 Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to the district. You're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host for this segment, Dave Vellante. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Steve Graywall who's the federal CTO at Cohesity. Steve, great to see you. Thank you for having me. Good to see you as well. We're talking about at this most shows that we go to, people come from not only across the country, but around the world. And while there is an international flavor, Public Sector goes well beyond the US. Most of the guests we have on our local, you yourself come from Maryland and have worked on the federal agency for a lot of your career before you joined Cohesity. So why don't you give us a little bit about your background and what led you to join Cohesity recently? Yeah, so I've been with Cohesity for four months now, since February. Prior to Cohesity, I was with the federal government, served in a variety of leadership roles at four different agencies. Most recently, the deputy CIO at GSA, running the overall IT portfolio there. Prior to GSA, I was at the Department of Education for five plus years in a variety of roles to include CIO, CISO, CTO, and then also another eight years between DOT, HHS. So good cross-sectional between those federal agencies kind of experienced the issues firsthand. And when I came across Cohesity, the reason I joined the company was because a lot of the problems that federal CIOs are trying to solve, and we can talk more about those around cloud adoption, infrastructure optimization, et cetera, the real tangible outcomes, both technical and financial, Cohesity has a value proposition and a solution to each of those. So for me, being on the other side and actually experiencing the pain, but also looking at industry, looking at solutions, trends, real tangible outcomes that a company or vendor can provide. Yeah, so Steve, we definitely want to geek out with you on some of the technology. Before we do, since you came most recently from the GSA, let's talk about government purchasing. Think of anybody that knows the GSA, it's here's what I can buy, what I buy it for, companies that get into that, it is super important. When you talk about in the cloud era, there's some, we've done some interviews today that moving from the CapEx to the OpEx world can be challenging for the financial, the budgets thing. So give us a little bit of your insight. Yeah, so I think the traditional procurement processes blend more towards a traditional model with cloud removing to subscription-based pricing, it's on demand. There are creative ways to basically take advantage of the OpEx model where you're not having a traditional cash outlay buy and then basically on a cycle to do some level of renewal. We've practiced it, there are ways to do it. There's forecasting, not to exceed thresholds. There's parameters that you can put in place so you're compliant with the procurement policies, but still take advantage of those true as a service offerings and the OpEx offering. So it's certainly a paradigm shift for federal organizations, but it is being practiced and it is viable under the current construct. So when you talk to people about Cohesity, a lot of times I'll put you in a sort of a backup camp and you guys always say it's not about backup, even your tagline here says, it says web simplicity for secondary data. Yes. So how do you describe yourselves? Help our audience understand that. Yeah, so I think there's some, as definitely a misconception, we do many things. So we focus on secondary storage. Think of secondary storage as everything in the enterprise that's not your crown jewels. So the distinction between primary and secondary really is high SLA stuff, your emission critical apps, and that's your primary. Everything else in the data center, your data protection, your backups, your analytics, all of those other very fragmented data sources are considered secondary. So we've built a software-defined web-scale platform that essentially services all of those secondary silos and secondary workloads, right? So yeah, I think data protection is often an area that most organizations will start with as phase one, but the scale out value, the continuous innovation value is tremendous. Just to give you one data point, I think most organizations in government typically have point solutions that are servicing those workloads. So you can have anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen different products, different vendors that are basically providing those capabilities. So we've built a platform where you can reduce architectural complexity, you can bring simplicity in the enterprise, you can reduce costs, you can get native cloud integration, right? Given we're in this era of managing traditional data centers and we also want to adopt the cloud, you need that common data fabric in a native way, not in a bolt-on gateway kind of proxy way. So going back to that, we do all of that. So I think there's some misconception about data protection, but it's really having a space-efficient, centralized software-defined platform that is able to service all of those secondary use cases and secondary needs. When you think about secondary storage in the private sector, several things come to mind. First of all, data obviously is becoming increasingly more strategic. CXOs are much more aware of what's going on with secondary storage, data protection, obviously analytics. There's also a big gap in terms of what the business expects in terms of automation and capability and what IT can deliver and as a result, there's a lot of potential for churn with your existing software company. Yes. Bring that into your experience in the public sector. Yes. Is it similar or is there just sort of a more of an inertia and it's slower to change? Yeah, so I think generally, right, the pace of innovation is very fast. I think you're going to, what's best to breed today in terms of toolings and technologies may not be best to breed tomorrow, but to your point about business, I think data is a strategic asset for the business, right? So as we talk about digital transformation, which is largely driven by the end-user experience, data is a key component of that, right? The one thing the public sector does really well is capture and collect a lot of data. The one thing we haven't done well in my view is the utilization, the access to that data for decision-making, for analysis, for thinking about how do you improve end-user experience, stakeholder experience, whoever your constituency is, right? So that's where I think you get into this whole notion of dark data, where we do collection, we do capturing, but that data is really not available on demand. So I think another tremendously important play for Cohesity is around digital transformation where if you have those data assets, you're able to access those data assets, now you can think about using that data in a more business-mission context around the services you offer. But I think that's what, the other point around that is as we get better, as we see more innovation, we see more disruption, right? The one thing that you want to have full and total control over is your data, right? Whether you are going to leverage CSPs in a public fashion, whether you're going to leverage commoditized tooling that changes over time, the one thing that you want to make sure that you have full control over is your data. So Steve, I'm wondering, help connect the dots for us. There's lots of federal initiatives that are happening. Does that tie into things like digital transformation and managing data, help walk us through that? Very powerful, so going back to the reason I joined the company, right? If you just think about maybe the top five or six things that CIOs and federal agencies have been working on trying to solve, data center consolidation, data center optimization, cloud adoption, reducing architectural complexity, which ties right back to skill sets and workforce, right, digital transformation. All of those, I think, that are key themes that have been under review and under consideration for solutions for many, many years, Cohesity has a value prop in. If you look at the latest construct that the Office of American Innovation and GSA have put in place, this whole notion of centers of excellence, there's five centers of excellence that they've put in place, right? Around cloud adoption, infrastructure optimization, service analytics data, and they're using USDA as kind of a poster child for those COEs. Cohesity has a value proposition in each of those COEs. That's why, to me, it was incredibly powerful to see a vendor, to see a company that can have a multi-prong approach, right, to solve all of those problems for you and give you the flexibility to move at your own pace. So Steve, the only thing I didn't hear in what you just discussed, that I'm hearing at the show is application modernization. Hearing over and over from, whether it's the government agencies, education, nonprofits, that whole move to cloud native, and it's a long journey, I always say, the application upgrade is the long ball in the tent of modernization, but how does that fit into the whole story? Yeah, so replatforming, refactoring is an important consideration. I think the challenge around that is you're going to have coexistence of your legacy assets, or you're going to have net new development where you're leveraging cloud native and emerging technologies. I think you have to organize and assess all the variables for when is the right opportunity to replatform. So existing investments, renewal timeframes, skill sets, right? And I don't believe in a wholesale kind of approach to replatforming, I think leveraging things like serverless containers, microservices, you can start to take a bite at the apple in a phased approach. So as you kind of holistically assess your enterprise, you look at those variables, you figure out what the right points are for replatforming and what have you, you can also take a service by service approach to that journey, right? So it's not going to be, I think in the near future, not just all cloud native or all legacy, you're going to have this coexistence of both, and I think you have to build the underlying foundation that provides you the enterprise services and platform services that enable that transition, right? So once you have the foundation in place and then you are able to organize around it, you know what the right opportunities are timing-wise, then you can start moving to things like serverless and containers and what have you. Okay, so you're not just backup, we get that. What makes you guys different? This is obviously a hot space. It's a competitive space, a lot of VC money poured in. You have legacy guys trying to retool their portfolios. Why are you guys different? Why are you compelling? I think our architecture. I think our architecture is incredibly different. I think it's the most superior architecture in this space. I attribute that to our founder who was on the team for the Google file system. He's a developer there, right? So he understands scale, understands distributed, understands all of that. He was also the CTO and co-founder for Nutanix, right? So always also considered the father of hyperconvergence, right? So he really, in his learnings and his lessons from Google till present, applied all of those to the architecture. So if you look at, and I think the key distinction there is, those are ground up, you know, design principles and design decisions. They're not things that you can pivot and fix on the fly. So when I look at the space broadly, right, between the kind of the established dinosaur players and even some of the next-gen emerging players, I think our architecture is what makes us special, makes us different and where we really shine. Can we talk a little bit more about that? How would you describe that architecture? What are some of its fundamental principles? Sure, so things like global deduplication, for example, right? We're able to do cluster enterprise level global deduplication, which fits right into economics, which fits right into data center consolidation. We're not a rip and replace solution, right? So we've built the technology. We understand that technology is always mature, but enterprise change management's challenging. So we've also designed the product and the solution in a way where you can move at your own pace and you can move in a phased approach. We're not a rip and replace solution. Incredibly powerful. So what enables that, if I may, Stu? What enables that capability of not being ripped into places, API-based? Yeah, it's the underlying architecture, it's the interoperability, it's the integration. So if you want to basically subscribe to our vision but say, hey, I only want to utilize you guys for storage day one, I want to continue using my data protection software suite while I train, we retrain our folks and we adopt that, right? So it's the integration, it's the interoperability. With the product and design, that gives us that flexibility. I could trickle in function, get comfortable with it and then open up the spigot and then go. Yes, and then you can also, from a use case perspective, you can also move horizontally, right? Going back to continuous innovation. If you start with data protection, you can then look at test dev workloads. You can look at your analytics footprint. You can look at how you're doing via management. So there's a lot you can do over time. So that's why I think the power of the software really is the power of what we do. All right, so Steve, the cohesive solution with AWS has only been out a little over six months if I remember right. What are customers asking for you? What's on the roadmap? What should we be watching through the rest of the year to next year? I would say the most common kind of in public sector, the use case has been retention and archiving, right? So if you think about the sea of data we talk about, you think about all the compliance regs and you look at how folks are designing that. Just the ability to do data mobility from your on-prem data centers to Amazon Cloud and leveraging things like S3 or Glacier, right? So really being able to shift those things in an automated way via policy, whether that's time parameter policy, whether that's utilization policy based on cold storage blocks and what have you. That's been, I would say, the most widespread common use case that we're exploring. In terms of roadmap, we're launching something very exciting in the August timeframe called Cloud Spin where we can natively spin up VMs in the Amazon Cloud with no Cohesity software that's required in the native format of Amazon. So think about a scenario where you have an on-prem VM that could be a VMD case scenario and we can literally port that over, spin it up in Amazon's Cloud, right? In the native Amazon format. So what is Amazon to you? It's a target, is it a partner? What's the relationship like? It's definitely targeting in terms of storage for us. It's a strategic partner for us. We're joining forces and working on how we can partner with each other and do better on these accounts. In addition to archiving, I talked about retention. We have tiering solutions. We have replication solutions for DR. So we're joining forces to really see how we can augment and complement each other when we think about this whole notion of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. I think given the VMware partnership you mentioned earlier, I think given Nutanix and Google, everything you're seeing in the space, I think it's an ecosystem relationship, right? Where there's different needs and different requirements and how can we best serve service or customers working in collaboration? So you guys just did a big funding round. I think $250 million was announced at Cisco Live. Obviously going to be hiring a lot of people. What should we be watching as observers? What are some of the milestones that we should be looking for of progress? Yeah, I think go-to-market expansion is going to be a key focus for that expanding all of our capacity and reach across our global teams. We opened an office in Raleigh. We're going to continue looking at those strategic decisions as well. You know, from a huge vote of confidence endorsement, second ever software investment by SoftBank from in the enterprise software space. Slack was number one. So we're super excited. I think it's going to really kick things into the next gear and you're going to see Cohesity on the forefront. All right, well, Steve Graywall, really appreciate you giving us the update. Great insight as to what's happening, especially in the federal agencies, how Cohesity plays across this hybrid cloud solution. All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from the district at AWS Public Sector Summit 2018 for Dave Vellante, John Furrier. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.