 Everyone welcome to this special CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE and we have two great guests, Prashant Jagannathan, technical director of Global Alliance is at CataLogic and Vaughan Stewart, CUBE alumni, good friend of theCUBE, vice president of technology at Peer Storage. Guys, welcome to this CUBE conversation, good to see you. John, it's great to be here, nice to see you, mate. So you're on the road, you guys are a growing startup, you guys are doing great, congratulations. Thank you. So you guys, CataLogic, we've been covering you guys and you guys have been combusting out, still in my opinion, not like well-known, but you're well-known, you're the most unknown, well-known company because you have a really awesome solution. Peer Storage, you guys are known, you just went public earnings, again another successful quarter, congratulations to the team there. Again, everyone's like, oh, Peer Storage, you guys continue to demystify the marketplace with performance. Congratulations, what's the, why, what's going on? So thanks, so again, we just announced our quarterly earnings, another great quarter. We've accomplished 3,350 customers, 25% of those are in the Fortune 500, over 25% of our revenue comes from cloud service providers, be it SaaS, PASS, hosted private cloud. Really the key of our success has been not the performance of Flash, which I think a lot of folks assume, it's been about reinventing the operational model through simplicity, right? We'd like to talk about being effortless, efficient, and evergreen, and so that's kind of our tagline to help customers put their data to work. There's certainly a cloud transformation going on. I want to get your guys' thoughts because one of the things that our team at Wikibon and our editorial team at SiliconANGLE are focused on is really three major pillars we're seeing that are powering a whole new set of applications, cloud-native, whatever you want to call them, that is obviously cloud computing, which is a combination of on-premises, hybrid, and then public, big data, which is now AI in machine learning, and then IoT. Those are really the underpinnings that's transforming the data center, and this is causing a lot of opportunity for app developers on top, and you're seeing all the key software markets just completely being disrupted and transforming. So I got to ask you guys, what does this mean to your relationship because you guys have a partnership, okay? So how does that fit into that industry trend? Can you talk about the partnership that you guys have together? Sure, I'll let you go first. So we first started engaging almost a year ago. Right. You know, there was a lot of relationships based out of the valley from previous relationships, or I should say employment. It's a small industry, the storage industry. Yeah, it's a small industry, we all know each other. And so at that time, even more than in your current opening statements, CataLogic was really flying under the radar, right? Powerful set of tools, how to bring in a copy data management and data protection scheme into a heterogeneous storage infrastructure. And they've kind of reached this gap between I'm software enabled, software defined, giving you a control plane, leveraging all of the offload and acceleration capabilities within the hardware infrastructure. And at the end of the day, what we were able to identify is this feels a huge gap within the market, whether customers are looking to convert their virtual infrastructure into a private cloud, meaning it can be self-service, right? By the end users are, you know, consumerized, if you will. They can better accelerate their development teams, you know, develop a more DevOps centric model, right? That lets these teams start to work in a more agile infrastructure and ultimately start to embrace better hybrid storage technologies by making data protection just a native element within their on-prem and extending it into the cloud. What are some of the use cases? Because this really highlights the demand for faster solutions, not necessarily buying a new tool or something else. I mean, people got to use what they got. Yeah, exactly. I mean, first to start with the integration, right? So we are very synergistic relation. Catalogic is an orchestration engine. So it leverages in place existing infrastructure to automate certain operations. So these operations include answering your question on use cases, include DevOps, include test-dev automation, and also data protection and disaster recovery management. So it makes it use case-driven and also for different industries where they're looking for a centralized, a heterogeneous automation tool that can perform a lot of operations, but not reinventing it. So you don't need to move it to another appliance to deliver these use cases, but leverage the services to the storage and the hardware already provides. I mean, test-dev is obviously low-hanging fruit. That's kind of been around for a while. We've heard a lot of the top cloud guys say that. We're hearing, as we go out through a variety of events, real practitioners and users putting production workloads into the cloud and really bringing the hybrid architecture in there, which impacts the storage and the pre-existing. Outside of test-dev, I mean, I hear a lot about mission critical. Are you guys seeing that? Is that a use case? And then how do the people who are your customers deal with that pressure? Okay, move some mission-critical workloads, make them work, what happens? Right, I mean, mission-critical applications are what's actually driving, they're actually driving the purchasing point of the product itself. So applications like if you take Oracle or SQL database, they are running on high-performance storage on Flash. And what these developers and app owners are looking for is I have my production data, but I need to access that data. They cannot touch production. So they end up using a copy of data, which is driven by backup tools. They backup the data to some tape or some disk appliance and they perform a full restore operation, which is slower and doesn't give them data access right away. So with CataLogic, what we are trying to do is leverage these production databases and then quickly spin them up for these mission-critical applications, they get data protection locally on the storage and these copies can be spun up instantly from an end user for self-service. They are looking for quick access to data, which sometimes the storage administrators cannot give them right away, but we provide the tools and the necessary components to give users access to the data. Let me add some color to this because I agree with what you said. I think when you look at what's occurring within mid-sized businesses and enterprises, which is really kind of where we sell to, right? We, at Pure Storage, we don't go into the small market. There is this macro desire from organizations to get their private cloud finalized, right? This transition from virtual to private cloud because the end state of private cloud is then to optimize IT resources and start to move your people into areas of future investment, right? Meaning focus more on IoT, a lot more on the analytics, whether it be ML or AI. And so when you take a step back and say, okay, now come from macro and let's talk about our two products, right? We make an all flash array. What was interesting about the introduction of our flash array when we first brought it to market was it didn't start in tier two or tier three. It started mission-critical tier one. In which you're in that space and you're dealing with some applications powered by an Oracle Suite or on top of SQL Server, for example, there are a lot of steps that have to be taken to protect that data, right? I've got to call the application. I've got to coordinate with the hypervisor layer, the storage. And if I'm going to now start to automate this to bring a cloud-like experience to my end users, I've got to deal with compliance, operations, and security concerns, right? I should say regulatory, right? Concerns. I think of all the personas involved in this. Right, which means there may be a retention policy, it may be a release, the resources, it may be measuring the resource constraints, it may require data masking, right? All of these elements that are above the storage layer, right, and above our great performance and cloning engine, catalogic manages for us, right? And they've got geocentricity to it. Is it on-prem, what country is it in? Is it off in the cloud? These are the elements when you say, I want to make a private cloud, a cloud, it's where the hypervisor vendors have kind of left us- So that's a gap you're talking about, if I get your thoughts on that, because, I mean, Wikibon just put out a survey just last month that through 2026, the true private cloud, they call it true private cloud, is going to be $237 billion. That speaks to the data center kind of migration to cloud where you got true private cloud, which is essentially data center that has cloud-like features for DevOps. And private, hybrid cloud. But this mission-critical question comes back to it, because as a VP of technology, we've talked about storage in the past, but databases in isolation are easy to deal with. When you're dealing with production databases, this is a nightmare. No one wants to fool with them. So talk about, I mean, how hard this is, because most people don't kind of get how complicated it is to kind of wrangle production databases to get something into production in a true private cloud. So the, like you said, production database, nobody wants to touch it, because that's driving business and anything to do with business, the developers don't want to touch it, the QA that- They call it no ops. No, don't touch it. Don't touch it, exactly. And they also want self-service, because they want no operational people involved as well. Right, and that is part of the problem as well. So every time the whole DevOps movement is you're trying to combine the developers and talk to the ops people, but the true DevOps is, the ops is not involved, just developer wants some access to it, they get it right away, right? So the ops people usually don't want to give access to developers for the production environment, part of the reason because developers want to do a lot of different things with it. They want to do it batch testing. They might want to run queries against it, run analytics against it, use it for big data consumption. And if you do this against production database, not only are you degrading the performance of it, even if it's on Flash, you're performing operations that you don't normally perform on a production database, which is why they need access to it in a self-contained environment, not directly on the production. And one of the values that the private cloud can differentiate itself on today versus public cloud offerings is in the public cloud, there isn't an ability to make instant copies of production data. You've got to be making backups that come out of one storage silo across the interconnects to another silo, and then when you want to clone, it's got to copy out of that silo. So from an agility, a time to perspective, the cloud's not there on that construct yet, right? It's all based on software copies in the model that Catalogic enables, whether it's Pure Storage or other storage partners that are within their portfolio of support. We get to leverage these engines that are very mature and robust within the enterprise-class storage arrays today, to deliver this agility and speed. And we find customers being very creative in how they're leveraging these technologies. I was sharing before we sat down, right? We have a customer that, they've taken their legacy environment, which is storing all these customer records and information in a relational database, and now they're leveraging it to say, let's make multiple copies of this database and run queries in parallel across multiple cloned instances because they don't have the staff that knows how to adopt a Hadoop ecosystem today. All right, so let me see if I can put this together because the things I like to look at externally to what you guys are doing is some trends that are back in point two. Pure, your growth on terms of the number is in the green, competition's down. So you're obviously in a modernization kind of wave. People are buying your stuff and they're moving it in. But also seeing on the data protection side and in the cloud, you're seeing kind of new startups emerging. I mean, you know, I look around and there's a lot of startups reinventing data protection and backup and recovery for cloud. So the pressure that the customers have is, I want the best of what I've been doing, but yet I got to move to the cloud really quick. IT monitors modernization, consumers, whatever you want to call it, it's happening. How do you guys work together and make that happen? Because I still got to get this new environment, but I got to make the production, protection work, there's no four walls anymore. I mean, did I get this right? Oh yeah, that is correct. So customers are moving to the cloud. They are, the notion of hybrid cloud exists in some fashion, as in they're running most of their mission critical applications on production and on faster performing arrays, but they're still moving their workloads into the cloud. So they have a mix of both. With true data protection, you have to cover both these scenarios. The hybrid cloud model where you're taking care of data protection both on premises and also into the cloud. So with the cloud migration, now it becomes more important to understand and catalog the entire environment, to identify what's out there, are they protected and are my users getting the right access to the right data? So that's where catalogic comes into the picture where it can provide a single global view into things of identifying these are your mission critical applications right there on premises. And here's the data in the cloud and not only drive data protection natively in the cloud, but I also kind of give cloud people access to data that's on premises. So you guys have a good fit with Pure that way because they're hitting the large enterprises and then emerging modern enterprises with the store flash. You guys kind of give some extensibility through that integration. All right, so I got to ask you the tough question. Data masking and security, huge issues right now. Security in particular, there's no perimeter in the cloud. You guys know all about this on the storage side on-prem, it's pretty well known, but still there's no perimeter even on-premise. How do you guys deal with security in your relationships? That's a great question. It's actually easier for me. That wasn't a tough one. Damn, I wanted it to be a hard question. That wasn't a tough one. So data obfuscation or data masking is a main ask for mission critical applications, right? So especially when you're talking about DevOps giving access to data, you don't want to give access to production data that contains information like credit card info, social security number, blood group of your first barn, a kind of information that you want to keep private. So, catalogic integrates with some of the data masking or obfuscation tools out there. So that's a great value add to the storage as well. So from a storage layer, you don't really know what's the content of the data, whereas catalogic provides that information where it can take the database information and apply masking against it. And when we manage these snapshots, we provide role-based access control against it. So an end user will give them access to them for admins to do basic recovery. They can perform against the entire database, whereas a developer who needs access to a subset of the data will only get access or see the data that we allow them to see. Okay, hard question now. I'll try to bring another one to you. Self-service is nirvana. IT operations moving into higher value, cloud-native developer. How do you guys see the progress of full self-service? Scalable, horizontally scalable data. Are you there now? Where does that fit that picture of full self-service? No operations guys involved. So no operation guys involved is still in your room. She just dumped you. Right, so it's still in nirvana because it combines a couple of things, right? So one, if you want to give access to data, it has to be instant and it doesn't have to be script driven. It has to be like either click off a button or leverage the existing tools that they have. And the other is how much can you give access? So in the sense that I have 15 developers and 15 developers are all asking for the same data and you need to have a performance storage that should be able to handle these multiple stream requests. And I think you're speaking very eloquently about the technology, but I think you're understating the whole nature of enabling the private cloud right and having it be self-service. There's a point in time when you first take that first 30 to 60 minutes to set up catalogic and to register into the authentication realms and the virtualization environment and the storage array. Okay, sure that's overhead. Then you're going to spend some time with your team as the operation side of the house defining your infrastructure policies and you're probably going to go reach to talk to, again, this is DevOps. I'm going to go talk to the development teams and go talk to the regulatory folks. What are the requirements? Because does this data have to stay in country? What countries is it visible for? They send a legwork up front. Right, yeah. What has to be masked based on what groups and you set up these role-based policies, once that's in place, that's no different than, now you have a service catalog and you're showing up and you're like, hey, I'm John. You guys know I'm part of the Oracle team. And so the developers can have full access to that data. They can program with it. They get the catalog. They get the catalog. And the API set. Exactly, so what we create is templates and these templates can be customized to developers. So I have a financial services theme that needs access to the financial service data. So we'll create templates that will include policies like, hey, this is the storage provision for it. This is the data, the mass data contains the financials and we'll give that template to the financial services team. And just for the audience, because I think we all grok this but I'll make sure the audience gets this. The difference between what we're talking about and just saying, well, hey, I can clone a database virtual machine today and by my hypervisor, sure. But that's a manual process by the virtualization team which is disconnected from the application team. Then he's being emailed as a meeting get set up. People have to weigh in. There's no data masking. There's no role based access policy. There's no termination of the resource policy. So we're sitting again and back in, sure virtualization gave us agility but we're still manual in trying to track it. This gives us not just the catalog of services. It's all audited. Now we can go back and see who accessed what data at what time. Cloud. Awesome. I want to ask you the final question because I want to talk about kind of a futuristic industry view. AI is the hype right now. Augmented intelligence, I call it, but soon artificial intelligence. We're seeing self-driving cars out there. Will there be self-driving storage? I mean, I mean literally driving around but I mean, talk about auto provision. Talk about the ability to just plug something in having machine learning and AI, these kinds of things. You guys working on things like that in R&D? I mean, I would imagine a world where ultimately you plug the storage in, magic happens. People are programming with it, it's programmable. Where are we on this? What's the vision? So you got to watch out. This is a trick question, right? Rule number one from your comms team. Don't make news. So I would say is again going back to our pillars in the foundation for Pure, right? How do we help customers put their data to work, right? We make it effortless, efficient, evergreen and under that effortless piece, right? The big notion with Pure is there's no knobs to turn. And right, so the secret sauce is that I can give you flash performance at disc economics. And guess what? Your virtualization admin can be a storage expert, right? It can hit six nines availability without ever reading a manual, right? It's, so this is the foundation of what we built with FlashArray, right? We've now rolled out FlashBlade and let's just say with our partnership, right? You're being a good spokesperson right now by not trying to go to the script. First of all, we'll go to you because we know everyone's working on automation. So that's not like a secret. The question is specific. I don't want to get you in trouble, but the point is people looking for real automation where there's some intelligence. I mean, that's the trend. I mean, you guys are kind of at the beginning stages of your relationship that are doing that now. It's a level, but when's that next level? What's it look like? The heart of automation is building that catalog there. And there goes in the name of our company, Catalogic. So I don't want to give any future details away, but yeah, that's where everybody's going, right? So we, they're all looking for a chatbot or an Alexa like project. Well, storage as a service is what people say. Tesla's a car. It's not really a car anymore. It's a service. It's a service, right? Powered by software. It's like somebody. Storage, you can almost imagine some product coming out that's very service and connected oriented. Well, look, you know, I wasn't trying to dodge your question, but you know, at the end of the day, everybody wants to automate their data center. You think you were taking a step further saying, okay, look, I see frameworks here of what we're talking about between Pure and Catalogic. You know, what comes next? You know, we've got a lot of folks that we know in this valley that are working for a number of startups trying to say, hey, how do I bring AI into the data center? I think it's going to be more prevalent over the next four, five years. Let's see how it goes. Okay, so where's the partnership go next? We'll kind of end it on that. You guys had a great partnership. Thanks for coming in and sharing the data, but Prashant and Bon, where does this go next? What happens next? Good integration. What's the next step? So I think customers who are looking at this today, probably the easiest place to start is to say, I want to automate Oracle in our SQL, right? Or I want to bring and look at reinventing my backup space. I don't want to buy an appliance. I want just data protection to be part of my ecosystem and cloud connected. Where does it go from here? I think we'll see probably an expansion in terms of our partnership, right? Obviously we've got a new protocol FlashBlade that we want to look at working on together. We've got some other work that we can't announce at this point in time, but if you come to Accelerate, which is our user conference in June, you'll hear about some of the new capabilities we're going to bring to market and that we're working on within that ecosystem together as well. Right, so yeah, and for us, it goes back to the mission critical databases. So we are expanding our portfolio and adding more databases and strengthening existing database. Expanding the catalog, more microservices oriented, that kind of thing. Exactly, and supporting other... Well, key industry applications based on vertical. Right, and more tighter integration with existing storage arrays as well as the new... Cloud is about the data, right? I mean, the data is where the action is, right? I mean, that's the action. Exactly, and we are looking at how to extend into the cloud as well. All right, cataloging and peer here inside the CUBE conversation. For Sean Vaughn, thanks for spending the time. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching this CUBE conversation.