 This is theCUBE, live from the Mascone Center in San Francisco. This is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2010, now inside theCUBE. Live, I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE, here with Dave Vellante, the founder of Wikibon. Big research firm, Dave. Thank you, John. We're back. We're here with Kent Langley of N-Scaled, CTO, and founder, right? Yeah, that's right. CTO founder. It's great to have you here. Thanks for coming on. Thank you guys very much. In the cloud, we're hearing all kinds of disruption stories around cloud, and it's all a lot of high-level messaging. Developers are great, going to be ecosystem boom. People are going to be making a lot of money. Growth opportunities up and down the stack, infrastructure apps and user. Apple's got the big news today, but there's a lot of little nuances in the cloud, and a lot of them are configuration, backup, recovery, I mean, meat and potatoes kind of stuff. I mean, what your company N-Scaled is in that world. So how does this all affect you and tell us what your angle is on all this? Yeah, absolutely. Cloud computing for us at N-Scaled is very much a way to deliver a service like business continuity and disaster recovery that previously was incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive, and absolutely not capital efficient. Using cloud business delivery models as well as technical delivery models we're able now to deliver, N-Scaled's able to deliver disaster recovery in business continuity to our clients at up to 80% less cost than running their own data centers today. And this is a lot of real. And you're the CTO, right? I am the CTO, yes. So technically, what is all the meat and potatoes around some of the things you've got to do to make this thing work? What are the core issues? I mean, obviously you've got people to choose from to buy products, what's happening? Yeah, absolutely. There are literally dozens of different pieces of technology you have to put together end to end to provide disaster recovery and business continuity. We've integrated with partners like Falcon Store using their CDP replication services very effectively as well as some of their snapshot technologies to enable things like RPO and RTOs of 15 minutes or less across the WAN in another data center in another state literally by clicking a button. You click activate your service starts and your clients can get back to work straight away. That's the most important thing is making sure that people keep working. So talk a little bit about what you're doing with VMware and how you're deploying it and what it's meant to your business. So our use of VMware is global. We have, I believe approximately, 28 distinct geographic locations where we have VMware hypervisors installed in varying concentrations protecting over 300 and somewhere around 300 or 400 terabytes of client data today. VMware for us is, it's our operating system. I mean, we view it that way very much. Everything that we deploy runs on top of the VMware hypervisor from the replication technology to the networking technology we're integrated with and so on and so forth. So it's an enabler for us. We were talking earlier about the old, remember the managed service provider, the storage service providers in the late 90s, companies like storage networks and a number of others and how it was just, I think you said wrong decade. Yeah, I think I mentioned loud cloud. Yeah, you're right, brilliant wrong decade. Yeah, wrong decade, right. You've also said that you've been waiting to start this company for a while. So talk a little bit about the way in which you've developed this company and what's different now and why is this the right decade and particularly I'm interested in how the whole notion of data protection is changing. Okay, so the way that we've developed this company is really straightforward. We realized that there are any number of companies that want to go to cloud. Everybody hears the buzz. Everybody knows what it's all about. But using the cloud today, it's really about solving real business problems and so what we thought we needed to do was provide people a pathway, if you will, or a bridge to the cloud. So we've deployed in a true hybrid cloud model where we have an on-premise and an off-premise component to our hardware. The off-premise component are the data centers we manage. On-premise is, think of it as a little slice of our cloud that sits in your data center. And in doing so, what we've allowed people to do is sort of get rid of the vendor alphabet soup that they have to deal with every day. They can sign up with us and pay an on-demand rate and only use what they consume or only consume what they need at any given point in time. So, only pay for what they consume. Yeah, exactly, pay for what they consume. Use it when you need it and that's it. And I think that what we've found is the market is incredibly receptive to this. They say things to us like, our actual live customers say things like, thank you, this has enabled me to go and do what I want to do, which is provide true value to the business. And I think that that's, as long as I can do that every day, then people are going to keep coming to us. So you mentioned CDP. We actually, the Monday we had Jim McNeill on home's CSO at Falcon Store. And we were just riffing on backup, how it's changing virtualization and the impact and the kind of model that we had in our brains was Apple Time Machine for the data center, where you're essentially doing recovery in a very seamless and quick fashion. John, you're a Mac user, you use Time Machine, right? It's just, the backup's there. It's a fundamental- I don't even think about the data. But that's a big story here is data management, data protection, number one issue we're hearing from cloud service providers is data protection from their clients. They want to go cloud, but they want data protection. Right, so- Is that what you see this headed? Is it sort of that more dynamic backup and recovery? Well, it is, it's absolutely dynamic. CDP means a lot of things to a lot of people, but for us it means a very low recovery point objective, say five, 10 minutes, and being able to always have the most technically possible available image of not just files, right, but of every file, folder, disk, or server that you have and being able to recover that either on-premise or off-premise, it's technology like the Falcon Store, CDP devices, and the underlying micro-scan replication that make this possible because it's so efficient. You know, and when I looked at, I looked at dozens of different replication technologies to choose that one. Jim talked about, Jim McNeil from Falcon Store talked about how backups change and all this stuff's changing, the definitions are changing. What key things are you seeing around the redefinition? When we had JuniperNet was just on about, you know, changes is the constant and what are you seeing specifically? Well, specifically, people don't want to do it anymore. I mean, that, to be honest with you, that's the big change and now- Backup sucks. For the first time ever, really, for the first time, you ask me, why is this the right time? The network is there, the servers are there, the virtualization is there, and for the first time ever, people can actually look at their backup services and go, there's a better way. And that is about being able to do it on demand all the time out of band so that you're not impacting your users when you're doing it. This is crucial, right? Because everybody wants 24-7 uptime on everything. And so, with these types of technologies, what InScale is doing is enabling that and also enabling the sort of the global- It's a core business issue for you, right? Yes. So, we've said a few times, shorter RPOs, a lot of people may not know what we're talking about, many do I'm sure, but we're essentially talking about how much business, how much data you want to lose. Yeah, absolutely. Our RPOs are getting shorter and shorter and shorter because businesses are saying, I don't want to lose any data. It's as little as possible. On our website, we have specific client case studies of clients that have adopted InScale that have gone from one hour to 24-hour recovery point objectives down to 15 minutes within a 30-day implementation life cycle. So, let's talk about what that means. So, you're talking about if something critical or disaster occurred, you're talking about not losing a day's worth of data, but maybe 15 minutes. Maximum. That's a big difference. Maximum. And there are paths. In terms of disruption to the business, that's potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars or more. Absolutely. And our client base is in the legal industry. They're in the financial services industry. We call them risk intolerant. I like to also call them high value content creators. If you have a lawyer making a very nice salary for every hour that he works, it's very important that he keep working. Because for every minute that he's not, and especially for every minute that email is down, he's not producing in the way that he should. Dave, we got two minutes. So, I mean, I wanted to get one question in from my standpoint. Then Dave's going to get one last question in. You guys are in the business cloud service provider business. And a lot of your vendors that support you have to have the cutting edge technology. Dave and I talked about cloud service providers being a key integral part of this new architecture. But what do they got to do to be successful? What do you say to the folks that are trying to interface with you and get you new technology? What are the key things that you need to run your business going forward? Not today, but with virtualization, it's going to enable a whole new set of requirements. What do you demand from the falcon stores of the world and other vendors? What do they got to continue to do or do differently? You know, I think the biggest change is something that we have to push all our vendors very hard on. And you can call it whatever you like, on-demand business model, SPLA model, SPLA model. They have to be able to allow us to consume their services in an on-demand model as well. And we've had to fight that a lot over the last couple of years to reach that with all of our vendors. That's changing. It's changing very quickly. Additionally, we need rapid, agile, development, iteration cycles. I can't come to a vendor and say, this doesn't work right. And they go, oh, we'll have that fixed six or eight months from now. No, it's got to be two weeks, right? Four weeks, because you've got to match the speed of the market. And no one is going to sit around and wait for you to change a piece of code six months from now. No one. You'll move on, right? Next question is, Kent, where do you see this? Look out in your crystal ball. Where do you see this in five years? The whole cloud service provider space, the whole concept of backup and how it's changing. Where do you see that going? Wow, that's a big question. It is big. In five years. Yeah, so. In-scaled, you know. Think about your objectives as a company. Where do you want to see it? And how does the whole vision that we've talked about play in there? Okay, so for me, five years means that the customer adoption lifecycle will have gone full circle multiple times. And that customer adoption lifecycle goes from adopting a protection service, replicating it to your local device, getting it into the cloud, and then being able to have the power as a business to make choices like, you know what, I don't want to run that server anymore. I'm going to fail that over, never fail it back. I'm going to leave it there. And that data set will also remain mobile. So if tomorrow I want to take it to a different cloud, or if I want it back for any reason, I'll be able to do that. Today, we're able to achieve those things, but it's difficult still, even today. It's, that in five years is going to be like nothing. No one's going to think twice about clicking a button that says, move my stuff to Dallas, move my stuff to Hong Kong or anywhere. And I think that's what's really exciting. But changing the whole way in which recovery happens. Cloud computing. That's a great vision. Yeah, cloud computing's a renaissance in the way we do business. It's going to be amazing. So we, I mentioned this to MacNeil. When he was on, in the Wikibon community, we're setting forth that vision of how the industry needs to respond to the changes that virtualization brings, particularly around data protection. So we'd love for you to be part of that. Have you back on Wikibon and SiliconANGLE. Thank you very much, guys. Great to have you on today. We're here live at the Moscone Center and ground floor and scene of VMworld 2010. Live at SiliconANGLE.com. Continuous coverage, blanket coverage, wall-to-wall coverage and analysis every day. More interviews, it's like the mail, it never stops coming. Rich Napolitano, president of EMC up next, a repeat guest. He's the head honcho for the unified security. Most important guy in the company, I always say. Better run the other way. He's a great guy. We'll be right back with Rich Napolitano from EMC. Thanks, guys.