 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, and welcome to the Boston Area Studio. Happy to welcome back two of our CUBE alumni, both from Activio, Brian Regan, the CMO of the company, and Shukrama, who's the vice president and general manager of Cloud. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Happy New Year, Stu, great to be here. Yeah, 2020, as we were talking about, we don't all have flying cars and some of these things, but there are a lot of exciting things and ever changing in the tech world. We're gonna talk a lot about 10C, which, of course, is Activio's announcement. If I heard the C, it's about cloud, it's about containers, and it's about copy data management, which, of course, we know Activio quite well. So, Brian, let's start with the company update first. Of course, copy data management is where Activio really created a category, but all of these new waves of technology that Activio is fitting into. Well, 2019 was an incredible year for us. Continued accelerating our growth in the market, in the enterprise particularly. The secular trends around hybrid and multi-cloud really played well to our existing strengths, and 10C really builds on those strengths. We'll talk more about that, I know in a moment. We also saw continued, as digital transformation, as application modernization initiatives took hold in just about every enterprise, our database capabilities really played, again, as a strength that we could capitalize on to land significant enterprise accounts, get started with them, and then really start to expand the overall data platform, data management platform in those accounts. Yeah, so, Ashok, before we get into the 10C stuff specifically, Brian teed up some of those cloud trends, and how I think about data protection, data management absolutely has changed. I remember a couple of years ago, we said, oh, well, people are adopting all these clouds. All of these concerns still exist. It doesn't go away, it's not magically, oh, I did Office 365, I don't need to think about all the things that I thought about with Outlook. When I do public cloud and build new applications, oh wait, somebody needs to take care of that data. So, bring us inside your customers, the team that's building these products and some of those big trends. Sure thing, happy new year still. So, and happy to be back on theCUBE. So, 2019 really defined the era where a lot of our enterprises really started moving production workloads to the cloud. Multi-cloud become a reality for Actifio. We were running production workloads on seven cloud platforms. And so, the key elements of being infrastructure agnostic, wherein Actifio can do everything in all cloud platforms. We had basically infrastructure neutral was a key element. And the other element was a single pane of glass. You could have an Oracle workload running on-prem with a web logic application running on Azure and not know the difference. So, the seamless mobility of data was the key element that a lot of our enterprises took advantage of from an Actifio standpoint. And a lot of the 10 C capabilities adds on to those capabilities. And we see more of these adoptions happening in 2020. So, I think 10 C teases up absolutely perfectly for that market. Yeah, Brian, let's talk a little bit about Actifio's place in the market, the differentiation there. That direct connection with the application and the partners is a real big piece of it. It's a huge piece and something we really not just double tripled down on in 2019. Certainly, for us, our database capabilities which we believe are really second to none in the industry, we continue to expand and enrich the capabilities including SAP HANA, obviously already Oracle and SQL Server, DB2 as well as the Linux-based databases, the new and no SQL databases. We also understood and as our customers were talking to us about their application modernization, they were moving more of their front-end capabilities to containers and they wanted the data to come with it, at least temporarily. And so, that was a big focus for us as well, was making sure that we could bring the data whether it was into a VM, into a container, into a physical server, into any number of clouds in order to support that application at that time was a critical part of our differentiation for 2019. Yeah, I'd love just a little more on the database piece because you go to Amazon, re-invent and the migrations of databases to the cloud of course is a major conversation. You look at Amazon, they have a whole number of their offerings as well as if you want to use any database out there, they'll let you use it, of course Oracle might charge you more if you're doing it on the Amazon, the Amazon partner, the Azure partnership with Oracle with some big news in the second half of 2019. So, when you're working with their customers, database is still central to how they run their business and one of the bigger expenses on the books there. So, as we look at 2020, what is the landscape specifically from a database standpoint? Well, we continue to see in most of our large enterprise accounts that Oracle and SQL servers continue to dominate the majority of the payload of databases. We don't see that changing, although we do see net new applications being built on new database platforms to compliment the Oracle and SQL server back end. So, we are seeing a rise of the Mongos and the new and no sequels out there. We're also seeing more consideration of building in the cloud as opposed to starting on-prem and then potentially leveraging the cloud sort of post facto in terms of the application architecture. So, our ability to support both the legacy big iron database platforms as well as the new generation platforms regardless of application architecture, regardless of the geometry of the application is a big part of our differentiation going forward. All right, so let's wait, we've hinted about it but 10 C major announcement, let's get into how that extends what we've been talking about. Absolutely. So, we've made a lot of the new databases particularly the no SQL databases, the Mongos and HANA's first class citizens intensity, which means we understand not just the database, they also the ecosystem that the database lives in. We all know HANA's a fairly big database in terms of the number of machines it consumes, number of applications that reuse it and to capture and actually provide value for HANA you need to understand where the HANA database lives. And so, some of the capabilities we've added in 10 C is to kind of figure out this ecosystem and when you migrate, you migrate the ecosystem, not just the HANA database because that is a key element. And the second aspect is the containers that Brian touched on. Now, we're seeing legacy data being presented into containers and there's a bridge required for that. Now, how do you present that bridge? Containers can be brought up but they're lifeless unless you give them data. So, we act as a bridge wherein you bring up the container using Kubernetes or whatever framework you have and we marry the data into the container framework. So, most organizations, you know, as they evolve from yesterday's architecture to today's architecture, they need this bridge which helps them navigate that migration process and Actifio being the data normalization platform is helping them live on both segments, right? Nobody does us turn the switch off on the old one and move to the new, they coexist. That is the key element there. We spent a lot of time over the last couple of years hearing about cloud native architectures and that discussion of data is kind of something you need to kind of dig into understand. I'm glad to hear you talking about, you know, when you talk about storage and containerization, you know, where that fits today because, you know, originally it was only stateless but now we know we can do stateful environments here but while containerization is, you know, growing at huge leaps and bounds, you know, customers aren't taking their Oracle database and shoving it in a little bit. You know, Brian, a lot of discussion about the partnerships. I think it was, what's it, seven, you know, major cloud providers that Actifio is there. Talk a little bit about the cloud native, the relationships with some of those partners. Absolutely, I mean, we made great strides from a go-to-market standpoint with our cloud partners this past year. Google Cloud is probably our most significant go-to-market partner from a cloud standpoint. We've done a lot of joint engineering work in order to support both our existing software platform as well as our SaaS control plane in the Google Cloud. We have landed many significant deals with Google this past year and they have been, you know, as they continue to really increase their focus on enterprise accounts and both hybrid as well as public cloud sort of architectures, we are hand in glove with them as their backup and DR partner for those cloud workloads. Great, so we talked quite a bit about the database piece but in general, back into the cloud, archive in the cloud, what does TenC, specifically in Actifio in general, enhance in those environments? So TenC brings in the key elements is recovery orchestration. So if I have to bring up, let's say 500 machines in any cloud platform, how do I do it? Well, I can go and bring up one machine at a time and take two days to bring it up or with Actifio's resiliency director, you can create a recovery plan and a push button recovery happens. So we've seen a lot of customers adopt that, particularly customers that want to leverage the Google platform for its infrastructure capabilities once an orchestration that understands the applications that are coming up. So there is a significant benefit from a DR standpoint of the recovery orchestration. So we invested a lot of time in tuning the performance and understanding Google and Amazon and Azure to make sure this was built right. The other big push we're seeing for the cloud platforms is SAP. SAP as an enterprise has taken a mission to say there's no more data centers, everything is going to the cloud. So an SAP workloads are not the easiest workloads to manage. And so the intersection point of SAP and the cloud is where Actifio becomes really valuable because those data sets by definition are large, they're complex and they're geodistributed. And the DR is of paramount importance because these are crown jewels. So those segments of DR orchestration followed with SAP and HANA, which is, again, our strength with databases is kind of where TenC really hits the home run. Yeah, when we're talking to users in the discussion of multi-cloud in general, one of the challenges is you need different skill sets across them. One of those powerful things I've heard from Actifio is really is a normalization across any cloud or even in a cloud. Oh, wait, I was going to stuck six up in an archive. That means I'm never going to touch it again. Ingress and egress fees, I have to figure these out where I need to dedicate an engineer to those kind of environments. So it seems that just fundamentally, the architecture that you've built at Actifio is to help customers really get their arms around those multi-cloud environments. Absolutely, and I think there are two additional components that really one of which has lived with Actifio from the very beginning of the company, which was API first. The cloud is very much an API centric type of operating model. And with Actifio, we don't change the management system we're operating model, but in fact, we incorporate in. So all of this orchestration that Ashok talked about can be actuated via API. The second piece, which we really started in 2017 with our 8.0 platform release is the consumption and the intelligent consumption of object. With 10C, we've continued to advance our object capabilities. In fact, we published a paper with ESG in late 2019 that talked about mounting 50 terabyte Oracle databases directly out of object with actually increased performance versus the production block storage behind it. So we have really with 10C actually added caching to even further performance optimized object workloads, which speaks to both the flexibility, but also the economic flexibility of being able to contemplate running workloads in the cloud out of object at a lower cost platform without necessarily the compromise of performance that you would normally expect. Absolutely. And like you said, the skill set required, do I need to put it in object? Do I need to put it in block? We kind of eliminate that, right? We neutralize that to say, you wanna leverage the cloud, give us your cost point and you can dial the cost up or down depending on what you see for performance and we will move the data back and forth. So that flexibility is enormous for customers. That's great. If you've talked to anybody that's been in the storage industry for a while and you wanna make them squirm, say the word migration. So we know how painful it has been if you go talk to any of the traditional vendors, they have so many tools and so many services to help do that. In a cloud era, it should be a little bit easier, but it sounds like that's another key piece of 10C. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean 10C hits the home, I think with the API integration. So the other element 2019 saw was the scale of deployment effective field. When you have to manage hundreds of thousands of machines across different geos, there is a scale that comes to the data protection that people really, you have to see it to actually build for it and work with it. And we saw it in 2019 and 10C incorporates a lot of that capabilities as well, making it as cloud native as possible to basically run these applications globally. All right. Was wondering if you might have a customer example to really highlight the impact that 10C is having. Understand if you can't name them specifically, but yeah. Well, actually, Schuch has already talked about one customer slash partner who is I think still the world's largest software company in the world based out of Germany. And they are powering their enterprise cloud and the data management and data protection beneath that enterprise cloud across four different hyperscalers using Actifio. And I think they're on record in a webinar earlier in December talking about their evaluation of pretty much every technology out there. And the one that could really deliver on performance at scale across clouds was Actifio. And the key element was they wanted a single platform with a single pane of glass across all cloud platforms and Actifio was the solution that they chose. So. And certainly I think we credit them and the rest of our enterprise customers for pushing us to make 10C more powerful and more capable across any cloud. You know, ultimately an enterprise is going to make a decision that they've probably already made the decision to incorporate cloud into their enterprise architecture. What we give them is the freedom and the flexibility to choose any cloud. And by the way, any cloud today that might change tomorrow and having the ability to seamlessly migrate and or convert from cloud A to cloud B is something that Actifio powers as well. Yeah, just make sure we're clear as to what's happening there. It's great that you've got flexibility there. When we're talking about data and data gravity of course we're not talking about just lifting an entire database and ignoring the laws of physics there but it's the flexibility of using all these various things. And any, we talk about SAP of course needs to live across all these clouds. But when you talk about an enterprise, what is kind of that killer use case because we said we're not at a point where cloud is not a utility. I don't wake up in the morning and look at the sheet and say, oh, I'm going to use cloud A versus cloud B. So what is the importance of that flexibility? For us today, the majority of our business starts with a company saying I need to deliver my data faster to my developers or my testers or even increasingly my data scientists and analysts. And my data sets have become so large that it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to do that with regularity. So the currency of the data is starting to suffer. That is the first use case for us and that powering that enterprise transformational initiative around a new application or an updated application based on a historical app using those enterprise databases. Delivering that seamlessly, quickly, regardless of how big the data is still remains our first use case. And then increasingly those customers are realizing that they can start to achieve the other benefits of Actifio, including I can start to back that up to the cloud. I can actually orchestrate recoveries in the cloud not just bulk sort of transfer but actually the entire application stack and bring that up in the cloud. I can start to take those data sets and actually mount them into containers for my next generation application. So that starting point of give me my data as quickly as possible regardless of how big it is starts to become universal in terms of its applicability for all use cases. I guess I shook the last thing I want to understand from you is in 2019 we saw a lot of the large providers putting out their vision for how I manage in this multi-cloud environment. You were at the Google Cloud event where Anthos was unveiled. I was at Microsoft Ignite when Azure Arc was unveiled. VMware has things like Tanzu out there so this multi-cloud environment, how do I manage across these dispersed environments? What do all of those moves mean to Actifio and how you look at things? I think with the Tensi release and with the core architecture that Actifio had in place which was multi-cloud ready and API ready. So those are the two elements that are kind of building blocks that you can tie into any one of those constructs you talked about. So we have customers integrated up with Anthos. We have customers integrated up with ServiceNow. We have customers doing VRO with us. So there are many, many integration platforms. The latest I saw was an Alexa app where we were mounting an Oracle database on a voice command. So there's endless possibilities as these ecosystems evolve because Actifio stays behind the covers, powering the data, delivering the data wherever it is needed on the target. So that is the key element and enabler that we see that helps all these other platforms become super successful. So Brian, it sounds very much a tailwind, the big trends that we're seeing here. Key partnerships and meeting your customers where they need to be. Absolutely, yeah. We continue to play in the enterprise market where these are absolutely top of mind of every CIO and top of their agenda. And we are working hand in glove with them to make sure that our platform not only anticipates their needs but delivers on their current state of needs as well. Brian, thank you so much. Congratulations on the 10 C launch cloud containers, copy data management. Look forward to watching your customers and your continued growth. Thanks as always, Stu. Thank you very much. All right, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage here in 2020. Check out thecube.net for all of it and thank you for watching theCUBE.