 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017, theCUBE's eighth year of coverage of what was once EMC World, now it's Dell EMC World, the first official show of the combination of two companies. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, my co-host this week for three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Paul Gillan, and our next guest is Matt Waxman, Vice President and Product Manager, Dell EMC Data Protection, and AJ Wynanski, who's the UNIX, and Microsoft Technologies Managers at Shazam. ITS, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you guys. Thanks for having us. So data protection on stage, it's hot. I mean, it is the hottest category, both on the startup side, but also customers as they go to the cloud are rethinking the four-wall strategy of data management, data protection. Why is, is it the cloud, what's, why is it so hot? Yeah, I think you nailed it. It is very hot, it's, backup is not boring. I think, you know, customers like AJ are talking about simplifying, automating, getting to the cloud. And so, we got a modernized data protection, you know, our announcements this week were all about how we're doing that. We had a great announcement around a new appliance that's turnkey solution, out of the box, time to value less than three hours. That's the agility that customers are really, really looking for. And of course, our cloud data protections evolved a lot. Great new use cases, disaster recovery now for the cloud, great use case. Matt, AJ, I want to get your thoughts in a second, but Matt, first, talk about the dynamics that the customers are facing right now, because really, there's two worlds that exist now. Pure cloud native, born in the cloud, completely different paradigm for backup and recovery, data protection, all of the scheme that has to be architected. And then, companies that are moving quickly, they've had a data domain, had the pre-existing apps that were doing great, but now have to be architected for that cloud, hybrid cloud, those are the two hot areas. Can you just break that down real quick? Yeah, yeah, you know, I think you have a good framework there, right? There are customers who will go for a replatforming, right, and think about how they can move their application and its existing ecosystem into the cloud. That's where we've seen a lot of traction. We would call that lift and shift. You know, move the application as is. And then this cloud native space is really different. It's developer-centric. It's thinking about how do you cater to the application developer who wants to build off of a modern tool set? And there, it's all about microservices. It's API-driven, you know, it's a different structure. Absolutely. Programable backup. Yeah, exactly, right? That's what makes it sexy. All right, AJ, the proof is in the pudding. When you sit there and you look at that scenario, programmable, being agile, automations all coming down the pike, what's it look like for you? Well, for us, prior to having the ECS, the Elastic Cloud Storage Suite, we were running everything to backup tape. And we were having to do two sets of tapes. It was taking us two weeks sometimes to do our tape retentions. We had to set retention policies at 11 year across the borigs. Our pass backup software didn't allow us to set retention periods very well. Once we got to Elastic Cloud Storage Suite, it was a couple clicks, you set retention periods, it takes care of itself, automatically replicates to our DR site, and we don't have to worry about it. It's done. I used to have three and a half FTEs who took care of backup suites all the time. I'm down to a half guy now. So I gained back. So you redeploy those resources on other things? On other products, I hired them for in the beginning. And now since that's happened, I'm able to use a lot more of those resources for the projects we should be using them for. We don't have to worry about backups like we used to. I don't have to worry at night. Did it back up? Did it not? Did my essential databases get backed up to tape? I don't have to worry about that anymore. It's done automatically. What was that transition like for you, going from tape to cloud? Painful. It was because we were having to move everything that was on tape onto ECS. It takes a while to redo that. Finally, we decided at one point that after this period no longer are we going to be writing to tape. We're going to write everything to ECS. It just became too painful. So once that transition was done, once we made that decision that we were no longer going to tape, it was easy. How about the cost? I mean, you now have an operational cost instead of a capital cost in your backup equipment. Over the long term, is this a better, a lower cost? Oh, much better. We're saving $350,000 a year just in backups. And over the five-year TCO of that product, it's $2.7 million that we are saving over five years for that product alone. We're a small nonprofit organization that we can then in turn turn around and give our customers some of that money back because we're not having to charge them so much for some of the backups that we have to do. Yeah, talk about the dynamic. You mentioned developers. This comes back down to the developer angle because just a scenario, data is becoming the lifeblood for developers and providing that data available in that kind of infrastructure's code way or data as code as we say in the data ops world, if there is one, yeah. But I'm a developer. Okay, I want the data from the application from an hour ago, not two weeks ago. Or those backup windows used to be a hindrance to that agility. How is that progressing? And where is that going in terms of making that totally developer-centric infrastructure? Yeah, I mean, I'd answer that on two fronts. I think there's the cloud native view of that where what those developers are looking for is inherent protection. They don't want to have to worry about it regardless of their app framework, regardless of the size of their app. But at the same time, you also have database sizes that are growing so dramatically. I mean, when I was here even two years ago, I remember talking to customers who had databases that were over 100 terabytes was like one out of 10, right? Now I talk to six out of 10, 100, 200 terabyte infrastructures. At a certain point, you can't back up anymore, right? And you have to go to a more transparent world. It's the time alone, the time is killer too. Absolutely, absolutely. And so customers are replicating, right? And how do you put the same sort of controls around replication to get the levels of data protection that you expect? Well, we're in a world where people, customers are collecting everything now. They're saving everything. And they don't have to save everything necessarily. They don't find out until they start to use it. Is data protection becoming more of a surface, a filtering surface also? How you, of what data you really need to back up? Yeah, I think that gets into the whole notion of data management, right? And that whole space is how can you leverage the information out of the data as opposed to just managing the infrastructure? And through automation, we're going to enable our customers to get there. Automate the infrastructure to the point where it's completely turnkey, set a policy, set an SLA, and go. And at that point, you're managing the metadata. Analytics become really important, right? We've got a really cool new offering called Enterprise Copy Data Analytics. It's a SaaS-based solution. Literally log on to our website and you enter your serial number. You're often running analytics, predictive recommendations based off of machine learning. That to me is the transition. Is that managing your copies, you mean? That will give you visibility into your copies. That will give you visibility into your protection levels. And it'll actually score you. So you have a very simple way to understand where you're weak, where you're not. So this is the AJ's point about staff efficiency. You have that machine learning that can automate a way what used to be crawling through log data, looking at stuff, pushing buttons, and provisioning. I mean, you see that impact on your end? Oh, it's huge on our end because in the past, our database administrators would have to write something and if a developer needed a backup copy of that database, it took potentially days, if not weeks, depending upon the size of that to get it from tape or to go back to the old tape set to do that. Now with ECS and DD Boost, it's instantaneous. They can restore that instantaneously to where the developers needed. It's a tremendous, tremendous savings for us. Some recent research I've seen says that there's still a sizable minority of customers who are concerned about the private security and the integrity of their data in the cloud. Is that an issue for you? It is, we're heavily regulated through different regulations because we're in the financial services industry. So we have PCI compliance, we have FFVIC compliance, SOC compliance, that's huge. And being sure that that data is protected at all times is encrypted from end to end, is encrypted in transmission. Those are all things that the Dell EMC suites give us. Talk about your data environment because the data industry's growing. I remember talking to Dave Vellante years ago in 2010, 2011, the companies that were selling data stuff weren't really data companies. They were selling software. And a lot of the innovation came from, we call data full companies. They actually had a ton of data to deal with. They had the data lakes piling up and then had to figure it out on the way. You guys have a lot of data. We do. I'm very excited to see how big the data size coming in because tier two data is very valuable. If data lakes could be more intelligent, that comes another factor into the architectural question. Yeah, the amount of data we collect is enormous and we're just starting to get into the analytics of that and how can we use that data to better serve our customers and how can we better advertise and pull our customers into us to provide those services for us? The data, I mean, we're doing over 90 million transactions a month is what we're coming through our system. And so you're data full. You're full of data. We're full of data. And so there's just a tremendous amount of stuff that comes through us and that data used for analytics is very powerful for us to be able to turn around and provide services to our customers. Matt, talk about the dynamic of, as you get into more analytics, this brings up where the data world's going and this is really kind of the data protection question is, okay, all this data's coming in, you got some automation in there, you got some wrangling, you got some automation stuff now. Analytics surface, the citizen analysts, not the data scientist, just start poking and touching the data. Okay, so now policies, how do you back that up? So you have now multiple touch points on the data. Does that impact data protection scheme and architecture? Yeah, I think it does. Fundamentally, there's going to be a shift from the traditional backup admin role and not just managing the policy but also managing the data itself to a role that's more centric around managing the policy and compliance against it. As you go to decentralized environments and centers of data as opposed to data centers, you need to rethink the whole model. Data center, data center, not server center. It's the data center. And data's got mass, right? So it doesn't move very easily. As you move to a more distributed model in an internet of things type of environment, how will that affect data protection? Do you have to re-architect your service? We have been on a journey to transform data protection. We last year talked about some new offerings in that space with our copy data management and analytics solution. And that's really oriented towards that decentralized model. It's a different approach. It's not your traditional combined your data path and your control path. It's truly a decentralized distributed model. Paul and I were talking on the intro today with Peter Burris, our head of research at Wikimon and we're talking about the business value of data. And not to spare you the abstract conversation we had. We're talking about valuation of companies with based on the data that they have and data under management might be a term that we're fleshing out. But the question specifically comes back down to the protection and security of the data. When you look at the market cap of Yahoo on that hack that they have, I think you mentioned Yahoo hack really killed the value of the company. So the data will become instrumental in the valuation. So if that's the case, if you believe that, then you got to believe that the protection is going to be super important and that there's going to be real emphasis on brown management policies and also the value of that data. You guys talk about that in your world. You guys think that holistically and can you share some insight into that conversation? I think it comes back to your very first point about data protection is hot. It's hot because there are a lot more threats out there and of course there's that blurry line a little bit between security and data protection sometimes. But absolutely, if you look at regulations, if you look at things like GDPR in the EU, this is going to drive an increased focus on data protection and that's where we're focusing on. And IOT doesn't make this thing any easier. Absolutely not. You should have said like, yeah, I know. ATMs will be devices, wearables will be doing, using analytics to share security data and movement data of people. And so us, security is one of the top priorities and it has to be. You look at what's happened with Target and Sony and Yahoo and all the other breaches, that keeps me up at night. And I'm sure that we have a stable backup is integral to our system and especially with some of the recent ransomware threats and things like that. I couldn't ask you about that. That's scary stuff and one way to be sure that you are protected from that is being sure that you have number one a good security system and number two, you have a good backup. Over half of companies now have been hit by ransomware. Is there a service, a type of service that you have specifically for companies that are worried about that? Yeah, we have, I think AJ said it very well, right? It's a layered approach. You have to have security, you have to have backups. We have a solution called isolated recovery, which is all about helping our customers create a vaulted air gap solution, right? As the next level of protection and some of the largest firms out there are leveraging it today to do exactly that. It's your data, you got to get it off-prem, you got to get it into a vaulted area, you got to get it off the network. Matt and AJ, thanks so much for sharing the insight on the data protection, great customer reference, great testimonial there in the product, congratulations. Final question, your take on the shows. The first year, big story is Dell EMC World as a customer, are you kind of like, good, just looking good off the tee, middle of the fairway, you know? I'm impressed, I was really kind of skeptic coming in last year when it was announced and what is this going to mean and things like that. And just seeing this year the integration of all the technologies with VMware and the Dell desktops, laptops, the server line, the VxRail, VxRack and all the other suites that EMC Dell products offer, it's refreshing to me as a customer, knowing that now I have that one call for just about anything in the IT world. As they say in the IT, one throat to choke, single pain in the glass, I'm kind of going back down and congratulating them on the solution. Thanks for my data protection, data center, they call for a reason, the data center, got to protect it, it's theCUBE bringing you all the data here from Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier, Paul Gillan with SiliconANGLE Media. We'll be right back with more, stay with us.