 Hello everyone, welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase, season one, episode two, your host of theCUBE, John Furrier. We're here with two great guests, Pujon Kumar, CEO of Clumio and Sabina Joseph, the general manager of AWS. Welcome to the show, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John, good to see you again. Great to see both of you, both CUBE alumni. Great to see how the business is going, going very well, cloud scale, continuing to dominate. Clumio is doing extremely well. Tell us more about what's going on, Clumio. What's your mission? What kinds of use cases are you seeing that, Pujon? That's helping you guys keep your growth trajectory and solve your customer problems. Yeah, firstly, thank you, John. Thank you, Sabina. It's great to be here. Clumio is a backup as a service platform that's built natively on AWS for AWS. We do support other use cases beyond AWS, but our primary mission is to basically deliver a ransomware data protection solution on AWS for AWS customers. If you think about it, one of the things that's typically holding back any company to put mission critical workloads on a fantastic platform, a public cloud platform like AWS is to make sure that the data is protected in the event of any attack. And it's also done with extreme amount of simplicity, so that nobody is doing the heavy lift of doing backup themselves. So that's what really Clumio provides. It's a service, it's a turnkey service that provides data protection on AWS for AWS. Well, you're a frequent CUBE alumni. We're always talking about the importance of that, but I want to ask you this year more than ever, you're seeing it at the center of the conversation built in from day one. You're seeing a lot more threats. Certainly you mentioned ransomware and more. There's more and more online attacks that's impacting this particular area more than ever before. Can you comment on what your focus has been this year around that? Yeah, I see, if you think about Clumio's evolution, our primary mission has been to go and protect every data source. But guess what, right? With more and more move to the public cloud. Look at just AWS's journey, that pioneer in public cloud going from whatever, three billion in revenues, 10 years ago to north of 70 billion run rate today. There's so much of data that is in the public cloud and the most important thing that customers need is they want to feed themselves from going and protecting this data themselves. And there's a lot of scale in these environments, right? If you look at customers running hundreds of thousands of AWS accounts across every region on AWS, and if you give them that kind of flexibility and that kind of scale, what they want is give me a turnkey solution that just allows me to go and protect all of these workloads running across all of these regions in a service that takes the data out of my accounts separately in an air gap fashion, right? And that's really what we basically provide. And that's what we focused on over the last 12 months, right? So if you look at what we have done is we've gone after every important service on AWS, EC2, EBS, RDS, S3, Dynamo, SQL databases and other databases running on top of EC2. So now that becomes the comprehensive set of things that somebody needs to use to really deliver an application on top of the public cloud. And that's what we're going to protect. And the growth has been there and the results on Amazon because of the refactoring has been huge. Can you share any examples of some successes that you've had with the AWS refactoring and all that good stuff going on? Yeah, I mean, basically what we have seen is, customers have basically told us that before you guys existed, we had to go and build these things ourselves, right? Again, they had all the blocks to go and do it themselves but it was so much of a heavy lift to go and do it themselves. And again, they didn't want to be in that business. So what we have done essentially for, and we have some joint customers at a pretty massive scale that basically have said that, okay, let me just use your solution to protect my critical assets like things sitting in S3 and really use Clumia as a service for those. Yeah, I think that's a great example of the refactoring. Sabina, I got to ask you, obviously you're at the center of this, you have your hand on the wheel of the partnerships and all the innovators out there. The growth of AWS just has been spectacular because there's value being created. Again, companies are refactoring their business on the cloud and you're at the center of it. So talk about the partnership with Clumia. Can you tell us how it all started and where it's going? Yeah, thanks for having me here, John. And good to see you again, Pujan. If I'm not mistaken, Pujan, we met each other at the San Francisco Summit, the AWS San Francisco Summit, actually. I believe it was in 2016 or 2017. You can correct me if I'm wrong here. 20 times in a month, company started. Yes, I think so. It was in the month of April, I still remember it. And that's when you kind of mentioned to me about Clumia and this modern backup as a service solution that you were creating, it was still in stealth mode. So you couldn't talk a lot about it and we started to engage deeply on the partnership right from 2017. And initially, we were kind of focused around helping Clumia build a solution using our well-architected review. And then as soon as Clumia came out of stealth mode, we started to engage more deeply around deeper integrations and also on go-to-market activities. As you know, AWS has a very prescriptive approach to our partnerships. So we started to work with Clumia around the five pillars of security, reliability, cost optimization, performance, and operational excellence to really help them tune the solution on AWS. And we also started to engage with our service teams. And I have to thank Poojan and his team here. They really embraced those deeper and broader integrations, many services that Poojan mentioned, but also specifically want to mention S3 EBS and Clumia was also a launch partner for AWS Outpost when AWS in fact launched Outpost. So I want to kind of commend Clumia and the entire team kind of embracing this technology and innovation and this modern backup as a service approach. And also embracing how we want to focus on the five key pillars that I mentioned. And that's a great example of success when you ride the wave. Poojan, talk about the Clumia trends and the data protection because one of the things that you pointed out earlier is the ransomware, okay? That's a big one, right? That's a big hot area. How is the cloud, first of all, how is that going? And then how has the cloud equation changed the ransomware defense and protection piece of it? Yeah, I just want to add a little bit on what Sabina mentioned before I answer the question, John, if you don't mind. I think that collaboration is where is the reason why we are here today, right? Like if you think about it, like we were the first design partners to go and build with the EBS Direct API, right? And we work closely with the EBS teams, not just for the APIs, but the cost structure of it. How would somebody like us use it? So we're at the bleeding edge of some of these services that we are using and that has enabled us to be where we are today. So again, thank you very much Sabina for this fantastic partnership. And again, there's so much to go and do to really go and nail this in a great way on the public cloud. So now coming back to your question, John, fundamentally, if you see, right, what happened is when customers move to the public cloud, right there, the ease of use with which AWS provides these services, right? And the consumption of these services actually drives some amazing behavior, right? Where people actually want to go and build, build and build, but then comes a time where somebody comes in and says, okay, are you compliant, right? Do you have the right compliance in place? You have all these accounts that you have, but what is running in each of these accounts? You have visibility in those accounts and are these accounts, the data in these accounts, is this a gap, right? Is this air gap in the same region or does it need to be across regions, right? I'm in the East, do I need to have it air gap in the West and so on and so forth, right? So all of these confluent of all these things come in and by the way, all these problems existed in on-premises world, it just get translated in the public cloud where do I need to replicate my data, do I need to back it up? Do I need air gap in a, like in on-prem world, you had a data domain of plans which was separate from your primary storage for a reason, something similar now needs to happen here for compliance reasons and for ransomware reasons. So a lot of parallels here is just that here we are, it almost feels like, as they say, right? The more things change, the more they remain the same. That's what it is in the public cloud again. Well, that's a good point. I mean, let's take that example of on-premises versus the cloud. Also the cloud's got more scale too, by the way. So now you've got regions. This is a common problem that customers are having. You can build your own and or use solutions, but if you don't get ahead of it, the compliance question can bite you in the, you know what? Because you then got to go back and retrofit everything. So that's kind of what I hear a lot on my end is like, okay, I want to be compliant from day one. I want to have an answer when asked. I don't want to have to go to old techniques that don't fit the cloud. That comes up a lot. What's your answer to that? Yeah, no, pretty much, right? I think it's like, you know, when it comes to compliance and all of these things, you know, people at the end of the day are looking for that same foundation of things. The same questions are asked for encryption. You know, is my data where it needs to be, when it needs to be, right? And what is my recovery point objective? What is my recovery time objective? And all of these things basically come together. And now, as you said, it's just the scale that you're dealing is extremely different in the cloud and the services, right? The easier it is to use these services and especially what AWS does, makes it so easy, so compelling that same ease of use needs to get translated with a SaaS service like what we are doing with data protection, right? That ease of use is very important. You have to preserve that sanctity. Sabina, let's get back to you. You mentioned earlier about the design part and that benefits for Clumio. Now let's take it to the next level. As customers really realize they have a problem, they need solutions and you're on the AWS side, so you got to have answers for the customers. You got to put people together, make things work. There's a variety of things that you guys offer. What are some of the different facets of the ISV or the partner programs that you offer to partners like Clumio that they can benefit from? Absolutely, John. We believe in a win-win approach to the partnerships because that's what makes partnerships durable over time. We're always striving to do better here and we continue to broaden our investments. As you know, John, the AWS management team right from Adam Szilipski, our CEO down, firmly believe that partners are critical to our success, our long-term success. And as partners like Clumio work to lean in with us, with more investment resources, technology innovation, we also ensure that we are doing our part by providing value back to Clumio. About a few years ago, as you might recall, we really did a lot of investment in our sales team on the AWS side. Well, one of the things me and also our partners observed is while we were making investments in the AWS sales team, I don't think we were doing a great job in helping our partners with reaching out to those customers, what we call as COSA. And partners gave us feedback on this. We are very partner and customer feedback driven. And we introduced, in fact, a new role called the ISV Success Manager, ISMs, who are basically embedded in our field and they work with partners to help them close opportunities and also net new opportunities. We've also, in 2020, I believe at ReInvent, we launched the ISV Accelerate Program, whereby we offer incentives to the AWS field team to work with our partners to close existing opportunities and also bring in net new opportunities. So all of this has led to closer collaboration in the field between both our field teams, Clumio's field team and our field team, but also accelerated mutual customer wins. I'm not saying that we're doing everything great, we still have a long ways to go and we are constantly getting feedback from Clumio and also some of our other key partners and we'll continue to get better at it. But I think the role of the ISV Success Manager and also the ISV Accelerate Program has been key to bringing in COSA's success. Pujna, what's your take on this? Is this a good partnership for you? Obviously, the wave of AWS has got the growth numbers, you mentioned that, but from a partnership standpoint, you're closing business, they got scale, is it working? How do you organize your company to take advantage of these benefits? Can you share your thoughts? Absolutely, we have embraced the ecosystem wholeheartedly, 100%. But if you think about it, what we have done is, you look at our offering on AWS Marketplace, just an example, right? We are the only company I would say in our domain, obviously, that routes our entire business through AWS Marketplace. Whether, obviously, we get a lot of organic benefit from AWS Marketplace, people go and search for a solution and Clumio shows up and obviously, they go and onboard, self-onboard themselves. And guess what? We let them self-onboard themselves and we rely on AWS's billing automatically. So you don't need to talk to us. You can just get billed automatically in your AWS bill and you get your data protection solution. Or if you directly reached out to us, guess what we do? We actually route you through AWS Marketplace. All the onboarding is just through one place and it's a fantastic experience. So we have gone all in on that experience and have completely internalized that that's the right way to do things. And of course, thanks to Sabina's team and the Marketplace team to have created that platform so that we could actually plug in into it. But that's the kind of benefits that we have that we have taken advantage of with AWS. That's one example. The other example that Sabina mentioned, which is this whole ACE program, we put a ton of registrations on ACE and with all the wins that we get on AWS, they get broadcasted to the sellers. So that creates its own vicious cycle in terms of more coming into the pipeline and more closing in. So these are just two small examples, but there's other examples. If you look at our recent press release where AWS, when we launched S3 data protection and back up the GM of AWS S3 supported us in the press release. So there's things like that, it's a fantastic collaboration that's working really well for our joint customers. Sabina, tell us something about the partnership between AWS and Clumio that people might not be aware of or some of the things that Pujin said that are different out there that are co-selling, co-marketing that you guys offer people you guys work together on. What is that? Yeah, the ISP Accelerate program that was created, it was really created with partners like Clumio and mine, our SaaS partners. I think that is something very, very unique between our partnership. And I wanna double click on what Pujin said which is routing their opportunities through Marketplace, all of their opportunities. That is something pretty unique. They understand the richness of the platform and also how customers are procuring software today in this world and they've embraced that. And we really appreciate that. And I wanna say, another thing about Clumio is they're all in on AWS, which is another unique team. There are not a lot of, I would say all in partnerships in my world and I manage infrastructure, business apps, applications and industry partnerships from the Americas globally. And all of those things are very, very unique in our partnership which has led to success, right? We started very, very early stage when Clumio was in stealth mode in 2017 and look where we've come today. And it's really kudos to Pujin and his entire team for believing in the partnership, for leaning in with us and for placing that trust with us. That's awesome. Pujin, any final words you'd like to share for folks out there about the conversation and what's going on Clumio? Yeah, no, absolutely. As I said, I think we have been fortunate to be very early adopters of all these technologies and go and really build what a true cloud native solution has to be, right? And again, this is what customers are really looking for. And people are looking for, at least on the data protection side, a ransomware, air gap solution. People are looking for a solution natively built on the cloud because that's the only way a solution can deliver something at the scale and at the cost structure that is needed to have a data protection solution in the public cloud. So this has been just a fantastic thing end to end for us overall. And we really look forward to going and doing much more with AWS as we essentially go and scale our business. I have to ask before we go, because you're the CEO of the company and founder, having all that backhand infrastructure from Amazon just on the resources, it creates a market for your product, but also the sales piece. They got the marketplace you mentioned, that's a big expense that you don't have to carry. And you get revenue on top line. I mean, that's an impact for startups out there and growing companies. That's a pretty big deal. What's your advice to folks out there who are trying to think about the buy versus use the leverage of the marketplace, which is at large scale? Because as a CEO, you've got to make these decisions. What's your opinion on that? It's not as easy as, and I make it sound, to do your own part, AWS is huge, right? It's huge. And so we have to do our part to educate everybody within the, even the AWS seller base to make sure that they internalize the fact that this is the right solution for the customers, for our joint customers, right? So we have to do that all day long. So there's no running away, there's no shortcut to everything, but obviously AWS does its part to make it very as easy as possible, but there's a lot of heavy lifting we still have to do. And I think that'll only become easier and easier over the next few years. And Sabina, your take on AWS, you've got a great job. You work with all the hot growth companies. This is the big wave we're on right now with the cloud, next generation clouds here, a lot of opportunities. Absolutely, and it's thanks to Poojan and partners like Clumio, that really understand what it takes to build a cloud native solution because it's part of it is building and part of it is the co-selling the go-to-market engine and embracing both of that is critical to success. Well, thank you both for coming on this journey here on theCUBE as part of the showcase. Poojan, great to see you, Sabina, great to see you as well. And thanks for sharing that insight, appreciate it. Thank you very much. Okay, this is the AWS partners showcase, speeding innovation with AWS. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.