 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. You know, we've been following a company called Actifio for quite some time. Now they really popularized the concept of copy data management, really innovative, Boston-based, Waltham-based company. And with me, Brian Regan, who's the Chief Marketing Officer, and Paul Forty, who's the newly minted revenue officer of Actifio. Guys, great to see you. I wish we were face-to-face at your June event, but this'll have to do. Yeah, welcome. You're back there. Yeah, so, Brian, you've been on the CUBE a bunch. I'm going to start with Paul, if that's okay. Paul, let's talk a little bit about your background. You've done a number of stints at a variety of companies, big companies like IBM and others as well. What attracted you to Actifio? Yeah, so great question, Dave. I would say, in all honesty, I've been a software guy and candidly a data-specific leader for many, many years. And so, IT infrastructure, particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for a fun on words there. And so, Actifio is just smack dab in the middle of that, right? And so, when I was looking for my next adventure, I had an opportunity to meet with Ash, our CEO and founder, and describe and discuss kind of what Actifio was all about. And candidly, the number of connections that we had that were the same, a lot of our OEM relationships are with people that I actually worked with and for and some that worked for me historically. So, it was almost this perfect world, right? And I'm a Boston guy, so it was in my old backyard and it was just a perfect, yeah, it was a perfect match for what I was looking for, which was really a small growth company that was trying to get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and could understand and articulate the value proposition. Well, as we say in Boston, Paulie, we got to get you back here. I know, I'm going to get you back, so I pack my cap. I haven't been 25 years, I still got it. Let's talk about the climate right now. I mean, nobody expected this, of course. I mean, it's funny, I saw Ash at an event in Boston last fall and we were talking like, hey, what are you expecting for next year? Yeah, a little bit of softening, but nobody expected this sort of black swan, but you guys, I just got your press release. You put it out, you had a good quarter, you had a record first quarter. What's going on in the marketplace? How are you guys doing? Yeah, well, I think that today more than ever, businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis and that data, whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers, how they manage through their supply chain, and frankly, how they take care of their employees is all very data-centric. And so businesses that are protecting that data, that are helping businesses get faster access to that data, and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data, on-premises in the cloud and hybrid configuration, those are the businesses that are really going to be top of the CIO's mind. I think RQ1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets and with their confidence in Actifio as an important part of their data supply chain. Yeah, Paul, I want to come back to you. First of all, I want all the people to know you're an ex-army ranger, so thank you for your service. That's awesome. Who are rangers? You know, I was talking to Frank Slutman. I interviewed him the other day, and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages, and he says, you know, I'm managed by a playbook. He's a situational manager, and that's something that he learned in the military. Well, this is a situation. So, and that really is kind of how you're trained. And of course, we've never seen anything like this, but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before. So how are you seeing organizations generally, Actifio specifically going to manage through this crisis? What are some of the moves that you're advising, recommending, give us some insight there. Yeah, so it's really interesting. It's funny that you mentioned my military background, because I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day, that one of the things that they train for in the military is the eventuality of chaos, right? And so when you do an exercise, we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say, okay, you're now dead. And without that person being allowed to speak, they take a knee and the unit has to go on. And so what happens is you learn by muscle memory, like how to react in times of crisis or, and this is a classic example of leadership in crisis. And so it's just interesting. Like, so to me, you have a playbook. I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with a plan. I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson, but one of my famous quotes was, plan is good until somebody punches you in the face, right? That's the reality of what just happened to business across the globe. Is it just a punch in the face? And so you got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic. And from a leadership perspective, I think you can't lose your confidence, right? So I've watched some of my friends and I've watched some other businesses cripple in the midst of this pandemic because they're afraid. Instead of looking at this in my first commentary at our first staff meeting, Brian, if I remember it was this, okay, so what makes Actifio great in this environment? Like not, why is it not great, right? And so we didn't get scared. We jumped right into it. We adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter. And we took down deals, honestly, Dave, we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy. I mean, so it was insane. It was really fun. Okay, so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record quarter. It was really a broad-based demand. Yeah, so if you dug underneath the covers, you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter. We had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever. We had the largest contribution from our panel partners and our OEM partners ever. And we had the highest number ever. And so it was really a nice, truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries, right? Interesting. I mean, you used the term opportunistic and I think you're right on. I mean, you obviously you don't want to be chasing ambulances at the same time. You know, we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing. And I'd like to get your feedback on this, Brian. You're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer. You're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic. And I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency. You talked about digital initiatives, data center transformations, et cetera. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that, Brian. I mean, did you do those things? How did you do those things? What kind of pace were you guys at? How did you do it remotely with everybody working from home? Give us some color on that. Sure. And, you know, Ash, if you were here, he would probably remind us that Actifio was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. So we have essentially been bookended by two black swans over the last decade. And the lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit is relevant today. Everything starts with cost containment and cost reduction and protection of the business. And so CIOs in the midst of this shock to the system, I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital and critical initiatives and what is it nice to have? And I'm going to pause on nice to have and invest entirely in the critical initiatives. And the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working remotely, getting people safe access to their systems and their applications and their data. And then ultimately, it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals and state actors up. Unfortunately, as we've seen in other times of crisis, this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike, particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to really ensure the resiliency of their applications. So we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs, helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructure light manner, but also really emphasize the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected that you don't know when. Instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is incredibly valuable. So let's dig into cyber resiliency. So specifically, what is Actifio doing for its customers from a product standpoint, capabilities? Maybe it's part of the 10C announcement as well, but can you give us some specifics on where you fit and let's take that use case, cyber resiliency? Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's a stack of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency. At the lowest level, you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're infected. And so the ability to go back in time, test the recoverability of data, test the validity of the data is step one. Step two is once you've found the clean point, being able to resume operations, being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase. And that's something that Actifio was founded on, this notion of instant access to data. And then the third phase, and this is really where our partnerships really shine, is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk. You want to go back and clean that system. You want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it. And that's where our partnership with IBM, for example, resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solution which takes the Actifio platform and then wrappers in a complete managed services around it. So they can help the customer not only get their systems and applications back on their feet, but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable account. Okay, so that's interesting. So Paul, was it kind of new adoptions? Was it increases from existing customers? Kind of a combination. Can you talk to that? Yeah, totally. So like ironically to really come clean, we are the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar to the metrics that we see historically. So the mix between our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics, which candidly we were a little surprised by. We anticipated that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base, but candidly we had a really nice split, which was great, which meant that our value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it, but also in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerated or just continued on the path of adoption during the timeframe of COVID-19. Across industries, I would say that again, there were some industries I would say that pushed pause. And so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during this past period were the ones you would think of, right? So financial institutions primarily, as well as some of the medical. So some of those transactions, healthcare and medical, they accelerated along with financial institutions. And then I would say that we did have some industries that pushed pause. You can probably guess what some of those are and majority of those were the ones that were dealing with the small and mid-sized businesses or consumer facing businesses, things like retail and stuff like that. Where we typically do have a pretty nice resonance and a really nice value proposition, but there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just paused, like we're going to come back. But overall the, yeah, the feedback was just in general, it felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal, as strange as that sounds. Cause I know speaking to a lot of my friends in peer companies, peer software companies, they didn't have that experience, but we did pretty well. That's interesting. I mean, you're right. Certain industries, airlines, I'm interviewing a CIO of a major resort next week, really interested to hear how they're dealing with this, but those are obviously depressed and they kind of dialed everything down. But we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot. It didn't buffer the decline in IT spending that we're expecting to be down, maybe as much as 5% this year, but it definitely offset it. What about cloud? Being elevated levels in cloud demand, guys have offerings there. What are you seeing in cloud guys? You want to take your mic? Yeah, I'll start and then Paul, please weigh in. I think that the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the move to cloud that we've been witnessing over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months. Projects that might have been on the 18 to 24 month roadmap have all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year, but in terms of the wholesale, everything moves to cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate. I don't think we've seen that quite yet. I think the world is still hybrid when it comes to cloud. Although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the non-number one or number two cloud providers, but the rest of the hyperscalers who are fighting for market share because now they have an opportunity to perhaps Google, for example, a strategic partner of ours has a huge offering and it comes to enabling work from home and remote work. So leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings, I think gives them a wedge that Amazon might not have, for example. So it's an acceleration of interest, but I think it's just the continuation of the trend that we've been seeing for years. Yeah, and I would add a little bit, Dave. The IBM held their think conference this past week. I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate, they're one of our OEM partners. Oh yeah, we covered it. You know, when our CEO presented his opening remarks, it was really about digital transformation and he really kind of put it down to two things and said any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid cloud or they're talking about AI and machine learning and that's kind of it, right? And so every digital business is talking in one of those categories. And so when I looked at Q1, it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than, as Brian talked about, all of the cloud business was just some version of an acceleration. But outside of that, the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity, did so. And those that did not kind of just peeled back a little bit, but overall, I still, I would agree with IBM's assessment of the market that those are kind of the two hotspots and hybrid cloud is hot. And the good news is we've got a nice value right in the middle of it. Yeah, Arvin Krzysztof talked about the, and it has maybe not a think, but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call, just in public statements that IBM must win the battle, the architectural battle for hybrid cloud and also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially, which is, I mean, to me, those two things are great news for you guys. Obviously, Red Hat is the linchpin of that. I want to ask you guys about your conference, data-driven. So we were there last year, it was a great, really great, intimate event. Of course, you can't have the physical events anymore. So you've pushed to September, you're going all digital, give us the update on that, Brian. We're eager to have the CUBE participate in our September event. So I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks. But yes, we have that exactly. So you can tell Frank to put that in for me. So we've been participating in some of the other conferences, think most notably last week, learning a lot and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics for putting on a digital event. I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event, one of the things that is, I think, first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on-demand digital content, particularly from a technology standpoint. Our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed. The digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly, as many sessions as they might want. So I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content for the users of our technology. And then we're also eager to have, as we've done with data driven in the years past, our customers tell the story of how they're using data. And this year, certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular, how they use data during this incredible crisis and hopefully renewal from the crisis. Well, one of my favorite interviews last year at your show was the guys from DraftKings. So hopefully they'll be back on and we'll have some football to talk about, let's hope. I want to end with just sort of this notion of, we've been so tactical the last eight weeks, right? You guys too, I'm sure, just making sure you're there for customers, making sure your employees are okay. But as we start to think about coming out of this into a post-COVID era, which looks like it's going to be with us for a while, but we're getting back to quasi-opening. So I'm hearing hybrid is here to stay, we agree for sure. Cyber resiliency is very interesting. I think one of the things we've said is that companies may sub-optimize near-term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and resilience, business resiliency in place. That's obviously something that is, I think, good news for you guys, but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian, you can bring us home. How do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the post-COVID era? Yeah, so this is a really interesting topic for me. In fact, I've had many discussions over the last couple of weeks with some of our investors, as well as with our executive staff. And so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occurred for IT specifically at the enterprise level is about to go through a transformation. No different than we watched the transformation of SaaS businesses when you basically replaced a cold-calling salesperson with an inside and inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and BDR. Because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of an airplane ride or a physical building to go through. And so that whole thing has been removed from the sales process. And so it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that we're going on, they happen to be online. However, it's way higher than what we're making so. You couple that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices. And I really think that those companies that embrace this new model are going to find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way. And I do believe that the professional sales, enterprise salesperson of tomorrow is going to look different than it looks today. And so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and watching us learn together how we're going to buy, sell and market to each other in this post COVID way. Cause I'm the only thing I really do know it's just not going to be the way it used to be. What is it going to look like? I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet but it's going to look different for sure. They're very thoughtful comments. And so Brian, you know, our thinking is the differentiation and the war gets won in digital. How is that affecting, you know, sort of your marketing and your thinking around that? We fortunately decided coming into 2020, our fiscal 21, that we were actually going to overweight digital anyway. We felt that if it was far more effective we were seeing far better conversion rates. We saw, you know, way better ROI in terms of very targeted, competitive digital campaigns or for general purpose, AVM type of efforts. So our strategy had essentially been set and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds into digital. So, you know, we have essentially a two pronged marketing, you know, attack right now, which is, you know, digital creating inbounds and BDRs that are calling on those inbounds that are created in digital. And so it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events, if and when they do actually come back into form, you know, how much we decide to actually go back into that venue. I think that, you know, to some extent, we've talked about this in the past, Dave, you know, the physical events and the sheer spectacle and the sheer, you know, audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through, that was an unsustainable model. And so I think this is hastening, perhaps, the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling customers what they need to know to help and assist their buying journey and their investigation journey into a new technology. I mean, the IT world is hybrid and I think the events world is also going to be hybrid. I mean, intimate events, you know, they're going to live on but they're also going to have a major digital component to them. I'm very excited that, you know, there's a lot of learnings now in digital, especially around events. And by September, a lot of the bugs are going to be worked out. You know, we've been going to, it feels like 24 seven, but really excited to have you guys on. Thanks so much for really looking forward to working with you in September at Data Driven. So guys, thanks a lot for coming on theCUBE. Oh my gosh, thank you, Dave. So nice to be here. Thank you. All right, stay safe. It's always a pleasure. You too. Thank you everybody. Thank you and thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time.