is one of the things the infinite flexibility of the public cloud again if you consider the public cloud both our competition and our partner you know we need to be able to offer that same kind of electricity in that same kind of endless capacity and at this point although I don't have completely unless capacity I have a tremendous amount of options I have workloads I can move different places and again a lot of times now it's more about performance than it is capacity oh you gotta give me something okay something that you wanna that should be doing to make your life better yeah I mean I gotta tell you it solves so many problems that is actually hard to come up with and again I'm smiling here because I've been down this road with those storage providers I've been let down by other storage writers I guess the son degree I maybe I'm waiting for them to let me down but I don't think they're going to that's a really interesting part I think that I'm you know the new trees cloud which is something that's been added over time you know a public cloud interaction is something that is desperately needed in the storage space so I'm interested to see how that product grows if I'm gonna give you something you know but again these are enablement platforms these aren't you know we need to do a feature comparison between a cloud and a public cloud and a private cloud last question some gifts are stuff you're working on yes II always like the SCT oh is that question yeah you know one of the the really interesting things to me is that we're finally getting there with anomaly detection not only you know just pure we found one event that that went out somewhere that doesn't make sense but we're profiling user behavior now AI and machine learning has been one of the big items that we've been promised for years but a lot of times it was just a tag line I think a lot of things that are happening in the public cloud computing space around profiling users and being able to reduce the amount of noise in the security space I think we're finally here and I think you know in the next 12 to 18 months AI isn't gonna become a cool feature said it's going to become a standard of a lot of security products so applying machine intelligence to a lot of the data that you have a lot of metadata yeah infrastructure metadata yeah yeah and you know even if you take for instance you know I'll pull it back to our storage conversation earlier if there's a storage activity is some sort of activity that's outside the norm that actually could be a security incident itself so you know pulling in data feeds is something that we've conquered its what are you gonna do with it now and we needed some humans to be able to pull that off before I think AI and machine learning is finally at the point where it's not out of reach for your average customer it doesn't take someone with a data analytics degree or something like that we can now buy these kind of products off the shelf and and leverage them for a lot of value oh Michael you've been a great guest thanks so much if you're welcome back anytime all right happy to be here all right and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante in the cube we'll see you next time

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Ciscolive! Europe brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our first day of three days of coverage for Cisco live for Europe. Lynn Lucas is here, she's the chief marketing officer for Cohesity. Lynn, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you here in Europe. >> We were just saying it's the first time that we've done this on the continent so, another first. >> Yeah, another first. >> So pleased to be in the US with you guys at multiple shows, and now we're here in Barcelona. >> So it's a great venue. >> We've actually done you know, a number of shows here and again, it's a pleasure having you on. Let's see, let's get right to it. What's going on with you guys in Cisco? You got some news? Let's talk about it. >> Absolutely. >> As you know, we don't stop innovating, continuous innovation at Cohesity, and a number of new things. So, last week we announced a new Cisco validated design with HyperFlex, and Cohesity integrating for Snapshot. Integration for backup, and of course, instant recovery of that critical data center infrastructure and we're calling it HyperSquared. So you get full hyperconvergence for your primary and of course, your backup and other secondary applications. >> And those guys this morning talked about HyperFlex anywhere Stu so, it's like infinitive hype and infinity HyperFlex. >> HyperSquared. >> So, HyperSquared, love it. So you guys will, how's that work? Obviously you want to be the provider of data protection provider for multi-cloud. That's a huge opportunity for you guys. >> Absolutely. >> So how do you do that? You'll plug into whatever framework the customer wants, presumably a lot of customers want the Cisco framework, how does that all- >> No, absolutely, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, Cisco, obviously one of the most respected IT leaders in the world. Tens of thousands of customers globally depend on them. I'm a Cisco Alum, love being back here at the old stomping grounds. And Cisco's been an investor in Cohesity now since our Series C, so they really saw the promise and the benefit of what Cohesity offers with hyperconverge solutions for modern backup, recovery, and two year point to the cloud. You know Cisco's talking a lot about multi-cloud here and Cohesity with our native cloud integration helps customers protect those backups on, or those applications on HyperFlex. And then instantly move them to a cloud of choice and then as you've mentioned, Cisco has so many fantastic relationships that they're a very strong go to market partner with us. When customers want to buy a solution, they can get the whole solution from Cisco, including Cohesity. >> Yeah Lynn, glad we have you on. >> Because connecting the dots between something like hyperconverge, which we've been talking about for a number of years now and how that fits into multi-cloud is, it's a little clunky sometimes because like, when I've got my data center am I just doing backup to the cloud? Cause what we know is customers at Cisco says their data is, you know, kind of de-centered. It's no longer in the data center, it's all over the place. Companies like Cohesity can give you that centralized data protection no matter where your environment is. Walk us through what you're hearing from your customers, how they look at their data center versus the multicloud environment and data production. >> Yeah so, I think it's you know, customers are now understanding that its not either or, right? There was a time when people thought "wow I'm going to move everything to the cloud" and I really think there's a maturing of an understanding of what's going to work well for me in this cloud first world, what do I want to put there and then what am I going to keep on premises. So that's one of the things that Cohesity innovated; our core technology, a distributed webscale file system, spanning file system which spans the data center and the cloud world seamlessly. And what we're seeing is customers are really using the cloud for archiving, getting off of tape because then they get that search capability very easy when they need to. Tiering and then most importantly, disaster recovery you know, in the event of something man made or natural. Many many organizations moving to the cloud for their second site and with Cohesity, it's very easy to make that transfer happen in a very seamless way with our capabilities set. So I think what we're seeing is this real maturing of how customers look at it as a real holistic environment. And so Cisco calling it data centered, but we call this mass data fragmentation and then with our spanning file system being able to really consolidate that now. >> Yeah, another thing that needs that kind of holistic view is security. >> I know its something that's in your product, there was a ransomware announcement that you made last week. Tell us how security fits into this world. >> Yeah well I think that we all hate to say it, but that old phrase the new normal, unfortunately ransomware and malware has become the new normal for organizations of all sizes. Here in Europe we had that awful situation with the NHS and the UK last year, and it's happening everywhere. So one element that these attackers are taking is looking at how to disable backups. And so this is really important that as a part of a holistic security strategy, that organizations take a look at that attack vector. So what Cohesity has introduced is really unique. It's three steps. It's detect, prevent, and then recover. So detect in terms of capabilities to see if there are nefarious changes being happened to the file system right? And then prevent with Helios automatically detecting and with our smart assistant providing that notification. And then if need be, recover with our instant mass restore capability going back to any point in time with no performance issue. This is not taking time for the rehydration, the spanning file system doing this instantly, and allowing an organization to basically say "sorry, not today attackers", we don't need to pay you because we can instantly restore back to a safe point in time. >> So let's unpack those a little bit if we could. The detect piece, I presume there's an analytics component to that? You're observing the behavior of the backup corpus, is that right? Which is a logical place because it's got all the corporate data in there. >> That's correct. >> So, last year we introduced Helios, which is our global sass space management system. It has machine learning capability in it. And that's providing that machine learning based monitoring to see what kinds of anomalies may be happening that is then proactively alerted to the IT team. >> And then the recovery piece as well like you said, its got to be fast. You got to have high performance, high performance data movement, and that's fundamental to your file system is that what I'm hearing or the architecture? >> That's correct. >> That's one of the differences of our modern backup. Solution versus some of the non-hyperconverge architectures is the distributed web file system which our CEO, Mohit Aron, he was formerly at Google, helped with developing their file system, has what's called instant ability to go back into any point in time and recover not just one VM. At Vmware a couple years ago we demonstrated thousands of VMs at a time and the reason for that is this web scale file system, which is really unique to Cohesity. And that's what allows an IT organization to not be held hostage because they can not have to potentially spend not just hours, but even days with the old legacy systems trying to rehydrate, you know, these backups. If they have to go back potentially many months in time because you don't know that that ransomware may have been introduced not say yesterday, but it might have been several months ago. And that's one of the key advantages of this instant mass restore. >> I mean, this is super important right Stu? Cause we're talking about very granular levels of being able to dial up, dial down, you can tune it by application. A high value application, you can have much greater granularity. Some of the craplications, maybe not as important. So the flexibility is key there. How about customers? Any new customers that you can talk about? >> Absolutely. >> So one of the ones since we're here at Ciscolive! So Cisco along with Cohesity, we've been working with one of the largest global manufactures of semiconductors and other electronic equipment. Tokyo Electron based in Tokyo, but also here in the UK on the continent. They had one of those older backup solutions and were challenged with the time it was taking them to backup, the restores not being predictable. So they've gone with Cohesity, running on Cisco UCS because we're a software defined platform. We offer our software on our customers choice of certified solutions and of Cisco UCS. So they've started with backup but they're now moving very quickly into archiving to the cloud, helping reduce their costs and get off of tape, and to disaster recovery ultimately. So, super excited that together with Cisco, we can help this customer modernize their data center and accelerate their hybrid cloud strategy at the same time. >> Awesome. And then you guys are also protecting the Cisco live network here? Tell us about that. >> Yeah so you know, Cisco builds an amazing network here I mean, you've seen the operation center, a huge team of people. But as we all know, things can go wrong potentially. And so, we are protecting the critical services that Cisco's providing to all of the Ciscolive! Attendees here so should something happen, which I'm sure won't, Cohesity will be used to instantly recover and bring back up critical services like DNS and other areas that they're depending on to serve all of the thousands of show goers here. >> So, super hot space, we talked about this at VMworld. Actually last couple of years just how much activity and interest there is and the whole parlance is changing and I wonder if you could comment. It used to be backup when the world was tape. Now you're talking about data protection, data management, which could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To us storage folks its pretty specific but you're seeing a massive evolution of the space, cloud clearly is the underpinning of the tailwind, and it requires you guys to respond as an industry. And Cohesity specifically as a company. So I wonder if you could talk about some of those major trends and how you guys are responding and how you're leading. >> Yeah. Yeah I think, you know, folks have been a little bit surprised like wait a minute, what's this kind of sleepy industry? Why is it getting all this funding? I mean our own Series D funding, middle of last year 250 million dollars, Softbank banked along with Sequoia of course. But really the trend is being talked about here at Ciscolive! Is data is, I don't want to say the new oil, but its the water of the world right? I mean, it's absolutely crucial to any business these days. Other than your talent, it's your most important business asset and the pressure on the board and the CEO and the CIO in turn to be agile, to do more with that data, to know what you have, because here we are in Europe, GDPR increasing regulations, is super important. And so, you know, this has really brought forth the need to create holistic ways to organize and manage and have visibility to all of that data. And it's massively fragmented. We put out that research last year, massive data fragmentation, and most of that data has been kind of under the water line in most peoples minds, you know. You think about your primary applications in data that's really only 20% and the other 80% in testev and analytics and backup, has been pretty fragmented and siloed and it hasn't yet had that vision of how can we consolidate that and move it into a modern space until folks like Mohit Aron you know, founded Cohesity and applied those same hyperconverge techniques that he did at Nutanix. So I think this investment just further validates the fact that data is the most important business asset and people are really in need of new solutions to manage it, protect it, and then ultimately do more with it. Gain insights out of it. >> You know, just a couple comments on that. >> One is you know, we always joke about data is the new oil, its even more valuable because you can use data in multiple places, you can only put oil in your car once. And so, companies are beginning to realize that. How valuable it is, trying to understand that value, how to protect that, and then GDPR. It's interesting, its really the fines went into effect in Europe last May. But its become a template, a framework globally. People, you know, US companies are saying alright we got to prepare for GDPR, and then local jurisdictions are now saying well that's a decent starting point. And so its not just confined to Europe. It's really on everybody's mind. >> It is. >> You brought up the cloud before, and you know the cloud is a new way for people to be agile and they're getting a lot of value out of it. But it also continues to fragment their data and the visibility in talking to a large CIO of Fortune 100, a large organization, he actually has less visibility in many ways in the cloud because of the ease of proliferation of testev, and that is creating more stress I would say in the system, and need for solutions to both provide and enhance that agility, move data to the cloud easily, move it out when you need to, but also with regulation be able to identify and delete as you know, with GDPR if needed, the information that your customer may ask you to remove from your systems. >> Yeah well, I love this conversation. >> I love following Cohesity because you guys are up leveling the entire game. I've been following the data protection space for decades now and the problem with data protection is there's always been a bolt on. And companies like Cohesity, both with the funding, your vision, you're really forcing the industry to kind of rethink data protection. Not as a bolt on but as a fundamental component of digital strategies and data strategies. So it's fun watching you guys. Congratulations on all the growth. I know you've got more to go. So thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and its always a pleasure to see you. >> Always a pleasure to be here with you guys. Thanks very much. >> You're very welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante from Ciscolive! Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)