 Live from New Orleans, Louisiana at the Cube. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. Your file was so big, it might be very useful, but now it is gone. Oh wait, we're not talking about those type of haikus. Happy to welcome to the program the new CEO of haiku, that's HYCU, Simon Taylor, the rebranded company, formerly Comtrade, I'm Stu Miniman with Keith Townsend, Simon, great to see you. Great to see you as always. Yeah, so yeah, of course did a quick Google search, give me some technology things. I believe it's actually like a former Vexpert that a friend of mine had it in like his deep archive. He's got all these things about Windows and like, so let's start there. We've had you on the program as Comtrade, explain the haiku, the name, how it fits with the other company, everything like that. Absolutely, so huge shift since the last time we all spoke. As you might remember, Comtrade Software was a data protection and monitoring company, but it was a part of a larger organization. We spun it out of Comtrade Group and rebranded as a new company, Haiku. Haiku stands for hyperconverged uptime, and really the way we came up with the name is we were thinking about the fact that we sell data protection for the hyperconverger enterprise cloud. More specifically, purpose-built backup and recovery for Nutanix. And we thought when we think about hyperconverged, what are we really doing? We're taking enormous amounts of data and we're simplifying it down to a nice, small, elegant package, much like the Japanese poem, Haiku. So we leveraged that name, Haiku, and then created HYCU, hyperconverged uptime. Yeah, and if you kept the enterprise cloud and everything like that, it would have been a much longer one. Absolutely right. All right, but let's speak to Comtrade, and now Haiku's been working with Nutanix for a lot. Tell us what you're hearing from your customers, what shipping and market, what's it like being in this ecosystem? Yeah, absolutely. We found it to be absolutely wonderful. Haiku, Inc., now, is really the world's only purpose-built backup and recovery product for Nutanix. We've got about 350 employees in five different countries, and we launched about eight months ago our very own backup and recovery product for Nutanix. When we thought about what kind of product we wanted to build as our own standalone company, we knew it had to be in hyperconverged. We knew that Nutanix was the industry leader, and we'd had so much respect for Nutanix for their leadership for so many years, as you remember. We had brought the monitoring scompact for Nutanix to market about three years ago, and we thought, you know, our real legacy has been in the data protection space. We've been working with companies all across the world for 25 years from an engineering perspective supporting the development of blue-chip data protection products, and we thought, what better than to build our own backup and recovery product? And if we're going to do that, we should do it for the industry leader in hyperconversion enterprise cloud, which is Nutanix. So when we thought about what it would take to build an HCI backup and recovery product, we said, you know what, we don't want to be the platform. Nutanix, in our opinion, is the platform, and they've got snapshots and cloning and replication built in to their product. So we said, rather than creating another beast, another platform, another silo, let's leverage the elegance of Nutanix, and let's add to it application awareness, let's add to it all of the various different cataloging and application support that would be required to actually provide a complete data protection solution to Nutanix customers. It's been wonderful, and in just eight months, we're now in 22 countries around the world. So 350 people, this is a crowded space. There's a lot of startups, there's a lot of established companies. Why Nutanix, the focus for such a large company, what's the total addressable market for the product, and what's the traction amongst Nutanix customers? Those are great questions, Keith. And absolutely, I think this is the question that on everybody's mind, how big can Nutanix really get? You know, in our eyes, you can guess the corollary for us. We believe that Nutanix are where VMware were a decade ago, and that they're going to keep going. I think we've heard it from the Nutanix executive team. They want to be a $3 billion company, et cetera, and I think they're going to hit it. I think they're going to absolutely just grow and grow and grow and really be the platform of the future. So from our perspective, this is the most crowded space in technology, and a very difficult place to penetrate. I would certainly not recommend anyone building a sort of plain vanilla backup solution and saying, hey, here we are. I just don't think it'll work. But when you look at Nutanix, and you look at the evolution of data protection, starting with Unix, there was a solution for that. Windows, there was a very relevant solution for that. Virtualization, another backup and recovery product. Now we're in cloud and enterprise cloud, and there's a couple of new vendors that have appeared on the market, and they're all sort of saying the same thing, which is it's all about the application, it's all about integration, and gosh, it's got to be very usable. It's got to be next-gen, and it's got to be focused on the consumer. It's got to be something that people want to use that really has that simplicity and that elegance. The core difference is that, unlike some of the other HCI backup vendors, we've focused almost entirely on building it for Nutanix, which means that we can leverage the power of their platform and make our customers more successful. In terms of total addressable market, what we wanted to do was say to customers, you only should have one data protection solution for your environment. So what we did is we added a VADP integration so you can actually backup and recover not only Nutanix data, but all of your legacy VMware data as well, through Hikoo, okay? But we only marketed to Nutanix customers. So what that enables us to do is to provide a unified data protection solution for Nutanix customers, which helps them to more quickly migrate customers and workloads to new Nutanix boxes. So as far as that support for legacy workloads, we talked to quite a few Nutanix customers, and they're in a mixed environment where a percentage of the workloads on Nutanix, a percentage of their workloads are outside of Nutanix. So does that support extend not only from the virtual machines, but machines and physical machines outside of the Nutanix scope? Sure. So we're at V3.0 right now. We've been out for about eight months. In our latest release, we've added the Essex supports. You can backup all of your legacy infrastructure. We are adding physical and Q4 of this year as well. So you're really looking at a comprehensive enterprise-ready HCI enterprise cloud solution that leverages the power of Nutanix to make their customers more successful than ever before. Okay, great. So VMware and HV today, bare metal coming soon in the future. Let's talk about that cloud piece of it. Nutanix partnerships in putting their environments into AWS, Microsoft, of course Google, really. So all the backup players are talking about how they fit in this multi-cloud world. So how does Haiku fit? You know what we did? We actually repurposed Haiku and we launched our own Google Cloud Services backup product. It's in the Google Cloud Services store. You can download it and you can actually leverage that as well. But I see that as the precursor. I think we on the Haiku team all see that as the precursor design. We love what Nutanix is doing with Google on XI. We think that's going to be a real game changer for them. And what we wanted to make sure is that we really understood the concepts behind it so that when they start launching workloads on XI, we're right there ready with XI integration. So big, give us some hero numbers. What are some of the big features that you guys offer Nutanix customers that other data protection companies can't do? Sure. So one of the key things, Keith, is that from a Nutanix perspective, we actually integrate right at the storage level. Right, so we're not going at the hypervisor level. And what that means is that we avoid something called VM stun. So when we think about customers who are trying to recover their data, in a traditional hypervisor environment where you're backing up at the hypervisor level, you're going to see that VM stun. You're going to see things freeze up a little bit when you're doing the recovery. By backing up and recovering directly from the storage level, we avoid that entire process. The second thing we've done is we've actually patented application awareness. Now this is a great thing. We leveraged it in the monitoring tools. Stu's going to remember that. And we brought that back in a totally new form for the data protection. What we do is we actually look inside the virtual machines. We can see what applications are there. We reconstruct them ourselves. And that enables self-service recovery on the part of the Nutanix admin. So now a Nutanix admin can say, I want to restore SQL. I want to restore Exchange. I want to get an email back. They can do all of that themselves right from the solution. All right, so I mean, last thing I want to cover is what feedback are you hearing from the show here? What are the customers excited about? You've been to quite a few of these also. What's your wrap up of the show? I think this is by far the most successful Nutanix event ever. And I think it's been a wonderful scale-up approach for everyone here. I think what people are, we're starting to see a lot more in the federal space certainly. We're starting to see a lot more for both Nutanix and Haiku kind of across the larger enterprises. And I think what people are starting to see is that they can actually move entire environments to Nutanix. And I think more and more workloads are shifting faster than ever before. And these guys have just really found scale. That's been a terrific thing to see and obviously fantastic for our business as well. All right, Simon Taylor, CEO of Haiku. Pleasure to catch up with you as always. We'll be back with lots more programming here from Nutanix.next 2018 for Keith Townsend. Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.