 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite 2019 here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Chris Weiberg. He is the vice president of product marketing at Cohesity. Thank you so much for coming on the show and for providing us with this great space, this prime real estate. We really appreciate it. Yeah, it's been a good spot on the show floor and I hope this is working out for you guys here with all of us branding and so on behind you. It has been terrific. There's 26,000 people from around the world here at the Orange County Convention Center. Well, talk about how the conference has been for you here at Cohesity. Yeah, I think it's gone really, really well. I mean, apart from the lovely booth property we have right here, some of the keynote messages around the importance of hybrid cloud moving forward with what Microsoft's doing with ARC and things like that really resonate with how we see the market. So a couple of announces we've made have been around support for Azure Stack and for the AVS, the Azure VMware solution. And that's just what we see with our customers across the board. And I think Teresa actually mentioned this yesterday that if you look forward at most organizations' cloud journey, they end up somewhere in that hybrid range, right? They may not all be there today and maybe just a little bit of SaaS, O365 to start off with, for example. But looking ahead, unless you're natively born in the cloud and that's typically small organizations, most mid to large enterprises are hybrid cloud. Viewers that are not as familiar with Cohesity, which is a company that is growing from strength to strength, tell us a little bit about what you do. Yeah, yeah, sure. So we are very much a software defined data management platform. And typically when I say that to people I get blank stares to begin with, right? But let me tell you really what we've thought about and this goes back to the heritage of our founder. He, before he co-founded Nutanix he was the lead engineer on the Google file system. And the philosophy he has for Cohesity and the direction that we're going is very much based upon his experiences there. If you build a shared nothing distributed file system and you do that right, you establish a great platform to build upon, right? And so if you think about what Google did they did that with the file system that today runs many things, right? Gmail, YouTube, all the G Suite apps. But the first thing is they built that file system and then they figured out how to manage that in a distributed fashion, right? Because their points of presence are all over the globe these days. And then on that they started delivering applications. But if you think back, the very first application Google delivered was what? The search, right? That's how they became known as a company, as Google search. And so for us we're taking that same mindset towards dealing with enterprise data. So if Google does a great job with data in the consumer world for the things that they own and operate, organizations don't have that luxury of having Google come in and crawl and manage and index all their data, right? We can help do that. So the journey begins with the genius behind our distributed file system that we call SpanFS. And that's what a lot of the intellectual properties gone into is building that file system that truly is web scale. That's shared nothing architecture, scales from on-prem in your data center core to the edge to the cloud. And then being able to produce a manageability layer on top of that, something we call Helios that manages all the data across various sites you may have managed by Cohesity. And then our first app if you will on top of that platform really is data protection, right? So people may know us first and foremost as a backup and recovery company. And absolutely that's something we're really, really good at. I would put us head to head against anybody else on the show floor here in that regard. And candidly many large enterprise customers have done that with us and chosen us as their solution. But I think from there the question is once you amass the data, what can you do with it? And how can you get more out of it? So if you look at backup and recovery I think traditionally that's been largely viewed by IT operators as an insurance policy. It's there, something goes wrong. But we believe you can do more than that. You can not only have that insurance policy to help with things like disaster recovery and coming back from ransomware attacks and so on. But how can you do things like put analytics on top of it to get more out of it, get better insights out of it? How can you have another customer that stores all their customer care phone calls? It's a voice object, right? Kind of opaque, but they want to transcribe that. Why don't you do those transcription services on top of the data that you already have from that backup and recovery solution? And so get the data through backup, get the data through files and objects. I think David Noy talked about that with you earlier. And that's a great way to start to aggregate and consolidate not only the data in your enterprise but also all the infrastructure silos that are out there. And so that's problem one that we solve and then we go from there. So Chris when I think about all the various customers here one thing they're dealing with, there's a lot of change. They've got their business challenges whether it's adopting the cloud, looking at edge, adopting containerization. It's always defined by the change that's going on in their environment. Traditional backup and recovery was please don't change everything. I had my backup window, my administrator, I had the program that I'd used for 15 or 20 years that I trust and I know and I please don't sneeze on it because I've got it the way that I like it. Over the last like five years, companies are because of that change, they're looking at new solutions, they're looking at other environments. Tell us how Cohesity is riding that wave to move. Not like enterprises are moving fast but they're at least looking and aware that if they don't make some move everybody else has moved along. So they need to at least be a little bit more agile and move faster. Well I think first of all thank you for realizing that oftentimes are number one competitors that do nothing option. I've done this forever this way, why change? But to your comment about the backup window, well there's no such thing anymore for most companies, it's seven by 24 by 365. And so that alone I think is causing people to step back and say hey is the way that I used to do things still the right answer or is there a better way? And so that's often the beginning of a conversation we'll have where maybe their current contract with an existing provider is coming to a point where there's a window for renewal and they want to look at something different. But I do think and we had a customer panel earlier today at the show where a couple of law firms are talking about this. They just don't have the luxury of time they used to to deal with this and so that sort of causes change whether you like it or not. And so that's often how we begin that conversation even though to your point these folks sometimes aren't the most risk embracing crowd in IT. They're not on the bleeding edge all the time because if you're in the insurance policy guys you don't want to mess that up. But that's what we find is the disruption we're bringing in the market creates an opportunity to look at how you do things differently. We had another customer panel back at VMworld in San Francisco this year where one of the customers had actually three different providers. One that was doing backup software. One that was target storage and another that was the media gateways to handle some of their information. He was happy with all of those. But when he looked at that and he said wait a second instead of dealing with three companies I can deal with one and I can per data center eliminate about a half a rack of gear. He said that for me was it. That was the no brainer that led me to you guys. And so that's what we're seeing. So as a former IT practitioner yourself I'm curious to know how your background helps you get inside the brains of these people who are making decisions where you said the do nothing option is compelling because it's easy. And yet it is the wrong way to go because in this ever changing world that's risky in and of itself. It's always a risk reward balance. And so I think whenever you're introduced to something new to the market and new concept you feel the pain as an organization because you're having to educate people about there is a better way. I mean think about let's use Mo-Hit's former company Nutanix as an example of that. I remember the battles early on people were scratching their heads. What is this HCI thing? Because I do storage this way and I do compute this way and I do networking this way and I have my existing vendors. They put it all together and took a while to get going but when they did it, it really took off. And I can think multiple examples. I mean Apple and the iPhone, what have you, right? And so we're sort of at that stage as a company where people are just starting to get their head around the opportunity we're putting on the table by disrupting the way things run today and actually making their lives better. And so it's not just having an understanding of that from my background. It's then being able to articulate the benefits not just to the organizations looking to save money and do things more efficiently but actually to the IT operators themselves, right? I mean, you talked to Teresa about this a bit yesterday. IT burnout is a thing. And anything you can do to make manageability and automation easier, the better off the folks actually doing the work are. And so that's something we care about deeply as well. It's not just saving money, it's giving you a better way to do it and ideally taking the complexity of the puzzle you're managing today and making it easier, simplifying it. So Chris, one of the challenges is as you were talking about, you can replace multiple solutions out there, but it means that there are multiple constituencies that you need to talk to and position your product. So with your marketing hat, how do you look at the roles and the message that you need to get to? Super good question. So my team will appreciate that you asked that. So one of the first things I did when I came on board a few months back was say, hey guys, we really need to sit down and think through the different personas, a classic marketing approach that we're talking to and really understand what's in their heads, not only today but formerly and then what are they looking at going forward? Because if you're going to cross that chasm, you need to understand that whole life cycle and what are the things that you can grab onto that draw their attention into these solutions we provide? And so we're going through an exercise right now to refresh those personas and be able to arm our field and our partners to have those conversations because it does touch on different people in the data center. Absolutely true. So what, I wanted to return our conversation and come full circle with the very beginning of what is resonating with you here at this show. There have been so many new product announcements. You started talking about Azure Arc as sort of something that is catching your interest. What are you going to take back with you when the show is over? I was chatting with some of our PM team earlier this week. We have our own management solution and we've done a lot to simplify it and make it easy to use. But as is the case for many providers, we are a building block in a bigger data center strategy. And so importantly, while I love our console, a lot of people may not want to use it. We may not be the center of the management universe. And so something like Arc, and you saw this in what they demoed not just being able to manage an Azure environment or reaching across the aisle to AWS and so on, we need to be able to fit into that management framework. And by the way, they're just one provider that does that, that at most guys are out there and others. And so the good news from a Cohesity standpoint is the products have been built ground up with an API first approach. And what that means is you can take those declarative statements that you have in let's pretend someday Azure Arc and use that to orchestrate deployment and management of Cohesity as well. And that is candidly one of the beauties of being a software defined solution. We thought about that from the ground up. And so I think we're not only ready for today, but also for the future. Chris, want to give you any other kind of customer aha moments or things that are brought through final takeaways from Cohesity at the show? Yeah, I think customers are still discovering us is an aha for me. The big change that I've seen in the booth behind us year over year is they think in the past, we've only been in operation really selling for three years. It was who are you guys? And what's up with all the green, right? This year, the conversation has shifted to, hey Cohesity, I know who you guys are. I'm looking at changing things up in my software defined data center. I think you might be a part of that. So tell me why you're different. And so I'm really happy to be here and get the opportunity to have that discussion this year versus where we were last year. And again, I think the types of questions that we're getting are much more focused on use case. How can you help me solve this pain point, this problem? You know, ransomware has been a constant conversation in the booth and the ability that we have because of what we've done, again, back down the file system to do what we call an instant mass restore. That's an interesting feature on a data sheet, but I tell you what, when you've been subject to a ransomware attack and you're just lights out, that ability to bring back the whole environment very quickly at once really is a differentiator for us. And so it's those sorts of conversations we're having this year, which is a nice step forward. And so hopefully, you know, we'll come back next year and things are on that upward path even more so. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Chris Weiborg. It's a pleasure having you on the show. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks guys. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE.