 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Orlando for Cisco Live 2018. It's theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman for three days of coverage. Our next guest is Lynn Lucas, CMO of Cohesity. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. Great to be back, thank you gentlemen. So great story, you guys are announced huge news yesterday, $250 million in a Series D funding. That's a boatload of capital, boatload of cash. You guys are rich. You guys are rich. It is a ludicrous amount of cash. You guys are rich. Having a big party, ludicrous was playing. This is big news. Why the funding, why the big treasure trove of cash? What's the strategy? Sure, so Cohesity as you know has been working on really reinventing secondary storage and this is a huge market, $60 billion, soft bank only investing companies that are disrupting big markets and they see what Cohesity is doing and really felt very compelled about having an investment in us to take that forward, to take Mo at Aaron, our CEO and founders vision forward to really change the world and transform secondary data and applications in the data center. So we're really looking forward to this investment from SoftBank along with Cisco, which is why we're here at Cisco Live. HPE, Morgan Stanley joined us in driving new innovation and driving our go-to-market expansion. So Cisco investments put some cash in. Obviously they're interested in that. I want to get your thoughts about what's different and a lot of people are trying to understand the Cohesity story. It's not just storage. There's a cloud game going on now where Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco on State said it's a whole new ball game with scale. What's different about you guys around that scale question? Because, okay, storage and backup and recovery, we've been around that block before we've seen other people do it. What's different and does the cloud scale tie into that? Cloud is a huge part of this and Moe, as you may know, came from Google. He was one of the lead developers for the Google file system. So he gets cloud, he gets scale. I think in a way that few founders do. And his vision has been to bring this cloud-like simplicity to what today arguably is a set of very siloed legacy solutions for not just backup, which you brought up, but also file services, test dev, analytics. When you think about it over the last 20 years, customers have basically bought point solutions for all of those areas and they're dealing with a pretty fragmented mess. And then they've been trying to figure out how to get that to the cloud and it's been very difficult at best. So what's different about Cohesity is it's not just a better backup. We also are a distributed file system that allows customers to put all of their secondary storage into one consolidated hyper-converged platform. Yeah, Lynn, with that much money, one of the things everybody's looking at is, where are some of the big hiring moves that Cohesity's going to make? I've had quite a few friends that have joined over the last year. When you came on board, you know, obviously the marketing organization's growing. Speak a little bit about the culture. What kind of people Cohesity is looking for? Well, when you join Cohesity, you join Emission. We're on Emission and it's been a tremendous ride for me already. I haven't honestly had this much fun in tech in really since Cisco and I'm proud to be there. This time last year, the company was only about 200 people. We're well north of 600 now. Tremendous growth. Where are we hiring? Really all areas. We're building out engineering in particular in India, but also we opened a new office in RTP earlier this year. Sales and marketing, as you mentioned, really across the board. We've seen tremendous demand and so we're scaling the business to support our customers around the globe. I mean, when you're on a rocket ship, sometimes you just got to hold on, not get blown off as the growth comes in. Where are you guys seeing the growth coming from the marketplace? When someone says, what's clicking right for Cohesity? Why are you winning? What's the dynamic from the customer? What problem are you solving? Why is it working? So really we see three areas that click with customers right now. So first is legacy backup. We've got a perfect storm of events going on right now with two major vendors that are having some challenges and customers struggling with the amount of data and how do they start to move that to the cloud for archive scenarios? That's one. Second is this file services area. Legacy again, people are tired of paying for those forklift upgrades. And so a lot of organizations, CIOs, we had a major bank in San Francisco, 45 day sales cycle, start to finish multi-million dollar deal because the CIO is like, I cannot sign another multi-million dollar forklift upgrade for my legacy vendor. And then cloud. We mentioned that before, but here it was a big theme with Chuck, Google Cloud, we partner with Google, we partner with Amazon, we partner with Azure, customers are looking for how can they do archiving, how can they do replication, test dev in the cloud. We make that simple. A real shift paradigm shift on the cloud, on the backup side. All right, I asked you a personal question. If you don't mind, I'll put you on the spot here. You've been an industry executive. You've seen ways of innovation. You've seen mentioned Cisco. So you've seen successes, you've seen some companies, you've been involved in some partners with other folks that have gone here and there in the industry. When you looked at Cohesity, what attracted you to the company? What made you jump that leap of faith? Because it's always tough for startups. You know, am I making the right move? A good opportunity. Personally, what was attracting you to the opportunity when you dug into it and you did the due diligence? So great question. Three things. One, Moet Aron himself, true technical genius founder, committed to what he's doing with a very humble sense of serving the customer. Two, the culture at Cohesity is fantastic. People want to work together collaboratively and win. And then how we are really disrupting the industry. I feel that Cohesity is one of those architectures that will be the standard that others will be looking at in the next five to 10 years. Lynn, there's a lot of discussion lately about products and platforms. And one of the challenges we have today is it's a multi-cloud world. So while customers are making bets, it's, as you said, it's Amazon, it's Google, it's Microsoft. They've got their data centers, they're using a lot of SaaS. How do you build a platform that can span all of these different environments? So great question. So first of all, I wake up every day and I say to my team many times and our sales team, CIOs don't wake up going, hey, I'd like to buy a platform today, right? Customers want to solve business problems. So, you know, talking to CIOs, really what they're saying is, is I don't really care where my data and my applications are, I just want my business users to have access to it at the right time in a compliant way because compliance has become a bigger issue. So the distributed file system that Moet has invented, SpanFS, Span is for spanning the private data center to the public cloud. And that is part of the magic of what Cohesity is, this ability to span seamlessly and create one operating environment independent of whether you are on your private cloud or one of the three major public clouds today. One of the things that I said on Twitter when you saw the news that kind of couldn't help myself, but I said, hey, you know, you got multiple horse in the track, a couple competitors you have now in this new area. There was some rumblings in the community around, oh, Cohesity, the perfect M&A target. Okay, these guys are going to get bought out quickly. Other people who want to go public. You and I were talking last night off camera around this notion. I want you to just take a minute to explain. This is not a quick flip, the $250 million when I saw them like, okay, that's a signal. They're not going anywhere. They're in it for the long game. Talk about that dynamic, those rumors about Cohesity looking for the M&A, not in the cards. What's the formal statement on that? Well, I would say that Moet is really determined to make a difference in the world, make a difference in technology. I'd argue he already has done so at Nutanix. He was CTO and co-founder there. He's done it at Google, but he is in this for the long haul. And also SoftBank. SoftBank doesn't invest in small companies. They're looking for those that are disruptive, they're going to give themselves and their investors a big return. And if you look at some of the other investments that they've made, we're the second largest enterprise software investment after Slack that they've made. They clearly see a long-term future for the company. They want a durable company, they see a lot of opportunity, and we're really looking forward to that expansion. So you're playing the long game on this one. Absolutely. So the founder's been there, done that. He doesn't need the money. He's been successful. I would argue that he's been successful, yes. Lynn, I'd love to get your viewpoint on what you're hearing from customers. For the longest time, while the enterprise moves slow, there's so much change happening, disruption in digital transformations, what we talk about. You talked about billions of dollars of opportunity. How fast is the market changing? What do you hear from the enterprises that you work with? You know, I think that was the myth that this was an area particular about backup that was kind of sticky and it was going to change slowly. Not from my vantage point in talking to customers, I think that they are looking for a change. And one of the benefits that we provide them is the simplicity to give them agility. When you have got so much operational complexity, we were working with a customer who was looking at having to hire seven more individuals just to manage scale out of backup and recovery for a new government customer that they were bringing online. With Cohesity, they didn't have to hire those seven people for that. They could invest in IT and those seven individuals in development. That's the kind of agility CIOs are looking for and they can move faster when they get rid of that complexity. Gartner often talks about that 80-20 rule, right? 80% is managing what you've got. I think in some ways, is it the adoption of cloud that's making them need to make a change or are there other factors that you're seeing as to key drivers for them being open to it? Cloud is an enabler and certainly the business leaders kind of said, ah, cloud is the panacea. I think what we've seen in the industry is that a lot went to cloud and found this doesn't actually solve all our problems and that it's a hybrid cloud world that's going to remain that way. It's the business still that's driving them to want to move quickly and IT wants to do that, right? Yeah, it was right to my point actually is that people thought cloud was simple and cheap and when they got there they realized, oops, wait. I still need to worry about my data and my applications because that's, as you said, key to what we have to look at. Yeah, cloud needs to be used as an augmentation to your private data center and you're going to have some great use cases. We've got customers that do archiving to the cloud. Easy access, e-discovery, find it more quickly. Customers that'll spin up test dev in the cloud, do some work there with the compute resources and then spin it back down. Those are great examples of how you can use cloud to augment your private data center. Well, Lynn, thanks for spending the time on theCUBE here and congratulations on the big funding round. Your booth is in the center of the hall there. It's all built out beautifully, timed it perfectly with the news. I got to ask you, since we're here at Cisco Live, what's the most important story that people should know about Cisco Live this year? I mean, obviously the world is moving to a whole nother era, modernizing cloud, things are being consolidated and reinvested in, platforms are emerging. It's not your grandfather's backup and recovery storage. It's wholly integrated platforms. What's the takeaway for the folks that didn't make it here? What's the big story coming out of Cisco Live? I'll see your news as one of the top ones. But generally speaking in the industry, what's the top news? I think Chuck really got it right in the keynote yesterday. I think that this discussion that he had in particular of their work with Google Cloud and bringing together this on-prem and the cloud world in a seamless way so that it doesn't matter, that's the trend. We're here to help make that happen. We think customers like Automation, Hyatt, US Air Force are right in joining us and doing that. And I think that that's the way of the future. Thanks so much for inviting theCUBE to your Cohesity Party last night. Thank you, gentlemen. Take a minute to explain some of the reaction. A little bit big crowd at the House of Blues. Who was playing? What was the reaction? Real quick. We had Ludacris. We thought it would be fun to time a bit of a celebration knowing the news that we had and was just thrilled to see him engage the audience here. I think they had a good time. I think we all enjoyed some fine food and drink and a little music until the wee hours. And thank you, gentlemen, for joining us. Then, Lucas, the CMO here inside theCUBE. Cohesity on the fresh funding announcement of $250 million in the long game. Really changing the game. The cloud platform enabling new programming models, new value creation opportunities, and new brands are emerging. It's awesome. Cisco certainly building on their leadership here. It's Cisco Live. This is theCUBE with coverage day two. Cisco Live. Stay with us for more after this short break.