 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Actifio Data Driven 2020 brought to you by Actifio. Hi, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Actifio Data Driven 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for this event is Dave Vellante. But joining me to help kick off this discussion is David Fleuer. He is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Wikibon, of course, the research arm of SiliconANGLE Media, which includes also theCUBE. David, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. Great to see you, Stu. All right, so we've got a really nice lineup. Of course, last year, Dave and I were in Boston with the Actifio team. They had a really good lineup, analysts, thought leaders, and of course, lots of users. Love to talk to those users. You and I are quite familiar with Actifio, really the company that created copy data management as a category and a solution out there. So why don't we start there, David? What's the importance of copy data management here in 2020, many years after Actifio had created it? Well, this year has really amplified the importance of copy data management and being able to manage across different locations, across different clouds, manage the copies, manage the reuse of data in different places. The COVID has really emphasized the importance, for example, of putting just backup onto a cloud because on many occasions, it's not gonna be possible to get into your own data centers or if you're sharing a data center. So automation and use of clouds, multiple clouds has really driven, become of a supreme importance since COVID has started. And that's how it's going to be from here on in. That's not going to change. Yeah, David, absolutely. I mean, we said for many years when you adopt cloud, I still need to think about my data protection. I need to think about security. Those aren't just covered because I have lovely object storage or it spreads things out amongst the different cloud regions. And even this year, as you brought up COVID, we've been having so many conversations with companies in many cases, they're accelerating or new groups are diving in and therefore we need to make sure that they take the proper precautions. So, my disaster recovery, my backup is so important. Maybe flesh out a little bit for us, if you would. Cloud, we've been looking at that hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, how people should be building it. And of course data, the critical component that we look at there. What should people be looking at? Well, absolutely, if you're going to have a multi-cloud strategy, you have to, there are several things which are really important. You have to be able to operate across each cloud natively in the cloud. It's not good enough to just be an appendage, if you like. So, equally important is that you have to make sure that you're taking advantage of the characteristics of the cloud, in particular, object storage. Backup has always gone to object storage, but object storage itself is not that fantastic if you're trying to just recover something from a lot of different objects, unless you put an architecture around that, unless you make it such that you can take all the workloads and be able to address them in the cloud itself. And in particular, what's very interesting is there are two fundamental philosophies of moving to the cloud, one of which is that you migrate everything, you convert all of your databases to a database that's operating in the cloud that you go to. And the other one is to say, well, that type of lift and shift is not good enough. What you want to be able to do is be able to use the same databases, the same applications that you're using at the moment, avoid that enormous expensive cost of moving everything and then be able to operate on those databases using the cloud principles, the cloud object store, and have the same level of performance. Yeah, absolutely, David. I know I'm looking forward to, Dave's got Ash, the CEO of Actifio on today, tomorrow. I'll be talking to David Chang who's the co-founder, also owns the product there to really understand, how is Actifio building an architecture that meets what you were just talking about? And David, things I've heard you talking about for many years, migrations obviously are something that anybody in IT dreads, I used to say in the storage world, upgrade came with that four letter word, it was migration, because you had to do that and databases of critical importance. One of the other discussions I have is with IBM and IBM has had a long partnership with Actifio, but they're also getting involved with that data usage. So maybe if you could spell it a little bit, how was it just the early days copy data management, I looked at it, it was a financial savings, it was okay, hey, we've got way too many copies out there, how can we enable them to be used better and not have just lots and lots of big capacity that the storage vendors as they was hard disk and then flash converting there. So how are we actually unlocking the value of data in today's world? Well, there are two aspects of that. One of which is you want the original data wherever possible, you want to have, be able to access that data as quickly as possible. So if you have, for example, a system of record and you want to be able to access that system of record, it may be one day, you want to be able to bring it right to one day before the day before, not have a week waiting for it. Copy management is essential to be able to access that data and the same data for everybody and know from a compliance point of view, you have the right data. So that's the first stage. But then from a development point of view, you want to have the flexibility of using real-time data whenever you can. So you want to be able to access any data you want from anywhere and know that it's the correct data and move your business processes from asynchronous business processes to as synchronous as you can. And you can only do that with automation through real-time data management. Yeah, absolutely, David. And it's even more pertinent right now as everyone is, the discussion is work from home is becoming work from anywhere. So it's not just, oh, hey, I can get into the data warehouse and know that I have a low latency connection when I'm sitting in the corporate internet. Now, developers typically are dispersed, people need to be able to access it. Talk a little bit about the data pipeline, the discussion we've been hearing from, the CDO events that we've gone to as well as discussions, how does Actifio in the industry as a whole streamline that data pipeline that you started talking about? Yeah, that's absolutely essential. You have to have processes and procedures that identify the data, where it's going to go and have essentially a data plane, manage data plane, which is taking it from where it is to where it needs to go, sharing the metadata across that fabric. Those are the ways that you build a consistent data pipeline where people know what the provenance of that data is. And the less copies that you have, the more single copies of that data, a copy of record, a single version of the truth, then the less complicated the systems become and even more the systems between the systems, the human interaction that's required to manage that data goes down. So it, and it makes development so much easier. So a data pipeline is absolutely essential and it's part of that data plane and it's part of the overall architecture that has to be there. We've lived in silos for so long and getting out of silos is not easy at all. And you've got to have the right tools to be able to do that. Yeah, the keynote speaker that Actifio has for the event is Gene Kim, somebody we've had on theCUBE a few times and excited to have him back on at this event. What I thought was really interesting, David, I'd read his first book, his first fiction book I should say, he's also written many nonfiction books. The Phoenix Project was really the go-to book to kind of understand DevOps. I've recommended to so many friends, people in the industry, his new one, The Unicorn Project, is really about software development. But what I found really interesting, because I didn't get to read it earlier this year because there was just no travel, but made sure I did read it ahead of this event. And the lesson that it called out to me was, moving faster, using these modern tools, breaking through silos was all well and good, but the real turning point for the company was enabling that use of data. And as you said, real time, not looking historically, but be able to react fast. So not giving away the secrets of the book there, but a retail organization that could trial things, could update in real time what the inventory was and having everybody in the company get access to that. So the product people, the marketing people, the field people all accessing that single source of truth and that being fed throughout the organization really invigorated and drove the ability for a company to react and move fast, which really is the clarion call for business today. So, David, yeah, any final words from you as to, we've been beating that drum for years that data, data, data is critically important. Well, taking that specific example, if you can take all of that data and then start updating the pricing according to that data, you've suddenly made repricing a dynamic event, a one that's going to respond to the customer and their characteristics, good or bad, and the availability of those availability and the pipeline of products. If you understand all of that, then suddenly your ability to increase revenue by being able to reprice more quickly, automatically become amazingly effective in terms of revenue increase. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like I remember back in the early days of Padoop, it was, how can I make an ad better to increase click rates? But the promise of unlocking data today is to really understand and customize for that environment. So some of it is we can maximize profitability. There will be certain clients which are willing to pay for more premium products and others that you need to have that form of value option. But when you understand the data, you understand the customer, you understand the need for the portfolio of solutions you have data can just be that key enabler. All right, well, hey, David Fleuer, thank you so much for helping us kick off our coverage here. Want to tell everybody, make sure to tune in for the rest of it, Dave Vellante and myself going through the interviews of course on-demand with Actifio as well as, I'm sorry, alive with Actifio as well as on-demand on thecube.net as always for David Fleuer, Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for joining us for Actifio Data Driven and thank you for watching theCUBE.