 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation, eliminating barriers to enterprise multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is all the rage, all the buzz. It appears to be here, and now David Chang is here, he's the senior vice president of products and co-founder of Actifio and theCUBE alum. Welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. It's a pleasure to be here, thank you very much. You're very welcome. So eight years ago, you guys started this journey. Cloud was kind of new, experimental, maybe put some stuff in the cloud and see what happens and then boom, all of a sudden, it has become mainstream, your thoughts. Yeah, it's been quite of a journey. I think when we initially started, we were focused around all about making enterprises as efficient as possible. In the old traditional enterprise IT model, that resulted in net savings in terms of hardware, reduction in hardware, software, and so on and so forth. But in the cloud, now you're in a completely brand new category in terms of you're being charged on a per-use basis. So all the technology we build out over the years just has a direct correlation to this new model of consumption that the cloud is enabling everybody to do. So, if you think about when you started, platforms were really all mostly on-prem. The definition of those platforms has really changed. It's sort of shifted from whether it's a server manufacturer or a storage type or maybe a networking type to the big cloud players, Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure, Oracle's got a cloud, IBM's got a cloud, you see in the China clouds emerge. How were you able to, well first of all, is that a sort of an accurate view that you guys had this sort of platform agnostic approach to your business and that platform has shifted? No, that's absolutely true. I think we kind of walked into this by accident because of some of the architectural advantages we kind of built into our infrastructure from the beginning, but over the last eight years or so, our customer initially asked us, how could we, Actifio, help them to enable them to go from a traditional IT to a private cloud type of implementation? So, we had a lot of traction in terms of the MSPs and private cloud implementations and that's where I would say four or five years ago, even now I would say we had a lot of traction and a lot of customers that came to Actifio for us to help them in that endeavor, but within the last four or five years we definitely see an acceleration of extending that infrastructure as a service platform from on-premise traditional IT to private cloud infrastructure now into the public cloud. So, all the capability we kind of built really applied very nicely to this new sort of platform agnostic model regardless where you want to go. Can we dig into that capability a little bit? What is it about your architecture, kind of your secret sauce that makes you multilingual and maybe in this case allows you to go from a world that is largely on-prem or managed hosted services to one that's massive public cloud scale. If you think about it, the only thing that's constant as you move your application from IT to private cloud to public cloud is the application, right? So, from the beginning, we had this very tight application focus. Everything we do is from an application perspective that really enabled us to play nicely in terms of these platform shifts from these one location to another and fundamentally decoupled the application and its data from the infrastructure. So, now this normalization of this infrastructure really enable our customer to make that switch very easily. So, talk more about that. How do you do that? Is this software code? Is it architecture? Give us some understanding. I think it's the approach that we take in terms of supporting a lot of these data management and copy data functions. And it's really looking at the application data set as the entity that we want to focus on and focusing on enabling the application as the entity that we add value. So, what I mean by that is if you look at a traditional Oracle database and if you want to move that from a traditional, let's say an AIX type of environment into a Linux environment for your private infrastructure. So, we really fundamentally decouple that application and enable you to very quickly migrate that information from that AIX infrastructure into a Linux environment. Then once that's done, our capability in terms of it's all software, if you really, really enable us to kind of have a very efficient incremental tap to that database and then move that information incrementally into the cloud. And once you're into the cloud, you can now make multiple virtual copies, if you will, all consuming sort of the same amount of resources to so you have a drastic reduction in the capacity needed to do that. So, it's your ability to essentially jailbreak the data from the siloed infrastructure. Is that right? That's right. And I think four or five years ago, we realized that the cloud would be, the public cloud would be a infrastructure that we need to support in depth. So, the engineering group has been looking at, for an application to consume cloud natively, you have to understand a lot of new technology and new terminologies and new capability. Things like object storage, for example, is not something that a traditional application can consume readily, if you will, without going back and rewriting a lot of those applications. With Actifio, we enable our customers to not having to go back and retrofit and rewrite these applications, but be able to consume these new cloud technologies natively so they can reap the value immediately versus having to go back and retrofit their applications. One of the practitioners that we had on, of course, very recently, Jake Burns was saying that even in AWS, the block storage really isn't kind of enterprise ready, friendly. I want to ask you a question about, if you think about the on-prem block storage players that you guys eight years ago understood that you had to be compatible with, I'll use that term, whether it was EMC or NetApp or IBM or HP, whatever it was, were those block storage interfaces, the entries and the exits all very similar? And is it harder in the cloud or is it actually easier in the cloud because it's all sort of the API-driven economy? I wonder if you could give us some insight there. I would say the foundation layer is much easier on the cloud, right? So as Jake was mentioning before, you don't have to order the hardware, hardware gets here, so the agility of this picture improves drastically when you move to the cloud. However, some of the cons of that is a lot of the advanced features that you used to get on-premise with these enterprise infrastructures are no longer available on the public infrastructure. So in many ways, many of our customers, as they move into the cloud, a lot of the IT operational staff have to deal with a reduction in terms of capabilities or availability or time. It takes to make that data in terms of cloning and so on and so forth. So that's sort of, I think, the challenges many of our customers are facing and that's where Actifio can help you with. Can you talk about this notion of rewriting apps? Because in IT, if you have to rewrite the app, you got to freeze the code. If you freeze the code, then you're enduring all this risk. If you have to freeze the code for n number of months, that's n number of months, you can't keep up with your competition. So am I correct that your customers are not having to rewrite their apps because of your ability to isolate sort of the data model? That's right. And maybe you could talk about that a little bit and what impact it's had in your customer base. Yeah, as you know, in the cloud, the economic is per use. And in the cloud, the type of capacity you have to deal with tend to be in multiple categories. You have the EBS of the world, which is relatively expensive compared with the object storage. So if you take, just lift and ship your enterprise application model into the cloud, where a lot of, I would say, most of your application data is stored in EBS, then you're not really fully utilizing the economics of the cloud. So how do you make effective use in terms of minimizing the elastic black service on Amazon versus the object storage capability that you have available? That is, I think, a difficult topic for a lot of the traditional enterprise applications doing the lift and ship, where you have to essentially go back and rewrite those applications to take advantage of the cloud native capability for you to really drive that availability and cost to the new level that you're expecting. So I've been in this storage business a long time and I hope some of them are embarrassed to ask this question, but I have an architect here, a technologist, I'll ask you. When you think about block storage in the cloud, and EBS in particular, that was not, I mean, Amazon's first announcement. Did they announce that because they realized that they need to accommodate block storage for it to get more people from the enterprise, or is there something specific about block storage that is here to stay forever? Another way of asking that is, can we run these applications on object storage? Is that the direction, thoughts on that? Yeah, I think it's going to be a hybrid model, right? So what Actifia really enables our customer to do is not really running your production on object storage, but a lot of the secondary sort of data cloning, data analytics, and DR type of use case, you can shift, you know, I would say, reduce your usage of EBS block storage to object storage. So we think that's the low hanging fruit that enable our customer to move to the cloud faster, cheaper, and with better capabilities, right? I think longer term, as you, as our customers start to develop applications that's native to the cloud, it's probably more efficient for you to consume some of these cloud native capability directly, but we're talking about a lot of time and resources that not all organization will be able to afford to a high percentage of their applications moving to the cloud. So new applications might be rewritten to take advantage of object storage, and what about things like performance or latency and recovery, et cetera? Do you see the block storage world being able to get there, to actually compete effectively with, or the object to compete effectively with block, or is that? We believe so, because if you look at object storage, it's now proven over the last, I would say, six, seven years, it's the most scalable storage that's available to the industry period, right? That scalability also enable you to kind of reduce any hotspots you may have from a performance perspective. So what Actifuel Engineering Group has done is really leverage that capability, the ability for you to fully utilize the full bandwidth for that entire object storage, and having multi-parallel streams of access into that. So the way we look at object storage is just another access protocol. If you think about it, you have block storage, you have iSCSI fiber channel, you have NFS access protocols, object is simply another protocol that enable you to have persistent storage. And what Actifuel has done is really leverage the performance and scalability characteristic of these object storage to have our customers in terms of realizing value from day one. Yes, it's true to your DNA, you don't really care. Whatever the customer chooses, you're going to support it. If the whole world goes object, great, no problem. If the world stays, you know, mixed. Yeah, I think for the foreseeable future, it's going to be a mixed environment. But as Jake was mentioning before, it's all about optimization in terms of capability and cost. And object storage is a key piece of that equation. We can really enable you to kind of tweak that knob to exactly what you're looking for. When customers make a move to the cloud, it's a migration, any migration is risky. How does Actifuel generally and your product specifically reduce that risk? I think it's all about keeping it simple, right? So the ability for you to kind of lift and chip your applications without having to go back to rewrite, that's a huge value proposition or a huge reduction in terms of risk that you can achieve in your environment. The ability for the Actifuel to tap into your enterprise IT existing production environment without a lot of sort of dangers or latency effect is a huge value we can bring to the table as well because Actifuel from day one is designed to be very efficient in terms of tapping your application's data while it's running, while it's in production, right? So the ability for us to incrementally do that and move that information into the cloud effectively for you to do that migration process can drastically reduce your risk, if you will. Let's talk about cost a little bit. We heard a lot from Jake about cost in theory anyway. You guys can help optimize, not in theory, in actuality. You can help me get rid of stuff, I always say. Talk about the optimization angle. How have your customers taken advantage of that? You heard from Jake. Do you have some other favorite examples you could maybe share with us, David? Yeah, so I think one of the key things is that instead of doing, for example, if on a traditional IT perspective, if you want to keep data for a long time, you typically employ deduplication technology, right? Dedupe technology typically works really well if you own the entire asset and you have sort of big servers, big number of cores, big memories, and so on and so forth. When you actually do a lift and ship of that technology into the cloud environment, all of a sudden your price tag, in terms of what you charge on a monthly basis, go through the roof because now every CPU cycle and every IO you generate to do that deduplication now becomes very expensive on a, you're essentially charged on a per use basis into the cloud. So what Actifio has done is really enable our customers to eliminate a lot of the cost in terms of moving, doing that and doing a lift and ship into the cloud by enabling to use leverage object storage directly without having to employ these expensive deduplication technology there as well. So that's one example. I want to talk about digital transformation a little bit. It's the buzzword, we go to a lot of conferences and every time you hear, oh, digital transformation, Uber, Airbnb, blah, blah, blah, we tend to have these detailed storage discussions and product discussions and it seems like it's really far away but I want to run something by you and see if you can respond. Digital means data, right? If it's not data, it's not digital. You guys are in the data business. We'd observe that the big digital players, the big internet players, they're data-driven. Your conference upcoming, we're going to talk about that is called data-driven. What does that mean? That means that data is at the heart of your enterprise and human expertise sort of surrounds that but it's the foundational, it's the data. Most companies in the enterprise, human expertise is at the center and data is in silos and bolted on all over the place. You guys are in a big way or a silo buster. You allow me to have sort of a comprehensive view of my virtual data store. Are you seeing that in your customer base? Can you help enterprises who are scared to death that they're going to get disrupted cross that digital divide and close the gap with the disruptors? Absolutely. So Actifield does not do AI, for example. But what we really do is unlock the data you already have in your environment. So it's absolutely free to be, so you can run analytics, you can run on analytics on demand, whether it's on your primary IT infrastructure in a private data center or in a public cloud. So if you think about it, some of the biggest challenge our customer have in terms of doing these sort of going digital is how do I fundamentally uncouple or decouple my data from the infrastructure that I'm running. Once I have that detachment of that data from my underlying infrastructure, now I'm free to move that information to anywhere I want in terms of make use of that information or to run analytics, to actually run sort of a lot of the advanced algorithm that you could monetize that information for your business. So that acceleration or the agility we provide and the reduction of number of copies for all these use cases is at the center of what we can do for that use case. Or even move code, bring code to that data wherever it lives, because I may not want to move a petabyte of data around. Is that right? Okay, so data-driven. So if you can't be data-driven unless you can put data at the core of your enterprise, that's part of what you guys do. The conference is June 5th and 6th. It's called data-driven. It's at the Fontainebleau in Miami. We did a Cube gig there a couple of years ago. It was fantastic. Tell us about the event and what people can expect. We're very excited about the event. It's a really an industry-wide event. We have many customers or many partners within the community coming in and sharing with the entire industry around some of the best practices in terms of monetization of the data you already have, some of the best practices in terms of making the data self-service, some of the best practice in terms of leveraging the best economics in terms of the private or public cloud to make effective use of that information. So we're very excited and like to see everyone there in June. Great, David, thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. Really a pleasure, congratulations on all the success and good luck in June. Thank you very much, pleasure to be here. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante from our East Coast Studios. We'll see you next time.