 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to theCUBE's wall-to-wall coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, virtual re-invent and our coverage over three weeks of a cloud. We're looking into the next decade of innovation and with me are two great guests. Chris Weiburg is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Cohesity and Sabina Joseph is the General Manager of America's Technology for Partners, AWS. Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you. Great to be here, Dave. Thanks for having us. You're very welcome. Thank you, Dave. It's great to see you, Sabina. And Chris, before we get into the partnership, I want to ask kind of what you've seen in the market, you know, with the increased focus on data, digital business, obviously the last nine months, people have really shifted their priorities. How have you seen customers responding? Yeah, it's actually, you know, it's sort of strange to say this at a time it's really hard for all of us dealing with the global pandemic, but the market has picked up in many ways and perhaps that's not surprising. Given a lot of folks have started to shift things to more virtual way of working and the data hasn't slowed down. And so with that, we've also seen a little bit of a shift and this is part of the reason behind the announcement we're making of trying to accelerate for many organizations, projects that had originally been planned to put in a data center to moving more towards the cloud, right? Part of this is a CAPEX to OPEX shift, but I think it also in some cases falls under this umbrella of digital transformation, right? Where they're trying to accelerate new ways of doing things while in some cases, people can't even get into data centers in some cases anymore. And so how can you do that more remotely? How can you go to a model to move more self-help? And all that leads up to part of what we're going to be talking about today. So the market has been very busy because again, data growth hasn't slowed down. I think the one thing that I'd add to that is you'd see an uptick in terms of focus and interest in some of the things that we do because of all the ransomware attacks that are out there, right? That's another piece of it. Yeah, and I want to get into the announcement as well, but I mean, you're right, Chris. It's actually as tough as it is for the climate. It's a good time to be in tech. It's even better if you're in cloud. So Sabina, I wonder if you had to think you must have a lot of people in the ecosystem really wanting to work with you. We do, I think with the proliferation of data, right? And data across many different silos. I think the key is, how do we provide customers more value for the data? That way they can make it optimal for their business. So yes, we do have a lot of different partners wanting to work with us, yeah. Okay, so we're all busy. I feel like we've never worked so hard in our lives. But so Cohesity and AWS, you've announced a strategic collaboration. Tell me more about it. Why did you choose to collaborate together? Chris, other than AWS is the number one cloud platform. What were some of the other factors that we should be focused on? Yeah, I think and Sabina, please do chime in here as well. I think the big portion of it, Dave has to do with this shared vision that we have around really what we believe is the next chapter in data management. And so how do we make it simple for organizations to not only protect and secure and manage their data, but also get more value out of it and derive more value from that data, which is kind of what Sabina was hinting at. And a lot of the reasons that we think this is such a good match, given all the varying services Amazon has that you can build off of, given what Cohesity does. Yeah, so Sabina, I know you're going to start with customers. You always interviewed enough Amazon, Amazonians to know that's really the starting point, the prism from what you look. But so from that prism, from your perspective, what's the collaboration? Why the collaboration? What does it bring for customers? As Chris was saying here, right? I think there was a lot of alignment, both in terms of culture and working backwards from customers, customer obsession, right? And really kind of understand what can we do, right? To bring intelligent data management solution to enterprise and mid-sized customers and provide simplicity, flexibility, and reduce total cost of ownership. And that's where Cohesity and AWS, we really shared that vision, I would say, over the last couple of years. Cohesity, of course, has been a partner of AWS for quite some time now. And then when we started to talk to each other, we understood that these were some of the things we wanted to not just address, but also provide an opportunity for customers. So that's why we collaborated in this unique way to bring forward a data management as a service solution for our customers. All right, Chris, I really want to dig into this a little bit more, because I've talked to a number of, of CIOs that have said, boy, our business resilience strategy was way too focused on DR, maybe too much focus on backup. We're now a digital business because every business, if you're out of business, if you're not a digital business, overnight. And so this notion of data management and data management as a service, what problems are you really focused on solving there? Yeah, I think two things, Dave. I mean, let's go back to a Cohesities after solving as a company. And that's this problem of what we call mass data fragmentation, right? Where you have data stored in many different locations, Prem, Cloud, Edge, et cetera, typically in many different pieces of infrastructure. So there's a lot of silos going on there. And it's really hard to get your hands around the entirety of what you have. And first of all, make sure it is protected and there's some compliance implications of that and so on. And then also, again, how can you not only protect it but do more with it and get better transparency and more value out of that data that today might be dark, right? Might be opaque because A, do you know where it is? And B, even if you do, what more can you do with it? And so that's kind of the first problem we're setting up to solve. And why, as we look at moving to doing what we're doing with AWS, providing an alternate consumption option is also really important, I think. So, you know, some people have staff and skills to roll their own, to do their selves. And Cohesity will continue to support those customers, obviously, as we do today. But what we also wanna provide is a new option for those that want to make that shift from CapEx to Apex and more from a management of their environment doing it themselves to having somebody else manage it for them and really reducing that cost and overhead associated with running your own data center effectively. And so bringing the value of what Cohesity does to the cloud is the second piece of that, where we wanna make sure we carry that bigger vision along, where we're not just doing one thing, we're doing multiple things. And so data management in our sense is not just about backup, although that's the first thing you'll see. We're also gonna tackle that DR problem you raised as well. If you look closely, a couple of weeks ago, we made an announcement around what we're doing with a product we call Site Continuity in the on-prem world. Guess what, that's gonna come real soon to AWS. And then beyond that, files and objects, test data management, and as we'll get to a little bit later more, when we start leveraging the value and the power of some of the advanced services AWS has to bring to the table for things like compliance and so on. Great, thank you for that. And so Sabina, I mean, we run on AWS, we're small, but still, we go into the console and there's this buffet of services and we have a lot of options. So I wonder if you could talk about customer choice, your philosophy around that, why that's important, how you're providing different deployment models and the example I would use is, why is backup as a service not enough? Why do we need to go beyond that? Yeah, so first of all, thank you very much for being our customer. Welcome. And I think it's the key behind this solution that Cohesity is building on top of AWS is to really provide one platform and one user interface, right? Yes, backup as a service is the first deployment, it's the first service that we will start with and we are starting with. But I think we all realize that customers do many different things with their data, they do disaster recovery, they have file services, dev and test and then the value add services, which we'll talk about in a bit around analytics, compliance, machine learning and so on. So those are all the different value add things we wanna provide with that data in addition to of course backup as a service, disaster recovery as a service, file services and so on. Well, the backup service is comprehensive that we are launching with and provides a rich protection across all of this data. But at the end of the day, it's customer choice whether they wanna manage your own data and infrastructure or at Cohesity kind of manage this across the infrastructure for them both in a hybrid model and in a cloud model. And we have many customers kind of wanting to look at both options because they have both environments. I don't know, Chris, if you wanna talk about Dolby a little bit, but I can certainly get into it. I don't know if you wanna delve a little bit into Dolby and how they're using it. Yeah, that's a great example actually, Sabina. So I think Dave, as Sabina's suggesting, one of our early design partners on this was Dolby. And they're an existing Cohesity customer today. They're very happy what we're doing on Pram. And so I asked them why would you be interested in managing data also in the cloud? And his answer was, well, look, for me, it's really all about the self-help option. I have a lot of clients, I do a central IT, but I have a lot of clients in my organization that I wanna point to do their own thing and not have to directly manage them. This is gonna be the perfect option for them, right? They can just go sign up, connect, and protect to get started, right? Step one, I talked to another customer who commented, well, in this sort of hybrid configuration that Sabina suggests, the stuff that they have on Pram today will probably protect on Pram. But workloads like, let's say Microsoft 365, mailboxes or something like that, it's in the cloud. Why would they backhaul that into their data center? Why not just protect it there in the cloud itself? It just seems to make sense. And then we also have, you know, customers we're talking to that they're a large distributed organizations where maybe the stuff that's in the branch office, the remote office, they wanna back up to the cloud because of when backhaul costs and so on, it's easier to do it that way. And then the central stuff is still central. So we're gonna give Sabina said, customers that choice, right? You can do cloud only if you want to, you can do Pram only with us, or you can do both. And we expect a lot of customers living up in a third bucket in that sort of hybrid scenario and let them choose why they do it and use that combination. The great thing is when you go to Cohesity Helios, that's gonna be the control center, if you will, for both things on Pram and also in this new DMAAS offering in the cloud. So one experience from a manageability standpoint. That's just the only thing I'd add to Sabina's answer about what's great about this and why you wanna do more than just one thing. Well, if you sort of solve this problem of infrastructure silos and in your traditional data center, and now you're bringing in the cloud, why recreate silos and best to breed things all over again? Don't you wanna consolidate some of that for ease of use and lower cost of ownership as well. And so that's one of the things we think we're gonna bring to the table is pretty unique versus letting customers pick and choose five or 10 different solutions and trying to munch those together. We think we've got a better way. Got it. Sabina, let's come back to some of the comments you were making about added value. So what can customers really do with their data with data management as a service and AWS that maybe they couldn't do before? Yeah, so the way I look at it, Cohesity and AWS are custodians of this data, right? On behalf of the customer, ultimately it is their data, but we wanna unlock the value from this data versus having it being in different silos, different locations and so on. So the vision that we have, which we are on the road right now in terms of unlocking this data, is to really add additional services, maybe compliance as a service, analytics as a service, machine learning as a service. So let's just kind of walk through these three things, right? So if you think about compliance as a service, right? Using Amazon Macie, which uses machine learning to really kind of discover, classify and protect sensitive data. And if you think about analytics as a service, right? Using AWS Glue to run ETL on this data, Amazon Athena to run SQL queries and then potentially create data warehouse using Amazon Redshift. Then if you really start thinking about other machine learning services, right? Across the AWS machine learning stack, if you look at it at a high level, you could, customers could use Amazon Textract, Amazon Transcribe to attract value from the metadata to allow deeper business specific content, right? That they need for their different solutions that they have to end customers. For example, another vertical use case could be Amazon Comprehend Medical using that to kind of extract medical information from this data. And then finally, customers can also use Amazon SageMaker to build advanced machine learning models to really start deriving even additional value and gain business insights from this data. So those are kind of the things we have in our mind in terms of compliance as a service, machine learning as a service, analytics as a service. And then of course I want to bring in Chris here to talk a little bit about what they plan to do with their marketplace with the Cohesity Marketplace. Yeah, I think it's a great segue. So we've always had this concept at Cohesity Dave of being able to do more with your data and you've seen that express so far in our marketplace which is still going to be there. We just think plugging some of the additional services that Sabina mentioned, when you have a center of gravity for your data in the cloud is going to make that concept even more powerful. And so day one, when we GA this just for right now, actually during reinvent, you're going to be able to do it yourself. You'll have data backed up into the cloud, for example, you can apply those services if you have the skill to do that. But over time, working in conjunction with Amazon, the goal is to be able to make those services something that you would just go in again to Helios and say, for example, turn on the compliance service. And behind the scenes, we're invoking Amazon Macy doing all right thing with all the data under management like Cohesity already. And so you just get then the report back out if that's what you're aiming to do. And so we're going to try and make this as a simple and easy to use as possible, leveraging the power of all the great things that Amazon does through the API that they have combined with what we do in an engineering effort that we'll be driving with our guidance to really give great value add customers far beyond the insurance policy, you get with backup and being able to do more with that data and add value to your organization. And it's okay, so you've announced at re-invent GA of Cohesity Data Protect, how should customers think about getting started? Well, they can get started today, since we're now GA and just go to www.cohesity.com and I have the ability to go ahead there and actually join in on a free trial to get started. And if they decide to convert, then they can go from there. So risk-free going in, check it out. We welcome feedback as always from our customers and then stay tuned because right around the corner, after we're done with that one offer as part of the bigger D NAS umbrella, you'll see disaster recovery and additional services, really the whole value of the Cohesity platform over time delivered through AWS. As a service, bring it on guys, Sabina, Chris, thanks so much, really appreciate you coming on. And thank you for watching everyone. Keep it right there, we're digging deep into AWS and the re-invent ecosystem, you're watching theCUBE.