 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, and welcome to a special presentation of theCUBE here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program, Lasvec Ureides, who's the CTO and co-founder of ClearSky Data, also a Boston area company. Las, thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. So Las, we're going to go through a few things here. First of all, you're the CTO, you've been in the storage industry for a while. I first met you when we were both working on virtualization technology, well over a decade ago. So I want to dig into kind of the state of some of the things that are going on. Then of course, I want to talk about what you're hearing from customers, the update from your company, who we've been tracking you since you came out of stealth. We had Ellen back on the program a few months ago, and you got a really, solving a really interesting problem out there that many of us have been watching and looking at and hacking at for a lot of our careers. Sure. So first of all, yeah, tell me, what's the latest with you? What's keeping you busy? And how are things at the company? Well, so we've been very busy. So first week, first year of selling, really. And so we're collecting our first round of customers, trying to understand what their needs are, trying to understand their pain points, really trying to identify what the sweet spot is for our technology. And it's a great learning experience. It keeps you up at night, but it's been extraordinarily interesting for me because you're starting to see a lot of the things that we suspected over time would happen or are happening and you see the angst as people have to make a shift in the way they think about technology and there's always a continuous path for them to get from where they are to where they need to go. And so we're having a lot of really interesting discussions and we've been updating the product and believe it's the service that we provide and the technology has been expanded substantially over the course of the last year. Great. And we're gonna, I think we're gonna unpack some of that a little bit, but let's start on some of those. Use word like product and services and some of the big shifts that are going in the marketplace. Let's start with storage. So storage is, I said, maybe we got beyond it being storage, but the things I say, I worked at a large storage company for 10 years. I'm a networking guy by background. And I said, hey guys, I'm sorry, no matter what the coolest technology you're gonna have, it's never gonna be sexy. But what do you see happening? What's the big trend in storage today? What's driving customers you're talking to and as you think about the technology area, what's the state of storage? Oh, state of storage is, so depending on where you sit in the storage ecosystem, you may be ready to slit your wrists right now or not. So the fact is that the marginal cost of storing a byte of data is going to zero. And we knew this all along, right? So you basically have an entire ecosystem of people that basically sell bytes and the cost per byte is going down. So the density of storage is gone up so fast so quickly that you can't help but have a reduction in revenue. And so everything has become really coin operated. And so you see that, you can see the acquisition of Nimble very recently. Everyone's getting bought, if you consider yourself a storage company, you're getting bought or your product is getting bought for a very less interesting multiple, I should say, than maybe two or three years ago. Yeah, so I guess it was fair to say you did think that the era of the standalone storage company has passed. Yes, yes. And of course we look at the largest player in storage market got acquired slash merged. So EMC, biggest acquisition in the IT space with Dell. So they are no longer a storage company they're now part of a much broader portfolio and all the companies are figuring out how do I deal with cloud? How do I deal with kind of the changing legacy? What new solutions and areas get me into kind of my data, my applications and interesting things that I can do with that information as opposed to just storing the data. That's right. And so that's a lot of what we have been talking about. Our vision was always about access to your data. And we always saw a place where you'd never be limited to one location. And the cloud has kind of forced that on us. And the clouds are actually in specific places. They're in Virginia and they're in Portland. So whether or not you thought you had a second data center you actually do if you're in the cloud and your data has a lot of inertia and the world is really rapidly gonna become aware of the inertia of your data. So if you want to spin up all that cheap compute in Amazon to work on a problem how do you get the data there? You could spin up an infinite number of cores there but for an infinite number of cores you need a really, really large footprint for them to work on. Moving a petabyte is a very difficult thing. And so you're not gonna do that. And the current state of infrastructure does not allow you to make these types of choices and to be that nimble. Your data is gonna sit wherever it is that you last used it. You're never gonna want to move it. Yes, so what is your viewpoint on cloud today? And I guess specifically want to talk about the public clouds. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM has a show. They're doing some things with it. Oracle making their push into cloud. But there's a small number of the big public cloud guys and then of course, I mean they're service providers. There's people that are allowing other clouds to exist but the big clouds and how does storage fit into that discussion? Well, so the big clouds, the whole notion of cloud it's about optionality. It's about being able to turn things on and off anytime you really want it. And the optionality of having multiple clouds or multiple sources of infrastructure is not there yet. And so you're seeing a lot of really interesting, at least we are in our sales process. We're seeing a lot of really interesting consternation with respect to a couple of weeks ago, Amazon S3 went down for some ungodly amount of time. Everyone is thinking about, well, how do I manage that? If I was sole sourced on S3, my entire IT would be down for five hours right now. What would that be like? And so we're kind of heading into this multi-cloud world just from a requirement of durability and reliability. But you're also seeing that the cloud vendors are differentiating themselves in various ways either with creative pricing or creative infrastructure. And so how do you get data there? And so the new architecture for infrastructure is going to require this sort of more agile infrastructure that allows you to take your data and put it where it needs to be crunched and then move it somewhere else where somebody else might want to touch it. And that's a hard thing to do. And a lot of what we're trying to do in Clear Sky is try to enable that vision and also take away some of the more mundane problems that customers have. Typically part of the problem is that you have primary storage, you have secondary storage, you have backup storage, you have DR, you have all sorts of things. That makes moving stuff around even more difficult. And so being able to just have a bucket that is your safely protected encrypted data that you can access from anywhere is not possible today for a lot of these guys. So I think it makes sense that we allow you to talk a little bit about what you're doing because you went through a bunch of pieces and I agree with much of it. When we talk to users out there and you say, hear everything, it's like, oh, the state of the world today is hybrid. And you say, okay, what does that mean? It means I have some applications that I'm doing SAS with. I have some applications I have in my own data center or in my hosted environment to something that I understand the infrastructure stack underneath it and I built an application on top of it. And then I'm using one or more public clouds out there and how much am I using just base things like just compute or storage or how much am I going up the stack there and how do I get my arms around all of that, all of those applications, all of those data? There are lots of companies and lots of people dealing with it because we had, somebody wrote for Wikibon a couple of years ago and it was like, well, it's composite cloud. And it's really, it's not hybrid, it's like, I buy at the CVS and at my grocery store and multiple grocery stores and I buy from Amazon and sometimes I'll buy from other place. I'm not a hybrid shopper. I might get a credit card bill that tells me where all my shopping went but how do I manage that as a family? So it's really not hybrid because it's not really orchestrated well and that management and orchestration it sure as heck isn't simple today and how much am I trading a certain kind of operational paradigm for a different one and public cloud is just getting more complicated as time goes on. So how do you, what are you hearing from your customers? What's the pain that they have? How are you helping them to solve at least, what parts of those problems are you helping to solve? Well, so that was actually a really, really apt analogy by the way because the way I think about it is that if there was only one drug store in your neighborhood and the roads were really bad, you would be by necessity always going to the same place. What makes it possible for you to be a hybrid shopper in that word world is you have a car, you have clear roads, you have sort of a friction-free experience, right? Today the friction is too high. I have deliveries today and Boston now has one hour delivery for some stuff and drones are coming sometime in the future so. The friction in the marketplace or the friction to switch things is very high at this point and that plays into our vision. If you look at, when we talk to customers in the enterprise, we always talk about these things. Curiously, there's also a lot of mundane stuff that we talk about along the lines of data protection and just essentially making things resilient for them because a lot of what they, the difference between buying a $300 disk drive and putting your data on it and enterprise requirements is durability and reliability and availability, right? And so they have a real bizarre patchwork of ways that they achieve this and it's incredibly expensive today. So it just makes it that much difficult. That's another piece of friction that needs to be removed so that they could actually get these options in place for them to, you know, I want to go to Google, I want to go to Microsoft, I want to go to Amazon. You can't just make another copy of your data. And you guys are in an interesting intersection, you know? When I worked at a storage company, I'm a networking guy by background and I worked on that whole thing we called storage networking. And the reason we created a separate network for storage is because storage group and the network group didn't necessarily play together and the storage team wanted to control things like, you know, performance and latency and all this stuff. So if I could build it all together and have something bespoke, but when I go to this multi-cloud world, I need to understand how the storage and the network all fit together and of course that's where you guys live. So how's the world different today? How are you guys solving that? Because as we said, storage is a service with networking really as the enabler. Yes, that's right. Well, so while we raised $39 million, I keep saying we didn't raise enough money to change the speed of light. So maybe it'll happen at IBM, I don't know. But we are very, very focused on building a very, very high-speed data path that can be solely focused on moving data around. And we're focused on fixing latency problems. We're not gonna be on the internet anytime soon. You just can't do this, there isn't enough bandwidth. And just like that storage network that was very, very focused on a single purpose inside the Enterprise Data Center, we're doing something that's external that has a similar focus, which is to move data around. And this is a requirement and it's actually a piece of infrastructure that is possible to build today. I think if we tried to do this 10, 15 years ago, the cost equation would have been substantially different, we would have given up. But now it's possible to do it and there's also a set of technologies that we're using to make it more amenable to this type of application. So we have a network, we have a unique data management stack which takes advantage of the network to create a performance profile that is pretty much the same as local storage. And because we're starting to build out endpoints all over the place, you wanna access your data in Amazon, we can do that. You wanna access your data from Virginia or New York and you're in Boston, we can enable that as well. So it's the same thing, only much grander in terms of what a storage network really, really is intended for. It's there to allow you to exercise options about how you consume data and what applications can use data. And more importantly, since latency is very important, where, physically where, because your users actually do experience latency and they're not happy about it and your compute does as well. Yeah, so maybe I think it would be helpful if you could talk about some of those applications cause it reminds me of say what Citrix Net Scaler does to help with access to certain kind of, if I'm an end user and I'm doing mobility and I need to have access, I wanna be able to have the same response on my mobile device as I had sitting on my laptop in a server that was directly attached pretty close. So understand shrinking, not change the speed of light but making sure I've got the network bandwidth and the application response that I need. So what are some of those kind of use case and applications that you can share? So we spent a lot of time selling to folks that are doing analytics. So analytics workloads are particularly interesting because they're enormous and they're also highly tiered and you need to have, in order to crunch this data, you really need to have very, very low latency and very, very high throughput at least to the compute so that you can actually build these enormous indexes to complicate matters. When you're doing something like internet of things, things don't understand traffic jams. They're just gonna keep dumping data at you. So if you're getting two or three or four or five terabytes a day, that's quite a fire hose of data. So an application like that is a really interesting one for us because we have this really, really gigantic pipe that goes out to the cloud where last I heard there is infinite storage or they won't run out anytime soon or else we're all in trouble. And so there's always a place for that data to go and using our clever caching algorithms, there's always enough data there close by the compute that you can do your crunching. So the cost benefit of using a network like ours is very, very high there because you have a single endpoint that you're using at your data storage. So I'm curious because there's a big discussion that's been happening kind of the last maybe year at this is and Wikibon's David Floyd has actually been writing a lot about the edge compute requirement because there's certain things. Think about the windmill. I don't have network connectivity or I've got all these devices where I need to make that immediate action. So I need to have some compute there and do things but then some data will go back to the cloud. So how do you parse that? What happens at the edge? What goes back there? How are you getting inserted? Are there some big partners? Amazon is looking at this. Some of the other, everybody's looking. Cisco, anybody that's involved, when Peter Levine wrote like cloud computing is dead because it's all going to be at the edge, it was like, okay, wait, we need to rethink. Data center is changing, edge is changing, cloud is changing. I mean, we know that's the only constant intact right is change. So where do you fit in that equation of? Well, so we are the transport. We are fundamentally the way you actually can get access to the data. And so if you're collecting typical splunk like or log, we also partnered with Elasticsearch. I mean, these types of applications, you're collecting a lot of data at the edge and you need to aggregate it at some point. So what are the aggregation points that's local? That's very low latency. That's very, very fast. That provides you that landing pad where you could do your initial processing. We also can provide you with another high performance sort of a processing point in the cloud. So you can do pre-processing, post-processing, using a single platform. You don't have to make two copies of the data. And that's, when you're talking about 10 terabytes a day or something like that, that's a pretty expensive footprint that you have to duplicate in two places. And not to mention the plumbing and all the other things that need to happen in order for that to be real. And so we can just enable that as just a byproduct of what we do. And so it's very attractive. There are other scenarios. We've here in the Boston Medical Community, there's a lot of folks doing genomic research where you have more enormous data footprints. So we've talked to a lot of people that have the same types of data management problems where you have machines. In this case, they're medical imaging scanners and things like that, that are generating huge amounts of data that get crunched. And that data needs to be shared or it needs to be used in the cloud at some point in the future. Because you can't really have a giant farm of compute sitting around idle waiting for the opportunity to be used. And so those are the kinds of use cases that I see as the classic, I call them classic edge computing use cases because you have that need for low latency. We have a fire hose of data being generated way out in the edge where the thing is or where the people are. And you have that latency problem. The other thing that's interesting about this and we haven't really talked about it is that the internet is not really appropriate for sending a lot of this stuff. There isn't enough bandwidth really for uploads. It's kind of optimized for downloads which is coincidentally how we all use it. So, you need infrastructure like this. And so that's the classic use case for us. Great, we're going to be talking about how high depth video can get a faster end to be even better. Yes. If you want to upload it, sure. Absolutely, we want to stream it. We want to do lots of stuff with it. Great, so I guess last piece is, talk about what's exciting you in the industry. We always get excited to kind of the next big tool, containerization, serverless technology. Where does that fit into the discussion and how does that change the discussion of data and application modernization? So, we're slowly creeping up the stack. So, we're a data management company not really like what a typical storage company does. And so we're creeping up the stack. The thing that is really interesting to us right now are technologies that are more abstracting of the underlying infrastructure. So, Docker is one of those. Certainly, the serverless compute vendors, although that's so fragmented right now, I find myself, I really wish that there was some VMware-like entity that was the serverless computing company that we could just all go and integrate with and make it all happen. But I don't see that right now. We've got AWS Lambda and I think we have at least three open source solutions that I'm aware of right now. And they're working on it still very early. Yes, but managing state in those environments is a very, very difficult thing because ultimately, that's what we do. We manage state and we fix it so your state is always present. It's always durable and it can show up anywhere you decide to actually access that state. And that's a missing piece of the Docker foundation today. And so there's a big opportunity there and that's really exciting to us. But Docker's mature enough where you can actually say, well, okay, that's likely to be one of one or two players that are gonna be available and are gonna have an addressable market that you could attack serverless compute. As you said, it's hard to be the state for Amazon today, just not built that way. But the other players, they're open source solutions and they don't have as much traction. I'm curious when I think about kind of how the network and things move in there, wonder if it comments on VMware NFV and I'm not NFV, NSX, sorry. And like Kubernetes, which ties into the container piece but also one of the things they talk about is if I've got multiple clouds, Kubernetes has supported it all the public clouds and OpenStack and locks the environment. So either of both of those if you have how those fit in. And we fit in wonderfully in those kinds of environments because what we enable is the state to move, really large amounts of data. So one of the things that we found interesting is that folks are using containers for a lot of the stateless portions of the applications but if you have the lifeblood of the enterprise is databases, right? They have these big, huge, either structure or unstructured databases and huge data footprints. Putting that in a container is kind of an oddity right now and their folks are trying to work on how to actually do that but consider a world where you can just treat a database as a containerized thing and you can just move it from one piece of compute to another, another one location to another. That's a very, very exciting thing to me. It makes me wanna go out and build something right now. In fact, maybe we're doing that. So. Excellent. Last one to give you the final word. Any specific jobs you guys are hiring for or things that you'd say people out there in the industry, it's like, hey, if you're having, if you have this, come talk to us. Well, so we are in the middle of our sales ramp. So we're all about hiring, really talented, go to market and certainly account executives. So, you know, tweet at me if you're in any of the territories where we have an actual point of presence. And there are a few places like the West Coast where we might have one very, very shortly where I'd love to talk to you if you're out there. All right, great. And last, always great catching up with you. We expect to hear lots more updates coming out as product enhances, customers are growing and congratulations on the progress so far. Always great to talk with you here and online. So, thanks for joining us for this segment and you've been watching theCUBE.