 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering ZertoCon 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. This is theCUBE, we're at ZertoCon 2018, Heinz Convention Center in Boston. My name's Paul Gillan. My guest is John White, the VP of Product Strategy at Expedient. And I wanted to start by giving us just the elevator pitch on what Expedient is all about. Sure, Expedient is a cloud service provider, as well as managed service provider. And we also have data centers that we operate here, mainly on the East Coast. We have seven cities and 11 data centers. Those are in Boston here, locally, as well as Baltimore, Maryland, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Memphis, Tennessee. And then we actually, we'll put our private cloud services really anywhere. So we actually will put them on the customer's premises to meet that need, as well as then in partner data centers anywhere over the world, if they have to deal with compliance, security, whatever it might be, we'll go and tackle those problems for them. So our goal is to be an infrastructure as a service provider for really all the enterprise. So when would a company do business with you versus a Microsoft or an Amazon? Yeah, so if you kind of look at really three ways to kind of go cloud, right? You can still do it yourself. You can build some cloud-based services. And that's, again, you're in and on your own. You can go all the way to the extreme, which is the AWS or the Azures. And that's more, again, you're kind of going to do it yourself type of mentality. And your support structure there is a little bit different. It's maybe a little bit more mechanical, a little bit more robotical. If you need help in transitioning and figuring out where your workloads should sit and maybe creating more of a hybrid cloud. So it's maybe on your premises. It's inside of one of our data centers. And then maybe it's even in one of those AWS or Azures. You're going to work with a company like Expedient to go and help you figure out where you should put your workloads first off and then how to create that long-term strategy. So you get the best of all worlds that are out there, not just one prescriptive cloud. So you're kind of a high-touch cloud provider? Very, very high-touch, yeah. Our whole product service is actually all Alucard menus. So you pick and choose what you want. You can manage servers, we can provide virtual infrastructure, we can do things like DR as a service, backups as a service, all those pieces. So you build basically your perfect IT strategy with us and then direct connects into AWS and Azure and some other cool products coming soon to kind of make your life a little bit easier, consuming and running your workloads in public clouds. We hear a lot these days about multi-cloud, about customers wanting to shift their workloads seamlessly around between multiple backend cloud providers. And certainly vendors talk about that a lot. Do you hear customers talking about it? Yeah, we have some customers starting to talk about it. And in the beginning, they just wanted to see, okay, I'm running workloads in AWS, I'm running workloads in Expedient, I'm multi-cloud. And then they start to understand, well, our management's really hard and the network's really hard and the security's really hard. And we're doing backups another way than we've done it traditionally. And we're helping customers bridge that gap and saying we can take some of the security policies that we've been running internally in our data center and maybe you've been doing inside of your data center and take those out into the public cloud. Simplifying things with networking. We're a pretty big VM or NSX shop. So doing something where you can create tagging and policies local inside of the Expedient data center and then being able to translate those up into AWS and Azure to make it, you basically one seamless network is really, really big and key for our customers. It's something that I think is still new. We have a handful of customers that we're working on a lot of cool research projects on, but I think it's going to be something that's going to be the dominant force here in the next few years. You mentioned disaster recovery as a service. Now, is that where Zerto fits into your plan? Correct, yeah, we've been working with Zerto for quite some time now, really since they were just coming to Boston. And we worked and spent a ton of time with them, getting them to understand the needs of service providers as they were traditionally enterprise focused. And that partnership that we've built over the years has done tremendous value for not only our customers, but our businesses. And we've actually had two year over year growth for the last three years with them. And actually we just won the service provider growth partner of the year award with them. So we're creating some pretty cool solutions around DR as a service and taking some of our network background and actually simplifying DR for our customers that way. So we use Zerto as well as VMware and some of our own private connectivity NSX to actually simplify the package of DR to get the recovery time objective down into 10, 15 minutes instead of four hours or eight hours or multiple days that really most people are experiencing right now. So when you look at the landscape, there are a lot of disaster recovery solution providers you could have worked with. What does Zerto do that's really different? The part, well, you know, on a technology wise, I mean, watching them take a look at the change block that's occurring inside of the VMware environment, making it agnostic from a storage layer. That was really big for us in the beginning on the technical tip in. And then the partnership as of late early since the beginning was the big value differentiator that we just couldn't find in other companies that were out there. We locked, you know, arms with their product management team and their product strategy team right away. We gave them literally two sheets of paper and said, these are the things we need to be successful as a service provider using your software. They went down, checked them all off. We started going at it and we started then growing that year over year for the last three years. So it's been an amazing partnership. They have a strategic team that understands where the marketing industry is going and we're going to, you know, use them and leverage them as much as we possibly can to help out our customers and give them the best outcomes they can possibly get. When your customers talk to you about backup, where do you see them going? Where is that market headed? So back up, you know, traditional backup is something we've been doing for quite some times. I mean, we do petabytes of backups every year for customers. Still using tape, believe it or not, as well. We have a lot of this, but there's tape is still out there. I actually have a bumper sticker that I think EMC made when they bought Avamar saying tape is dead and I don't think it's going to die anytime soon. We're still, right, mainframe has been dead and we still roll new ones into our data centers on a regular basis and then put cloud beside it. But on the, you know, the backup side of it, you know, if you look at some of, you know, the new disasters, right? Look at Atlanta, their disaster was different. It wasn't a natural disaster. It was a ransomware attack, right? That's a new disaster. We're going to find new disasters and you can't go and restore back from 24 hours ago and think that that's good. We don't live in that world anymore. It needs to be from five minutes, seven minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it might be. So we use their journaling today to actually get those quick recoveries and if they can extend that out, I think it's going to be pretty powerful for customers to say, okay, I want to go back to two years, three days and six hours from now and say, give me that point in time snap. That's the way I want to actually restore that data. You know, succeeding in that vision, I think we'll definitely change the game for how we actually look at doing, you know, backup and restores in the future. The, a lot of talk at this conference about resilience, is that a concept that you think customers, your customers have really internalized to understand what that means. They're getting it, yeah, definitely. I mean, DR even was something that we had to kind of walk them into, but now, if they have an outage, it's not just money that they're losing, it's the reputation. And as we all know now, reputation is key and you look at Twitter, when somebody has an outage or has a problem, I mean, their users essentially just blow them up and there's memes and all kinds of other stuff. There's a lot of funny ones for the airlines. I mean, from Delta and Southwest having those challenges. And so our customers today are realizing that, yeah, we can't go, you know, a day or two without having service to our customers. We can maybe go a minute or two, but that's about it. We need to make sure we're being resilient with our data. We need to make sure we're protecting it. We'll be able to create ways to quickly roll it back to make sure our customers are up online because they just can't go down anymore. How important is security as a driver of resilience and spending on disaster recovery now? Yeah, I mean, security is definitely, you know, with being able to quickly restore from like a ransomware, I mean, it's starting to bring that infrastructure that has been, you know, security's been a little bit different there and where network security's been a little bit different, kind of bringing them together to create, say, we need to have a full package. We need not only need to figure out how we're blocking it at the edge and blocking it internally, east-west, but we need to figure out if we're going to get breached because we're going to get breached. How can we quickly restore from that? How can we make sure we're not being held ransom for, you know, Bitcoin or whatever the next currency's going to be that they're going to be held ransom for that they just can't pay because maybe it'll knock them out of business. So, John, expedient, you know, being a small specialized cloud service provider, you're kind of dancing with elephants when you're out there with Amazon and Microsoft. What's the secret? What keeps you guys successful and how do you keep viable? There's a lot of different things. I think the way we focus on technologies is a little bit unique. I mean, we're there to design the best technical solution for that customer and not maybe fit them into a one-size-fits-all outfit. The other side of it is a lot of our customers like the local touch and feel. Majority of our customers are added around our data centers. That way they can get to learn the facility. Even if they're running cloud services with us, they know where it lives. That maybe eases their minds from a compliance standpoint, security standpoint, or just in a trust saying, I'm going to take my data that's been living inside of my data center that's key to my business and I'm going to give it to somebody I at least want to face in a name so I can know who to call and who to talk to if there's ever a problem. Face-to-face still matters. It does and I think it's always going to matter and I think we're always going to have some sort of high interaction with every enterprise out there and that's what they're going to need because this stuff can never commoditize all the way. Creating the solution is still hard. Maybe the bits and pieces underneath it are a little bit easier but the whole package is going to always be unique and really hard to define in a one-size-fits-all for a lot of those enterprises. John White, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. We'll be back from ZerdoCon 2018 here in Boston. I'm Paul Gillum, this is theCUBE.