 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to San Diego, day two here of Cisco Live 2019. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman, Lisa Martin is also here. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here in the DevNet zone, which is a very happening place. And all the action is here. The CCIE folks are getting trained up on how to do infrastructure as code. Terry Ramos is here, he's the vice president of alliances at Cohesity Hot Company, achieving escape velocity. Terry, great to have you on. Good to see you again. Great to be here, really enjoy it. So Cisco is a big partner of yours, perhaps the biggest. I know you don't like to say that, you love all your partners, it's like you love your kids, but clearly a lot of good action going on with you guys. Talk about the partnership, where it started, how it's evolved. Sure, so first off, a little bit about Cohesity I think would be helpful, right? We're in the data management space, really helping customers with their data management and how do they deal with the problem of mass data fragmentation, right? If you think about the traditional data silos that enterprises have, we really take and level that out into one platform, our platform, and really allows customers to get the most out of their data. If we talk about the partnership with Cisco, it's actually a really good partnership. They've been an investor with us, both series C and D rounds. We recently, about three months ago, announced that we were on the price book. So now a customer has the ability to go buy Cisco UCS, HyperFlex, and Cohesity as a cohesive bundle to solve their problems, right? To really help them grow. And then we're working on some new things like Cisco Solutions Plus support, where a customer has a single call place where they get all their support needs addressed. You know, that's huge, Stu. I remember when, you remember the V block when it first came out? It said, we support, I forget how many VMs, like thousands and thousands of VMs. And I just had one question. How do you back it up? And they went, they were staring at their feet. So the fact that now you're bundled in to UCS, HyperFlex, and that's part of the SKU, it's a different SKU. Yeah, they're all different SKUs, but it is bundled together. Yeah, so it's all integrated. It's a check box item, right? We came up with a CVD, validated design. So customers can get a validated design that says HyperFlex, UCS, Cohesity, here's how to deploy it, here's the best use cases, and they can actually go buy that and then it's a bundled solution. Yes, Terry, bring us inside a little bit that go to market, because it's one thing to be partnered with CVDs, they're great, but Cisco has hundreds of these, if not more. But you know, when you've got access to that Cisco channel out there, people that are transforming data centers, they've talked about converge infrastructure, hyperconverged infrastructure, Cisco UCS, tip of the spear for Cisco in that data center world. What's it mean to now be that, oh hey, you know, that whole channel, they're going to help get paid on that, not just say, oh yeah, yeah, that works. Yeah, I think there's a few things for the channel for us. One is just Cisco's team themselves, right? They don't have a backup solution, so we are really the next gen backup and that's really helped them out. When we talk about channel as well, channel partners are looking for a solution that differentiates them from everybody else. So we're a high-touch sales team, but we're 100% channel, so we're working with the channel and giving them new ways to actually go out and sell a solution. So let's talk a little bit about backup, data protection, data assurance, you know, sort of, we're trying to parse between, all right, what's the marketing and what's the reality for customers? So we remember the VMware, you know, ascendancy days. And it caused people to really have to rethink their backup and their data protection. What's driving it now? Why are so many customers kind of re-assessing their backup approach and their overall data protection and data management approach? Yeah, I think it's the best analogy, so last one, it's data management, right? Everybody has thought of data protection as just protecting their data, backup and recovery. What we've done is really looked at it as, it's data, you should be able to use your data however you want to. So yeah, we may do data protection on the platform, but then we do test dev, we do file shares, we do things like that, and we make it this cohesive data management platform where customers get various use cases, but then they can look at their entire data set. And that is really the key anymore. And when you talk about the data protection as it was, it was very siloed. You data protect one set of systems, and data protect the next, and data protect the next. They never talked, you couldn't do management across them. Okay, so, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, Terry, so I love what you're talking about, the silos there. Back in Barcelona, we heard Cisco talking about Hyperflex anywhere, and some of the concerns of us have is, is multi-cloud the new multi-vendor? And oh my gosh, have I just created a whole bunch of silos that are just outside of my data center, like I used to do inside my data center? How's Cohesity helping to solve that solution for people from your... Yeah, I think it's an interesting one. Cloud has really come along, right? Everybody thought, oh, we'll see what cloud does. It's really come along the way. And people are using multi-cloud, so they're doing cloud on-prem. Then they're archiving out to public cloud providers, and then they're archiving out to other silos where they, or other data sources where they have it. And that's really been the approach lately, is you can't just have your data in one location. You're going to move it out to the cloud. You're going to store it on UCS, and Hyperflex, and Cohesity. And again, it's how do you use that data? So that's the key, is really that. But it is a cloud world, for sure, where you're doing on-prem cloud and public cloud. So today, a lot of that focus, correct me if I'm wrong, is infrastructure as a service. Yes. Whether it's AWS, Google, Azure. Do you, have you started to think about our customers and partners asking you to think about all the, protecting all the data in SaaS? Is that something that's sort of on the roadmap? Are you hearing that for customers? Or is it still too early for that? No, I think it's actually a great use case. If you talk about, I'll just pick on one, Office 365, right? If you think about what they really provide, it's availability, right? It's not backup. If you need to go back a year and get that critical email that you need for whatever reason, that's really not what they're doing. They're making sure it's up and running and available to the users. So data protection for SaaS apps is actually a new use case that I think is enormous. Okay, so take Office 365 as an example. Is that something that you can protect today or is that kind of on the roadmap? It's something we can do today. So explain to our audience, why if I'm using Office 365, which is in the cloud? Is it Microsoft going to take care of that for me? Why do I need Cohesity? Yeah, I think it really comes down to that. It's they're really providing availability. And yeah, they have some backup services, but even if they do, it's not tying into your overall data management solution. And so backing up O365 gives you access to all that data as well. So you can do algorithms on it, analytics, all those things once it's part of the bigger platform. And you probably have more facile recovery, which is backup is one thing. Yeah, recovery still is everything. Yeah, it is. Terry, talk to us about your customers. How about any big Cisco joint customers that you can talk about, but love to hear some of the latest from your customers? Yeah, I think when we started this partnership a while ago, what we really focused us on Cohesity on UCS and we got some traction there. When we went on the price sheet, that really changed things because the customers are now able to buy on a single price sheet. When you talk about the large customers, it's been incredible the last three, four months, the number of joint customers that we've been in and Cisco's been in, and it's enterprise customers. It's the Fortune 500 customers that we're going after. Customer that's here later today, Quantium, is a great use case. They're data analytics, they're AI, and they're providing a lot of information to customers on supply chain. And he's here later today on theCUBE and it's a really great use case of what they're doing with it. Yeah, we're excited to talk to them, but so let's do a little prep for them. Tell us about Quantium, what do you know about them? So give us the bumper sticker, so we're ready for the interview. Craig'll do a much better job of it, but my understanding is they're looking at data, supply chain data, when to get customers in, when to have product there, propensity to buy, all of those things, and they're doing all that for very large enterprise customers, and then they're using us to data protect all that they do. So the reason I asked that is I wanted to double click on that because you've been stressing, Terry, that it's not just backup. It's this notion of data management. You can do analytics, you can do other things. So when you take, let's generalize it, let's not make it specific to Quantium. We'll talk to them later. But what specifically are customers doing beyond backup? What kind of analytics are they doing? How is it affecting their business? What kind of outcomes are they trying to drive? Yeah, I think it's a great question. We did something about four months ago where we released a marketplace. So now we've got all this data from data protection, file shares, test dev, cloud, as we talked about. So we've got this platform with all this data on top of it, and now partners can come in and write apps on top to do all sorts of things with that data. So think of being able to spin up a VM in our platform, do some analytics on it, looking at it for any number of things, and then destroy it, right? Destroy the backup copy, not the backup, the copy that's made, and then be able to go to the next one and really get deep into what data's on there. How can I use that data? How can I use that data across various applications? Are you seeing, I've sort of always thought that the backup corpus could be used in a security context, not to compete with Palo Alto Networks, but specifically to assess exposures and things like ransomware? Yes. If you see some anomalous behavior, because stuff when it goes bad goes bad quickly these days. So are you seeing those types of use cases? Absolutely, ransomware is actually a really big use case for us right now, where customers want the data protection to ensure ransomware is not happening, and if they do get hit, how do we make sure to restart quickly? Give you another example is we have a Clam-AV, so we can spin up a VM and check it for antivirus, right in their data protection mode. So not without, not touching the production systems, but touching these systems that are already backed up. I think you guys recently made an acquisition of a MANIS data, which if I recall correctly, was a specialized sort of data protection company focused on things like NoSQL, and maybe Hadoop, and so forth. So that's cool. Yeah. We had those guys on in New York City last fall, and then, so I like that, you know, building out the portfolio. Yeah. My question is around containers, and all this cloud native stuff going on. We're in the DevNet zones, a lot of DevOps action. Yeah. Data protection for containers, are you, customers and your partners, are they sort of pushing you in that direction? How are you responding? Yeah, I think when you talk about cloud in general, right, there's been a huge amount of VMs that are there, containers are there as well. So yeah, customers are absolutely talking about containers. Our marketplace is a container-based marketplace. So containers are absolutely a big thing for us. So what else can you share with us about, you know, conversations that you're having with customers and partners at the show? What are the, what's the narrative like? What are some of the big concerns maybe that, again, either customers or partners have? Yeah, I don't want to sound like a broken record, but I think the biggest thing we hear always is the data silos, right? It's really breaking down those silos, getting rid of the old legacy silos where you can't use the data how you want to, where you can't run analytics across the data. That is the number one talk track that customers tell us. So how does that fit in, you know, the old buzzword of digital transformation? But we always say the difference between a business and a digital business is how they use data. And if you think about how our traditional business looks at its data, the data's all in silos, as you pointed out, and there's something in the middle, like a business process or a bottling plant or a manufacturing facility, but the data's all dispersed in silos. Are you seeing people, at least as part of their digital transformation, leveraging you guys to put that data in at least in a logical place that they can do those analytics and maybe you could add some color to that scenario. Yeah, for sure, I mean, the data from, I'll give you a great example. The CVD we just did was Cisco, the updated one has Edge. So now when you're talking about plants and branch offices and those things, now we can bring that data back into the central core as well, do analytics on it and then push it to other offices for updated information. Absolutely, it is a big use case of, it's not just looking at that core central data center, how do you get that data from your other offices, from your retail locations, from your manufacturing plants? Final thoughts, San Diego, good venue, you know, great weather, Cisco Live, put a bumper sticker on it. I'm impressed with Cisco Live, I haven't been here in several years, it's an impressive show, 26,000 people, great, beautiful weather, great convention center, it's just a great place to be right now. Right, and we're bringing it all to you live from theCUBE, thank you Terry for coming on. Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman, Lisa Martin is also here, day two Cisco Live 2019, you're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back.