 from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by SiliconANGLE. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. It's the 12th year of the event, the fifth year we've actually had theCUBE here. Dave Vellante, my boss, was here the first year, every other year. I've been kind of manning it solo, great community here. Got to talk to a lot of users, and really looking at some of the transitions that are happening in the industry. This event is all about virtualization and cloud, and to help me kind of put an exclamation point on everything that we've been looking at here and what's happened in the industry, have it all welcome back to the program, Rob Stochet, who is the SVP of product at Zerto, someone I've known for longer than I even realized, and been on the program anytime. But first time, I think, since you've been at Zerto. Yeah, first time since I was at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, so I'm glad to join you guys here, and great event, glad to be able to get down here today. Yeah, so Zerto, a company we've known for many years, I happened to know one of the earliest investors in the company, and when I look at two of the biggest industry shows when you talk about virtualization and cloud, it's VMworld, and it's Amazon's re-invent show, and I remember the first or second year we did Amazon re-invent, the Zerto booth was right behind us, and so your company that really spans that gamut, helping customers with that, so Rob, I want to get your viewpoint, you talked about why people come here, but what are you hearing from the users, and what are some of the big challenges they're facing, and how are they looking to manage some of those transitions? Yeah, I think it's really critical to have events like this that are a lot of different vendors that are here, because I think when we see a number of companies going out and looking, and I was with a customer down in New York City yesterday, does software for FinTech, and what they were looking at is, how do we leverage multicloud? It becomes very important, they're looking at, it's not going to just be Amazon, it's not just going to be Azure, it's not just going to be VMC on AWS, they're looking at how they're going to have a multicloud strategy, and I think that when, what we're hearing from customers is, there's a lot of confusion in the market, and I think that's why this program, and others are really great at cutting through what is real, what's not real, how do you look for the ability to have that data mobility between clouds, but with security, especially today's privacy day, on the 25th, so you start to look at it and go, hey, security is a big thing, and a big theme from what people were saying here today too. Yeah, and one of the user interviews that I really love today talked about one of the biggest challenges he saw, he said, gosh, security, think about the Intel discussion there, what's that going to mean? He actually said, the performance issue actually isn't a big deal for him from an architectural standpoint, but security? Oh my gosh, he's in healthcare, it's like if he's in violation, or if patient information gets out there, this is the kind of things that put companies out of business. Absolutely, yeah, and I think that's what we're hearing, I mean, especially yesterday, it was okay, how do you layer encryption on top of your solution? How do you utilize the different types of secure transfers? How do you make sure that the data is secure? There's a lot about that resiliency of the data and making sure that you can get it back, and it's immutable for that matter. Yeah, one of the things, when we talk to customers, it's funny, in the industry, we're always arguing as to what's the right terminology? It's like, I still get to have a company that said that they had a convergence problem that they were trying to fix, and also, it's like a hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, no, they have a cloud strategy, and yes, they're using SaaS, yes, they're using public cloud, and yes, almost everybody's got something in their data center, and how do we get our arms around it, how do I have the services that work with me wherever I am, whether that's data protection, security, replications? So, we're zero fit into that discussion, and how are customers doing it, getting their arms around these big challenges? So, I think a lot of, when I'm out talking to the CIOs and the VPs of infrastructure and having those conversations, a lot of what we help them understand is, here's where you need to go, and here's the choices you need to make. Are you going to use Azure? Do you have an EA with Microsoft? Because you've probably been paying for Azure credits that you're not using. So, start there. It's simple, it costs you nothing extra. Get your feet wet, dip your feet in there. We see a lot of customers of ours that use DR as a service as the first stepping stone into getting into the cloud. It's a nice, easy way in. They can get their feet wet, they can test out the performance, the security, they can do user acceptance testing without actually having to go there. They can also get a realistic view of the cost. I think that was talked about earlier today, too, with some of the Amazon stuff, is that really, you have to understand the cost. It's not the same as owning it on-prem, but then again, you're not having the on-prem anymore. So, if you can get away with that, when we see the people taking strategies, a lot of it is data center consolidation, but maybe now I'm down from six data centers to two, and I still need to have that third copy. Where do I put that third copy? Do I put it at another data center? Do I go to a managed service provider, cloud service provider, or do I go to the public cloud? So what we try to do is offer them a platform, the Zerto platform, that can actually take them to all of those different places. We can take them there and bring them back. Yes, people use us for DR, but really that data mobility and the data flexibility really helps them stay away from the vendor lock-in as well. Yeah, and what do you hear from customers when they talk about vendor lock-in? There's very few companies out there that do a good job at being, it's like, oh, VMware, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, yeah, we can actually help you across the board there. And how much is lock-in a concern, and how do you, as a software company, stay agnostic and still fit into all of those environments? Yeah, the staying agnostic is really tough because some people are nicer than others to work with, and you try to not pick your favorites, but at the same time, we let our customers drive us to where they're going. I think that when we've started to look at the bigger picture, people start out, you know, Amazon's the 800-pound gorilla in this space. Everybody tries Amazon first. Maybe they didn't like or have the experience, they thought it was a lot more work than they thought it was going to be, so they start to look at other options. So when we started out, 2014, we've been shipping our two Amazon, DR to Amazon, part of our platform. Now, over the last year, we've added in the go-to and come back from Azure, and we'll soon release the next iteration of that next month that will take you even further among and across those different platforms. And I think to your point, it's a how can we give our customers choice? If you want to use a managed service provider, such as like an IBM, where they're based on Cloud Foundation from VMware, you can use that. If you want to then go from there to Amazon, our product will actually enable you to do that. And I think that's what we can do is look at our customers and they've luckily enough driven us to this heterogeneous cloud environment. Yeah, why don't get your comment on something. When people talk about compute moving to more of a utility model, but it's not the way utility was where if I'm getting energy as a consumer from one place or another, it doesn't, I don't care whether it's wind, solar, coal, nuclear, because I'm just getting it. When I look at cloud computing, even infrastructure as a service, there's things that need to happen. When I talk to most software companies, it's yes, I'm going to support across the board, but there's special integrations. There's things that I can do to make Amazon better, Azure better, Google better, and it's all a little bit different. And even with things like Kubernetes, it's not homogenizing IT. The big problem we see out there is, IT is a heterogeneous mess. There's never killing anything. It's all, oh, and add this and add this and add this. And now I've, you know, it's like, we've got a bad episode of hoarders. Is what we've got. So I'm curious from a customer standpoint and from, you know, a product standpoint, maybe, you know, talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I think our customers have been very clear to us that simplicity, and I think that's what you're getting at, is that simplicity is job one for us. If we're not being simple about what we do and we're not really trying to make it all that one platform, we're not doing our job. We're doing it to service to our customers. So our Azure product looks identical to our AWS, looks identical to our IBM, looks identical to one of my other cloud service provider products. Looks the same as your on-prem VMware to VMware or VMware to Hyper-V for that matter. I think part of it is we've taken the approach that exactly that. We got to be heterogeneous, but we got to make it all look the same and be the same user experience. So I think what we as a industry can do better is really focusing on, you know, on user experience and single platform to help across these because like you said, we have a customer, he uses both AWS and Azure. And he was one of our first customers on AWS and one of our first customers using our Azure product. He said that certain Linux systems actually run better on Azure than they did on Amazon and that surprised him. But he was able to go up and test them out, put them up there, fail them over and do it in a test bubble and see how well they ran. And I think to your exact point, that was a surprise to him. And I think it's the, your mileage will vary with the different clouds and being able to go there, test on them is very important because you're going to find that, like he did, that, and we kind of look, he's a smaller company. They were fabrics manufacturer, Tincate. They really focused on having that multi-cloud strategy because for them, they didn't want to have all their eggs in one basket either. But they found that certain applications ran better on Azure, certain ran better on AWS. So they're going to have that multi-cloud strategy. All right, Rob, help bring us home. What brings Zerto to an event like this, kind of user groups in general and VTUG specifically? Yeah, so the VTUG, we've been a long-term supporter of this I think since pretty much the founding of the company. So one of the reasons is that a lot of our customers come to it. So we want to support them getting more knowledge out there. Obviously we get to reach more customers and more potential customers, but at the same time, it's about the community and building that community. And we look for more. In fact, we're starting to do even local user groups of our own. We've kind of seen that the user groups have fallen off and in particular around disaster recovery and IT resiliency, there's really no place to go. You had ISACA, you had different organizations for certifications, but really that community where I can go and understand what are my peers doing and get that group learning is so important. And that's why we've been a long-term supporter of this. All right, well Rob Stretche, really appreciate you helping me wrap up, put an exclamation point on what's going on here at the show, as well as in the industry, all the major changes happening, virtualization and cloud. Make sure to check out thecube.net for all of our coverage. We have a huge lineup of 2018 events. Feel free to reach out to the teams. As always, I'm really easy to get on Twitter. I'm just Stu at STU. And thank you so much for watching. I'm Stu Miniman and you've been watching The Cube.