 from the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special presentation of CUBE Conversation here from our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program from ClearSkyData, Ellen Rubin is the CEO and Las Vecueritas, who is the CTO. Las and Ellen, thanks so much for joining us. Hi Stu, nice to meet you back. All right, thanks for having us. Always good to talk to a local company. When we talk about technology, I was actually in the Seaport District earlier recently and there's a lot happening in the space. As we know, it doesn't all happen in Seattle for the cloud and Silicon Valley for all the VCs. So Ellen, I've been speaking with your company since it was the early days in stealth mode. First time I met you in person was at the Amazon re-invent show. So still one of the focal points of the cloud and everything happening there. But give us the update. You've got some new funding, some new partnerships. Tell us what's happening with Thursday. Absolutely, and I'm really happy to be back. So yeah, we've been, Las and I have been building this company together. We started in 2013 with the, sitting in a room with a whiteboard, but the company has really been actively funded and kind of building customers and our service offering since 2014. And we've just seen a tremendous amount of growth, especially in the last year. So we're excited to be able to share that we are raising a 20 million funding round. And it includes some new investors, a strategic investor, as well as some of our existing investors from General Catalyst in Highland and Polaris. So it's very important for us, but it's also great for our customers because it gives us a chance to now be in more places and have more people on our team to really grow and add to the support and the operations of what we're doing. So that's kind of part A. And we're really looking forward to doing that. We've added a head of our sales organization, our Chief Revenue Officer, Roger Cummings. And so we've really kind of filled out our team and are growing as a company overall. So that's kind of part A. So yeah, congratulations on the numbers. The other piece, I think back to the first discussions we had when you talk about living in lots of environments and how do you help customers? There was somebody that you're partnering with now that I believe came up in that first discussion because they've got one of the largest global footprints on the planet that I'm aware of. Indeed. So yeah, also today we're announcing our partnership with Equinix and we've actually been working, we've been talking with Equinix since we were in stealth mode and we've been working with them over the past several years already in a couple of locations. And we can talk in a lot of detail about sort of where the great alignment and fit is, but the news for us is that we're now gonna be able to really expand the reach of our service across the rest of the United States. So we're gonna triple the number of locations and we're gonna be basically anywhere our customers need us to be. As you know, we are a Metro based service. So it's very important from a latency and an access that we be in more locations. And we see it as basically a great jumping off for filling out the initial vision of being across the United States and now starting to expand outside. That's great. Let's pull you in here because if we look at the data piece of it, we understand that latency is clearly important. That's the conversation we've had, back in the storage world for a long time. Data has gravity, it's tough to move it. And having some locality is super important. So why don't we first, for people that aren't as familiar with the company, just give us the thumbnail architecturally and tell us what you've been seeing update-wise from a technology standpoint. Sure. So our technology is really a Metro based network. So we deliver caching services on the edge to make all of the resources, the specifically data management resources that are far away appear as if they're nearby. Now, one of the problems, as you know with the clouds is that they're only in certain locations. So unless you're in Ashram, Virginia, or you happen to be in the Pacific Northwest, you have a latency problem. And so as a result, some certain types of applications aren't gonna work well. What we've built is really an edge-based data management network. We provide high performance file and block services to systems at the edge that leverage the cloud for their backends. And so as a result, you get all of the economics of the cloud and the flexibility that you get with those types of services, but you get the experience of enterprise class, functionality and capabilities and it's nearby. So you don't miss any of the things that you are kind of used to. All right, Lars, I want you to help explain something. When you say edge, what does that mean to you and your customers? Because there are service provider edges, there are kind of the IoT end devices edges, there's some things in between there. So what specifically are you helping with? This is true. It's actually, you know, it's really interesting. So we have a very specific definition of edge. We call it the data center edge. And hence our alignment with Equinex, they are, you know, in these metro facilities, when you look at our architecture, we're either putting an edge appliance either in an Equinex facility or in a customer facility and then tethering it to the Equinex facility. And so that last hundred or so miles around an Equinex facility is our edge. And that is going to be our definition. Now that can change over time, just like everything else in the cloud changes, because we basically have built software that can run in any type of a Linux environment with some amount of connectivity. But, you know, in our current market push, our edge is really the data center edge. Yeah, Alan, I love that that really fits into the discussions I've been having a lot over the last year or so. When people talk about hybrid cloud, when they talk about multi-cloud, it's that, you know, they're using lots of SaaS. They're usually using more than one public cloud provider. And then they have their own resources. And their data center oftentimes is a, you know, rack and Equinex and leveraging things like the Direct Connect from Amazon, the equivalent for Google and Microsoft, or, you know, expanding those definitions. Bring us inside, what are you hearing from customers? I'd love to hear what you can share about, you know, specific customers or in general, you know, what's the need that they have and where you will fit into all of it? Yeah, no, you're totally on point for what we see every day, which is, you know, we deal with medium and large enterprises. So our customers are in healthcare, they're in financial services, they're in the legal services and also in managed service providers now as a newer market for us. So we have customers that include companies like Partners Healthcare, Mesh General Hospital, Nuance Communications. We've just added Unitas Global as a managed service provider. Special Olympics is a customer and then some regional hedge firms and law services like Miles and Stockbridge. So what you can kind of see is that we have this really nice set of experiences that are not just, you know, what is, you know, Facebook doing or what is State Street doing, but we kind of have a broad range of what CIOs and heads of IT are really struggling with. And it's exactly what you're saying, which is the edge to a customer, very much depends on how they're thinking about where their applications are gonna run. And our philosophy is, don't worry about it, we've got you covered. Your data is gonna be, you know, high performance, low latency, totally protected and you can access it from wherever you need to. But for a lot of customers, honestly, we've seen everything and I won't embarrass anybody specifically, but you know, there are still some kind of scary old data centers out there. There are server closets that are acting like data centers. People still have things in their buildings. And then you've got everything to like the world-class Equinix, Colo that is an Ashburn or whatever. And then people are obviously trying to adopt multiple shades and flavors of public cloud. And I just was out at a customer yesterday where the CIO was talking to us about the fact that they had grown through a tremendous amount of acquisition. So they've got one of everything. And then the cloud for them was a bunch of people did a bunch of things in Amazon five years ago. Then they decided to standardize on Azure. They don't really know why they standardize on Azure. Then they realized that that was not actually the answer for all their problems. And then they started to think about how Google might actually be a much better fit because of some of the analytics work they're trying to do. And by the way, they've got data centers all over the world. That is a very typical scenario that we see every day. And for the customers, hedging their bets and not being locked into anything is really, really important to them because the applications keep evolving and new things are getting in some ways built for the cloud. But sometimes the edge actually still is critical, right? In terms of where the actual physical source systems are. Yeah, so I would say the elephant in the room is that kind of, how do I get my arms around this multi-cloud environment? And there's not one company that's gonna solve all of these issues I've had. And even if they did, would you really put everything in one cloud? Probably you wouldn't. Well, right, but it's the, okay. I've got all of these clouds out there and all of these things. I have licensing issues I have to worry about. I have identity management I have to worry about. There's the overall management of it. And it seems primarily it's the networking piece that you're helping with. Maybe explain a little bit more in the last part of what comes to you as to, that elephant there, it's clear sky data. We solve your networking challenge for multi-cloud and it's more than just that. Right, so it's sometimes embarrassingly. I actually started my career in the networking space. And so, you know, a lot of- It's okay, I did too. So when Ellen and I started talking about what we wanted to do, we were really focused on networking. Maybe I had enough of storage. And so, you know, a lot of what we discovered was that the network is an extremely sort of, undersold part of the overall cloud strategy of any company. If you really want to go to the cloud, this is really about moving huge amounts of data back and forth from these locations. And so we've built a very, very high performance, one hop network from our pops, right to all of the various regions of the public clouds. So what this basically means for our customers is that they don't have to worry about the internet. They don't have to worry about the security that they need to set up in order to get into the cloud. And the amount of throughput that we can get through is really astonishing. So we've really built a system that can maximize this network pipe. So, you know, just even our smallest customers can move in excess of 20 terabytes a day back and forth from the cloud. So this becomes a really, really interesting, you know, solution if you have a lot of source systems or you have a lot of data to move, we can outrun that Amazon truck. So I want you to, you know, I think back five years ago, I heard Equinix, some of the other large data centers, they were like, oh, well, we're just going to give you a cloud marketplace and there'll be all these services. And if you need to access something, you know, we'll just be able to throw a 10 gig wire between some of these connections. It sounded really good, but it sounds like you're helping to fill a gap. Maybe explain what that is. Well, so most of the networking pieces are actually very expensive, very complicated to set up, first of all. So you also have core charges and all sorts of high availability issues that you need to resolve with each one of the clouds. Additionally, although they are sort of on demand, you know, you're not using all this bandwidth all the time and you don't know when you're going to need it. What we've done on the network is to make it possible for you to utilize, you know, 40 gigabits of throughput, our 40 gigabits of throughput into the cloud and pretty much whenever you need it. So for example, latency from Boston to Amazon East, for us, 11 milliseconds. For most people, if they don't have direct connects at some exuberant price, they're going to end up experiencing in the hundreds of milliseconds if they're going over the internet. So that and the bandwidth guarantee is, you know, you think you have a one gigabit internet connection, but that's not really what all the elements along your path are going to provide you. So there's a lot of variability and we make that all go away. We make the management go away. We make the security issues go away and it's so totally seamless. You just need to connect into our network with our edge. You know, just it's as if the cloud really isn't there and if you need to access the resources in the cloud, we can bring your data to EC2 and you can connect instances to it. So it's the whole process of moving things back and forth is so seamless and transparent. You just don't manage it. It's all sort of a byproduct of the architecture. I was just going to add, you know, equinex invested early and better early on becoming a cloud hub and, you know, this idea of having the cloud exchange and a lot of the other services that are plugged in is a tremendous value to customers. But what we do see is that, you know, there are still a lot of customers out there and I'm sure this will persist for a while where there's still even yet further distributed last mile issues and customers are moving into, you know, equinex and co-location sites for all the benefits that they bring and we take, you know, full advantage of that and help drive that from our side. But we also see that there are things that are just not moving and need to stay put and it's either because of legacy reasons, compliance reasons, they don't want to invest to re-platform things. There are a lot of reasons that are out there and because we both come from the enterprise infrastructure world that does not scare us. So we understand that what you have to do is you have to meet the customer where they live, right? And you have to make it easy and accessible and as Laz is describing kind of a turnkey situation where however your application wants to run and be best, you know, situated, we're gonna make sure that your data is available to you. Yeah, you bring up some great points there. A line I've used it many times recently is there was the promise that, you know, cloud was going to be simple and cheap and it turns out to be neither of those. What do you see as some of the biggest challenges, Ellen, that if we start with you maybe, is that, you know, what are your customers facing? What are you excited about that's actually made progress the last few years and what do we still need to do as an industry as a whole? Well, I always have to say this and of course it makes me just feel completely so old but, you know, I've been in the cloud since 2008, right? My last company, CloudSwitch, you know, was kind of at that, you know, early, okay, there's a thing, it's called the cloud. It happens to be Amazon, but there'll be other clouds too. So you have to say, fast forwarding 10 years, a lot of really good progress has been made and it is for sure the case that now when you talk to enterprise customers and to the CIOs, they're in the cloud, they've adopted the cloud. The cloud is in their mental picture of where things are gonna be. They've accepted the fact that developer groups are already in the cloud and have been for a very long time and that it's there, it's part of their portfolio now to make sure it's protected and highly available and compliant. So I think that is progress. I also, the best thing that ever happened was I don't have to convince people that the cloud is more secure than what they're doing on-prem because everybody kind of knows that. So that's good news. We don't have to have that conversation 20 times again, et cetera. But what I do see that's surprising to me is that still some of the fundamental problems are still problems. So getting my data into the cloud. You'd think, come on, we've got lots of solutions, tools and toolkits and stuff like that but it's still a very major problem, networking of course being a key issue for customers. I don't wanna have to roll out a bunch of new lines. I don't wanna have to hire a snowmobile. I don't wanna have to rebuild everything from scratch. So that is still, I think shows up more than I would have guessed. Right now what we see is there's a lot of focus on operational things in terms of how to optimize what turned out to be the high costs of the cloud. Every one of our customers knows that if you pull data back from the cloud, that's not good. So they learned that, they found that out and then they were kind of a little surprised probably the first time the bill came in and it was really high. So this idea of having tools that allow optimization of using the cloud more cost effectively and figuring out which cloud is gonna be more cost effective based on the access patterns. There's more awareness of it but there's still a lot of struggling with that. Last but not your comment on that. Well, the whole notion of cost optimization is deeply embedded in our technology. And every time we have a conversation with a customer the first thing they ask about egress fees is it really just the same price no matter how much I use it. And they think about all of these different like things about IOPS for example because the cloud providers have sort of indoctrinated the market to think about what their IOPS needs are in order to get them into the appropriate price point. So there's a lot of optimization there that I still don't think that the customers really grok. How many people really understand how many IOPS a particular application really needs and how many should I buy? And if I buy the wrong number, oh my God everything is messed up. And so the ability to solve those types of problems for people in a way where it becomes a non-issue is still, certainly we're doing it for storage but there are all sorts of issues just like that for compute. There are all sorts of issues like that for networking as well. And so anyone who's trying to build an application on top of this platform really needs to think about those things. And so thankfully our customers don't have to worry about a whole slew of things because we've actually arbitraged out all of the unusual aspects of the tariffs of network providers versus cloud providers access fees and transaction fees, et cetera. But anyone who's doing this needs to think about this in a very analytical way which I don't think IT has been used to up until now. They overbuy as you know and they continue to overbuy and as long as there's no complaints about performance and there are no complaints about excesses in cost everything is fine. That's not how the cloud works. And I think we're getting to the point now where any serious move to the cloud is going to require a lot more thinking and a lot more analysis. And because there's still a mentality that the cloud is cheaper and then when people try it they quickly realize like, oh my God, look at this bill. And it's forever. It's not like you can just shut everything off. It's every month. It's not like you just spent $40,000 in a month and you could shut it off. And so it's a difficult problem and I don't think IT's prepared in general. I think one of the things that we've seen at Clear Sky over the past several years is the willingness that customers have to use the cloud for data protection. I think when we started it was sort of, everything's going to the cloud. The whole thing, damn the torpedo is full speed ahead, right? And I think a lot of what people are actually doing is archival, backup DR. Those are comfortable state of the industry is sort of that there should be a connection between the on wherever bottom premium is for the customer and then out to the cloud for the things that are the longer tail kinds of things. The problem is, what if you have to pull the data back? So these are things we think about every day. All right, Ellen, what I want to give you the final word, $20 million raised the strategic partnership with Equinex that's going to increase availability. What does this mean to your customers and to the company Clear Sky as we look forward? Well, I think one of the things that's true about the fact that we are a network-centric kind of a company is that the power of the network is in how many access points you have. So what this means is that customers who are national and then global have more opportunity now to be able to access things with Clear Sky and to grow and expand with us, which is great. We've seen tremendous expansion business this year. Really, like a huge percentage of our business has already expanded at least once, if not multiple times with us. And that begs a lot of questions, well, okay, that's great, you're here with us in this metro, how do we get across the rest of our locations? So I think that's very valuable. And also obviously from our side, making sure that we can handle the care and support that our customers are expecting, we're fully managed 24 by seven. So the bar is high, right? And this is not the, here's a toolkit in the cloud, go figure it out. This is, we take care of everything, we're an SLA to you and that's it. And obviously the customer wants to see that scale. Well, Ellen West, congratulations on all the progress that you made and always great to catch up with you on all the updates. Great to see you. All right, and thank you so much for watching. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our coverage, including, we're at all the cloud shows of the huge show at Amazon re-invent at the end of November. Be sure to tune into that and everything else. Feel free to reach out if you've got questions for our team or teams that you'd like us to cover other events we should be at. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE.