 Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2018, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to day two of VeeamON 2018 in Chicago. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Dante Orsini is here. He's the senior vice president of BizDev at Island. Cube alum, good friend of theCUBE. Great to see you again. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. So what's happening with Island these days in the world of cloud service providers? Well, Dave, it's been insane for us. I mean, obviously Veeam's a huge partner of ours. We've been working together for what, seven years now, I think. And it's just amazing to see the growth of this company. I mean, we've integrated Veeam, our relationship. We started off basically providing managed backup many, many moons ago, right? But six years ago, we started to build our own platform on top of VMware, on top of Cisco, on top of HPE. And customers really wanted to see more control, right? They wanted greater levels of security. They really wanted a true enterprise cloud, right? So to do that, we had to enhance the VMware stack. And we had chosen to basically take Veeam and integrate them via their API. So today, if somebody deploys anything in the world with Island, it's automatically backed up by Veeam, right? So if you fast forward a bit, as you see what Veeam's done to innovate with cloud and multi-cloud, they've really helped build our business, right? So Dante, if you go and look back, kind of before the whole cloud wave, the typical service provider, they would have one of everything. You'd walk down the aisles and the, you know, whatever it was, an EMC box, a digital box, whatever it was. Did virtualization change that? Were you able to consolidate, create a platform, create a simpler environment to manage, or is it still a lot of bespoke infrastructure lying around? Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, for us, I'd love to tell you we hit it right the first time, you know, 12 years ago, but no, you know, just like you said, all sorts of different technologies, right? But I think what we've done is we quickly standardized, right? So we leveraged Cisco UCS from a compute perspective. We leveraged some of their storage platforms for things that we do with Veeam Cloud Connect Backup. We actually helped them drive the validation of that product before it came to market. So we operated scale with them, same thing with Veeam. So we're the largest cloud provider in the world right now. As far as leveraging Veeam technologies. Now, in addition to that, on the storage front, we also, because the demands of the environment, right? We really wanted to deliver a secure cloud service. So, you know, encryption is table stakes and has been for years, right? So HPE Nimble plays a critical role for us there. So that's really our stack. Cisco from a network and a compute perspective, VMware at the hypervisor, right? And HPE from a storage perspective. So it sounds like you've taken some very cost-effective platforms, Nimble, Veeam, et cetera, and then architected an enterprise class solution. So you guys are adding value around that as an integrator and then obviously a service provider. Yep, correct. And I think, you know, the market is demanding more and more from a cloud provider, right? People want true transparency. They want control over the infrastructure. So for us, it's like, how can we develop an API so we can make this platform extensible, right? And then still work with customers that are struggling with the promise of cloud, right? And Stu, you see this all the time, right? Yeah, yeah. And Dante, one of the things we're discussing here is it's a very hybrid world, you know? As Veeam said, we've got, you know, customers are doing lots of sass. They're using service providers. They have their own data centers. They're using a few public clouds. One of the things I've been watching real closely is companies like Island and the other cloud service providers, Amazon and Microsoft, you know, aren't the enemy anymore. Well, we actually have to partner with them on some services. We do some things locally. Maybe give us your viewpoint as to how that's changed in the last couple of years. Yeah, great question. So I would tell you that we're not quite there yet, Stu. And also from my perspective, right? So you guys know, we're known best for delivering disaster recovery as a service. That's where we've made a name in the space. But the irony is we've really focused on building this enterprise cloud infrastructure, right? So an IaaS platform. And ironically, that's a majority of our revenue, right? So when we look at public, clearly it is a hybrid world, right? So where we spent a lot of time is investing in how can we highly automate the integration, right? Because we know that people are going to have workloads everywhere. So the idea is to think about it from a recovery perspective. If I'm predicting your traditional workloads and you've got a dev team that's using various different services that are proprietary to a public cloud, that stuff's got to talk to each other, right? And a true resiliency capacity, right? So we want to make sure that people could actually highly automate and orchestrate a failover to us, a test to us, but also integrate the connectivity portion of that, right? So making sure that all these things can talk together is important. Now, you understand as well as I do, as these cloud architectures change, become more modern, and then more service-driven, the traditional, I'm going to move from point A to point B, it's no longer in play, right? It's how can I have more diversity amongst my vendor base? So if I'm using containers, I've got a globally distributed architecture, if I can deploy some of that with Island, and some of that, and maybe using Kubernetes, right? That gives me diversity for recovery. Oh, yeah, Dante, you hit on one of the key things we've been, as an industry, struggling with, that pace of change is just so rapid. How do you internally deal with that pace of change? Is to architect something today and tomorrow there's something new? And tell us what you're hearing from your customers as to how they make their decisions and sort through this constant changing rubric. Yeah, well, it's definitely insane. We see all sorts of various different use cases, right? Depending on the industry and that pressure to innovate, right, at the speed of light, is really people struggle with it, right? So I think from our perspective, there's a couple of things that we're doing. One, we actually wrote our own assessment application. We call it Island Catalyst. And this was really designed to help both our customers, as well as our partners, because we go to market through a lot of partners as well, to help streamline this pre-sales process for a customer. So again, we focus squarely on the VMware infrastructure stack, right? So being able to pull an inventory of what somebody has in their environment and then go through and select resource pools and VMs for whatever the purpose, whether they're looking to lift and shift workloads or whether they're looking to protect them from a backup or DR perspective. And we're able to mitigate all the challenges associated with that. So to your point, as people are looking at cloud, it's like, okay, is this cloud thing real? And how's it applied to my business, right? What can I really do with this? And oh, by the way, I got to deal with my budget also. So what's this stuff cost? So we've got some really smart people, but you can't scale our smartest people globally, right? So we wanted to really drive that into an application and it's really helped get people to outcomes much quicker. So do it right first. If you reverse back a few years ago, VMware was calling Amazon a bookseller. Amazon was calling, you know, the guys like VMware, the old guard, you know, the old way. Yep. You know, they kissed and hugged last year. So you must have loved that, first of all, because it was like, great VMware specialist. We'll just drive a truck through that opportunity because we get service provision, cloud, VMware stack, boom. Okay, now fast forward, they've got this little kumbaya thing going on. How do you now differentiate from that? Yep. Yeah, that's a great question. So first of all, you know, VMware obviously a very strategic partner. I think they've got a long road ahead of them, right? On some of the things that they're doing, right? And I think the promise of where they're going is great, but I still think that there's a lot of folks that struggle with the idea. I mean, think about commingling my traditional workloads and then trying to integrate cloud-native services on top of it. I think it's a tall order, right? So we'll see where it goes. We're keeping a close eye on it. But in the interim, for us, we continue to see folks that are saying, look, I want to get out of the data center business. I've built my data center on VMware and I need to have much greater levels of control and visibility and you need to make this easy on me, right? So from that perspective, we've been able to do really, really well. We work with a lot of service providers that are looking for that level of consultative approach but also want to realize the benefits of a cloud, right? So the point being is I want a true cloud but it needs to be enterprise class. And I also need to know that I might need help architecting that migration, right? All right. Well, that's the key, right? I mean, you're not going to get that from an Amazon. They're not going to come into your shop. They're not going to hold your hand through it. They're not going to help you build the architecture out. It'll help you manage it on an ongoing basis, right? Dante, it's May 2018, so I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about GDPR. Hey, Stu, I love you, man. This is great. So you guys know we operate globally, right? And have for, you know, over a decade. So GDPR, we were way out in front of this. So I'm not sure if you follow the, the BSI came out with a new standard 10012, I believe. I think our compliance and DPO officer would be pretty proud of me remembering that one. But it's, it's tailor made for GDPR, right? So we've been pre certified, one of four companies that did it. We do a ton in the security side and the compliance side. I nearly go hand in hand. We went through a global audit last year on the back of some of the ISO work we do with the CSA, the Cloud Security Alliance, and actually came out with a Gold Star certification. Sounds juvenile, right? Gold Star, woohoo, right? But it's a big deal. Only Island and Microsoft have actually achieved that level of certification. Yeah, so on the compliance side, we're way out in front of GDPR. We're doing a lot from a thought leadership perspective and educating both our partners in the marketplace. And I think it's going to be very interesting to see what happens with Brexit also, right? And I think you'll see the rest of the world kind of find their way to their own type of regulation. So what are all those acronyms mean for your customers in terms of GDPR compliance? How does that turn into value for them and make their life easier? Can you explain? So I think right now the whole market's been kind of, in my opinion, has been ill-prepared for this. And so you see a lot of people scrambling, right? So being able to identify what data is going to fall under that regulation, how you treat the data, how you're able to account for the data, and also destroy the data and validate that, is frankly I see some of the biggest sweeping change in marketing. I see marketing people really scrambling, right? Because they have to make sure that they double opt in. I mean, because the fines for breaching this are unbelievable, right? So I think you're going to see the regulators make an example out of certain people, right? No doubt. Quickly. And there's going to be some examples. They're going to go after the guys with deep pockets at first, but the fines are, I mean, what are the fines? 10% of turnover? No, 4% of turnover. 4% of your previous year's turnover. Which is insane. Yeah. That's going to hurt. Yeah, or something like 20 million pounds, something like that. Which ever is greater. Greater, yes! Yes, exactly. Yeah. It's pretty onerous, all right. Dante, Veeamon 2018, we'll give you closing thoughts. Fantastic event, right? Just super appreciative for our relationship with Veeamon. They've been behind us. They've been behind this whole cloud provider community. I mean, guys, you can know this, Ratmir and team had the ability to go take this stuff to a public cloud many moons ago. They chose to enable a managed cloud provider market first. So we are very grateful for that. Awesome. Hey, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you. My pleasure. As always. All right, keep it up everybody. Go Yankees. Oh, whoa. Go Yankees. Okay, well, we're on the topic. Here we go. Listen, you can't beat the Red Sox in April. Yeah, you know that, right? Yeah, here we go. So it's going to be interesting to see. I mean, I have predicted the Yankees are going to take the East and I think they go into the World Series, but you got to be excited as a Yankees fan. Could be a good year. I've always liked Brian Cashman. I think he's one of the best GMs in the business. And I watch his moves at the trading deadline. He's going to beef up the bullpen and I hope the Sox can hang tough with them because anything can happen. It's true. Anything can happen. All right, great to see you. Great to see you guys. Thank you. Go Sox. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest