 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partner. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with John Troyer and excited to welcome back to the program, Chris Wall, who's the chief technologist at Rubrik. Chris, thanks for joining us. Oh, my pleasure. It's my first VMworld CUBE appearance, so I'm super stoked. Yeah, we're pretty excited that you hang out with just a couple of geeks as opposed to Kevin Durant and Ice Cube. Is this a technology conference, or do you and Bipple work for some Hollywood big time company? I mean, it's funny you say that, they'll be more tomorrow, so I'll allude to that, but ideally, why not hang out with some cool folks? I mean, I live in Oakland, hip hop needs to be represented, and the Gold State Warriors. All right, so it's pretty cool. I'm looking forward to the party. I know there'll be huge lines when Katie comes to throw down with a bunch of people, so looking forward to the photos and videos, but so we've been looking at Rubrik since came out of stealth. I got to interview Bipple really early on, so we've been watching. You're on the 4.0 release now, right? How long has that taken, and why don't you bring us up to speed with what's going on with Rubrik? Yeah, it's our ninth major release over basically eight quarters, and along with that, we've announced we've hit a $150 million run rate that we've included. When we started, it was all about VMware doing backups, providing those backups a place to land, being ObjectStore or AWS S3, and now we protect Hyper-V, we protect Acropolis from Nutanix, obviously the VMware suite. We can do Archive to Azure to AWS. We can do, there's like 30-some-odd integration points with various storage vendors, Archive vendors, public cloud, et cetera, and the Alto release, which is 4.0, just really extends that, because now not only can you provide backups and recovery in Archive, which is kind of our friend butter, but you can archive that to public cloud, and then you can start running those workloads, right? So what we call cloud on, I can take either on-demand or archived data that's been sent to S3, and I can start building virtual machines, like I said, on-demand. I can take the AMI, put it in EC2, and start running it right now, and then start taking advantage of the services, and it's a backup product, like that's what always kind of blows my mind. This isn't, that's not the use case, it's one thing that we unlock from backup to archive data. One of the challenges I usually see out there is people like, oh, Rubrik, they do backup for VMware. How do you, you know, you're very much involved in educating and getting out there and telling people about it. How do you get over the, oh wait, you heard what we were doing six months ago or six weeks ago, and now we're doing so much more. So, I mean, stay up with that. It's tough to keep up, obviously, because every quarter we basically have some kind of either major or dot release that comes out. I mean, realistically, I set the table a little bit differently. I say, what are you looking to do? What are the outcomes that you're trying to drive? Simplicity's a huge one, because everyone's dealing with, I have a backup software vendor, and I have a storage vendor, and I have a tape vendor, and all this other, you know, hodgepodge things that they're dealing with. They're looking to save money, but ultimately they're trying to automate, start leveraging the cloud, start really like taking the headache out of providing something that's very necessary. And when I start talking about the services they can add beyond that, because it's not just about taking a backup, leaving it in some rotting archive for, you know, 10 years or whatever. It's really what can I do with the data once I have this de-duplicated and compressed kind of pool that I can start drawing from, and that's where people start to, their mind gets blown a little bit. Now that the individual features in check boxes, that is what it is, you know, like if you happen to need Hyper-V or Acropolis, whatever, but it's really just where you add in that journey to start taking advantage of this data, and I think that's where people start to get really excited, and we start whiteboarding and nerdy out a little bit. Well, Chris, so don't keep us in suspense. What kinds of things can you do once you have a copy of this data, it's still, it's all live, it's either on, you know, solid state or spinning disk or in the cloud somewhere. That's very different than just putting it on tape. So what do I do now that I have all this data pool? So probably the most common use case is I have a VPC and a security group in Amazon that exists today. I'm archiving to S3 in some way, shape, or form, either IA or whatever flavor of S3 that you want, and then you're thinking, well I have these applications, what else can I do with them? What if I put it to a query service or a relational database service, or what if I spin up 10 different copies because I need to for load testing or some type of regression testing. I mean, it all falls under the funnel of dev test, but I hate just capping it that way because I think it's unimaginative. Realistically, we're saying here, you have this giant pile of compute that you're already leveraging the storage part of it, you know, the object store that is S3, what it was you could unlock all the other services with no heavy lift, and the workload is actually built as an AMI, right? So an AMI is actually running an EC2, so there's no, you know, you don't have to necessarily extend the hypervisor layer or anything like that, and it's essentially asked three questions from the product perspective, it's, you know, what's security group, VPC, and shape of the format that you want it to be, like large, small, XR, et cetera, that's it. So think about unlocking cloud potentials for less technical people or people that are dipping their toe into public cloud. It really unlocks that ability and we control the data plane across it. Well, just one thing on that, because it's interesting, dev tests a lot of times used to get, you know, shoved to the back and it was like, oh, you can run onto that old gear, you know, you don't have any money for it. We've actually found that it can increase kind of the company's agility and, you know, development is a big part of creating new, cool things out of a company, so, you know, you don't undersell what, you know, improving dev tests can do. So do you have some customer stories or, you know, great things that customers have done with, you know, what this capability has? Yeah, and to be fair, at first when I saw that we were going to start, you know, basically taking VMware backups and pushing that in archive and then turning those into EC2 instances of any shape or quantity, I was like, that's kind of crazy, like, who's really wanting that? And I started talking to customers and it was a huge request. And a lot of times my architectural background would think, lift and shift, oh no, don't necessarily do that, I'm not a huge fan of that process, but while that is certainly something you can do, what they're really looking to do is, well, I have this binary package or application suite that's running on, you know, Elkstack or some Linux distro or whatever and I can't do anything with that because it's in production, it's making me money, but I really like to see what could be done with that or potentially can I just eliminate it completely and turn it into a service? And so I've got some customers that that's literally what they're doing, they're archiving already and what they have the product doing is every time a new snapshot is taken and is sent to the cloud, it builds automatically that EC2 instance and starts running it so that they have a collection of various state points that they can start playing with the actual backup is immutable, but then they're saying, all right, what if exactly kind of what I alluded to a little bit, what if I start using a native service in the cloud or potentially just discard that workload completely and start turning into a service or refactor it, replatform it, et cetera and they're not having to provision, usually you have to buy infrastructure to do that, like you're talking about the waterfall of shiny stuff that turns into dev stuff three years later, they don't have to do that, they can literally just start taking advantage of this cloud resource, run it for an hour or so because devs are great at CIDC pipelines, let's just automate the whole stack, let's answer a question by running queries through Jenkins or something like that and then throw it away and it costs a couple bucks, so I think that's pretty huge. Well, Chris, can you also use this capability for DR for disaster recovery? Can you rehydrate your AMIs up there if everything goes south in your data center? Absolutely, I mean, it's a journey and this is 4.0, so I'm not going to wave my hands and say it's an amazing DR solution, but the third kind of use case that we highlight with the product is that absolutely, you can take the workloads either as a planned event and say, I'm actually putting it here and this is kind of a permanent thing or an unplanned event, which is what we all are trying to avoid, where you're running the workloads in the cloud for some deterministic period of time and either at the application layer or the file system layer or even a database layer, you're then protecting it using our cloud cluster technology, which is Rubrik running in the cloud, it's right there, it has access to S3 and EC2, adjacently there's no network fee and then you start protecting that and sending the data the other way because Rubrik software can talk to any other Rubrik software, we don't care what format or package it's in, so in the future we'd like to add more to that and I want to oversell it, but certainly that's the journey. Yeah, so Chris, tell us about how your customers are feeling about cloud in general, because you've lived with the VMware community for a lot of years like many of us and that journey to cloud and what does hybrid and multi-cloud meet to them and what you've been seeing at Rubrik for the last year? Yeah, everybody has a different definition between hybrid, public, private. Every customer I talk to have a different answer to that. I just say multi-cloud because it feels the most safe and technically correct version of that definition. It's certainly something that everyone's looking to do, I think kind of the I want to build a private cloud phase of the journey has somewhat expired in some cases. Did you see Pat's keynote this morning? Like the private cloud using OpenStack and build all my widgets, I feel that era of marketing and whatnot, that was kind of like 2008, 2010. So that kind of era of marketing message has died a little bit. It's really just more, I have on-prem stuff. I'm trying to modernize it using hyper-converged or using software-defined X, networking, et cetera. But ultimately I have to start leveraging the places where my Paz, my IS, and my SaaS are going to start running. How do I then cobble all that together? I mean, at the C level, I need visibility, I need control, I need to be able to make executable decisions that are financially impactful and so having something that can look across those different ecosystems and give you actionable data, like here's where it's running, here's where it could run. It's all distilled to kind of a business-level decision based on SLA is powerful. But then as you go kind of down message for maybe a director or someone that's managing IT that's really, someone's breathing down their neck saying we've got to have a strategy, but they're technically savvy. They don't want to just put stuff in the cloud and get that huge budget or that huge bill that then there has to explain that as well. So it kind of sits in a nice place where we can protect the modern apps or kind of, I guess you can call modern slash legacy in the data center, but also start providing protection and a landing pad for the cloud native to use kind of an overwashed term. The stuff that's built for cloud that runs there, that's distributed and it's very sensitive to the fact that it charges per IOTA of use at the same time. Well Chris, I mean originally, Rubrik was deploying to customers as an appliance, right? So can you talk a little bit about that, right? You have many different options now. The customer, right? You can get open source. You can get commercial software. You can get appliances. You can get SaaS. And now it sounds like there's also a piece that can run in the cloud, right? That is not just a box that sits in an A data center somewhere. So can you talk about again, what do customers want? What's the advantage of some of those different deployment mechanisms? What do you see? I'm not saying it's a stalling tactic, but I love that question. Because yes, when we started, it made sense, build a turnkey appliance, make sure that it's simple. It can deploy. Like we used to say, it can deploy in an hour and that includes the time to take it out of the box and that only goes so far because that's one use case. Also certainly for the first year or so of the product that was where we were driving it as a scale out node based solution. Then we added Rubrik Edge as a virtual appliance and really it was meant to, I have a data center and I'm covering those remote office type use cases and we required that folks kind of tether the two because it's a single node that's really just ingesting data and bringing it back using policy. Then we introduced Cloud Cluster in 3.2 which was a couple of releases ago and that allows you to literally build a four plus node cluster in Azure or AWS. Basically you give us your account information, we share the AMI with you or the VM in case of Azure and then you can just build it, right? And that's totally independent. Like you could just be a customer. We have a couple of customers that are public that that's all they do. They deploy Cloud Cluster, they backup things in that environment and then they replicate or archive to various clouds or various regions within clouds and there's no requirement to buy the appliance because that would be kind of no bueno to do that. So right, there's various different packages or we even have the idea now where you can bring your own hardware to the table and we'll sell you the software. So like Lenovo and Cisco and things like that can be your choice based on the relationships you have. Wow. Chris, your team's been growing a lot, Juntus, your personal team, but the Rubrik team, I walked by the booth and wait, I saw five more people that I know from various companies. Talk about the growth of Rubrik. You joined a year ago, it felt like a small company then. Now you guys are there, I get the report from this Financial Endos firms that like, have you seen the latest unicorn? Rubrik in there, I'm like, Rubrik, I know those guys. And gals, but yeah, absolutely. Talk about the growth of the company, what's the company hiring for? What do you tell us a little bit about the culture inside? Sure, I mean, it's actually been a little over two years now that I've been there. It's kind of flying. I was in the first 50 hires for the company so at the time I felt like the FNG, but now I guess I'm kind of the old man. I think we're approaching or have crossed the 500 employee threshold and we're talking eight quarters essentially. A lot of investment across the world, right? So we decided very early on to invest in Europe as a market. We had offices in Utrecht in the Netherlands in London and the UK. We've got a bunch of engineering folks in India so we've got two different engineering teams. As well as we have a center of excellence center, I think in Kansas City. So there's a whole bunch of different kind of roots that we're planting as a company, as well as a global kind of effort to make sales, support, product, engineering, marketing obviously, something that scales everywhere. It's not like all the engineers are in Palo Alto and Silicon Valley and everyone else is just in sales, but we're kind of driving across everywhere. My team went from one to six over the last, I don't know, eight or nine months so everything is growing, which I guess is good. As part of that, you also moved to Silicon Valley and so how does it compare to the TV show? He's in Oakland. Well, it's close enough to Silicon Valley. Oakland is Silicon Valley adjacent. Yeah, yeah. It's not really there. I will say, I used to visit all the time for various events and things like that, VMworld and whatnot. I always got the impression that I liked being there for about a week and then I wanted to leave before I really started drinking the Kool-Aid a little too heavily. So it's nice being just slightly in the East Bay area. The same time I go to events and things now more as a local and it's kind of awesome to hear, oh, I invented whatever technology. I invented Bootstrap or NPM or something like that and they're just available to chat with. I try to, like, the sunscreen song where he says, you know, move to California but leave before you turn soft. So at some point I might have to go back to Texas or something just to keep the scaly rigidity to my persona intact. Don't you miss the barbecue? Well, I don't know if you saw, Franklin's barbecue actually burned down during the hurricane. No. Yeah, if you're a huge barbecue fan in Austin, weep a tear. It might be a bad mojo here for a little bit. Wow. All right, we were alluding at the beginning of the interview. You've got some VIP guests. We don't, you know, talk too much about, like, oh, we're doing this tomorrow and everything but you've got some cool activities. The V All Stars, you know, some of the things. Give us a little viewpoint. What's the goal coming into VMworld this year and what are some of the cool things that your team and the extended team's doing? Yeah, so kind of more on the nerdy fun side. We've actually built out, one of my team, Rebecca Fitzhugh, has built out this V All Stars card deck so we picked a bunch of influencers and people that, you know, friends and family kind of thing. Built them some trading cards and based on what you turn in, you can win prizes and things like that. It was just, you know, a lot of other vendors have done things that I really respect like Solid Fire has the socks and the cards against humanity as an example. I wanted to do something similar and Rebecca had a great idea how she executed on that. Beyond that though, we obviously have Ice Cube coming in. He's going to be partying at the Marquis on Tuesday evening. So he'll be hanging around, you know, the king of hip hop there. And on a more like fun charitable note, we actually have Kevin Durant coming in tomorrow. We are shooting hoops for his charity fund. So everybody that sinks a goal, or I'm obviously not a basketball person, but everyone that sinks the ball into the hoop gets two dollars donated to his charity fund and the ability to win a jersey and things like that. So kind of spreading across, you know, sports, music, various digital transformation type things to make sure that everyone that comes in has a good time. VMware's our roots, right? 1.0, the product was focused on that environment. It's been my roots for a long time and we want to pay that back to the community and you can't forget where you came from, right? All right, well, Chris Wall, great to catch up with you. Thanks for joining us. Sporting your Alta T-shirt, your Rubik, you know, sneakers there. I'm very brandy. Everything like that. John Troyer and I will be back with lots more coverage here. At VMworld 2017, you're watching theCube.