 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering ZertoCon 2018, brought to you by Zerto. This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillin, we're on the ground here in Boston for ZertoCon 2018, the third ZertoCon, and with me is a gentleman who has been to all the ZertoCons as well as many years before that, Gil Levin and I, the Chief Marketing Officer at Zerto. Welcome, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me here. You were one of the first people at Zerto to understand, way back in the day. Yeah, yeah, I'm kind of like ground zero type person here in Zerto, managed back then the product team and the marketing team, then we grew bigger and bigger, and now I own all of the marketing for Zerto. So how do you feel coming to a conference like this? Are all these people here, you've got big name keynote speakers, having joined the company as one of the earliest employees, what does that feel like? It's like when I have three teenagers, so I know what it means to be proud of your child, it's a very proud moment, okay? Because really, I think the caliber of customers we see here in the conference, of course there's the quantity of customers, et cetera, but also the caliber of customers, the caliber of discussion that's happening here is really, it really makes me proud and knowing that this company started a few years ago and from just like any other startup, a very small company, and now we're really making a dent in an industry and I'm changing and we're making customers successful. It's really, really... Your first user conference, your first user conference is a milestone of sorts, isn't it? Yeah, two years ago it was really like having a child, okay, it was like, so now it's like we got into a rhythm, we know what we're doing now, we know what the conference looks like and we know what it means, but just like with children, when the older they get, the bigger the challenges, same thing, okay? The bigger the conference gets, the different challenges and it's always hectic few weeks, but... But very valuable because you come here, you have a chance to talk to customers and non-stop really for three days, what are you hearing from them? What are the trends that are emerging to you from the conversations you're having out there? So, you know, going back to why I was hired, as one of the first few people, is actually kind of like a good example of that because I was hired because I was actually a marketing and product management guy hired in Zorto before we actually wrote our first line of code. Why? Because we want to make sure that we talk to customers and we get their feedback and we get their guidance on what should be doing back in that day, okay? And so, from that point on, we always are doing the same thing. We're listening to our customers, okay? That's kind of like a key DNA for Zorto. So, this conference is an amazing place to do that, to really hear from our customers what are the challenges? You know, we had our customer advisory board with our partner advisory board here, but also every hallway conversation with customers is the same thing, okay? Hey, what do you need to do? What are you trying to do that you know, capable of doing? And that's where we actually understand the trends in the market, you know? We have John and people like that, the analysts are amazing, but there's nothing like an unbiased conversation with the customer and understanding their needs. And what we see is really two major aspects, okay? And kind of like, as you mentioned in its keynote, one, the SLAs are totally different, okay? It's really, really, really unacceptable to be down or to lose data. Done, it's no industry can do that. No type of customer, no size of customer. It doesn't matter if you're retail, if you're airline, if you're banking. Five nines isn't enough anymore. It's like, it's people have, you know, we all have phones, we're all used to always on, and everything needs to be always on. So that drives, you know, the whole narrative of guys. I can't tell you, hey, I'm going to recover from two hours ago. It's like nothing anymore, okay? The second thing is, they are all facing a lot of complexities in kind of like the changing infrastructure. They all want to move to cloud, we hear about containers, we hear about cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and it's all really coming from the right reasons. It's coming from trying to change the business model. It's coming from trying to change the cross-structure, but to lose so much complexity, so between these two, they just like, they need to really briefing the way they're doing what they're doing in the terms of data protection, mobility, et cetera, and that's where we came to this kind of like, I-to-resilience platform concept, from the needs of the market. So we see customers, I mean, they want more flexibility, they want to use multiple clouds, they want hybrid clouds, they want to have shift workloads around seamlessly, all of this has risk, and resilience in an environment like that is challenging. What is Zerto going to do to make that more seamless for them? I think resilience is double-charging. It's challenging because really to be successful, you can only be kind of like resilient to, hey, how am I addressing bad things that happen? You need to be resilient to the fact that you changing your business is part of your business now, okay? And how am I kind of like effectively change my business, run forward, run fast, while I'm not living behind any gaps or anything that, hey, I might get like, you know, struck by some bad luck or intentional cyber thing, okay? And lose my business. And that happens also. You see major companies that have big impacts on their business because of events like that. So the key to doing that is really to, hey, simplify the way you protect everything and really move to what we call continuous protection. And, you know, that's from a product perspective, but from a thing about from a methodology perspective, you need to have the ability to always recover anytime, anywhere, whatever you need, from realistically, whenever you need it, okay? It's like, it's the only way possible. And only technologies that are, you know, we started from, we're coming from the high end of the market into the, into this kind of like, now more much wider market because we're coming from protecting huge Oracle databases with huge change rates with seconds of RPOs, okay? That's our DNA. That's why we know how to now take that into an entire kind of like, I can say, you need that IT to be available wherever you need it. And you need to be able to protect it at any point in time and move everything around between clouds, as you say. And that's where, that's where our kind of like is our message to the market. You need to be able to do that. Our platform is the way to do that. But that's the only way you can actually not only, as we say, not only survive what's going on, but also thrive in this environment. And that's because you have a converged platform and the time is right. I hear Zerto exactly saying the time is right for convergence. Why is that? It's, you know, when you see the market, kind of like, look today at any player in the back of the RSpace website, all say the same thing, okay? Why are all everybody saying the same thing? Everybody's trying to sell the same thing. Everybody's trying to sell all of these business cases, okay? And some don't call it converged or they do, it doesn't matter. The fact of the matter is from a customer perspective, if you look at any vendor today in this space, all of them are trying to provide you all of these services. So that's where we see, hey, this is what's happening. And the customers are also telling us, guys, we are using, we just heard it on stage now, we are using Zerto instead of our backup, okay? Why? Because in the short term, kind of like retention, you're giving us a much better solution. So we see from the customers that they're saying, hey, I want less systems, I want one kind of like place where I go and I can mobilize, I can protect, I can recover, I have compliance, I have ransomware protection, all of that in one place. So, you know, the market is really telling us convergence isn't happening right there. And that's where I kind of like, you know, we believe we have the best DNA and the best core technology to provide that converged solution, because eventually it's about the atomic engine of how are you doing your protection and I think we have the best avenue there. But if you look at everybody, everybody's talking the convergence game. So where is backup going long term? Does eventually this backup just disappear or everything becomes continuous? Not in a million years, literally, okay? No, pun intended, okay? Because, you know, everybody, you know, the legal holds, the compliance. The attention schedules, yeah. The act of backing up your data, your application is not going away. That's going to stay. We believe that there is a, the shift that needs to take place in the market that we're leading is what does short-term backup mean, okay? Because short-term backup is really kind of like the same thing today as recovering from ransomware, it's the same thing as mobilizing an application. And that's where we think that needs to be continuous and then you need one platform that can also take care of your long-term, you know, months, years, depending on what industry you're in, regulated backups. I just talked to a large customer of ours last night in our great party. He said, hey, I'm doing 14 days and I don't care about anything after that, okay? I'm in an unregulated industry, okay? And I do what is good for my business and for my business, 14 days is good. I don't really need anything. I sometimes have some more copies later, but that's it. So the actual use case of backup depends on the industry, but it's not going away. There's no question that the use case of backup is stayed. We think that the way the technology that drives that should change. As we're talking today, we're two days out from the implementation of GDPR in the European Union. Does this have an impact on your business? Oh, a major impact, you know, first of all, we're a company. Number one, I don't know if you know, International Company, sure, of course. And we work, we have, you know, we work globally with, you know, offices and employees in Europe and customers in Europe and operation in Europe. So all of that. We're marketing, you know, our marketing guy, we're marketing in Europe. We actually had a session here in the conference, joint session by our appropriate council. And some customers talking about how to implement GDPR because it's actually a joint project in Zoto from all sides to say, okay, what are we doing for GDPR? So as a company, that's number one, okay? Second thing is for our customers. There's a number of things that, you know, for example, take locally, knowing where your data is, which is part of GDPR, we help by identifying exactly where is your data, where is your backup data, where is your application data, et cetera. There's lots of kind of like, we believe there's going to be lots of more and less compliance kind of like related things that will emerge for GDPR. And but also, you know, there's like the rise to be forgotten, what does that mean about backups? Do I need to now go open all my backups? So if you can see, and again, not me, but we have people that dove down, for example, the right to be forgotten is one of the less kind of like, the less stronger rights because I think even the regulator understood that, hey, it's a bit hard to forget someone from, you know, do I need to open my back, back up from like five years and delete something? That's going to be a huge cost. So there's definitely going to be implications and I think time will tell you a bit where this is going in terms of like, what are the bigger implications? No shortage of agendas for Zerto going forward. Oh, no shortage, no. Gil Levin, I thank you very much for joining us, Chief Marketing Officer at Zerto. Thank you very much. We'll be right back. I'm Paul Gillum, this is theCUBE. Thank you very much.