 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios. The conference season is just about ready to take off. So we still have some time to get some cube conversations in before we hit the road and spend the next several days and weeks and months in Las Vegas, Orlando, and points on the compass. So we're excited to have our next guest. She's Lynn Lucas, CUBE alumni, CMO of Cohesity. Lynn, great to see you again. Jeff, super to be here for the first time in Palo Alto. Yeah, how do you like the studio? I love it. It's a little different than the vibe at the conferences, quieter than the conferences, but I like it. Good, good, well welcome. So you have a relatively recently joined a new company, Cohesity. So congratulations on that. And just curious, one, give us just a quick overview on Cohesity, but more importantly, what did you see that attracted you to get you to join? Great, yeah. So Cohesity just joined at the beginning of January, having a blast. And really what I saw that attracted me to Cohesity was three things. It's an incredible founder, Mohit Aaron, who was formerly the CTO and co-founder of Nutanix, called the father of hyperconvergence. And before that, the lead developer at Google File System. And he really is doing what a lot of Silicon Valley is known for, which is he took a step back and is looking at this space in the data center that we call secondary data, backup, archive, replication, test dev, analytics, and said, you know what, the world doesn't need a better point solution, need to take a step back and really look at how this goldmine of data can be used in a much more efficient way, because data is, after all, what's powering the world's businesses and their differentiation. So the technology, Mohit himself is a founder, and then it's just an incredible startup culture. It's fast growing, we're having fun every day, I love going to work. It's amazing, I'm just doing some background, you guys have raised $160 million. The list of leadership and board and advisory is pretty amazing, it's like a who's who from this industry. So he pulled together a hell of a team. He really has, and you know, Carl Echenbach, former COO of VMware is on our board. Cube alumni, Patrick Rogers, Rob Sammon, who is the, yes, NetApp, Dan Wormenhoven, Google Ventures has invested, Sequoia, I think Sequoia said we're the fastest growing company in their portfolio. We grew 600% year over year last year, 40, 50% growth in new customers every quarter, because there's just such a pent up demand to really solve some of the problems that haven't been addressed over the last really couple of decades for the inefficiencies and how all of this data for these secondary workloads is managed. Right, so you got an interesting graphic on the website talking about secondary data, and that it's really the ugly part of the iceberg below the water, significantly bigger, heavier, and more expensive to manage than the primary data. So I wonder if you can take us into that a little bit deeper, how did it get to be such a problem, and why is this new approach a better way to attack that problem? Sure, and an iceberg is really kind of a good metaphor when you think about the data center. You know, we've got our production applications, primary storage, and that's what's floating above the water, and we see that 20%, but below is another 80%. And according to most industry analysts, IDC, Gartner, that represents not just 80% of the data, but 80% of the cost. On average, IDC says every organization has 12 to 14 copies of each piece of data. And that happens because what's grown up over time is point solutions for all the various workloads. You've got one set of hardware and software for backup, you've got yet another set for test dev, you've got another set for analytics, there's been no sharing of the data, there's no single infrastructure, knowing even, or operations, knowing what you have and being able to tell you where the inefficiencies are. And so you think about a developer in a retail or a bank organization, they're requesting a copy of data to develop the new applications, that copy gets instantiated, they do their work, never gets erased, just like in our consumer life, they ever erase photos off your phone? I can't tell you how many copies and copies and copies, because it's often, it figures it's easy just to make another copy just in case, right? Exactly, so then that never goes away and then you've got yet another copy for the next time they need an updated set. And so this has been multiplying and it creates just an incredible expense to maintain and operate. And it also creates a lot of risk these days for organizations because of new regulations like GDPR. Where are all those copies of personal information from EU citizens? People don't even know anymore. And then there's two other big factors that have come into play in recent years in a software defined and public cloud. Two really big, huge tidal waves of change that were not accommodated in prior architecture. So you guys obviously saw that opportunity glommed on and are now offering something that can take care of the different types of needs based on what type of infrastructure you need. Really not at a company level, but really at the application or the workload level, right? Yeah, so I think it's a great point and I won't claim any credit for this. This is Mohit and his team of developers. And really as you pointed out, what do we see organizations looking for now? They now realize that, hey, if I can get a software defined platform, a lot of commodity hardware does a really good job for me and I want to have that flexibility to choose what vendor I might be using. So Mohit developed a software defined platform that addresses how do you bring all of these data and these workloads together in one platform? So I can have a consistent set of infrastructure and a consistent operational model and because of his heritage working at Google, being one of the lead developers for Google file system, it comes with this cloud first mentality. So this is not a bolt on with a gateway to get to Amazon or get to Azure. This is a software platform that natively understands and spans both your private cloud and your on-premises data center and the public cloud. So it gives an IT organization the flexibility to choose how do I want to use the public cloud with my private data center and not have to think really about kind of that plumbing below the waterline anymore. Because there is no either or, right? It's really workload specific where that particular workload is and the storage that supports that workload. So let me be specific about what Cohesity offers. It's software defined and we offer a appliance so that it's very easy for an organization to go in and say, you know what data protection backup, frankly, legacy architectures built 20 years ago before the advent of the cloud, biggest pain point that we see right now can move in a Cohesity hyperconverged appliance and solve that problem and gain massive business benefits right away. We offer global deduplication, very advanced compression, erasure coding. And we have customers that are telling us that they're seeing eight to one, 10 to one, even 14 to one ratios that really then give them a 14 to one ratio and a reduction of capacity to store the same amount of stuff. Versus from some of the current customer or current vendors that they have been using from what I would call these legacy architectures. Right, right, that's pretty significant. So they're getting an amazing storage efficiency. And then they often next say, wow, I'd like to give my developers the flexibility of spinning this up in the cloud. So we offer a cloud edition that allows them to choose whether they want to operate on Azure, on Amazon, on Google Cloud and be able to move that data into the cloud, use it for a test dev instance. But again, all under the same software interface all looks like one operating system, no bolt-on gateway to manage. And then, and I was going to say in the third part is many organizations obviously have remote offices, branch offices, so there's a virtual edition too. So I'm just curious on the cloud side. So Andy Jassy's been on a ton of times, great guy. You know, one of the promises of cloud is spin up what you need and spin down when you don't. As you just said, nobody ever spins anything down. So are you seeing customers have the same type of economic impact in managing their storage that's in the public clouds because now they're actually spinning down what they don't need or consolidating more efficiently? Yeah, so I think that we've seen in general in the industry that if you likened the data center and been maybe kind of a messy garage where there was a lot of things in the garage and weren't really sure what it was. A lot of folks, I would say five plus years ago, I kind of ran to the cloud because it was clean and new and it was like that new shiny storage box, you know, that you see parked on people's driveways sometimes and then realized that there can be a lot of expense because you're really replicating in the cloud some of these same silos if you're not careful. We're going to help customers avoid that. I think customers are much more sophisticated now than say five years ago and they're now looking at what's the best way for me to incorporate public cloud. So really common use case right now would be what I mentioned before, test dev, let's move something there, get the benefit of the compute, do some analytics on it, build some new application, maybe get spun down after that. But another really common use case is a lot of organizations worried about disaster recovery, bringing the cloud in as their second site because that's a very efficient way for them to do that and not build yet another on-premises data center. So the company's been around, the A round is 2013, you're coming in as a CMO, you're brand new and fresh, what's your charter, you know, you didn't come in at a low level, you came in with the C, what are you excited about? What, you know, again, why did they bring you in and what are you going to bring to the table and what are your priorities for the rest of 2018 and be honest, I still can't believe we're a quarter of the way through 2018. We're going to be at those shows pretty soon. I know they're coming. They are. So I'm here really to build on the good work that the team has done and I'm just really thrilled to be at the company. I think what my charter is, is to continue the company's expansion. So they've seen tremendous growth and in fact, we've just really launched into Asia. So we now have a large sales presence in Australia, New Zealand and we're going to continue to expand into the rest of Asia. Significantly expanded in Europe as well recently. So part of my charter is to bring the marketing programs to all of these new regions and in general to up our awareness level. I think Cohesity has an incredible opportunity to really be one of those companies that changes the data center landscape. And I want to make sure the world knows about the incredible benefits the customers are seeing already with us and do that in a way that really features the customer voice. I've been on theCUBE before and I talked about that. For me, that is all about ensuring that the customer voice is really front and center and so hopefully we'll bring a Cohesity customer here. Good. Well, I just want to ask you kind of from a marketing professional and B2B business, it's a really challenging time in terms of the scarcity now is not information which it used to be, now the scarcity is in attention and people can get a lot of information before they ever make it to your website within peer groups and hopefully watching some CUBE interviews, et cetera. So I'm just curious to get your perspective from a chief marketing officer. How are you kind of looking at the challenges of getting the message out? It's a really different world than it was years and years ago. People aren't reading white paper so much and you know, it's a different challenge. Yeah, and it's part of the fun actually in being in marketing and being in marketing in tech because a lot of that cool technology for marketing is invented right here in the valley too. So, you know, I think that word of mouth still actually plays an incredible role and it is that customer voice but bringing that out in ways that are accessible for customers. You and I know we're all very ADD, very time-sliced and so those small moments on social media where you can feature bits of information that get people's attention. In fact, we're running something right now which I think has a lot of legs because at the end of the day, I'm selling to a human, right? So we've got B2B monikers but at the end of the day folks are, you know, people that laugh, they cry, they want to have fun. So we're running a break up with your legacy backup campaign right now and I encourage the audience to go check it out. It's pinned on our Twitter feed at Cohesity but it pokes a little bit of fun at how you might break up with your older vendor and that's a moment that we think captures folks' attention and gets them interested so that maybe they do want to move down and read the white paper and so forth. So I look to do that through combinations of just, you know, bringing out Cohesity's incredible voice, our customer voice and then sharing it on social because that's the way people really get their information these days. It is really interesting because I think the voice of the customer or the trusted referral is actually probably more valuable now because it's just a different problem before I couldn't get information so that was a good valuable sort. Now it's really that person is my trusted filter because I have too much information I can't take it in so that continues to be that trusted filter and conduit so I could just focus on my peers and not necessarily try to read everything that comes out. Exactly, you know, so as an example, Manhattan Associates is one of Cohesity's customers and we've been super thrilled to be able to feature them, you know, through social, through our website and let them talk about the benefits of moving to the platform and what they've seen. And you know, I hate to say it but Gartner as well continues to be an incredible influence on most organizations but we're pleased to say that our customers chose Cohesity and we won the Gartner Peer Insights for Data Center backup software just about a month ago. So that again is another example of customers looking at the options that they have in voting with their voice and we'll continue to drive that message out in the variety of ways and hopefully get people engaged so that they can see that there really is a completely different way of managing your secondary data and getting a lot better efficiencies and a lot lower costs. Yeah, good, good, exciting times, challenging times, the old marketing mantra, right? Half of my marketing budgets wasted, I just don't know which half, so. You know, you got to cover all your bases from the old school Gartner to the new school, having some fun and some comedy. Well then, really fun to sit down and spend a few minutes and get deeper into that Cohesity story. Likewise, thank you and I'll be seeing you in Orlando, Vegas and those other points on the campus. She's Lynn Lucas, I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE from the Palo Alto studios. Great to see you, we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.