 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and we're coming to you from the Boston Area Studio here of theCUBE. Excited to talk about some of my favorite topics, talking about culture, innovation, and really transformation in what's happening in the data center, digital transformations on everybody's mind. Specifically, happy to welcome Mike Rendonetti, who is the Chief Marketing and Corporate Strategy Officer with Reduxio. Mike, thanks so much for joining us. Stu, thank you so much for having me. Great to be out here with you today. All right, so you're a local guy, so we're glad that you could join us here. Before we jump into the company, tell us a little bit about your background, what you worked on, what brought you to Reduxio. Yeah, and so I guess in a nutshell, my background is all about innovation, right? I've sort of eat, breathe, and slept innovation for the last 25 years of my career. So I started off as an engineer in Silicon Valley with HP, back when Bill and Dave were still around at a time when it was America's most admired company, was a remarkable sort of introduction to what is possible. Went back, got my MBA, did several years at McKinsey, doing corporate strategy consulting, mostly around innovation related projects. And then I moved up here to Boston to be a part of the first of what is now eight consecutive enterprise venture capital back startups. And I've been lucky enough that two of those in public on the NASDAQ, you know, the prior seven have all been acquired by companies like AT&T and Oracle. And now Reduxio is my eighth startup. And you know, we're really having a great time building this business. All right, great. We're definitely going to dig into some of the innovations up at lunch. Reduxio, so the name kind of tells itself, you know, we've seen a few companies with the IO at the end. We've talked so much when we talked about kind of 2018 data is at the center of everything, really what is driving business. So for audience that hasn't run across Reduxio, kind of give us the why and the what. Yeah, and so to your point, right? Data is driving everything. So, you know, Mark Andreessen famously said, software is eating the world. I think if we were to update that, it's data is eating the world. And so I think you and I have had this discussion off camera, whether it's fair or not, I think it's true. And it needs to be stated that the amount of innovation that has occurred in the storage industry over the last 20 years has been disappointing at best. And the solutions that have evolved have evolved in an extremely fragmented way. They are way too complex. They're way too expensive. And because it's a collection of piece parts, you've got to manage multiple screens, multiple learning curves. And a lot of things fall through the cracks. So when you go and look at some of the research data from a wide range of analysts, what you hear from them is, there's this extraordinary lack of confidence that even though I've spent a ton of money, invested a lot of staff time and attention to building out this infrastructure. I'm very lacking in confidence. I'm actually going to get that data back when I need it. So it's the old adage, you know, it's time to fix it, right? And so this is exactly what the founders of Reduxio saw. They were looking at this evolutionary path and saying, you know, people are just making it worse. So they did what many people would consider to be radical. They threw out the entire playbook of what storage architecture has been. And they took a clean sheet of paper, design-centric approach. You know, what are the use cases? Where are we in the world with regard to technology? And how do we design an experience for a storage admin or a DB admin or, you know, a person in the dev center that doesn't require a PhD in storage? And so that's kind of what the premise was. Yeah, so many things that they're gonna dig into. Absolutely, you know, I lived, you know, I worked for one of the big storage companies for a decade. Absolutely complexity is how we would describe it and what companies are looking for today. They need simplicity. They need to focus on the business, you know, turning dials and worrying about, do I have enough capacity? Do I have enough conformance? Do I have enough of those things? It's not what drives the business. Exactly. They need to focus on their applications. And the bit flip we saw in big data, and we can argue whether or not big data was, you know, hype or whatever we had there, but it was, oh my gosh, I'm getting all this data to, oh my gosh, I have all of this data and therefore I can do more things. I can find more value with it. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I worry a little bit when I hear things like, oh, I'm worried, you know, the storage admin. The storage admin's job before was, you know, how do I triage and kind of, you know, deal with those issues? You know, many solutions now, you look at the wave of hyper-converged, it's, you know, let's push that to, you know, a cloud architect or, you know, the virtualization layer. So how do we, you know, start with a clean slate and, you know, kind of get out of the storage business and get into the data business? I love it. And so I'm going to bring you back 10 years to one of the most remarkable product introductions that has ever been conducted on this planet. And it was the introduction of the iPhone. And if you recall, in that, those first five minutes as Steve Jobs took the stage in a way that only Steve Jobs could, he went on to tease the audience by saying that we are going to be introducing three products today. And then over the next minute or two, it became clear that it wasn't three products, it was one very innovative product at the time, the iPhone. And what they basically did is they integrated these three previously disparate pieces of technology, certainly the mobile phone, but also, you know, a music player and an internet navigator behind this gorgeous revolutionary user interface. So what we've tried to do is take a page out of the Jobs iPhone, you know, innovation. We're integrating and Forrester Research has written an incredible report about this and others, IDC and others have consistently supported it. Chris Malour from the register has written about this at length as well. Reduxia was integrating primary and secondary storage along with built-in data protection. So those previously siloed capabilities are now one. But we're also like Jobs did, you know, when you looked at the old style smartphone, the BlackBerry and the Trio and the, you know, all of those things that had all those keyboards is we've created a user interface using game designers. So when our customers go home at night and they log into Reduxia, their little kids will say, hey dad, what game are you playing? And dad will say, I'm not playing a game. I'm actually working on Reduxia. And so what that's done for us, I think, is it's allowed us to be able to drop a Reduxia system into any number of use cases with someone who may not have the luxury of being deep in storage and literally get time to value that day, put production workloads on the system that day. Yeah, it's interesting. Another piece that I'll draw from your analogy is when you talk about how did, you know, Apple take all of those pieces and it's kind of certain technologies moving along, but there's one specific technology that really helped drive that adoption. And it's flash. And the consumer adoption of flash 10 years ago drove the wave that we've seen in enterprise storage. So help connect the dots for us because we look at, you know, I remember a decade ago, primary and secondary storage, oh, I'll give you a big, you know, 11 refrigerator size cabinet and you can do both. But I put expensive stuff here, I put cheap stuff here, I use some software to put it together. I'm assuming I can consolidate it down and I think flash has something to do with the answer. And so it's a multi-tiered system, right? The array itself, right, it's an appliance. And obviously most of the value is in the software, okay? And there's a management platform that allows us to peer deep into the data. But everything is time-stamped and indexed. So we have a global view of the data and you can tear it in the most hot data, you know, very commission-critical business app data goes to flash. Secondary data can go to spinning disk or now we can archive to the cloud, specifically any S3 target Amazon or any S3 target. But what I think makes it very relevant is we've eliminated the notion of snapshotting. So we've built something which we call the time OS or the time operating system. And it's a time machine for your data. And so what happens is rather than incur that incredible burden of having to schedule snapshots that only requires you to another incredible heroic effort to bring the data back, you have continuous data protection. And I can go back to any point in time and literally with a very graphical screen point and say I want to bring data back from two seconds ago. And one of our best examples of that is we had a customer who had been attacked, had suffered from a ransomware attack. They went down for a week. They went down hard for a week and they came and found Reduxio. They got attacked again. And the second time around, they lost only two minutes of data and the recovery time was 20 minutes. So this is what we enable you to do, right? By being able to give you access to whatever your data may be anywhere in the world, you can, we're approaching near zero RPO and RTO. All right, Mike, there's been a number of companies that come and said data protection's been broken. We've been hearing that for a while. I think right down the road from us, Tiffio, a company that looked at data management, companies like Cohesity and Rubrik, you know, have quite a bit of buzz. Give us a little compare, contrast, how Reduxio looks at it versus some of the other. And I'd say again, for anybody watching, I think the Forrester Research Report outlines Reduxio, Cohesity and Rubrik, right? And of course, Cohesity and Rubrik are doing an extraordinary job. They're scaling rapidly. They've got world-class Silicon Valley money in the company. They've got a world-class client base. And I think the primary difference is that we are bringing that third component. We're integrating primary storage along with secondary storage and data protection. Both of them are focusing just on the secondary and the data protection. We, you know, we take issue architecturally with the fact that you've got to make additional copies. We take issue with the fact that, you know, with the way they're approaching this, actually, you know, they're in some ways exacerbating the problem because they're creating more data. But at the same time, they're also, you know, for a given amount of capability, two to three times the cost. So what we're hearing from a lot of our customers and our VARs that sell both is, you know, they're walking into a lot of more, let's call them price-sensitive accounts, where they don't believe that the incremental value of what Cohesity or Rubrik is offering is easily justifiable. So there's going to be some pretty extreme use cases to justify a $300,000 initial investment as you go into the data center. All right, another piece, you know, when I talked to, you know, companies today, one of the biggest challenges they have is really figuring out what their cloud strategy is and how that fits. You talked about tiering and how the cloud fits into it, but how does Reduxio fit in that overall cloud strategy for companies today? Yeah, and so again, you know, it's very early in our product evolution. And so with version three, which we announced back in late June, we allow companies to archive to the cloud, but do instantaneous recovery from the cloud. So we have two capabilities. One is called No Migrate. So there's no longer a need to migrate data. So, you know, you were at the Amazon Invent show and you saw the Snowmobile get rolled out, right? And the reason that Amazon rolled that Snowmobile, and at first I thought it was a joke, is because it takes an incredible amount of time and effort to move data from one data center to the next. Reduxio has this No Migrate capability where if I need to move data from that data center, and I set that data in motion, and I don't know if you're a Trekkie or not, but you remember the teleporter. Of course. We have in version three, we've created a teleporter. You can move that data from the cloud, and although it may take a long time for that data to actually get to its target, you can start working on that app as if that data had already been migrated, okay? When we run usability tests, and I remember one of them very specifically, and I know that you speak a little bit of Hebrew, I speak zero Hebrew, but I can remember watching one of our Israeli customers seeing this happen in this visceral reaction, like oh my God, I can't believe they did that. So we're trying to again bring that end to end ease of use experience to managing and protecting your data wherever it may be, bringing it back with almost zero RPO, zero RTO. All right, Mike, one of the questions I've been talking to a number of CMOs lately, and just you've worked for a number of startups. Today, digital transformations on the mind, what's the changing role of the CMO today? What have you seen kind of last five to 10 years that's different and exciting you? It's a great question, and I'd say that, and again, I did my first startup in 1991, so I can't begin to tell you how much high tech marketing has changed, but everything changed with social, digital, right, and inbound marketing, and it used to be that the sales team was responsible for filling the funnel, right? It is very clear that that is an incredibly non-scalable, unproductive effort, and so, you know, we now are all about acquiring high quality prospects, we're a HubSpot shop, we're a highly automated shop, and we are very biased toward digital and social. Doesn't mean that we're not going to events and things like that, but we feel that the way that we're going to scale this business, especially when we compete against big guys like Dell EMC and HP and others, there's no way that we can go person to person, so I'm not a very big fan of cold calling, I'm not a very big fan of going to trade shows and collecting business cards and fish bowls and giving away t-shirts. We really believe that our customers are too busy, they know what they need when they need it, right? They've built a fortress around themself, they are getting hammered, just like I'm a CMO, and I must get 150 LinkedIn in-mails and emails a day telling me about the next great lead management service. I can't even imagine what our customers are putting up with. So our job is to find relevant personas with highly relevant content at the moment that that is relevant to them, and there's many ways to do that, but this is really what we have to do every day now. So Mike, at the beginning of the conversation, we talked a little bit about innovation. Those of us that have been industry a while, there's too many peers of mine that I think if you say the word innovation, they roll their eyes. You have the great opportunity, you're working with master's students around the globe. Talk to us about kind of the people coming out of those programs. What does innovation mean today? What are they looking for? That's great. From a career standpoint. So it's a great question, and I think you and I can probably go for the next three hours on this subject, so we'll have to be careful. We'll make sure to post on the website the expanded audio. But I mean, innovation is such an overuse word, and most companies really can't spell it, and they can't spell it because their culture doesn't allow for it, right? So first and foremost, I think any innovative company or any innovative team starts with the culture that is all about trying to manage at the bleeding edge of best practices and really understand what's current, right? So I have the blessing of being both the chief marketing and corporate strategy officer of Reduxio and a global professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Holt International School of Business. I teach between 1,200 and 1,500 students a year. I teach them courses in entrepreneurship, in innovation, in digital marketing. And I run hackathons on campus, and we do a lot of events that give me an insight into who's passionate about innovation, right? And it's one thing to think innovation is interesting because you can get a good job. It's another thing to actually have the comfort level of living in a world of ambiguity and high velocity. So a lot of it is I'm looking for students that really want to sort of push the envelope. And they exhibit that in the classroom, they exhibit that in hackathons, they exhibit that in some of the internships that we take. They exhibit it by getting certified on HubSpot without me telling them to, getting certified on IDEO without me telling them to, going to conferences, learning, and then me learning from them because nobody can know everything. It's just so much new stuff going on right now. So I've now got a team of 11 people, and nine of them were my former students. And I've had a chance to observe them in action over 18 months in their world class. And they have that innovation gene in their DNA. And we're really at a point now where I'm learning from them every day. It's a very symbiotic relationship. All right, Mike, closing comments. I want to give you the opportunity. People find out more about Reduxio, what should we be looking for in 2018? Yeah, and so again, the one thing I will say is, we are now at 200 distinct customers. We have, in a very short period of time, and you know, when you sell into the data center, people don't have a real sense of humor. It's pretty important that the stuff works, right? So the first thing I would say is, we've gotten to that point now where we've got a lot of very significant customer references across our website and a lot of peer review sites. So 2018 is building on that foundation, okay? And I think what you're going to see from us is a couple of very radically innovative new projects, one a software-only project that will allow us to drive an inflection point in growth. By making available some of our core capabilities to anybody, whether they own a Reduxio system or not, we really want to go big now, right? We've validated the architecture. We've gotten some great early indications from the market that this stuff works as advertised. Our customers are telling we're simplifying their lives, we're making them more productive. And 2018 is about to really kick this thing into high gear. My friend and Eddie, pleasure chatting with you. Thanks so much for sharing. And thank you for watching theCUBE. Great.