 Hello and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Dave Vellante with Rob Streche. And we're here with Jaspreet Singh, who's the CEO of Druva and Travis Vihil, the Senior Vice President for Product Management at Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome, good to see you again. Great to see you. Thank you. Hey, we wanted to gather, because you guys have been working together for more than two years now, and we wanted to help our audience understand the nature of your relationship, why you're partnering with each other, and we want to unpack some of the innovations that you guys are doing. So, why is it that, how did you guys get together? Take us back to the beginning. Yeah, it's okay Jaspreet, I can start and then maybe you can add on. Thank you. So, we've been partnering together now for more than two years, and when Dell looked to provide a solution in this area, we chose Druva because by working with Jaspreet and team, our customers can leverage their proven cloud-native platform. It delivers fast, reliable, and secure backups and backup and recovery services. And most importantly, it's designed to be scalable, flexible, and easy to use. It provides customers with comprehensive features and capabilities and really enables them to protect their cloud data in a way that can reduce TCO, improve operational efficiency, and ultimately enhance cyber resiliency. So, it was really us working with the best in the industry. Jaspreet, anything you want to add to that? Yeah, I think, in fact, I think we're almost close to, if not cross-study, a thousand customer, a thousand joint customer mark to the partnership. So, they're a great partnership overall. And yes, I think as the customer, as your environment is getting more and more complex as a combination of cloud deployments, on-prem scale, AI, ransomware, a comprehensive solution offered by Dell, which includes the best-of-the-breed elements of on-premise protection and cloud protection elements of security oversight put together. That's the partnership brings together, the purpose together for the customer. And ultimately, the customer bends because they have a very comprehensive solution, all sort of them. Yeah, thank you, Jaspreet. Travis, why did you decide to partner versus just building it yourself? Yeah, I'll go back to what Jaspreet said. It really is the opportunity to work with best-of-breed. If you look at Dell data protection solutions, we have a portfolio which includes, basically software to secure a customer's data no matter where it lives. That's inclusive of appliances that meet the size of any organization. And then Dell Apex Backup Services, which provides data protection as a service and it scales on demand and as pay as you go. And I'll expand a little bit on what Jaspreet said, which is the reception to this joint offer has just been incredible. Jaspreet mentioned that the 1,000 customers, I'll expand a little bit on that. It's been just two short years. And in addition to those 1,000 customers, we have secured more than 900,000 end users and increased the total data protected over that time period by 12X. So we've just had a very great time partnering with Druva and seeing the success in the market. And just to both of you, I think this is part of the Apex Backup Services portfolio and really focused on SaaS being able to protect SaaS-based data. What are the biggest kind of threats that you're seeing in the market today that organizations have to handle when they're talking about that SaaS data? I'll start and then I mean, Jaspreet's really the expert here, but from our perspective, the issues that customers are dealing with are all about increasing automation, increasing efficiency, efficient utilization of IT resources and ultimately providing the best resilience against cyber threats like ransomware. I know we all love to talk about generative AI these days, but cyber protection, ransomware protection remains a top C-level conversation at companies of all sizes. Yeah, if you, first of all, the offering expands from all the data, on-premises, one in the cloud, one in SaaS. The solution spans a variety of applications across multiple clouds. But if you think about in general, the data protection market has been around for 30 plus years. The customers, as they evolve their needs, evolve the needs for the reasons of security, the reasons of operational efficiencies, of supporting new applications. That's where they, and every time they evolve the need, they want simple, scalable, secure, and the iterativeness of solution has to go much, much higher on scalability security. So, so far, there's been dominantly two choices in the market. Integrated appliance or integrated hardware market, or it's been a pure software-only market. The Apex backup services offer the third choice, which is everything as a service. Now, why that is critical is because if you think about cybersecurity or security in general, and if you think about what are the biggest pain point for a security professional today, it's not buying one more tool. It's actually how do they operationalize security? How would they actually operationalize multiple tools as they got, right? And in this world where cybersecurity is getting more and more complex, managing one more tool set, managing one more solution or a platform to manage aspects of cyber recovery isn't the ideal outcome for many professional. They want a simple, easy, secure, fully managed offspring. That is what Apex backup services offers, a choice which will look, almost all solutions are going to cloud, but it's how you update the solution also matters. And a SaaS-based approach, and then see you get the outcomes you want and the predictable price points you want across the group. So any application across the group, predictable price points, a predictable level of security. Yeah, so you're right, Travis. Everybody wants to talk about Gen AI. We knew too, but we'll park that for just a moment. Just to read you guys, and we were just at AWS re-invent. Druva was the winner of the global storage partner of the year. So congratulations on that. But of course, at the show, we saw AWS talking about its backup and recovery solutions and some of the other things that it is doing. So I'm curious, how do you guys differentiate from the sort of, what I'll call vanilla cloud offerings, whether it's Amazon or Google or Microsoft Azure, what do you guys bring to the table in your stack that's unique and differentiable? Yes, I think competitive modes or differentiation or value proposition it takes, sometimes 15 years to form. As I mentioned in my last statement, look, the world has many good choices when it comes to software first models or hardware first models or integrated solutions. We, Druva leads the market by offering a pure play SaaS solution, which you're unique in offering. So what AWS does a very good job of with their backup offering is snapshot management across a variety of assets within AWS, right? But the majority of world is very, very hybrid or very multi-cloud or very fragmented in how they consume multiple software and services. And as they deploy multiple applications, multiple places, they will at least a good portion of the world want to manage these outcomes much, much more simply, easy and efficiently. That is where a SaaS model comes in as a preferred model for those set of customers. It's not a solution designed for all, but those customers who don't want them in the game of architecting their own solution, building their own solution, right? They want to have the easy button and a scalable button. Druva is the leading choice for that. Yeah, and Jespreet, I think, you know, it's always good to take it back to a customer example that illustrates that. The one I'm thinking about is the Illinois State Treasurer's Office. They were looking for a solution to safeguard Illinois citizens' personal information. They wanted to protect against cyber threats. They wanted to back up sensitive data in the cloud and really free up their IT team to focus on innovation and less on managing backups. And with Apex Backup Services, built on Druva technology, they were able to modernize their infrastructure. They're actually safeguarding $50 billion worth of assets and large volumes of sensitive data. And in the process, they reduced the amount of time spent managing backup processes by 80% and allowed the IT team to benefit from automation, simplified data management, and really streamlining what was previously a time-consuming process. All right, thanks for sharing some of the customer input. You know, Jespreet was just talking about some of the multi-cloud complexity. I'm curious about a couple of things there. To the degree that you're developing joint products, and I wonder Travis, is there an analog in this space to like Project Alpine, which became the common storage layer, you know, across clouds, we call it super cloud, is there an analog in the data protection sphere that you guys are driving? Yeah, we see data protection as a key part of, you know, one of many things that customers would like to utilize Dell services both on-premises and in the cloud. So being able to offer a hybrid or multi-cloud experience based on, you know, common underlying Dell services is something that has really resonated with our customers. And, you know, I think it's a great example of Dell making sure that no matter where our customers are choosing to deploy, they have a solution for primary storage, unstructured storage, object storage, and of course data protection. And Jaspreet, when you're powering this Apex backup service or services, when you look at this and you look across all of the different, you know, all those impressive numbers, 900,000 end users that you're protecting, and when you start to look at all of this, is the vast majority of what you're being seeing on a daily basis is people trying to recover from things like ransomware that they've gotten through their Office 365 or is it bad SQL where they actually just have to do the, you know, traditional, hey, I dropped the table that I shouldn't have dropped. What are the kind of use cases that customers are using that really drive this service and the usage of the service? A great question. I think that nature of data prediction is changing overall. If you think about information security, there are sort of three dominant pillars, right? High availability or availability, confidentiality and data integrity, right? As three pillars for, like as data more and more goes to cloud and as the quality of hardware improves, the notion of high availability is mostly covered through providers themselves or the notion of high availability is covered through better architectures, better printing, better apps, right? So availability, which is the human errors, the application failures are still critical, still make a dominant portion about 40, 50% of all recoveries made but overall reducing in numbers to 70%, 80% recoveries were always faced, always because of a human error or a machine failure. It's becoming less and less critical now. We see almost 30 to 40% recoveries are based on a security or a risk incident, right? This could be a cyber incident. This could be incident based on an insider threat or a legal or a privacy concern they may have on the data, right? So data is becoming a central focus for a lot of different variety of different needs which are more security oriented needs, right? And you still see compliance or needs like disaster recovery or compliance needs around replication still being critical. But what's, as I mentioned, what's becoming interesting is the notion of cyber and risk becoming a bigger and bigger portion of why people think about data protection or data resiliency. That totally makes sense. And just to follow up on that because I think you hit on an interesting topic which is privacy. And when you have a SaaS based service, what is the talk track that you have with customers when they say, hey, you know, I'm competitive with other organizations. I don't want to be stored in the same bucket or in the same area that their backups are being stored because I don't want, you know, even accidentally or, you know, things happening between the two, I guess you could say repositories of data. Yeah, I think, as I said, like customers have, yes, customers definitely, like the story we often talk about in customers, like, you know, Thomas Edison eventually initially made the, made the business plan with JP Morgan to put a sort of electricity generator set back in the backyard to show on 31st of December how they could power a whole house. And the entire neighborhood came to see light bulbs and light shining. And the next day, Nikola Tesla published an article saying that, look, an elephant could get killed by electricity, the AC current rate. And JP Morgan went back to Thomas Edison and said, look, I like the idea of electric current, but my wife is very, very scared. Why don't you put this genset in your house and I could lease it from you? And then came the idea of GE, right? Leasing electric current as we know it, right? I think for many, many customers, they're extremely proficient in running their IT systems themselves, right? But the big majority of cloud need is an outsourcing need. It's an outsourcing need where you want a certain set of capabilities which are not core part of functionality to be leased, right? From a vendor which has a core capabilities. So while many, many customers will feel highly confident in their abilities to run their own data sets, many customers wouldn't, right? Which is where the entire Dell portfolio is a winning strategy, where it's an end to end comprehensive solution saying, look, if you care to run it yourself, great, but as security gets more and more complicated and applications start to get more and more complicated, many customers will choose an option of saying, manage it for me, run it for me and take care of it for us. But those customers, we host their backups. Now security and privacy is an interesting question, right? We oftentimes ask the customers like, where are the biggest risk gap, right? And when most customers would say that the biggest risk is at source code or customer contracts or stuff like that, right? Now, the notion of data, what's mine, what's my customer's data and what's my customer's customer data is a very bloody line. It gets blurred over time, right? So in fact, one of the things Druba does very well is bring visibility into the integrity of data and what is that data entail from a point of view of analyzing data for sensitive patterns or who is accessing what, who all is all, right? So that level of visibility and level of transparency brings trust to customers and gives them really good tools to even do stuff like reach notification. When I lose data, what did I lose? Did I lose my own data? Did I lose my customer's data? Did I lose my customer's customer's data? And both were notified as a result of it. So not only are we investing into managing data extremely simply in security, we also give customers very relevant tools to analyze and visualize the information sets and what it entails and what risk and the soil by managing it well. So Travis, this is a perfect time to unpark gen AI in the conversation. And we've been, it's Microsoft Ignite, we saw the co-pilots last week at Reinvent. It was all about the three layer cake and the AI stack and bedrock and just listening to Jaspreet talk about just privacy, you think about compliance, data sovereignty. I'm interested in how gen AI fits into this data protection space both as an enabler of some of those important compliance factors and privacy factors and potentially a detractor from that. I mean, for instance, how do you make sure you keep data leaking into the LLM vendors to the extent that you're using it? What is, how should we be thinking about gen AI in the context of data protection? That's a great question. I think looking at it from Dell's perspective, generative AI is a workload that we think a lot of customers will potentially start in the cloud or start with a hoster. And because of data privacy, data sovereignty, data governance issues potentially move to on-premises, from an operating the LLM perspective or operating the generative AI infrastructure perspective. And in the conversations with customers, I think it's fair to say they are still figuring out how the data and the storage part of the equation factor in, but we do know that it is going to drive and generative AI is going to drive more and consume more unstructured data. And so I do think that we will see a whole new host of generated data or source data that needs to be protected and backed up and stored in a very secure and resilient way. So we see it as a tailwind to data protection and we do see that customers are going to need a multi-cloud and a hybrid cloud approach to data protection for generative AI specifically. Thank you, Travis. And Jasper, we're out of time. I'd like to give you the last word. You can take it, you can follow up on what Travis just said or maybe put a bow on the entire conversation. Sure, I think Jenny has a very interesting conversation. People are be keen to not only, not only protect the information behind the algorithm, but they also want to protect the algorithm itself. It is rapidly changing. I believe in a world where there wouldn't be a single LNM, there would be many, many medium LNM, small LNMs and many LNMs, custom build, custom defined or custom problems. One solution will not fit all the problems and there people will have a variety of needs. It's also a very, very interesting time for applying large language models or Jennyi for solving very, very complex security and data management challenges. We pull the customers on one of the top five issues they grapple with on a daily basis and the issues around setting security policies or trying to understand error codes and pass through a variety of log messages, understand fidelity of an alert and Jennyi can be a very, very interesting tool. In fact, Druba launched the whole drill effort, a co-parry to really truly go deep in analyzing the customer situation and giving them a solution to a specific problem they may be facing in deep in their logs or their policies. So the world of data is changing rapidly. In fact, the whole conversation around digitalization is a data re-architecture conversation. The whole argument of Jennyi is a data architecture conversation and data is a centerpiece to a lot of these different topics and in a thinking around how do I protect, manage and secure this data? It is powering multiple outcomes and security threats is a very, very crucial conversation for the next decade to come and we're very, very happy, lucky and proud to part with Dell on this next decade of innovation. It was a great story. Thank you guys for sharing the details of the partnership. Travis, always good to see you and Jaspreet. We'll see you next week in our Palo Alto studio live. I'm sure we'll continue this Jennyi conversation and cyber resiliency. Really appreciate your time guys, thank you. Thanks a lot, Cube. Okay, thank you for watching this Cube conversation. Dave Vellante for Rob Stretche and we'll see you next time.