 TheCube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Welcome back, Jeff Frick here on TheCube. We're at EMC World 2014, day three wall-to-wall coverage. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We get the smartest people in the room. We get them on TheCube. We ask them what you'd like to know. Extract the knowledge, extract the insight. We're excited to be here. This is the fifth year we've been at EMC World. We actually launched TheCube at EMC World 2010 five years ago and the demand is so great. There's so much insight we want to share that we actually have two cubes for the first time ever. So we're joined in this next segment by David Gibson, VP Marketing at Veronis. Welcome to TheCube. Thanks very much for having me. Really excited to be here. First time? Not first time at EMC World. Been here for many, many years. But first time on TheCube. But first time on TheCube. All right, excellent. So let's jump in. So I was doing my homework in a very interesting space that Veronis plays in. Is Veronis or Veronis? Veronis. Veronis. Okay, I'm sorry about that. It's unstructured human-generated enterprise data. You've got it. So that's a mouthful. Easy for you to say, right? It's easy for me to say. So what is that? That is the spreadsheets, documents, presentations, audio files, images, blueprints, CAD files. Really anything that employees create and share every day is part of every business process. And if you think about it, it's really some of the most fastest growing and valuable data that an enterprise has today. Everything from intellectual property to medical records to financial records. Really what isn't stored in a file or email today? Right, right. And we've heard a lot in the past. There's a lot of early traction around this for say, compliance and people keep a track of emails and storing the emails and all that kind of stuff. But you're way past email and you've got a ton of different types of data types. So what do you offer for the company in terms of managing all that stuff? What are you doing with all those PowerPoints and Excel spreadsheets? Sure, sure. Well, I think about it in terms of really three things. We help organizations be more productive, more secure, and more cost efficient. So with Veronis Solutions, you reduce a ton of risk. We hear about WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden and all the incidents that's really top of mind with Target. So one of the things we do is we analyze usage and we spot abuse. So you can really be protected from the insider threat or hackers that have stolen credentials. We also take some of the manual processes that organizations do, just provisioning access to data can take days or weeks and it's highly manual. So we automate a lot of that, moving to a new NAS or migrating to a new platform. We automate some of that. And then the last thing is we help employees find the data they need quickly, get access to it quickly, and get access to it from the right devices anywhere they are. So that's a really hard problem, right? And it's been exacerbated by Google because now we all expect that the answer to any question is only, you know, five clicks or you can just talk, now you can talk to your phone, right? Answer my question. So the enterprise has got a ton of data, but from like a Google search perspective, it doesn't have, you know, kind of the classic search paradigms that kind of drive those algorithms to make things more accessible. So how do you help make that stuff accessible to the employee that's just trying to get his work done and I know there's something in there that's got the answer to my question. How do I find it? How do you help with that? You know, it's interesting you brought up Google. I think that really illustrates the power of metadata. Google takes the links between pages and as a result, it's been able to do wonderful things with search and think about how many times a day you use internet search to find what you want. Well, file systems are different. Really, Veronis is the only company that focuses on the same kinds of metadata, not the links, but the user activity. We know who can access data. We know who does access data and we know what the data contains and we really have the only technology that's purpose built to harness that kind of metadata on human generated data in the enterprise and that's the secret. Having total command of the metadata, like Google has total command of the internet metadata, gives us the ability to control the data, figure out who can, should and does access data, what it contains, where it's sensitive, where it's exposed and then enables us to do a whole lot more. Really, first thing, identify who's responsible for it, get them involved in all the real critical decisions and if you think about it, if you don't know who owns your data, it's like having a bank account without an owner. It's really critical. So there are a lot of critical steps that enterprises can now take once they have metadata. Right, right. So the metadata is the key. So let's unpack that a little bit. Let's first talk about security. So when a CIO brings you guys in, of those different attributes that you value, proposition that you offer, what's the one that gets you in the door? Is it the security piece? Is it worried about holes and leaks? Is it just access to all this tons and tons of data? What is it that you guys usually come in with? Sure, so I think the first thing, and by the way, we show the demo of our product and it's really compelling. The first thing is you can visualize who can access data and this is a big problem. Something happens, who could have done that, right? Or if we've got sensitive data, like we've got an audit coming up, what's exposed? So just answering basic questions about data is a lot harder than people think. Sure. Then, who did access data? Almost nobody, this is really surprising. Almost nobody has a record of who's opening, creating, deleting, moving, modifying files, or who's sending emails to whom, or marking them as unread. I mean, you'd think it's like not having a ledger for your bank account. It's a fundamental control without which you can't really recover from an incident or spot people doing things that you shouldn't do and there's a whole lot more you can't do. So what are they doing prior? They're just, it just happens and nobody knows? You know, it's interesting because over the last 20 years, file shares went from, we used to use floppy disks, right? 96. That's right. And then file shares became popular and then I think our founders really saw this is a huge problem when they started the company. But now, with 50% growth every year on this data, it's a huge problem. And we have the incidents like Snowden and Target. I mean, it's like now there's so much attention and the interesting thing here at EMC World, people are coming up to our booth and are like, you can tell me who's accessing my file share data, tell me more and then we show them the demo and then it's like, wow, I can take control of who can access my data, I can put the right people in charge, I can figure out who those owners are, I can automate the provisioning of data, I can automate recertifications and attestations and so we really transition from an environment which has gone without controls for a long time to where people don't know who has access or who does access or where the sensitive data is and we can really lock down, find and lock down all the sensitive data, put the right people in charge, identify the owners, put them in charge, have a sustainable model to really have least privilege. That's what everybody wants to get to. Nobody should have access to data that they shouldn't have access to. With our metadata and our intelligence, we can tell you where that is. Where can I lock stuff down without breaking what people are doing? And then we can take that automation so much further and enhance productivity with search, with mobile access, with migrations and automating that. There's just a whole lot that you can then do with that metadata. So what about the impacts of the hybrid cloud and shadow IT? So you've got people doing stuff on Amazon, you've got stuff doing stuff on a hybrid cloud, you've got the inside cloud, you've got file shares, whether it's box or box.net, and you've got Evernote and all this other kind of crazy stuff around the periphery. What are you seeing in your customers and their reaction to this? Are you working with or just providing a substitute for? How is the, is the guy who's trying to figure out where all this stuff is and who's opening it dealing with the reality of these other kind of third-party tools? I think that's a great question. And what the irony is, is there's this new functionality, right? Which people associate with the cloud. But all the data, and that's like file sync, mobile device access, easy third-party sharing. But the data that the employees really want is living on the storage that's inside the company, right? And you think about it, the customers here, I mean they have terabytes or petabytes of this human-generated data. And the thing is, is it's just a functionality problem. How can we layer on the functionality that people have come to expect with Dropbox and Box so that they have the same kind of functionality with their existing storage? And there are a couple of companies now, I'd say really that are looking at that hard. We're one of the companies that's doing that to enable the same kind of functionality using existing storage. We actually have a product called Data Anywhere that does that exact thing. Take your existing storage, allow file sync, mobile device access, and third-party sharing. Interesting. So when people are looking at bringing you guys in, are they doing hardcore ROI analysis? I mean, what are kind of the business drivers that they need to justify? Sure, so we have, I think we work with our customers to justify a purchase based on ROI, based on reduction of risk and productivity. So for example, a lot of organizations have several full-time employees whose sole function is to provision access to data. We automate that. If they want to do a recertification, that's a very painstaking, manual process that takes a lot of full-time employees. So we work with them to say, okay, what can we automate? We also help identify all the data that's not being used. Think about that. If you don't know what's used, you don't know the inverse. You don't know what's not being used. A lot of organizations are storing data that they don't really need to store or store on their first-tier storage. So we have a CapEx play, a capital expenditure play for ROI, as well as an OpEx play. And then it's really hard to put a dollar value on not having a data breach, right? When we've really seen it recently, like with what happened with Target and Snowden. I mean, when you can't protect yourself from a breach and you don't know what's been breached, it's very hard to recover from it well. So that's another thing. People have peace of mind that they've got mitigation for the insider threat, as well as better protection for outsiders that steal insider's credentials or use phishing attacks and things like that. And then the productivity gains are insane. If it takes you minutes to get access to data rather than hours or days, think about how much more productive you are. Think about how many times you create the same files over and over again because you forgot you created them or can't find them. And then when you can't get access to stuff from your mobile devices, you're just not as productive as you should be. So really the productivity, the risk and the cost helps build a business case with our customers. So it's interesting because we talk a lot about data from ERP and internal systems and now people are going out and they're collecting data from publicly available other systems, government stuff or real estate stuff or airline traffic stuff. I mean there's all kinds of data sources but we don't really talk very often. We do a ton of shows about kind of human generated stuff like PowerPoints and Word documents and these other things. Are we missing it to the CIOs? Are they thinking about that stuff? Is it kind of outside what they think about day to day or in what percentage of it is their thought process in terms of thinking about the data assets that they have inside the company versus all the stuff that they're getting off or their core, I guess, not people systems, the regular system systems. I see that it's coming into focus now. Really you've got structured data and all the database systems that people have in an organization. A lot of people recently have been looking at machine generated unstructured data, all the log files and the analysis systems that go into that. And now there's really a third kind that people are paying attention to that's in the enterprise, that's the human generated data. I think about it as like the gateway to and from your brain. Think about if you have a thought and you want to share it digitally, you put it in a file or in an email. That's the first place you put it. If you want to analyze a database, you dump it down to Excel, you do a pivot table, you put your findings in a presentation and that's what you send around to people or share it with people via a file share or whatever. So really, I think that the criticality of this asset, I mean, it's never been clearer. Cause the consequences of not protecting it are just like catastrophic now. But also the smart organizations are asking, how can we get more out of this intellectual capital? How can we stop creating, having two teams creating the same stuff that don't know about each other? Like think about if you take over a job for somebody. Like, do you really take advantage of what your predecessor did? There's just so much intellectual capital out there that we can get more value from if we mine it for metadata. If we analyze it and bring the right focus onto the problem. And really go from kind of the management of the data to pulling the value of the data and integrating it back into the other systems as you pull from your log files and all those other things. I mean, are people able to do that? Are they able to pull the metadata that you guys systems attaching to these filed documents basically and then pull that into some of their other BI tools and other kind of intelligence tools to extract additional value from that? I think people are just starting to understand the enormity of the metadata and the myriad possibilities of using it. If you think about it, the first thing you do when you discover that your bank account like has a bunch of people withdrawing money from it that you didn't know about it. Like the first thing you do when the lights are on is securing. Okay, only the right people have access to this bank account. I'm going to monitor it every however often to make sure that nothing happens that's adverse and I want to make sure I have controls in place. So that's really the first thing people do. And that's historically where we've been. It's in governance and the protection and the enhanced management of unstructured data. But now people are realizing there's so many more possibilities for this metadata. And the nice thing is our technology was built to be extensible. You can layer on on top of our metadata framework these new products and functionalities that take advantage of this metadata like we discussed before, how you can have better search. We really, I think we just announced on Monday data answers, which is a search product which has a very new approach to enterprise search for file share and SharePoint data. Which is what? So data answers takes advantage of our metadata framework. Think about how activity, knowing who accesses a file and can really help with relevance. If we know what files you've accessed or people like you have accessed, if you search for something, we use that to weight the results. So we have much more relevant results because of the metadata we have. The other huge thing is we have security routes. We've been helping organizations for years find people that have access to data that they don't need. So we can automatically prune out results that you shouldn't see based on your access profile. We also classify the data, look for regulated content like PCI data, like credit card numbers, things like that. We can prune those out of results. So we have a much more secure approach to search than you do if you don't have that metadata. And think about what happens if you don't have good permission set up and you put in search. Somebody searches for payroll, they have the keys to the castle. And then the last thing is because we have the activity, we can do true incremental indexing. We don't have to stripe the entire file share to see what's changed or modified. Our metadata tells us. So it's a very efficient, secure approach to enterprise search that delivers very relevant results. And you're basically proxying some of the things like that Google does in terms of the indexing with the metadata to improve all the things that you deliver. The metadata really fuels the index engine so that we, not only do we understand the content and we have that index, but we have so many more clues to figure out what somebody wants and what they shouldn't see. What they have access to. Well, that's exciting times. You guys are public company, right? They're rolling along. But it still sounds very early into the journey of the opportunity to work with this stuff, especially as all we hear about all these other data sets. This sounds like a big untapped one that's just been kind of sitting inside the castle that no one has really taken the time to exercise and pull the value out, to extract the value. I think the human generated data has been growing at a rapid clip, like 50% year over year I think. And that really people are starting to not only look at the problem how do we secure the stuff? How do we manage it more efficiently? But they're really starting to ask now, okay, how can we be more efficient, more productive? How can we get more out of that vast intellectual data at an intellectual capital that we've got? Internet of people, right? You don't have to hook an arm chip to them. They already self run on coffee and breakfast. So David, thanks for coming on theCUBE. It's very insightful. We really don't hear much about that category of kind of the big data movement at all. So it's surprising to me that we don't hear more because Lord knows how many word documents and PowerPoint documents and every other kind of document that we all create in our day to day world. And clearly it's a big asset. Clearly security of those assets is a big thing but to be able to extract additional value and have that power some of these other data initiatives is a huge opportunity. Sounds like you guys got great, great future ahead. So thanks for coming on theCUBE. We're at EMC World 2014. We'll be back after this short segment with our next guest. Thanks for watching.