 Welcome to theCUBE Conversations. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com. Here from the Marlboro, Massachusetts offices of Wikibon and joining me for this segment of Pre-VM World Promotion is Jennifer Gill who's the Global Product Marketing Manager at Zerdo. Jennifer, thanks for joining me. Thank you. So Jennifer, you and I have known each other for many years. I see you every year at VMworld, sometimes some of the local shows here in the Boston area. But the first thing we want to talk about today is an initiative, a blog you did I believe two years ago and there's a website and a whole initiative called I Am Not a Booth Babe. So we titled this segment, No Booth Babes at VMworld. So can you bring us back and explain to us where this initiative started? Yeah, so I was at a V-Mug in Charlotte and these two gentlemen were walking by and I said, hey, what do you do for disaster recovery? And they said, oh, we're happy with our solution. I said, well, what are you using? And they told me, and I said, look, just let me give you our top three points and against that scenario. So they said, okay, so I was talking a little bit about our product and why our solution was better. They were using SRM with a raid-based replication and talked about the savings, all these other things. And they started asking me about, well, can you use physical mode and virtual mode RDMs? I said, yeah, you can use both of those. And we started talking about reporting. And then they said, hey, you really know this product. And I was like, yes, I do. I'm the director of global product marketing. I have to know the product because I have to be able to talk about it. So this has not been the only time that happened to me or any other woman at Zerto. So we thought, you know what? We're gonna be aggressive at the next Beyond World Day. We're gonna come up with a campaign or something so that people know that everyone in our booth can speak intelligently about Zerto virtual replication and the company. So we came up with a pin that says, I am not a booth babe. Ask me a question. And we put together a website that talks about the story. Other companies can order the pins in different colors. And actually we had a blogger at VMworld and Mia. He had the pins made up in a bunch of different colors and handed them out. So like he gave the green ones, for example, to the women in the bean booth so that they could wear them. And people knew that we can speak about the product. So were you surprised at some of the reaction that you got? Yeah, actually it was really exciting to see how many people were really like, this is really cool that you guys did this. Jason Buffington, one of the other analysts, he wrote a little bit about it. He said, that's awesome. I think that's so cool that you guys are doing that. A lot of analysts have been really positive about it. You guys have obviously been very positive about it. So to see that kind of reaction was, for us it was really interesting and a lot of other women came up to us and said, hey, can I wear one of those? I have that problem too. So that was kind of cool too. Just to see that this has been happening which is unfortunate, but now we have a solution to, so it doesn't happen. Yeah, so we'll pull up the website so that people can see it. And this is not a new issue. I mean, I've had many friends that have written articles. I've shared on social media. When you go to a show, you wanna find information. I mean, why do I go to tech shows? I go there to find information, to network in people. And it's a challenge for booths to say, okay, how do I separate myself from the noise? Do I do a big giveaway? Do I have something that's gonna attract people? And we always said, it's like lazy to just say let's put a pretty girl to try to attack the geeks here because that'll draw them to the booth. I mean, the reason we go to shows isn't necessarily, it's work because I think why we're there. So, I guess you've probably gotten a mix of feedback. I'm curious what people when they're talking to you have said and kind of pros and cons and how do we get people beyond this so that maybe in the future we don't have to have this discussion about whether or not there are booth babes. Yeah, so absolutely, you definitely wanna have a draw. So you wanna have the cool technology, whatever it is. But I also think that, I've seen kind of responses from both sides. So, we put it the blog up and we got all kinds of comments, as you can imagine. So some of the comments were, this has been an issue for me for years. I go up to someone at the booth and say, hey, and ask them a question and I get this smile from whoever that person is because they can't speak about the product and they have to find someone else. And so that's an issue. And also, these are work events. Your company is probably sponsoring you to go, you're not paying for this yourself. So you do wanna make sure that the presentation of the company is professional across all aspects of your presence at our trade show. So that's something to consider as well. We do get the flip side that these people, it is mostly women and we kind of targeted that but there are men as well who go and they wear a costume or they do something fun to try to get that attraction. I think if they're in costume, it's more clear that they don't. They're probably not there to talk about the product. Yeah, you're saying when I saw Mr. Spock in the environment, I wasn't talking to him about the latest cloud storage solution. Exactly, he may not know about the latest trends and flash, so I'm saying. But what was surprising is when you see someone in a costume like, okay, there's the expectation but when that story happened to me in Charlotte, I was in my normal booth gear. I had on my Zerto red button-down shirt with my black pants and my black flat shoes. So I guess, so what I wanna do is just educate people and make sure that people know or at least try to change behavior and assume first that the person that you're speaking with knows about the product and the company. Ask and then second, if that comes back like, actually I'm not the right person for you to talk to then go to someone else. I mean, nobody expects everyone to be an expert on all the topics, you know, people come by theCUBE and they wanna ask me about the Hadoop Spark discussion. I say, you know, I know a tiny bit but you probably wanna talk my analytics and big data guy. So, you know, there's definitely that but, you know, you come by the environment. Yeah, it should be, right, default that not just because it's, you know, a woman that they might not know the answer. Exactly. Okay, so what's the reaction been that you've seen at some of the shows themselves? I think you mentioned RSA Conference was one that's making progress on this. Yeah, so I don't know, RSA Conference is in May, I believe? It's something like that in the spring, yeah. Let's go with the spring, that's a safer date. And before that they had put out something that they expect people to be, you know, dressed professionally, not in costume. So that was kind of a positive reaction in terms of seeing like, look, this is a work event. So you should dress how you're gonna dress at work to go. So we wouldn't, again, keeping it as a professional presence, so that was good. And then another, I was asked to comment on an article and I think even if you do have someone who is in the professional dress, you know, the red shirt, black pants, but maybe they have another role of scanning or things like that, it's a really low effort to teach, look, these are our top three points, be able to at least say these and then scan and, you know, hand out whatever it is they're giving and then send them on their merry way. So, like I would like to see changes like that as well. Like if you do have someone in the booth who's there for maybe not full product education, like, you know, someone like me or you would be there to do, but at least be able to say, okay, so, you know, we're hypervisor based replication, we're a storage agnostic solution, we can help you with your crowd strategy, be able to say those three things about Zerto all day long. All right, so VMworld's big show that's coming up. You know, how have you seen, how's the VMworld experience, you know, booth babes, no booth babes, what do people expect when they go to the show? So, I don't think that VMworld has a rule like RSA, so I think you probably will still see some staff there that's there for entertainment rather than product knowledge. And I guess as long as it's clear, because that's what really affects me personally and the other women at Zerto is that even though we're dressed in the booth gear and we're there to answer questions and have good discussions around technology and cloud strategy, people don't, they still say, hey, can I talk to someone technical? And I'm like, that would mean me. So, how do we, again, now, I'm just trying to change the behavior. I assume the person you're talking to knows the product and knows strategy and wants to talk to you about that. And then if they don't, then they'll get due to someone who does, you know, and costumes and stuff are fun, I like costumes, but I know that they're appropriate at work. Yeah, all right, so let's talk a little bit more about VMworld, you're part of the marketing team at Zerto. You know, how do you guys get attention at the booth? What kind of activities are you doing there and what do you expect to see at VMworld this year? So we're really excited about VMworld this year. We're gonna have a big booth there talking about our CloudCon new platform and we launched, last year, our any, any, any strategy. So any storage, any hypervisor, any cloud, we have a big party that we're doing on the Monday night which we're very excited with. We're doing that jointly with Kaminario. We also have an ecosystem program with some of our great partners, Kaminario, Pure Storage. I can't remember all of them and I hope they don't get angry that I can't remember them. Island, I believe, is in there as well. And we do, we give away T-shirts across all Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and on Wednesday, wear your red shirt and if we spot you, you'll be surprised with a prize. And then we're doing a big raffle too for something really, really cool. That's pretty cool. So, yeah, so, you know, VMworld, a lot of activity going on there. Yeah, I mean, so much in that ecosystem. You know, what's the latest on the company itself? There's Zerdo, so give us the update on kind of customer adoption and, you know, where you see yourselves playing in this expanding ecosystem. Yeah, so it's kind of funny. Zerdo, you know, the first release of the project was a disaster recovery solution, hypervisor-based replication, no hardware dependencies, all the VMware. Great starting point because there was not a solution like Zerdo available before. There wasn't a hypervisor-based replication solution period. We created that market. So that was really, really exciting. And then in May of this last year, we announced support for Hyper-V and Amazon Web Services, also really exciting. So now it's like, now we've kind of breaking, first we broke kind of the storage hardware requirements and now we're starting to break away from the hypervisor requirements and the cloud requirements. And what's been very exciting, so we have awesome customers at Zerdo. I run the reference program that's one of the things that I get to do and it's my favorite part of my job because our customers are really amazing and they love hearing about the technology and the product. And through this, actually, we just created a new piece of content. It's called What Can Zerdo Do For You? Because with this application encapsulation, so we create something called a virtual protection group, so group of VMs that make up like your financial application or your manufacturing application or whatever it is. And because of us being in the hypervisor and at that virtual layer, it lets you kind of move the application wherever you want to put it. So now we have application mobility, migrations are easier, doing updates and maintaining the environment is easier. And that's when we realized we really need to elevate the message to the cloud-containing platform. So that's, we announced 4.0, which is kind of the first step in enabling the cloud-containing platform so that you can use any hypervisor someday. Today is just VMware and Hyper-V and then use Amazon for backups or disaster recovery with Zerdo. So really that any, any, any, it's very exciting. Yeah, and it's interesting. You say your messages is any, any, any, which maybe VMware was liking your messaging because their product, their theme for the show this year is ready for any. I know some of us look at this and say, well, you talk multi-hypervisor, talk multi-cloud, talk some of that. That's not typically what we think of VMware for, right? They're not necessarily saying, oh, hey, it's perfectly fine if you want to use Hyper-V or KVM. No, you want to use AWS. No, I think they're gonna ask you to use vCloud Air. So yeah, any comments on VMware's any versus yours? Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. All right, so Jennifer, if let's wrap things up, people want to find out more about the, the booth babe piece and about Zerto, where do they go to find more information? Yeah, so Zerto.com, there's a whole page there on VMworlds, booth, where we're gonna be, parties, all that stuff. So that's all there and makes it really easy for people to find. And then we have the website, I am not a booth babe.com. So they can read a little bit more about the story and they can also have pins made. So we obviously do them in red for Zerto, but if someone wanted to do them in green or blue or yellow or orange for whatever company they work for, you know, I encourage them to do that. All right, well Jennifer, thanks so much for coming to the office today, looking forward to seeing all the activities you're doing at VMworld and look forward to catch an update as soon in the future. Absolutely, I'll stop by theCUBE. All right, thanks everybody for watching this, I've been at CUBE Conversations. Go to siliconangle.tv to find all the VMworld activity and our research on cloud, infrastructure and big data at wikibon.com. And thanks for joining us.