 Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We are here in Palo Alto, California, the CUBE headquarters. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are at Mohit Aaron, founder and CEO of Cohesity, serial entrepreneur, successful, distributed computing, PhD, computer science, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me here. So thanks for coming. You guys have been very successful. You found the company in 2013. Great traction, great success, great technology. What's the vision of Cohesity? Let me first start by describing the problem, and then I'll go on to describing the vision. The problem in a nutshell is what we call mass data fragmentation. It refers to the fact that everything sits in silos, whether it's a data center or whether it's the cloud. All our data sits in silos, in appliances, just spread all across the whole universe. And our vision is to basically consolidate that onto one platform. The easiest way to understand our vision is to look at what a smartphone did in the consumer space. Before the smartphone came, we all used to carry multiple devices, right phone, music player, camera, and so on and so forth. The smartphone came, it put all of those on one platform, gave us a single UI to manage it all, gave us the notion of marketplace from where we could download apps and run on this platform and give us machine learning. Our vision is something very similar for the world of data. In the world, the data is the most valuable resource today in the world, much more so than oil. And yet the infrastructure where we put that data is very fragmented. Let's look at the data center, right? Backups is one silo, probably bought from different vendors. Test and dev is another silo, analytics is another one. Filechairs and object storage is another one. Our vision is to put all of that on one platform, make it very simple, make that platform, span the data center and the cloud, manage it using one UI, bring machine learning concepts to it, and add a marketplace from where people could download apps. You know, the smartphone's a good analogy, I like that, because you had a market where they made devices to make phone calls, and then text messaging was the killer app at the time, but having the computer enabled a whole new class of services, functionality, usability, and capability, and obviously iPhone was a similar moment there. You see the same thing in tech right now with cloud. Cloud has changed again, seen cloud be successful. Scale is a huge thing. So functionality, new kinds of functionality and large scales with cloud computing has proven and apps have come around that. So I got to ask you, you know, backup has been a category that has been dominated, public offerings, data domain, the list is endless of great companies that have built great backup solutions, or AK phones, and I think that's what you're getting at. The phones is the backup. You guys are building new functionality. So I want you to explain the real capabilities that's going to come out of the data, because if you have data being backed up, you're touching the data. So if you built a platform for scale, which seems to you guys have, talk about that product. What is the unique thinking behind it? How did you come to it, and what are some of the examples? Yeah, so let's start one step at a time. So even though it's a platform that can do multiple things, just like the smartphone had to be a great phone to begin with, this is a great backup product to begin with. And once we've solved the backup problem for the customer, then we encourage them to do more on this, maybe do file shares, maybe do object storage, maybe start using the cloud, and so on and so forth. The next thing I want to say is that imagine you want to work on that data. So you've ingested some data using backups, and you want to get some insights from that data. Today what you're forced to do is you probably have to copy that data out into another silo, creating one more fragment, one more copy of the data. Why not move apps to the data, rather than data to the apps? So our whole concept is that take this platform and take whatever app you wanted to run outside of this, just run it on this platform. And thereby you're moving apps to the data, not the data to the apps, moving data is hard, data is big, moving apps is easy. So, and that's what Cohesity is about, and that's the platform, that's the capability of the platform, it's a distributed platform, it lets you run apps close to where the data is. That's the underlying. A lot of people say, I remember going back a couple years now, talking about cloud, everyone's, I want to be like Google, I want to be like Amazon, because they were operating at large scale using open source software, and you were lead engineer on Google file systems, so you know a lot about scale. But a lot of people wanted the scale and functionality of Google, but they wanted the ease of use of Apple. And I heard you mentioned that before we came on. So this is actually an interesting dynamic, but not everyone's like Google, right? But they have now data scaling, similar challenges that Google has once on or another's large scale. Talk about that dynamic, because you're changing the game on what backup did since you're touching the data, you're going to make that more valuable beyond just backing up. And this is the concept of moving apps to the data. Talk about this dynamic of scale functionality and ease of use, because if you're doing all the work with the data, why not extend that out? And this is essentially what you're doing. Can you explain that? Yeah, think about the problems that Google would have if they were dealing with lots and lots of fragments of data, if everything was sitting in a different appliance, with the volume of data that they deal with, they'll just be going nuts, pulling their hair all day long, right? So they built a web scale system that was sort of like a single platform. I was fortunate to be part of some of those technologies like the Google file system. So they built that web scale file system to make it look like, or make all of that look like one platform. And now that it was one platform, they could move the apps to it. And we are basically trying to do something similar to the realm of secondary data and apps. Because we have lots and lots of data here. Today it sits in silos, be they backups or tasks and dev or filers, object storage. We're trying to build one big platform that scales out in a Google-like fashion. Which can be managed very simply using one UI, kind of Apple-like manageability. And with this concept, we become very similar to those hyperscalers and we bring some of the same innovations to people out there. I want to share a comment we were talking about before we came on camera. We were just briefly talking, you said I like to solve one problem at a time and then move on. But what's interesting here, competitive strategy-wise, you're solving the backup problem, but while you got your hands on the data, you're actually going to reimagine the usability of that data. So you're essentially adding value to a basic function backup, putting a platform around it and extending that out, perhaps to come to it. And it's kind of a land grab that's working. This is a unique, it's a different way to think about it, is that right? So I like to say that we like to be masters of one trade at a time, not jack of all trades. And that first trade for us that we want to be masters of is backups. Once we are happy there, then we can go on and focus on maybe filers or object storage and this is how we build the platform. Right, I always say that when you architect a system, you have to think about all this from day one. You can't incrementally add patches and expect the system to grow, right? I sometimes draw an analogy between why Google won the war against Yahoo. I think Google thought of it all as a platform. They thought about all the use cases that they'd be putting on the platform. Yahoo just built something that was good for search, didn't think beyond that. That's why they bought a bunch of NetApps and built their file system. And no one else, there's no system here. And Google built the Google file system and then put YouTube on top and Gmail on top and blah, blah, blah. So ours is the same approach. We've thought about the problem, the problem we want to address, master the fragmentation up front. And our system has been architected to solve that. Even if we start by being masters of backups first, the system has been architected to do way more than that. So it'd be safe to say that cohesity from a software core competency standpoint is distributed computing, core competence, or distributed systems large scale from a computer science standpoint, and then data. So expertise, are those two, is that accurate? Yeah, so distributed computing and distributed file systems, those would be the two core competencies. But then again, depending on like, whether it's backups or it's test and lab, there are competencies within those domains. So I want to get into the product tech. First of all, thanks for responding to that. The product tech is phenomenal. You have a platform that can do multiple things. I want you to talk about SPAN FS and SPAN OS. You have some news, you've got some things, share an overview of what that is and what the new news is. So when you're trying to control and manage lots and lots of data, you better have a distributed file system. So we've built one and we call it SPAN FS. The name comes from the fact that it's supposed to span nodes in the data center. It's supposed to span multiple kinds of storage in the data center. It's supposed to span the data center and your multi-cloud environment, that hence the name SPAN FS. But since we were building it like a platform that's not just there for your data, it also runs apps on top of this platform. The SPAN FS is not enough. It becomes a full-scale OS, if you may want to call it. What's a OS? It has a file system and it has the ability to run apps on the file system and the same ability was built here. Hence the name SPAN OS. So we can store data, but we can also run apps close to that data. And with multi-cloud on the horizon or actually present today, a lot of people use multiple clouds and certainly Salesforce is considered a cloud. You've got Amazon. So essentially there's multiple clouds existing today in the enterprise. The core data at all is what hybrid and these things are going on on premise. It's cloud operations. This becomes an important part of the distributed environments that need to be managed. Talk about the impact of multi-cloud in today's IT world because it's a systems thinking. You got to think about it from day one, which is kind of today. I got on premise, I got multiple clouds out there and some clouds are great depending on the workload. Pick the cloud for the workload. I'm a big believer in that. Your thoughts though on as people try to get their arms around this and make it one environment with a lot of decoupled elements that are highly cohesive. Talk about that dynamic. Yeah, so cloud is a very nice entrant into the infrastructure world. It provides a lot of functionality, but it doesn't quite solve that problem of mass data fragmentation. When you put your data in the cloud, it's still fragmented. And when you're dealing with, often our customers, our big customers are dealing with multiple clouds and the data centers and they have dedicated people trying to move data and applications between them. That's the problem that Cohesity can actually solve very well because we're building a platform that spans all this. All of that becomes underlying infrastructure that we use. And now through us, they can easily move apps, they can easily move data, they can access the data anywhere. That's the value we bring to them. We have a customer here in California that was spending $120,000 per month. It's a new company, sending $120,000 per month on their AWS bill. After they consolidated that stuff through us in the cloud, their bill reduced to $17,000 per month. That's the kind of value we can bring to customers. Well, the Amazon Dynamics, it's interesting because you got storage and you got EC2, the compute. You need compute to manage storage. So again, it's not just storage, that's the cost. It's data is driving the economics, that's what you're getting at. Yeah, so I think data and storage and compute go together. So I'm a big fan of hyperconvergence which me along with the rest of my team at Nutanix invented. It's kind of doing multiple things on the same platform and you can do that without storage and compute both working in tandem. So consolidating with Cohesity, not because of all of it, but using Cohesity allows the better management, lower costs on Amazon. That's right, that's right. Because we store the data efficiently on Amazon, cutting the costs and then you can run your apps on top. You don't have to copy out the data to run your apps. You can actually run it on the platform and all that saves you costs. That's a great tidbit. Note to the audience out there, great to tip there, pro tip. Talk about the announcement. You now have apps coming out. You got three native Cohesity apps, that's my word. I don't know what you guys call it. I think apps, just Cohesity apps. And then four third-party application developers. So again, this kind of teases out the beyond backup story which is platform. What are the apps? Where does this come from? What are some of the reasons why they're being built? Can you share specifics on that news? Yeah, this goes back to our analogy to a smartphone and one of the innovations the smartphone brought to the world was the notion of a marketplace. You could go to the marketplace and download apps. Some of those apps are from the vendor who built the smartphone. Some of them are from third parties. So we are, and when the first iPhone came out, it actually had just basically five apps, right? And then now there are millions of them. So what we have seated the system with is we have a couple of third-party apps, four in particular. One is Splunk that runs on the platform within a container. One is from a company called I-Manus. One is actually two apps are anti-virus apps. One vendor is Central One. One is ClamAV. Those are third-party apps, but then we've built some apps from Cohesity itself. One is a app called Spotlight. It's a security app. One is a app called Insight. Searches through the data. One is a app called Easy Scripts. Allows our customers to upload scripts and then run them from Cohesity. So these are the apps that we have seated the system with. We're also announcing an SDK. I mean, just like your smartphone has an SDK, the world out there can go and use that and build apps on top. We would like people out there in the world, third parties, our partners to build apps and run on this platform. So Moe, what's the motivation behind the apps? Just more functionality as the demand grows, functionalities needed. So obviously platforms should be enabling. So I get why apps can build on platforms, but what was the motivation that around the apps now? Just evolution, capabilities, what's the thoughts? It goes back to our philosophy that if you need to do something, you shouldn't buy one more silo to do it. You should be able to extend your existing platform and then do stuff. That's what your smartphone does. Basically when you buy your smartphone, it can be a phone and a number of other things, but then you extend the functionality of that by downloading apps. It's the same motivation. You want to extend the abilities of this platform, just download apps and then extend it, right? Give the value proposition pitch for the developers out there. Why would they want to develop on Cohesity? Is it a certain kind of developer? What's the makeup of the target audience who would build on Cohesity? So all kinds of people we expect to build on this platform. So the value for our customers, for instance, now rather than copying the data out of this platform or do one more silo and that's very expensive, they can actually build an app that runs on this platform so that they don't have to move the data around and it's very, very simple. That's the value for our customers. For the developers out there, it's the same value that they get when they build an app on a smartphone. They build an app, some customer out there can download that app and that app and then pay that developer some money. So they don't have to build a whole company or a whole thing. Now they can build an app that runs on Cohesity. It's really simple for them. They get a cut of whatever the customer pays. So there's value all around. It's a win-win for everyone. Yeah, and it's good business model too. Get community going, you get an ecosystem developing. It's a classic growth opportunity for you guys, congratulations. So with our business, you guys have talked about a couple quarters ago publicly about $200 million run rate. Give us the update on the business in terms of growth, employee headcount, key milestones. Can you share as CEO, give us the update? So the momentum is phenomenal. We're very flattered by the fact that despite the fact that we're a young company, we've been selling for a little more than three years. 70% of our customers are enterprise customers, the big guys with lots and lots of data. Some of the biggest banks in the world now, use us. Some of the biggest credit card companies in the world use us. A lot of the secretive federal agencies use us. Some of the public customers I can mention, Hyatt uses us. A big financial northern trust uses us. The famous food chain, Wendy's uses us. So those are the names I can mention that are actually using and benefiting from Cohesity. So lots and lots of great stuff. We had 300% year over year growth in revenue. Our headcount actually this week crossed 1,000 people. So I spoke to our chief people officer. We should mention our 1,000th employee in a special way. So all that great stuff is happening. It's like walking through the door with all the bells go off. Cause you guys were at 200 last year about this time. One year back we were about 200 people. So factor of five growth in about one year. It's a phenomenal headcount growth. Wow, that's massive growth. How big is this guys? Real estate growing, you got to buy more office space. So we had quoted in a building in San Jose downtown. We started, we got that building about one year back. We only had two floors. We've already expanded to like five floors now and looking to rent more. We've also expanded to other locations geographically. We now have an office in Raleigh. We have an office in Cork in Ireland. We already had an office in Bangalore. We're setting one up in Pune. We're setting one up in Toronto. So lots and lots of expansion worldwide. Profitability looking good as well. I mean, you guys feel good about the economics. So this is the time where we are invested in growth. That's looking phenomenal. And there's a path to profitability. It all depends on, you know, our economics and what the board decides on how and when we want to chat towards profitability we can get there. It looks easy, but I think our productivity of our sales reps looks phenomenal. Our average productivity is very high, which basically means that, you know, we can get to profitability fairly quickly if you want to. Well, I got to say, I'm very impressed with the growth and impressed that you go out on the road and talk to customers, closing business. That's a sign of a great CEO. Always make sure the customers are happy. Eventually that's what the company is about. A, happy employees and B, happy customers. And my job as a CEO is to make sure both happen. Before we get into some of the questions I have from the community I prepare because people knew you were coming on. I want to ask you about entrepreneurship and your journey. You've had quite the career. Google mentioned that. Nutanix and now here. Look at today's environment. I mean, there's a lot of talk about how entrepreneurship's changed. And starting a company, you know, you got a rocket ship so you got a lot of people coming on now for your journey you're on now. But there's a lot of other entrepreneurs out there right now kind of like looking at this transition. People say, tech is bad, not good for society. You've seen a bad negative press in there. Entrepreneurship is a great opportunity right now in tech. What's your thoughts on the current landscape and opportunities for folks out there building new things and going in and solving a problem from an old market and reimagining it for the new because there's a lot of new going on. You're seeing a new sea change with cloud and on premise. I would say this is probably the best time to do a company than ever in the past because technology is there to help people, young entrepreneurs. There's plenty of money to be raised from VCs. VCs are very happy to be helping entrepreneurs. A couple of pieces of caution that I want to give to would be entrepreneurs. Number one, don't be in a hurry. Learn their hopes of doing a company first before jumping and doing it because often I find that they burn their fingers and then they don't want to do a company again. First, go to a good company. Learn the ropes of doing a company and then do a company. That's number one. Number two, I would like to encourage all entrepreneurs to think about their ideas in the context of the following two thoughts. One is the company needs to have a great entry point. That's how the company takes off. But then it also needs to have a bigger vision to look up to. And I often find that companies lack one or the other of these and that's why they eventually fail or they never take off the ground. In our case, the entry point was backups and the big vision is the consolidation of secondary data and apps that I spoke about. One or the other, if they are missing, it's not great. And the extensibility is key there too. You get the beach heads in a real specific segment and then you sequence the broader beach head without trying to take it all too fast or not knowing where to land. That's kind of much the analogy. That's where I say be master of one trade at a time. Go ahead in the beach head and then expand on the bigger vision. And by the way, that's a classic proven tech way to do it. So just stay with what works. All right, let's get to the questions from the community. A lot of people wanted to ask. So here's the first question. Moe, you have a great perspective on the difference between hyperscale and enterprise worlds. Is the enterprise still 10 plus years behind the giants in tech and how have you helped bring hyperscale thinking to the enterprise architecture? The enterprise is actually surprisingly is getting closer and closer with all the great technologies available. Hyperconvergence has been one of those technologies that has made hyperconvergence combined with web scale is one of those technologies that has brought the enterprise world very close to the hyperscalers. Now they can buy products that are hyperconverged that scale out in a Google-like fashion and they can get some of the same benefits that the hyperscalers have enjoyed over the years. So I won't say they're that far behind anymore. They're catching up. They're catching up. It used to be a few years ago, you could look at it and say, old relic, modern cloud. Yeah, and the companies that I've founded have, I'm very flattered to say, that have kind of hastened that journey. Hyperconvergence and in Cohesity, we're solving this problem of mass data fragmentation. The hyperscalers have kind of already solved that problem. They have massive web scale systems that don't deal with data fragmentation. It's one platform and we're trying to bring that value to the world through Cohesity. Great, great success. Okay, second question. There's a ton of money pouring into the data protection space. Again, a category that's, there's a carton of magic quadrants for that. But again, you start companies that don't have magic quadrants because it's new. Why is this money pouring into the space? Why now? Number one, data is exploding. There's lots and lots of data. Bulk of the data sets in what we call a second storage. It comes to it through backups. Your production stuff has some production data, but eventually that data, nobody wants to delete the data. They want to keep the data for at least six, seven years, maybe forever. All the data comes to backups. The opportunity that people have seen is that they can actually now do more with that data. It's not just done data setting there. So it's not just data protection. It becomes more of data management. And you do data management through apps. That's what Cohesity is exploring. We get the data onto a platform through backups, but then we expand into our rest of the vision and can run apps to extract value from the data. That's why the money is coming in. Well, you just answered the next question, which is why Cohesity, why now the space is crowded? A lot of competition, so I'll just move on. Ransomware, what's going on there and what's unique about Cohesity and what do you bring to the table with respect to ransomware? So ransomware is something that we now live with. It's every enterprise is at risk at being affected by ransomware. So what we have announced recently, I think a month back, we announced our ransomware support. We can offer not just the detection, but also a number of other things. We can detect ransomware. We can allow our customers to apply fixes when that happens. So we really allow things to be recovered once ransomware happens. So it's built into our data protection environment. That's how customers like it. So it adds value to the data that they already have. It's not just a dumb backup. And with all the third-party and SDK stuff happening, potentially extensibility beyond that core. That's right. Now we can have apps that can detect more ransomware by virtue of the fact that we can support running apps close to data. Some of those apps could be anti-ransomware apps, help detect the data, do some custom stuff. Once ransomware is detected, all that becomes possible. Last question from the crowd here, community, multi-cloud, everyone's going after the space. What is multi-cloud data protection really about? And why Cohesity? Isn't this just really a multi-cloud vendor? Can do it all? I mean, a lot of people are saying they're multi-cloud vendors. Why you? What is multi-cloud data protection all about? So, you know, big enterprise customers probably have a foot in every cloud. And so they call it a multi-cloud infrastructure. And if they want to protect the data, unfortunately the data is very fragmented. So they need a backup solution for one for every cloud. That's roughly multi-cloud data protection, where Cohesity adds value. It's building one platform that spans your multi-cloud environment. So one platform can now take care of all those backups. So it really simplifies the job of doing backups or data protection in a multi-cloud environment. And that's where the Cohesity value comes in. Well, congratulations. Final question for this interview. How would you summarize the state of Cohesity right now, thousand employees, growth on the customer traction side and revenue, business fundamentals look good, economics with a platform certainly, software margins looking very good, growth. What's it all about right now? Culture, value proposition. It's kind of like a rocket ship and we're just hanging on. But yeah, I think our focus is when you grow this fast, the challenge becomes keeping your culture intact. And we try to put a lot of effort on our culture, our core values, our cultural guidelines. We are fanatics about that. So we want everyone to feel that they're coming in and this is home away from home. And they treat others to make them feel it's home away from home. We're trying to build a family here. So there's a lot of emphasis on that. But at the same time, you know, we all work hard and let the company keep coming. And the new ecosystem opportunity for you is looking really good because if these apps take off, certainly the cohesive apps and now you got third party with an SDK, this is potentially a game changer for you as a company too, as well. You're a product company, software company, obviously a lot of scale, but now you're going to be bringing developers in. Impact there. The impact, the thought leadership impact, you know, I'm personally very fond of, you know, I do these companies because I want to change the world. I want to change the way the world thinks. This is the way I think. And if I can help the world think in this fashion, I've contributed something to the world. And so that's the excitement. That's what our mission is. Our team is excited about that. It's just great. We got a great mind, PhD in computer science and distributed systems, entrepreneur that thinks up new things that disrupt the status quo and the old guard, certainly track record there. Congratulations. Moa, thanks for coming on theCUBE. This is theCUBE conversation here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.