 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Sai Mukundan. He is the Director of Product Management, Cloud Solutions at Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks, Rebecca. Thanks too. Nice to have you guys here at the Cohesity booth. Microsoft Ignite. And thank you for hosting us, I should say, yes. Absolutely, it's been wonderful. So we already had your colleague, Lynn Lucas, on this morning. She was terrific. And she gave us a high level vision of the news. So why don't you break it down for us? Explain to our viewers exactly what Cohesity was announcing here at Ignite. Sure, so broadly speaking, we announced three things this morning. The first one, we've seen a lot of customers, Optic Office 365. In fact, that's one of the first or initial use cases of how they adopt Microsoft's solutions more of as a service. So the ability to now back up and recover O365 has come up quite a bit in our customer conversation. So we announced a solution that will be available shortly so customers can leverage the same Cohesity platform that we had up until now to also back up and recover O365. So that was number one. Number two was around Azure Data Box. So this is a relatively new offering from Azure. It was up until now it was in preview and now it's going GA. So the fact that we can now integrate with Azure Data Box as a means for customers to move data from on-premise to Azure, a great initial seeding for long-term retention and the fact that we integrate seamlessly with that. That was the second piece of the news. And then the third one is really around the hybrid cloud message and the model, right? Really, you know, hybrid, I know it's true you like to refer to it more as it's an operational model. It's not about, you know, what the cloud is, but it's more of an operational model. And in that model, customers are always looking to, you know, leverage it for disaster recovery purpose. And the ability to fail over to Azure and then bring it back on-premise fail back, that capability is sort of like the third underpinning of the announcement this morning. Yeah, and Sai, one of the challenges we have is if we look at cloud and say it's an operating model, well, the challenge we have is it really is a multi-cloud world. If you look especially here in the Microsoft ecosystem, absolutely, start with Office 365. Microsoft pushed a lot of customers to the SaaS model. I have my data center, I might be probably modernizing things there and then I have the public cloud. Well, when I look at my data, I want to be able to manage and interact and leverage my data no matter where it lives. So that's where, as I said, Microsoft lives in other places. It sounds like your integrations are going to help customers span and get their arms around their data and leverage their data no matter where it lives. Yeah, I particularly like the use of the word span because as you may know, we call our underlying distributed file system the span FS, right? So the idea is that it spans on-premise cloud and to your point, multi-cloud as well, right? So the ability to use the same platform and that's really what drives customers today. When you look at sort of what are the three aspects of our solution that they like, I would say one is the scalability, the fact that they can start small and then scale as their environment grows, that's important. The second is around, everything today is around automation, API-driven, API-first architecture, right? And the fact that we are policy-based, API-driven really, really resonates with them. And the third one is the simplicity and ease of management. I mean, you can build all these solutions but at the end of the day, it has to be simple for customers to consume and that's something that really resonates with prospects, partners and customers we talk to. All right, so I'm wondering on the Azure data box, if you can help unpack that a little, we had some Microsoft guests on, Jeffrey Snowver walked us through, there's a couple of different versions of them, some are for data movement, some of them there will be really kind of edge compute and AI capabilities there. Which ones do Cohesity use? What do you see as the use cases that you'll be playing in? Sure, so before I go into the solution and the use case, I think one of the key aspects of why that announcement is important for us is it also shows the kind of engagement and close technology partnership that we have established with Microsoft Azure, right? The fact that we are one of their launch partners both during the preview and now in the GA timeframe and it's important for both customers and partners because that gives them a good sort of understanding that we are there in establishing thought leadership, we are there in working closely with Microsoft in this case, along with other technology partners out there. Just coming back to the solution itself, there are a couple of flavors of data box. So the one that we have done extensive integration with is data box. There's another version of it, which is called the data box edge, which also has compute in it. But the idea here, the use case is really around, you know, when customers are looking at Cohesity, there is backup and recovery that they can do from on premise, but Azure and Azure Blob Storage in particular becomes a seamless extension for long-term retention. Now, there are a few customers and I can relate to several who have asked, hey, I have a large enough data set that needs to be seeded initially, right? And obviously the network becomes a bottleneck in that case. So with data box, the ability to now transfer that data into your on-prem, like you get the data box shipped to your on-prem is, get it loaded through Cohesity, seamlessly get it hydrated in your Azure account. And from that point on, we only send the changes or the incremental data. So that is really appealing to both customers as well as partners who are really engaged in sort of these migration projects in some cases. I was really interested in what you were talking about with the thought leadership and your approach to partnerships because Microsoft selecting Cohesity as a partner, it's a real stamp of approval for Cohesity, a real validation that this company's for real. How do you then think about who you will partner with, particularly if the company is say, only five years old or pretty new to the space or maybe not as well known? Yeah, I think one of the things that Mohit, you know, Aaron and he's a pioneer in distributed systems and is the founder of Cohesity. One of the things that he established right from the get go is the ability for the product to scale, scale on-premise, but also that the cloud has to be very seamless. It's a natural extension of what the architecture is intended to do or achieve. And so that kind of made it easier for us on the product team to figure out who is it that we need to partner with. And Azure is obviously a leader in that space, particularly over the last few years. And I want to go back to something that was mentioned in the keynote yesterday. It's not a know it all, but it's a learn it all, right? And the learning that we have had as we have grown Cohesity and the product has grown and as we acquired customers and talked to prospects is they want to work with the likes of Microsoft Azure, leverage the infrastructure that they have to offer. So we started there and we said, if customers are asking for it, we do it and we learn along with them on why and what the use cases are. And it started with going back to my earlier comment, long-term retention. And now, as an extension to that with the hybrid cloud where not only storage, but leveraging disks, leveraging Azure compute, that's now become an extension of what we started off with. And so we have Azure data platform cloud edition, which is Cohesity running on Azure. So I would say how we made the decision in this case. A, the product and the foundation really set that for us. But B, more importantly, the customers really asking for it and asking for that integration made it easier for us to determine that, hey, we absolutely need to partner with the cloud vendors. Sorry, I'd like to build off of that, the customers and what they're asking for. This is a very large ecosystem here. To be honest, we know that Azure, Microsoft is a big player in cloud. When I look at the show, Azure's a piece of the overall discussion. So it was a little surprised not that we're hearing more about Azure here, but it's because if you look at just order magnitude, how many customers Microsoft has on Windows and Office, obviously that's going to dwarf customer adoption in general. Where are your customers when they talk about cloud adoption, your customers, do you find them more? Windows customers in their own data center versus Azure, what are your customers doing in adoption of Cohesity Cloud products in general? Sure, so if you look at the typical on-ramp of customers, more often than not, at least I would say over the last couple of years, our customers have typically started with the on-premise because their immediate pain point, while the platform can do a lot of things, customers are always looking to also solve their immediate pain point while looking into the future. So their immediate pain point was really around how do I make my backup and data protection systems, first of all, simple, efficient and less fragmentation. And while I'm doing that, how can I then potentially invest in a platform that is capable of doing more? And that's something that Cohesity offered in the on-premise world. And as a natural extension to that, as both from the bottoms up, as storage admins and backup admins started looking at leveraging cloud or Azure in particular for as an extension of their storage infrastructure, as well as from the top down, more of like the business decision makers and the CIOs driving that mandate of, hey, I want you to think about cloud first and have that mindset, I think it really appealed to them because now they could start leveraging Azure Blobs, again, back to that long-term retention, legal hold, compliance standpoint, and then building off of that, building off of that to do test-app. We have a great feature, it's called Cloud Spin, the ability to take some of the on-premise infrastructure and to your earlier questions too, it's, we have seen customers, both VMware, Windows, Hyper-V environments, and believe it or not, some customers still have physical systems. And the fact that Cohesity can take care of all that in the on-prem world, while seamlessly helping them adopt cloud is really the kind of customers that we have seen in this journey that we have taken along with our customers and partners. Well, this is theCUBE's first time at Ignite, I know you're relatively new at Ignite. I'm really surprised about that. I would think you guys would have made a number of appearances, but I'm glad it's the first time when it's at the Cohesity booth, so wonderful. So we're so excited, but what are some of the things you're going to take back with you from this conference? I think for me, this conference as well as any other such conference in particular, it's really the excitement, right? You go back and you reflect on the last three, four days you spend here and it's about all the great conversations that we have had with customers, prospects and partners. Secondly, we had a session earlier this morning, a Cohesity session. We had Brown University join us and then there's going to be another one tomorrow. We're going to have UPenn and HKS. We are working on your alma mater, Cornell, by the way, too, so we'll get that. Excellent. Don't be proud. Yeah, and so the fact that we had all these sessions and some really great attendance, and attendance from folks who are yet to embrace the Cohesity solution, so it's great for us to get our message out there. Getting the word out. Get our word out there. And I would say the last thing for us is also showcasing to Microsoft here in particular, the fact that we have this big presence here and the excitement it's having is a great message to the Microsoft executives and the leadership team that we work with as well to sort of show more love. We already have enough that we get attention from them, but this is more of a validation for them to say there's more that we should be doing and could be doing with Cohesity. So I think those are probably the three things that I'll walk away with and build on what we learn from Ignite here. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Cy, for coming on the show. It was great having you here. Thanks. Likewise. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit.