 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re-invent 2016. Brought to you by AWS and its ecosystem partners. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's broadcast of AWS re-invent 2016, where the worldwide leader in live enterprise tech coverage haven't just had Andy Jassy on the program. Happy to welcome customer of AWS, partner of AWS. I've got Bill Santos, who's the president of hosting.com and Josh Stenhouse, who's the technical evangelist at Zerto. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, I feel like I got like a little executive MBA, you know, listening to Andy Jassy. Bill, you know, give us a little bit, you know, what you do, hosting.com, give us the thumbnail. Sure, so we're a managed cloud service provider, principally based in North America. We've been around since 1997. Historically, we've owned our own data centers and run our own private cloud, but over the last three years we've really made a strategic shift to being a managed service provider across a range of clouds and certainly one of those strategic platforms is AWS. Yeah, so when you hear, you know, the keynotes up on stage and they say, you know, closing down data centers, moving to move, that resonates with what you do. Yeah, we understand exactly what folks are going through with that, for sure. Do you still have some data centers? We still do, yes. Yeah, and what's the timeline for when you're, you know? You know, it's funny when you're in a capital-intensive business like hosting. There's a timeline to all of these things and we've got a lot of customers that are still running in private clouds and most of those conversations really stem around, okay, how do you extend a private cloud solution into a public cloud for the elasticity, for the diversity that comes with that, but you know, we expect that most of our data centers will be around at least for the next five to 10 years. All right, Josh, you know, we've been talking to Zerdo for a couple of years. I remember two years ago, actually, you guys were right behind our set. So, you know, the Zerdo brand was right there. You've got the Master of Disaster shirt with a Pokeball. My son's going to love that. I got to get him one of those. What's your role at Zerdo and, you know, kind of the AWS, you know, connection here? Yeah, so it's a good thing you were talking about this transition from traditional enterprise IT and consolidation of data centers and how you then evolve into the cloud. And one thing that Zerdo did five years ago is we revolutionized the way that traditional enterprise replication was done by moving it into the hypervisor and we made it software-defined, but also included all of the orchestration and automation. So my role is basically to travel around the world talking about this revolution because at first people were like, oh, why do this? But it's only now as you see the evolution of the cloud where you need to have everything software-defined to have that mobility so that you can connect your on-premise VMware or Hyper-V infrastructure into Amazon so that you can then move workloads for migrations or disaster recovery and that's exactly what Zerdo enables. Bill, your customers, how's this journey affected their interaction? Is it just, you know, prices come down, you get to pass that along? How much visibility do they have? How much are they asking you about what goes on as you, you know, use more in various public clouds? You know, I think it's going to vary based on where you are in the market. For us, most of our customers are looking for sort of a white-glove solution. They've come to hosting whether it was three years ago or 10 years ago because they were looking for a higher level of support and so our customers today really still come to us for that, but the platforms are broader. So one of the things that we really liked about Zerdo was the ability to create that, take a world-class technology and lay that white-glove service on top of it. So most of our customers really come to us versus going direct or using the technology themselves because they're looking for that additional level of service and support. So, you know, some of the discussions we have is, you know, kind of, what is hybrid cloud? What is multi-cloud? Amazon has kind of their opinionated view. How do you look at it, Bill? And, you know, do your customers, are they doing multiple clouds with you or in general, what are you seeing? Yeah, absolutely. So for us, hybrid cloud is any combination of virtualized private and single-tenant public, multi-tenanted environments. And we're seeing the vast majority of our customers having those conversations and saying, okay, how do I accomplish that? How do I take advantage of the elasticity, the diversity of a public cloud platform while not dramatically increasing the complexity of managing and supporting that environment? Okay, and talk about your kind of disaster recovery, you know, replication, how long you've been using various solutions and, you know, because what was the problem statement that led you eventually to do Zerto? Oh, absolutely, great question. So we've been in the DR space for probably six, seven years now. We started on using VMware's native DR replication technology and we really honestly became an expert, one of the few in the industry that were really good at it, but a few years back started looking at, okay, as we started adopting additional cloud platform alternatives, we want to be able to do this with customers on-prem environments, but equally importantly, we want to be able to do this with a customer's AWS environment or Azure environment. So we needed a tool that met that, what we call that unified cloud criteria to create a single customer experience across a range of platform alternatives. And once we made that pivot about two and a half years ago, we realized we needed to go to another DR solution. And so we evaluated a range. There's certainly a lot of options out there and we brought most of them in and evaluated them based on how quickly can we get them up and running? What's the cost to support those environments and how accurate or how timely can they be in a DR failure? And in every one of those instances, Zerto came in clearly heads and shoulders above everyone else, particularly now with the 50 release and the support for Azure along with AWS. We now have a technology and a partner that really accomplishes this unified cloud vision of ours across all of the platforms that we support today. Josh, want to get into the updates, but before that, you travel the world and, you know, I see Zerto at a lot of shows. So you guys at VMworld, you know, there's the Microsoft play, you're here at AWS, you know, huge show, I mean, there. But is what Bill's saying, is that resonate, you know, from kind of in general customers, any differences in kind of geographies that you see or, you know, customer maturation that maybe you can share? Yeah, I definitely think around the world in different geographies, there's probably a different preference for the public cloud provider. But the one thing I think you can say across the whole board is that any technology that you invest in as an enterprise in late 2016, going into 2017, if it doesn't have a cloud angle, then you're buying something that is not going to evolve with your IT because you've got to be using cloud in some shape or form and it's about using it for the right use case. And for us, disaster recovery is one of the perfect use cases because if you look at the reason why the public cloud was created in the first place, especially with Amazon, it was for that elasticity in the event of a Black Friday, a Christmas, a high demand scenario, and there is no better similar use case than disaster recovery, where all of a sudden now you need to compute the RAM, the IOPS for 100, a thousand virtual machines. And the public cloud and Amazon, and that being a managed service, gives you that because if you think about a VM with 10 cores, 100 gig of RAM, if you were to try and do that with your own DR site, how much do you have to put into buying the right hosts, licensing the hosts, the storage? If you're just replicating to Amazon, it's a checkbox where you select the instance size. It doesn't really get any easier than that. That around the world is resonating and the key thing is that you might not be ready to make that switch tomorrow. So we have customers who buy Zerto in safe and the knowledge that even if they're using their own two data centers for the next two years, three years, when they want to switch to utilize the public cloud, they can make that choice per workload, offer the whole site and not have to go and buy and learn a new skill and tool set. All right, so Josh, you've got an announcement. I believe 5.0 Bill was saying, bring us up to speed on that. Yeah, so the cool thing in 5.0 is we enabled one to many replication. So now simultaneously, you can replicate a VM within your local data center so you can restore directly to production and you could take that same VM, replicate it to your secondary data center, to Azure, to AWS and have all of those copies, just seconds of lag behind production and automate the failover process for any of those different target locations. So it's ultimately, it's allowing a freedom of choice in removing lock-in from the storage and from the hypervisor and from the data center and cloud technology. Awesome, so Bill, it sounds like, I think I understand where some of that fit for you, but you guys using it? Yeah, absolutely, and so many of our customers are, they are still keeping one data center, you know, as their production and we might be a second facility, but they've got a legacy, particularly in the backup of wanting a third destination for additional security and they've historically not been able to do that from a DR standpoint, they've only been able to accomplish that with some specific backup solutions. So, CERTA's ability to do that now really creates a tremendous amount of flexibility, both from a DR standpoint, but also from a migration standpoint. So now I can start replicating to two different environments, failover and use that as a migration strategy as well as a disaster recovery strategy. Bill, a lot of announcements here at the show, so much going on, talked about the huge audiences here. Is there any specific announcements, new segments, or things you learned here that you could share? Yeah, so I don't want to plug CERTA too hard, but certainly that, the other thing that I was really impressed with was from AWS themselves and the importance of their place not just on security, but on compliance. So many of our customers, their security is kind of table stakes, but they really do need to get to and meet, whether it's HIPAA or PCI, a much more aggressive set of criteria for an industry or regulatory compliance set. And a lot of the announcements that enable that, I think is going to be really impactful for many of our customers. Josh, same thing, you can't mention the event itself, any specific announcements, things that you'd want as takeaways? Yeah, I'd say, first of all, from the event, just the sheer size and the number of people here, it's safe to say that Amazon is not only dominant, it's also leading from the front. And every big company who's doing anything of a new modern application, that it's being written from the ground up to be in Amazon using all the different tool sets. And I was quite impressed by the announcement this morning of the new protections of the Shield system for protecting against DDoS attacks. Thought that was really impressive and it's nice to see Amazon beefing up the protection once you've gone all in on their cloud and you're using it for the key use case of web scale 2.0 applications, that they're going to make sure that they're protecting that as well. From what is quite an increasing threat? All right, well, Bill, Josh, really appreciate you coming and sharing your story. Always great to kind of hear, maturation and what's happened in this space. And we'll be back with lots more coverage here at AWS re-invent 2016, you're watching theCUBE.