 Hello everyone, welcome to this special conversation with Eric Herzog, the CMO of Infinidat, who is here to give us a scoop on an announcement that Infinidat is making today that significantly expands the company's software-defined offering. Hello, Eric. Dave, always a pleasure being with theCUBE. I love the shirt, bro, love it. Thank you. Before we get into the announcement, I wonder, you guys just made some public statements about your business. Can you give a, what can you tell us you're a private company, but what can you tell us? Give us the business update, please. Sure. So we publicly announced a couple of weeks ago that Infinidat had a record Q1 of 2023. We also talked about how we did in 2022, which was double-digit growth. And of course, we remain profitable as we have been now for several years. The growth rate on the bookings, for example, was 59% year-to-year, 59%. Pretty good in the midst of a turbulent economy. And we do think part of the reason, Dave, is one of the big, huge advantages of Infinisafe, Infinibox, or Infinigard, Infinibox SSA is our technology doesn't only deliver technical value, but real financial advantages as well. So we commissioned a third party study by IDC actually talking to real customers in Europe and the US, put together a financial model based on that feedback. These were budget holders. These were directors, VPs. These were not the storage admins, not that we don't love them. They do a great job for us, but these were the budget holders. So they asked them a number of financially-oriented questions. They were results, incredibly positive. First of all, as you know, in a bad economy, the CFO really wants a fast payback. Our payback, 11 months. 162% ROI, five year. 48% average yearly savings on OPEX. And when you look at it from a dollar perspective, for every petabyte, we can save on average $167,000 compared to their previous supplier. So that we think is helping drive this, as well as of course our well-known white glove service and all the technical value. But we really think this capability of delivering a financially valuable solution as well as technically valuable is helping us with this bad economy. So that was part of what we announced and why we think it's driving things. Thanks for that. I mean, it's definitely a tough environment. Like you say, CFO wants to see the bottom line, a lot more approvals, necessary longer cycles. So congratulations on those results. Well, let's get to the news. What are you announcing today? And let's talk about why it's important. Well, as you know, the key tenant of InfiniteDepth is really built around our software. Our infuse operating system, which runs our Infinibox, our Infinibox SSA, on our Infiniguard, embedded inside of our purpose-built backup appliance controls everything, delivers real value, cyber resiliency, our high performance availability guarantees on the Infinibox and on the Infinibox SSA, our reliability, our neural cache technology, which allows our hybrid array to be faster than 75 to 80% of the all flash arrays in the market. And from an all flash perspective with our SSA allows it to have unmatched latency faster than anything in the world. But we're now with this announcement today expanding that software portfolio. So our infuse operating system will provide seamless hybrid cloud integration to an AWS instance. It's not backing up or moving data AWS with the S3 protocol. It's literally a full version of our infuse OS, snapshot, replication, Infinisafe, Infinibox, our neural cache technology, all of that sitting in an AWS instance, which means an on-prem solution is talking to an Infinibox or Infinibox SSA sitting out at AWS in the cloud giving you that seamless data movement back and forth between on-prem and off-prem. So that's the first part of the announcement today focused on our core operating system. And now making that core operating system infuse OS now available as the infuse OS cloud edition sitting in an Amazon deployment. What are the key features of that capability specifically and what does it bring for customers? In other words, why would somebody want this instead of just doing it on-prem? Sure, sure. Well, the trend as you know is for customers, particularly enterprise to have a hybrid cloud configuration, some data off-prem, some data on-prem. Now, when you look at it, there are certain data sets that are very well tailored to being out in a hybrid cloud environment. One for example is disaster recovery and business continuity. Second one is backup using snapshot technology. It's also very good for storage expansion. In this case, think I need to expand the capacity temporarily or I want to tear the data out to the cloud. It's a great idea that you've got high performance data. You want to tear it to lower performance data sitting out in the cloud into lower performing storage, I should say, sitting out in the cloud. So that's a great use case. And then as you know, the cloud is very, very good for tests, for DevOps and for doing proof of concepts out in the cloud. So in this case, whether they're testing, doing DevOps work or whether they're doing a proof of concept, let's say for some 30-party package for Oracle or third-party package for SAP, they're doing it in a real mimic of their on-prem environment because our InfuseOS cloud edition is sitting out in Amazon. So those are the sort of use cases that you would see using the InfuseOS cloud edition and allows you to move data back and forth between on-prem and off-prem seamlessly. And of course, as I mentioned, it has all the features of the InfuseOS, our cyber resiliency, our neural cache technology, our Infinerade technology. One of the most important things is our APIs so we can integrate with something like ServiceNow or Vertana or vCenter operations. And of course, we're known for our capability of ease of use. In fact, our set it and forget it mentality on our autonomous automation has had several public references in the Gartner-Peer Insights, which as you know, Dave, are end users writing about the vendors. Some of them talk about, I've had an Infinibox portfolio for several years and I never touch it. I've never had it down. Anytime anything happens, it autonomously and automatically fixes itself or adjusts to changes of workloads without my storage admins or my storage directors having to do anything. And that's publicly documented at the Gartner-Peer Insights with several customers talking about how they've had it for multiple years and they A, have never had it down and B, they've never had to do anything. It's just runs itself. So that set it and forget it autonomous automations in the cloud edition as well. So essentially it's everything on-prem moved out into a cloud instantiation that allows you to move data back and forth seamlessly. So that's what we've done within InfuseOS cloud edition. And you're saying that your customer's experience is identical, like 100% identical between on-prem and the cloud? Everything is the same. Anytime they need to use a GUI to configure something, it's there. How they interact with third-party software like VMware or containers, right? For a container config. All of that is the exact same thing. They're used to running it the same way. It behaves the same way and they're not going to another protocol. The protocol that's out there, as you know, heavily used in the cloud, of course, and everybody writes to that protocol. In this case, you're not writing to the protocol, which by the way is a good way to do things periodically. But in this case, you're going to a full-boat version of the InfuseOS operating system that happens to sit in the cloud. So the experience is exactly the same and completely seamless. And it's available today? It is available today. Absolutely, it's available today. Talk to your Infinisafe reseller. You're a fitted-at reseller or talk to, of course, your Infinidat salesperson. We're ready to go and existing customers can call us up right now and get something going right away. Speaking of Infinisafe, that's the other part of this announcement. You can do a little pre-app there. Tell us about the second vector here. Okay, so our Infinisafe technology is award-winning technology built around cyber storage resilience. It runs on our Infinibox, our Infinibox SSA, and also our Infinigard purpose-built backup appliance. Around Infinisafe, you have a number of guarantees. When I know you guarantee the snapshot is immutable, unobtrusable, unchangeable, doesn't matter if the admin gets mad at you, he can't change anything, doesn't matter if someone steals the admin's credentials, can't change anything. So we guarantee that immutability. The other thing we guarantee is the recovery time. On our purpose-built backup appliance, the Infinigard, we guarantee recovery in 20 minutes or less. In fact, we did a demo at the beginning of April live and we recovered 20 petabytes of Veeam backup data even 11 minutes and 55 seconds. We then, that same day, during that same webinar, did a demo of recovering 50,000 1040p video files. So hundreds of terabytes in four seconds. We guarantee on the Infinibox and the Infinibox SSA recovery in under one minute, under one minute. So that's all part of the regular Infinisafe. What was the first stat? Can we give me that again? It was 20 petabytes and 11... 20 petabytes of Veeam backup data on our Infinigard platform. We recovered that 20 petabytes in 11 minutes and 55 seconds. Okay, and then the second one, can you just repeat that? Yeah, the second one was on Infinibox platform. 50,000 1040p video files, approximately a couple hundred terabytes, and we did it in four seconds. I thought I heard four seconds. 200 terabytes in four seconds. Yes. How do you do that? Well, we're known for our recoverability, capability of our snapshot technology and our replication technology. We, of course, are tracking everything from the metadata perspective and allows us then to just scan the metadata, look at those instances and then pull because as you know, metadata is the data about the data and do a rapid recovery off of that capability of how we manage our metadata farms and how we look at that metadata related to the snapshots, we can pull it right back. So take me through an example of sort of the customer value here, how you're protecting the customer, how you might recover, go through sort of the anatomy of maybe a detective malware and then how do you sort of fence it off or detect it and how do I recover if in fact I'm in trouble? Absolutely. So what we're launching today is expanding Infinisave with Infinisave Cyber Detection. We've already done the immutable snapshots. We already do logical air gapping both local and remote. We create a fence forensic environment so you can then take a look at your snapshot. Remember, you don't wanna recover a snapshot that has malware ransomware. You have to get what is referred to in the industry as a known good copy. So you put in fenced environment to scan it to see is it good or not good until you find a good one so you can recover and then of course the guaranteed recovery times which we just talked about. So what we're adding now is Infinisave Cyber Detection. This allows you the flexibility to scan those immutable snaps in a number of different ways. One, you could decide what you wanna scan, volumes, files, workloads, databases. You decide what you wanna scan. You're already creating an immutable snapshot of certain data sets because you know you need them and you can't suffer a malware ransomware attack on those data sets so you need to have good data so you create the immutable snap then once you've determined what you want, you can go ahead and do a cyber scan and you could do it in two ways. One way is you can scan the immutable snapshot as an early warning system. There's lots of other early warning systems out there on the server side, on the networking side but with the average cost of a malware attack in the United States at $9 million and globally over $4.5 million, it's worth your while to possibly not only do the scanning at the endpoint, the scanning in the network, the scanning in the server infrastructure and the application infrastructure but you can actually go ahead and scan the immutable snapshot and it could possibly be something that slips through one of the other methods and be an early warning system so that's one thing you can do. The other thing you can do is you need to have a known good copy and prior to infinite safe cyber detection we could create the fence forensic environment but you have to bring all the Oracle guys or the SAP guys to make sure it was free of malware ransomware. With cyber detection we can take care of that. It's a machine learning based algorithm it looks at all the known variants of ransomware. So if the Valente ransomware is a known quantity and now the Herzog ransomware hits it actually will see some weirdness in the Herzog what it's doing to the metadata, what it's doing to the database, what it's doing to the files that will notice that then using machine learning technology it will take a look at the other known ransomware types and then in the dashboard it will flag it. It can have a low priority, medium priority or high priority. And out of the dashboard you can pull and create custom views of what you wanna see. You can even pull that data out, put in Excel files to check what you're doing and see what you're doing. So it can be used then to help create either a early warning system on the immutable snap or when you bring an immutable snap into the fence forensic environment you can scan that immutable snap in that fenced environment determine whether it's a known good copy or not but it does all this by looking at the metadata information it can handle files, volumes, it can handle databases and what it does it can scan them you decide what you want to scan how much you want to scan. Do you wanna scan a petabyte? Do you wanna scan half a petabyte on this Infinibox do you wanna scan five databases and on this Infinibox SSA 10 databases you pick cyber detect from Infinisafe will then execute whether it be on the immutable snap to help you as an early warning system or in your fenced forensic environment to get you a known good copy for recovery. So it's very straightforward it's very sophisticated and it's designed to make the whole process of recovery you already have the rapid recovery already. Again, we guarantee on the Infinibox the Infinibox SSA under one minute but before you do that recovery you better have a known good copy otherwise you could putting malware or ransomware right back on to the servers and primary storage that you're trying to clean off. So that's how Infinisafe cyber detection expands on what we've already had with Infinisafe and takes it to the next level giving our customers more peace of mind and also make it easier for them to do to bring over the Oracle guys or the SQL guys or the Mongo Cassandra guys to go ahead and look at that fenced forensic environment to identify a snapshot. That's more complex than having these automated machine learning scanning tool with Infinisafe cyber detection to get that known good copy faster. You said anything on, thank you for that. You basically saying anything on storage you said volumes of the snaps, databases, cash if it's in cash, yeah files, okay. Yeah, anything. So question, what about two questions? Well, first question is what about analytics? What kind of analytics can you give me? So basically this is effective 99.5% of the time 99.5% and so there will be some odd balls right that it might not catch, but it's gonna catch 99.5% of the anomalies flag it as high, low or medium. It can even set up automated with APIs automated notification to the security team, to the storage team whoever is managing this to both teams that can come right out of the dashboard to help automate the process and let you know, A, what's going on with it in the fenced forensic environment before you do your recovery or if you're scanning an immutable snap as an early form of finding out there is malware ransom where if you will early stage detection even though the product is called cyber detection but in this case early case identification of finding that malware ransomware in a snapshot. So it can be used along with other preventative tools and analysis tools in other areas of your data center right, such as your network, your servers your applications, your end points. The reality is the average enterprise will suffer 1,168 attacks every week. So the odds of it getting through are huge. And in fact, security analysts are pointing out that the cost of cyber crime is going to be close to $8 trillion in 2023, scaling up to almost 11 trillion in 2025. So it's not if you're going to be attacked at twin. So early warning system, you could use it for that or you could use it to scan the forensic environment so you can recover that known good copy or both. So that's what we see with infinite safe cyber detection. How can benefit the end user? Is there, I mean, I don't want to, you know I don't want to bait you into AI washing because everybody's talking about, you know chat GPT and everything else, but is there is there any kind of machine intelligence in here and machine learning? Yeah, there's a machine learning, there's a machine learning algorithm. So basically as it's scanning, it's looking at the metadata, the database, the files themselves, understanding changes. So it's learning. Is there a change? Not a change. Remember, if you're, if you think about the dwell time it's anywhere from 50 days on the low side to 200 days on the high side, before you even before the evil day Valente launches that ransomware attack. You're not running around announcing your Dr. Evil from the movies. You are surreptitiously being a spy and you're secretly either planning malware, ransomware all over their data centers, all over their hybrid cloud storage configurations. That's what you're doing. And so that is the real value of being able to look at the solution and understand of how to protect yourself. It's exceedingly costly. It's by the way exceedingly expensive to do the recovery not just paying the ransom, but to do the recovery both. So having the Infinisafe technology wrapped around it and having this machine learning built in to Infinisafe cyber detection allows you to understand, hey, something new is happening. I'm learning from the old. I'm learning as that new thing is somehow altering the file or altering the database and then it will give you in the dashboard a probabilistic up to 99.5% accurate that this is a bad thing. And it gives you high, low and medium ranking. So when it sees something bad, it learns about it and then it could be low. Doesn't mean you don't want to investigate even if it's low. Clearly if it's high, you want to be all over it like bees to honey. Immediately you want to get on that. So there are very few false positives and it uses machine learning to learn about the application and the attack vector that's happening to compare that to known existing variants of ransomware over 200 variants. And does that comparison to alert you as to what could be a potential malware ransomware attack? Yeah, great. I mean, prioritization is key because of getting swamp with alerts. And so if you can help me focus in on those high value areas. Last question, cause then we got to go. You mentioned IDC white paper, you mentioned Gartner peer insights. What's the, where can I get this stuff? Is there a sort of call to action to people? Where can I go to find out more? Absolutely. So we actually have built a custom web page on infinite app.com that focuses just on the financial benefits. Yes, it's all over our website, our data sheets, white papers, but this one location on our website allows you to find all the financial information. There's a white paper from IDC. There are several videos that talk about how we save money, what we do, how it works. So that's all there, ready to go. The Gartner peer insights are public on Gartner's website, but also we were awarded this customer's choice award. And there is a document that they produced which we have licensed that also happens to be available at infinite app.com. So whether you want to see what our end users think about us. And again, as you know, Dave, as we publicly disclose 25% of the fortune 50 buy from infinite app. We may not be big, but we are small and mighty. And we can prove that by who our customers are are very focused on the global fortune 2000 type accounts and large government agencies. That's who buys from us. And you'll see their reviews of us in the peer insights document. And then on the saving money aspect, this IDC white paper was done by interviewing real end users that control budgets that can able to tell you, oh my God, I got a return on investment of nine months or 10 months or 11 months. Here's how much money I saved. Here's what I did to my CapEx and OpEx budgets. Here's how I got TCL. And that's all documented and that also is from end users. So end users with the Gartner peer insights and end users with this IDC white paper on how to save money. Well, you are mighty, my friend. Thanks for coming on. It's great to see you as always. And also go to thecube.net. If you want to see, I mean, Eric and I have talked about these infinite ad announcements now for last several quarters and months and years now. So you can follow the progression of the timeline. Eric, good to see you. We'll see you next time. Great, thank you, Dave. Love to be on theCUBE. All right, you're welcome. And thank you for watching. And check out thecube.net, check out siliconangle.com for all the news. This is Dave Vellante. And we will see you next time as well. Thanks for watching.