 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, this is a CUBE conversation from our Boston area studio, I'm Stu Miniman, and joining for this deep dive into partnership discussions is Brian Regan, the CMO of Actifio. Brian, great to see you and happy 2020. Great to see you Stu, thanks. All right, so we had a conversation with yourself and Ashuk talking about 10C, some of the activities of the general momentum of Actifio, but really want to spend a little bit of time talking about partnerships. So Actifio being a software company always has had a number of partnerships, so why don't we talk a little bit of just the philosophy of the company and how important that is for technology partnerships as well as the go to market. Absolutely, and I think in 2019, we really increased our focus, our investments, and really our entire company alignment towards five types of partners specifically. One was a relatively new partnership for us, which is a software partnership with IBM and their data and AI division of IBM under Arvid Krishna and Rob Thomas that we really, they OEM our product to go after the test data management market opportunity and really become a data platform for a lot of their initiatives that involve Watson and analytics as well as test data management. That was a huge new partnership for us in 2019. Well, of course, a new area of partnership because IBM, I understand is probably the longest and oldest partnership that Actifio has had. Absolutely, so the software group was probably the last group that we have partnered with inside of the IBM corporation, but we saw incredible traction throughout the year, great pipeline growth from literally the beginning of the ink signing the paper and have a roster of incredible logos to show for it over the last 12 months. Yeah, it's always interesting to look if you talk about software and how AI fits to it. That was 2019, one of the things we just said, not just, okay, what is AI or along that spectrum, but how do these things stitch together? Everything to, am I a feed for the training algorithms or are there other things I can do? So it sounds like you found some areas where customers are going to be working at leveraging your solution. Absolutely, and certainly with IBM's acquisition of Red Hat and their embrace of containers and Kubernetes, that application modernization intersection point where we can bring data into containers is going to be a big theme for us in 2020 as well. Okay, exciting stuff, so that's on the software piece. So if you have software, hardware still matters in 2020. It turns out we still need to run things on servers and storage. And switches and the like. So we're fortunate to have partnered with Dell EMC as one of our focus infrastructure partners. We have reference architectures for converged infrastructure using the rail and the rack designs on the VX Flex OS underneath. And really going after the database cloning market opportunity, so bringing a, essentially a data center pod architecture with Actifio software running inside to power these databases of service opportunities that exist in the large enterprises. All right, interesting that EMC was not one that I would have thought would have been the first one to partnership. Dell EMC with a much broader portfolio seems a natural fit. Absolutely, and we were excited actually to based on client demand to also introduce the support to write to data domain. So we can actually support data domain. Essentially we treated almost like an object target to increase the useful life and actually increase the power of data domain within these broader infrastructures that the enterprise clients have. Yeah, I had a great conversation with the Shook talking about one of the things about 10C is we've known for a long time that object storage is so important for the storage industry and where we want to go. But customers shouldn't have to think about it. It's just how we enable that. And that leads up to of course cloud this big piece of 10C there. So where are the important partnership from a cloud standpoint? So certainly all of the clouds for us in our multi-cloud effort are important. We support seven of the hyperscalers and certainly Alibaba cloud, IBM cloud, Oracle cloud, VMware cloud, in addition to the three that people think about most. But from a go-to-market standpoint we were probably the most embedded with Google Cloud over the last year to 18 months. Again, we've aligned a lot of both go-to-market but also engineering efforts to make sure that we're supporting Google Cloud in the best way possible bringing the most compelling and differentiated offerings particularly for database workloads for backup DR and ultimately database cloning. Well congratulations, important partnership especially when you talk about that engineering standpoint. Google is not one just to make, oh, we made a handshake and it's good. Really they dig in from an engineering standpoint. And we know that Google makes the smartest stuff out there. They'll tell you that. So if you've gone through the ringer on that that really speaks to the architectural piece of the environment. And credit to Ashok and the entire engineering organization. I mean that is to your point very much an engineering first and then go-to-market second type of relationship and we're delighted to be in the go-to-market side of that. Okay, go-to-market then is probably another piece of partnership. So the last two types of partners that we're really focused on for 2020 and we certainly got very serious in 2019. One is global systems integrators. And TCS has really emerged as a really key partner for us in that landscape. When we think about the enterprise accounts that we target, a billion and up in revenue they're in every single one of them. And we have several wins that we can look back on 2019 in credit. Their influence, they are certainly helping the application modernization initiatives within all of these enterprises and partnering with Actifio to really bring a data management and a test data management capability to bear really was an important step for us in 19 that we hope to accelerate in 2020. And then the last piece and last but not least from a go-to-market standpoint is the channel. And important channel partners whether it's trace three particularly on the West Coast whether it's data trend from the Midwest and the East Coast, these types of channel partners have really helped us become embedded in some of the largest accounts in North America as well as globally and really are the trusted advisor inside of those accounts that we want to continue to enable with compelling differentiated offerings like 10C. Yeah, there were a lot of transformations going on in the channel. They were all trying to figure out how they live in that multicloud world. Seems a natural fit for those that are thriving in this era that those would be the ones that you'd be working with. Absolutely. So as a software company, the part of our power is the ecosystem power. And we believe that by continuing to foster these multifaceted relationships, they all have actually really fascinating benefits across the board. The IBM relationship for example has ecosystem benefits in their channel and their systems integrators. The Dell EMC relationship has ripple effects into their channel and their points of distribution. So we believe it's a very complimentary ecosystem that we're building. We're excited at the possibility of an even stronger 2020 because of it. Awesome, the one that you mentioned actually in our earlier conversation talking about Actifio and 10C. SAP of course, a big important partner also. A huge, it's an important partner from a standpoint of it's maybe the most critical workload in most enterprises that use SAP and being a part of their technology stack inside of the HANA Enterprise Cloud is a critical capability for us. But it's also an important point of distribution as they go out to their enterprise customers and are looking to become more relevant in a broader sense of data management. So we're certainly excited about the work that we're doing with them. We're delighted about the influence that they've had in terms of our roadmap and pushing our platform to be even more capable, particularly for HANA workloads. All right, a lot of different pieces, Brian. Congratulations on all that happened in 2019 and looking forward to watching the momentum in 2020. Thanks, Stu, looking forward to being back. All right, lots more coverage from us at thecube.net. Of course, we'll be at lots of shows. Feel free to reach out on Twitter. I'm at Stu and thank you for watching theCUBE.