 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to the live CUBE covers. This is day three of VMworld 2018. We're live in Las Vegas, it's CUBE's special coverage. Our ninth year covering VMworld. Kicking off day three, we've got two sets. Our next guest is Brian Reagan, who's the CMO of Actifio, CUBE alumni, great to see you. Great company, doing some great things on the marketing side. You guys taking a different approach than others? Let the product do the talking, let the solution speak for itself, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John, it's great to be back. And Dave, it's always a pleasure and it's great to be at VMworld. So you guys taking, I don't know how to say different approach, but you're here at VMworld. There's a lot of pomp and circumstances, a lot of big booths, a lot of glam, a lot of attention getting. You've got to kind of do that, but you don't want to overspend on that. You really want to just be in the community. What's your strategy? How are you as a CMO going into a world that wants more content? They want more data, they want to get solutions built. They love the glam, but meat and potatoes is what they want. So Monday night we had an event at Topgolf and I was talking to a couple of customers and they basically were all saying the same thing to me, which was I come to VMworld rather to basically collect squeezy balls for my kids. They're going back to school, I'm going to collect a lot of toys, I'm going to do the solution expo. Great, great opportunity to really break through from a swag standpoint, but no one's coming here to necessarily research the company that they want to disrupt or transform their business around. So what we believe for VMware and quite frankly, just in general is this is a great place to engage with customers, they're all here, this is the IT, this is Comdex, you know, 2018. So we need to be here, but we don't necessarily need to be in a solutions exchange where it's just an arms race about swag. What's your relation with VMware? How do you guys fit into the ecosystem? What's the value proposition? What is the Actifio relationship to the community? How do you guys walk that line and how do you deliver those solutions? Yeah, so as pretty much throw a rock and you'll hit a vendor out here who has a great VMware solution, right? We are no exception, everyone does VMware. Quite frankly, it's actually really easy nowadays and there's zero differentiation. I hate to say it, but everyone does VMware the same way. So there is really no disruption in this marketplace because everyone does VADP, everyone does snapshot. So quite frankly, what we major on and what we focus on is actually the workloads that are franchise critical to businesses which really are databases. So yeah, they might run into VM but oftentimes they run in physical machines. So let's focus on databases if they happen to be VMware great. You know what, we like everybody else has a great VMware solution, but it's easy. Let's focus on the hard stuff, which is databases which run the business and DX is all around databases and applications that run the business. That's where we major on. That's where our value comes in. That's where our customers see the most value from Actifio. So my takeaway is five, 10 years ago was all about integration and that was a differentiation. Who could get the SDK fastest? Exactly, right, yeah. And you get to see what's there. We own them in a net app right there, okay, fine. That's done. Yeah. Okay, so fast forward to 2018, what's your perspective on VMware, what they're doing, the market momentum? You mentioned databases, you see them with Amazon bringing database now on-prem. So a lot has changed. What's your perspective? So I think VMware is really, so you talk to any CIO, any IT leadership. I mean, VMware is a critical part of the conversation. So I don't mean to in any way diminish the value that VMware brings to the enterprise. And actually they are enabling cloud in every enterprise today, whether it's private, whether it's hybrid, whether it's I'm going to do public, but I'm going to do public VMware in the Amazon cloud. So VMware is table stakes in terms of running mission critical applications. What we believe is the next level of integration is what's the app running in VMware, right? What is it Oracle? I'm running Oracle Rack inside of VMware. I'm running SAP inside of VMware. That's the next level of integration that becomes the differentiation and quite frankly the value creation in a lot of these enterprises. So how do you guys differentiate? Tom was talking about all the glam and all the noises. There's a lot of noise. There's tons of noise around data protection. You guys pioneered the whole copy data management space. So where are you seeing growth? Where's the momentum? Maybe you can give some examples. Two thirds of our business is now actually leading with DevOps and cloud. And the real lever there is time. People want more time back in their day and they want more time back because whether it's, there was a great article that search IT operations published about Etna where they have, you know, multi, tens of multi-terabyte databases. And quite frankly it breaks every piece of infrastructure that they had but they want to be able to serve those multi-terabyte databases out to their developers within minutes as opposed to weeks or months or however long it takes traditional operations. Let's serve that need. Let's solve the time problem and all of a sudden digital transformation becomes a reality. You know, DX and continuous integration, continuous development is really easy when you're talking about megabyte sized JSON files. When you talk about 100 terabyte databases it becomes really hard. With Actifio we solve that problem. And so now we're enabling DX at scale in these large enterprises and it's really a time problem. So Etna's a customer obviously. We heard a similar story from Live Nation. It was another customer, but go ahead John. What's the drivers on this? Because this is a unique thing because databases as we say on theCUBE here in our analysis, the battleground in cloud. On-premises in cloud, databases is a crucial thing. Look at Amazon, they're going after Oracle, RDS, their relational database service on VMware, on-premises, Amazon's never done that before. Clearly the database is a hard nut to crack one, two. It's super important. So it's the pacing item on all migrations, all activity, what's driving your business? Because you're targeting that, that's just trying to improve ease of use, but what's the market force? Migration, developer scale, what are some of the things that are driving your business? So yes and yes, right? So help me collapse my cycle time. So typically the time to actually get a copy of data for a developer is measured in weeks or months. In the old way. In the old way. And CICD is talking about daily check-in and daily check-in weeks and months, it just doesn't jive, right? So if I can actually collapse that down into yes, no matter how big that database is, I can give it to you in a 15 minute, 30 minute SLA. The speed of matching that mist, so the mismatch between data pipelining to the developer need is a gap, huge problem that you solve. What are some of the consequences if that's not solved? Well, so what do people do to compromise the time problem? They subset, they give their developers a, it's 100 terabyte production database, they give them a terabyte or half a terabyte of actual subset of data. So they run their queries in development and they work great and then they roll them into production and all of a sudden they break because 100 terabytes is a different animal. And it could be a terrible experience for the application where data has to drive all the value. So speed of data insertion to the application is the critical cloud native and to our developer needs. It drives quality, it drives customer satisfaction, it drives, quite frankly, in regulated industries, it drives compliance. I feel like the Geico commercial, everybody knows that, this is a problem. Why aren't people doing this? Is it just too hard? I mean, this is a- It's hard. All right, so what do you guys, what specifically do you guys have for IP? What makes it happen? What do you guys do? So 57 patents later, we have cracked a code on how to do really application native virtualization of data and the ability to serve it up through workflows, through automation in some of the largest enterprises in the world. So we are enterprise tested, battle tested and quite frankly, the applications and data that serves the largest enterprises, that's where we shine. What are some of the value points you can point to anecdotally or publicly around? The value your customers have gotten from having the ability to have data addressable almost in real time for developers because there's got to be some new experiences or new capabilities that they're realizing. Can you share just some of the things that come out of this? So an IT leader in a major bank that you've heard of said to us after we went through the initial phase of deployment, you've just given me an extra quarter of development in every year. So that- Extra quarter of time. Extra quarter of time. Okay. So we've collapsed down and we now have five quarters of development cycles as opposed to four. And that quite frankly, if you put a dollar value on it is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So developer productivity. Any like new cool things that have happened, top line revenue growth, any impact to applications? Yeah. I mean, do you think about what is the battlefront now? Whether it's online banking, whether it's retail, whether it's healthcare even, what is the battlefront? It is your app, your phone, your mobile device. And it is the ability to self serve content, information and transactions. And so all of that is happening because people are transforming the way they're doing business around applications. Many customers going to eat this up. They saw them made the holy grail problem. I mean, it's so obvious to us, but getting data in real time, having speed and scale and relevance is super critical. How do you guys compare with the competition? Are you guys ahead? How do you guys compare versus other solutions? Are there anything like you guys? What's out in the marketplace? Share your perspective on the landscape and how do you guys compare? Right. So you're asking a marketing guy, how do we compare to the competition? So of course, I have this very convenient chart that shows us being the leader compared to everybody. The reality is 3,000 customers, 37 countries, nine years in the marketplace. We have been there and done that at scale in the enterprise and we, five of the top global 20 financial institutions. Four of the 10 energy companies in the world. Four of the 10 top retail organizations in the world. We have done it for the largest companies in the world and we continue to deliver value at scale in the enterprise. I love your saying. You said for hundreds of millions of value. That sounds like a lot and people might go, oh, well, how do you do it? So your cloud and your DevOps, which is all about agility and speed. If you take a net present value, a discounted cash flow, a break even or whatever curve you draw. And I think I heard three months. You compress that by a quarter and then look at the numbers. That's the value, right? So if it's $200 million in revenue, do the math. If it's $10 in revenue, okay, it's not going to be as much but you're talking to the companies that you're talking about the industries, talking about big, big projects and a lot of revenue associated with them. So you talked about cloud and DevOps. How was your business model sort of cloud and DevOps? Can you talk about that in terms of the way we do business, customer to activity? So increasingly, cloud has been for us a place where all of these use cases are executed. And as a result, the business model has been BYO, right? So I'm going to buy a license from Actifio and I bring it to Amazon, Azure, Google, what have you. More and more we're seeing a mixture of marketplace transactions plus the traditional sort of- Cloud marketplace? Cloud marketplace and you mentioned Live Nation. They are in many ways way ahead of the curve in terms of just going wholesale. I'm out of the data center business, I'm all in on cloud and I'm just going to buy everything through the marketplace. But increasingly we're seeing marketplace transactions becoming a relevant part of our business and the fact that we've integrated with the top six public cloud providers and increasingly we're going to expand out to Huawei and Oli cloud and more is it's not just a destination to conduct a use case, it is becoming a platform to conduct transactions as well. And a really important channel. Yeah, absolutely. Brian, great to hear from you. Congratulations on your success. Love the business model. We've been sitting on theCUBE so many years. Data's at the center and the time to get the data from any database or a database into the application speed is critical. That makes great value. So thanks for doing that, appreciate it. Thank you guys, always a pleasure to be here. We had it, Tiffy. Of course we're bringing the data to you in real time here on theCUBE at VMworld. We're live in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more after this short break.