 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, the virtual edition. I'm Lisa Martin. I have a couple of guests joining me next to talk about AWS and Druva. From Druva, Chris White is here, the Chief Revenue Officer. Hey, Chris, nice to have you on the program. Excellent, thanks Lisa, excited to be here. And from AWS, Sabina Joseph joins us. She is the General Manager of the America's Technology Partners. Sabina, welcome. Thank you, Lisa. So looking forward to talking to you guys. Unfortunately, we can't be together in a very loud space in Las Vegas, so this will have to do. But I'm excited to be able to talk to you guys today. So Chris, we're gonna start with you. Druva and AWS have a long-standing partnership. Talk to us about that and some of the evolution that's gone on there. Absolutely, yeah, we certainly have. We've had a great long-term partnership. Excited to talk to everybody about it today and be here with Sabina and you, Lisa, as well. So we actually re-architect our entire environment on AWS, 100% on AWS back in 2013. That enables us to not only innovate back in 2013, but continue to innovate today and in the future. It gives us flexibility on 100% platform to bring that to our customers, to our partners and to the market out there. In doing so, we're delivering on data protection, disaster recovery, e-discovery, and ransomware protection. All of that's being leveraged on the AWS platform, as I said, and that allows uniqueness from a standpoint of resiliency, protection, flexibility, and really future-proofing the environment, not only today, but in the future. And over this time, AWS has been an outstanding partner for Druva. Excellent, Chris, thank you. Sabina, you lead the America's Technology Partners, as we mentioned. Druva is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner. Talk to us through AWS's lens on the Druva AWS partnership and from your perspective as well. Sure, Lisa, so I've had the privilege of working with Druva since 2014, and it has been an amazing journey over the last six and a half years. You know, overall, when we work with partners on technical solutions, we help the partner better architect their solution for AWS, but also take their feedback on our features and capabilities that our mutual customers want to see. So for example, Druva has actually provided feedback to AWS on performance, usability enhancements, security posture and suggestions on additional features and functionality that we could have on AWS Snowball Edge, AWS DynamoDB and other services, in fact. And in the same way, we provide feedback to Druva. We provide recommendations and it really is a unique process of exposing our partners to AWS best practices. When customers use Druva, they are benefiting from the AWS recommended best practices for data durability, security and compliance. And our engineering teams work very, very closely together. We collaborate, we have regular meetings and that really sets the foundation for a very strong solution for our mutual customers. So it sounds very symbiotic and as you talked about that engineering collaboration and the collaboration across all levels. So now let's talk about some of the things that you're helping customers to do as we are all navigating a very different environment this year. Chris, talk to us about how Druva is helping customers navigate some of those big challenges. You talked about ransomware, for example, this massive pivot to remote workforce. What's Druva got going on there? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that we've seen consistently, right? It's been customers are looking for simplicity. Customers are looking for cost-effective solutions. And then you couple that with the ability to do that all on a single platform. That's what the combination of Druva and AWS does together. As you mentioned, Lisa, you've got work from home that's increased with the unfortunate events going across the globe over the last almost 12 months now, nine months now, increased ransomware that threats, right? The bad actors tend to take advantage of these situations, unfortunately. And you've got to be working with partners like AWS, like Druva coming together to build that barrier against the bad actors out there, right? We've got double layer of protection based on the partnership with AWS. And then if you look at the rising concerns around governance, right? The complexities of governments, if you look at Japan adding some increased complexity to governance, you look at what's going on across the globe, across the pond with GDPR, number of different areas around compliance and governance that allows us to better report upon that. We built the right solution to support the migration of these customers. And everything I just talked about has just accelerated the need for folks to migrate to the cloud, migrate to AWS, migrate to leveraging Druva's solutions. And there's no better time to partner with Druva and AWS just because of that. And I think we're all talking about in every CUBE statement we're doing this acceleration of digital transformation and customers really having to make quick decisions and pivot their businesses over and over again to get from survival to thriving mode. So I mean, talk to us about how Druva and AWS align on key customer use cases, especially in these turbulent times. Yeah, so for us, as you said, Lisa, right? When we start working with partners, we really focus on making sure that we are aligned on those customer use cases. And from the very first discussions, we want to ensure that feedback mechanisms are in place to help us understand and improve the services and the solutions. Chris, as he mentioned migrations, right? And we have customers who are migrating their applications to AWS and really want to move the data into the cloud. And you know what, this is not a simple problem because there's large amounts of data and the customer has limited bandwidth. Druva, of course, as they have always been, is an early adopter of AWS Snowball Edge and has worked closely with us to provide a solution where customers can just order a Snowball Edge directly from AWS, it gets shipped to them, they turn it on, they connect it to the network and just start backing up their data to the Snowball Edge. And then once they're done, they can just pack it up, ship it back, and then all of this data gets loaded into the Druva solution on AWS. And then you know, for those customers who are running applications locally on AWS Outpost, Druva was once again an early adopter, in fact, last re-invent. They actually tested out AWS Outpost and they were one of the first launch partners. Once again, further expanding the data protection options they provide to our mutual customers. Well, as that landscape changes so dramatically, it's imperative that customers have data center workloads, AWS workloads, cloud workloads, endpoints protected, especially as people scattered in the last few months. And also as we talked about the ransomware rise, as I saw on Druva's website, one ransomware attack every 11 seconds. And so now you've got to be able to help customers recover and have that resiliency, right? Because it's not about, are we going to get hit? It's a matter of when. How does Druva help facilitate that resiliency? Yeah, that's a great point we said. And as you look at our joint customer base, we've got thousands of joint customers together. And we continue to see positive business impacts because of that. And to your point, it's not if it's when you get hit. And it's ultimately, you've got to be prepared to recover in order to do that. And based on the security levels that we jointly have based on our architecture and also the benefits of the architecture within AWS, we've got a double layer of defense out there that most companies just can't offer today. So if we look at that from an example standpoint, and transitioning off of specific use case of ransomware, but really look at a cat's media companies, one of the largest media companies out there across the globe, 400 radio stations, 800 TV stations, over 100,000 podcasts, over 4,000 or excuse me, 5,000 streams happening on an annual basis, very active and candidly very public, which creates the target. They really came to us for three key things, right? They looked for reduced complexity, really reducing their workload internally from a backup and recovery standpoint, really to simplify that backup environment. And they started with Druva really focused on the endpoints. How do we protect and manage the endpoints from a data protection standpoint? Ultimately, the cost savings that they saw, the efficiency they saw, they ended up moving on and doing key workloads, right? So data protection, data center workloads that they were backing up and protecting. This all came from a great partnership and relationship from AWS as well. And as we continue to simplify that environment, it allowed them to expand their partnership with AWS. So not only was it a win for the customer, we helped solve those business problems for them. Ultimately, they got increased benefit from both Druva and AWS in that partnership. So we continue to see that partnership accelerate and evolve to really look at the entire platform and where we can help them in addition to AWS services that they're offering. And that sounds like them going to cloud data production. Was that an acceleration of their cloud strategy that they then had to accelerate even further during the last nine months, Chris? Yeah, well, the good news for cats is that at least from a backup and recovery standpoint, they had been ahead of the curve, right? So they were one of those customers that was proactive in driving on their cloud journey and proactive in driving beyond the work from home. It did change the dynamics on how they work and how they act from a work from home standpoint, but they were already set up. So they didn't really skip a beat as they continue to drive that. But overall, to your point Lisa, we've seen an increase in acceleration and companies really moving towards the cloud, right? Which is why that migration strategy, joint migration strategy that Sabina talked about is so important because it really has accelerated and in some companies, this has become the safety net for them, in some ways, their DR strategy to shift to the cloud that maybe they weren't looking to do until maybe 2022 or 2023. It's all been accelerated. Everything's, but we have like whiplash from the acceleration going on. Sabina, talk to us about some of those joint successes through AWS's lens. A couple of customers you're going to talk about the University of Manchester and the Queensland Brain Institute. Dig into those for us. Yeah, absolutely. So thanks, Chris, for sharing those stories there. So the two that kind of come into my mind is University of Manchester. They have nearly 7,000 academic staff and researchers. And part of their digital transformation strategy was adopting VMware Cloud on AWS. And the university actually chose Drova to back up 160 plus virtual machine images because Drova provided a simple and secure cloud-based backup solution and in fact saved them 50% of their data protection costs. Another one is Queensland Brain Institute which has over 400 researchers who really work on brain diseases and really finding therapeutic solutions for these brain diseases. As you can imagine, this research generates terabytes of critical data that they not only needed protected but they also wanted to collaborate and get access to this data continuously. They chose Drova and now using Drova solution they can back up over 1200 plus research papers residing on their devices, providing global and also reliable access 24 by seven. And I do want to mention, Lisa, right, the pandemic has changed all of humanity as we know it, right? Until we can all find a solution to this. And we've also together had to work to adjust what can we do to work effectively together? We've actually together with Drova shifted all of our day-to-day activities, 200% virtual. And we, but despite all of that we've maintained regular cadence for our review business and technical roadmap updates and other regular activities. And if I may mention this, right, last month we AWS actually launched the Digital Workplace Competency really enabling customers to find specialized solutions around remote work and secure remote work. And Drova, even though we are all in this virtual environment today Drova was one of the launch partners for this competency. And it was a great fit given the solutions that they have to enable the remote work environment securely and also providing an end-to-end digital workplace in the cloud. That's absolutely critical because that's been one of the biggest challenges I think that we've all been through as well as, you know, trying to go do I live at work or do I work from home? I'm not sure some of the days but being able to have that continuity and, you know, your customers being able to access their data 24 by seven as you said, because there's no point in backing up your data if you can't recover it but being able to allow the continuation of the relationship that you have. I want to move on now to some of the announcements because Chris, you mentioned actually Sabina, you did when you were talking about the University of Manchester the VMware radio certification. Chris, Drova just announced a couple of things there. Talk to us about that. Thank you. Yeah, Lisa, you're right. There's been a ton of great announcements there's been a ton of great announcements over the past several months and throughout this entire fiscal year Sabina's touched based on a couple of them around the AWS digital workplace. We absolutely have certification on AWS around VMware cloud, VMware cloud both on AWS and Dell EMC through AWS in addition to continuing to drive innovation because of this unique partnership around powerful security encryption and overall security benefits across the board. That includes AWS Gov cloud that includes HIPAA compliance includes FedRAMP as well as SOC2 type two certifications as well and protection there. So we're going to continue to drive that innovation. We just recently announced as well that we now have data protection for Kubernetes 100% cloud offering, right? One of the most active and growing workloads around orchestration platform, right? So doing that with AWS somewhat of my opening comments back when we built this 100% on AWS that allows us to continue to innovate and be nimble and meet the needs of customers. So whether that be VMware workloads, NAS workloads new workloads like Kubernetes we're always going to be well positioned to address those not only over time but on the front end and as these emerging technologies come out the nimbleness of our joint partnership just continues to be demonstrated there. And Sabina, I know that AWS has a working backwards approach. Talk to me about how you use that to accomplish all of the things that Chris and you both described over the last six, seven plus years. Yes, so the working backwards process we use it internally when we build our own services but we also work to it with our partners, right? It's about putting the customers first aligning on those use cases and it all goes back to our Amazon leadership principle on customer obsession, focusing on the customer experience making sure that we have mechanisms in place to have feedback from the customers and incorporate that into our services solutions and also with our partners. Well, one of the nice things of our drivers since I've been working with them since 2014 is their focus on customer obsession. Through this process, we've developed a great relationship and drew up together with our service teams a building solutions that deliver value by providing a full staff service for customers who want to protect their data, not only in AWS but also in a hybrid architecture model on premises. And this is really critical to us because our customers want us to work with Drova to solve the pain points, creating a completely maybe a new customer experience, right? That makes them happy. And ultimately what we have found together with Drova is I think Chris would agree with this is that when we focus on our mutual customers it leads to a very long-term successful partnership as we have today with Drova. It sounds like you talked about that feedback loop in the beginning from customers but it sounds like that's really entwined the entire relationship and certainly from what you guys described in terms of the evolution, the customer successes and all of the things that have been announced recently. A lot of stuff going on. So we'll let you guys get back to work. We appreciate your time, Chris Sabina. Thank you for joining me today for Chris White and Sabina Joseph. I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE.