 from the Moscone Center. It's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit here in San Francisco. I'm Stu Miniman, happy to welcome the program, a first time guest, Simon Cundin, who's in product management at Cohesity. Excuse me, Sai, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks to, lovely to be here at the AWS Summit. Okay, tell us a little bit about your background and really what led you to come to Cohesity? Sure, so as you know, Cohesity is one of the private VC funded companies in the Bay Area. I was actually in Microsoft Azure prior to Cohesity. Can't mention Azure here, we're at the AWS event, Sai. It's okay, I mean, that's where I was, right? So I've been in storage domain in the industry for some time prior to that at Veritas. Been in product management for a number of years and I think what drew me into Cohesity was really two things, right? One is the fact that it was led by, it's led by Mohit Aran, one of the pioneers when it comes to distributed systems and building and scaling companies. And then the second thing is to really be part of something where you can make a big difference in the industry. I mean, you're making a sea change in the storage domain of all things. It's become hard again and so to be part of that change was really what drew me into Cohesity. Bring us inside, you talk about storage in cloud. You know, when we think back, it's like, remember, cloud was going to be simple. It's just, you know, this wonderful thing, we just turn it on. I don't have to worry about things like, definitely don't have to worry about storage. I mean, you know, they'll take care of all my security. Oh, your backup goes away. I don't have to worry about any of the things anymore. Oh, wait, maybe we do need to worry about those things, right? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So what we see, you know, from customers is a lot of them really want to adopt the cloud and have been adopting it in their own way, right? But what they're faced with is really broadly, I would say, from a storage perspective, three different challenges. One is the fact that, you know, they have, they continue to have their on-premises and now they're looking to leverage the cloud. So that's number one in terms of how can I make it very seamless without any point products or point solutions. The second is, from a Cohesity perspective, we are really focused on what we call a secondary storage, things that are, you know, outside of what we call the primary, which is not your mission critical, high IOPS, low latency applications, but things like backup, test dev, DR, right? And so there's a lot of silos in there. So how do I, you know, adopt the cloud at the same time reduce the siloed infrastructure? And the third one is really around ease of use and management and simplicity around it. So that's really where the complexity comes in and Cohesity is trying to address that. Okay, so I, you know, when I looked up some of the marketing material from Cohesity, I heard the term it was, you know, hyperconverged secondary storage. Isn't that some box that lives in my data center? How does that fit into kind of the cloud discussion that we're having today? Yeah, so let me clarify that myth a little bit, right? So in the data center, yeah, you have a lot of boxes, right, but from Cohesity, the way we like to think about our solution is it's completely software-defined, right, software-defined API-driven approach to doing things. So let me kind of set you up with what the challenge is from a customer standpoint. So when you have secondary storage or the element of backup and test and DR, what customers typically have is a combination of, you know, media servers, master servers, talking to storage, tape, and then cloud becomes an afterthought. You typically have some kind of a cloud gateway talking to, you know, various different public clouds, right? So you can see how this environment is pretty complicated in the fact that you have different point products. So very, you know, scattered and inefficient. The second thing from an inefficiency standpoint is the fact that there is the same copy of data maintained across many different systems. And then now when you think about the cloud, you're now trying to manage the on-premise with the cloud, right? And managing it in two different environments is not very easy. That's the problem space. And then with Cohesity, what we're trying to do is we have what we call the data platform. Again, that's the software-defined aspect of it which can run on hardware that we provide or it can run on hardware that the customers bring to the table. So again, that's where the software-defined nature comes in. And the same software, we call it the cloud edition, can run on AWS or any of the other public clouds as well. Okay, so, but paint a picture for me is the data center kind of the primary piece and the cloud, is it kind of a backup archive, things like that? Or are they equal and they live? Are there some customers? Can I just have Cohesity software only in public clouds or does there need to be some data center component of this? It's really all of the above, in the sense that we have customers who think of a hybrid approach to doing things. So they have their on-premises and the cloud as well, right? And in the hybrid approach, they're typically trying to do two things. One is leverage just the storage in the cloud as an extension of their on-premise, wherein you could archive the data for long-term retention or for tiering. And then the second use case is really around test dev and disaster recovery in the cloud. Then we have a second set of customers which are born in the cloud only, right? And that's where our cloud edition product, the software-defined nature of it helps them to run in the cloud and solve the same pain points. We don't want any silos now existing in the cloud, right? And then there is a third category wherein, they are predominantly on-prem today, but heavily looking to leverage the cloud. And Cohesity is that data continuum, so to speak, in terms of a single platform, a single fabric that can manage both on-premise as well as the cloud environment. Great, so I heard cloud edition, I could be only in the cloud and can work with Cohesity. Absolutely. When I look at customers, it's typically heterogeneous environment. It's great if I've got some brand new, born in the cloud, there, but most customers, they've got a heterogeneous environment, which means I've got multiple different storage types in my data center. I'm probably using multiple cloud services and would think that that'd be a good position for Cohesity to be that secondary storage layer to help manage all of that no matter what we are. Am I getting that right? Yeah, absolutely. I would say the more fragmentation or the more point solutions a customer is using today, the greater the benefit that they can realize from Cohesity, because we are really bringing all of that together. So you mentioned storage. Storage is a big part of it, but we also see a lot of customers looking to adopt more compute as well in the cloud. That's where the likes of Amazon EC2 and EBS really comes into play as well. And in that case, really the use cases are test dev, disaster recovery, and then the fact that they can do more with the data. One of the other things that our platform offers is the ability to do analytics on it, the ability to find insights, as Moe would like to call it, it's dark data today, but we can shed some light on it. So that's really where the direction is where we are headed in terms of innovation and where Cohesity is headed as a company. What do you find from customers? Are they aware of the challenge that they have in the cloud? I think in the data center, it's kind of well known that I need to be able to deal with these. Are there customers that are just unaware that they've got some of these challenges or falling into pitfalls and losing data or having issues that they then have to deal with? I would say there are two sets of customers in that space, right? One is the customer who is really wary about things, who's really security conscious, who's kind of like dabbling with the cloud, maybe here and there, but really conscious about adopting it on a broader perspective, just because they're really concerned about whether it's PII information or any other security aspects, right? And so for them, having a solution that spans both on-premise on the cloud really is a great stepping stone, so to speak, in terms of now I can confidently move the data to the cloud, it's encrypted both at rest and in flight, and I can continue to use the same solution in both cases. We have a second set of customers I would say who are more, have been more bullish about the cloud in general, but now they're taking a step back and saying, hey, wait a minute, I'm continuing to face some of these same challenges that existed on-premise in the past, right? It's siloed again, I have various different storage, you know, you have S3, you have EBS, you have potentially other things, and then I'm running into the same pitfalls. So how can I take a step back, take a more holistic approach and solve the problem? So again, the software-defined nature of our solution really appeals to them because we come in and we can solve some of those problems as well, wherein they face the same problem set in the cloud world as they did on-prem world, and now they can say, hey, let me look at Cohesity as a solution that can get me there. All right, you brought up PII, so I have to ask the big question that everybody's mind lately. What about GDPR? AWS said this morning, all their services fully ready, you know, 100%, how does this impact kind of Cohesity and your customers? So GDPR is a big thing for us and our customers and prospects as well. So we are actively working on getting GDPR compliant. Today, our platform is FIPS compliant, so that's already a big stepping stone to getting there. So we look at GDPR in two ways again, right? One is the solution that we provide to our customers, the data platform and the data protect, as we call it, being GDPR compliant, meaning the data that lands on that system, the ability to delete the data, the ability to say who has access to the data, role-based access, things like that. The second aspect is our support and the fact that we have access to a lot of customer information ourselves, right? The fact that we can look at their systems and make sure that everything that we do internally is also GDPR compliant, so that the customers and our support systems and our Salesforce database is all GDPR as well. So both those elements come into play and we are actively working on all of that. I wouldn't expect that you'd be looking at the customer's data. Well, when I say customer's information, what I mean is the fact that when we access their platform, let's say they file a support ticket, the fact that now we can access their platform, debug their systems, look at the logs and alerts, it's equally important to be compliant there as well from a GDPR standpoint. Totally understand. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't any ambiguity there. Great, Sai, want to give you the final word. We look forward to 2018. What should we be looking for in Cohesity as it regards to the cloud marketplace? Yeah, I think a couple of things there. One thing that you will hear more about is Cohesity and cloud. We have been working on the cloud elements, both from a storage perspective and a compute perspective. But look to here, I would say more on what we can do with cloud addition, especially with the fact that there are more cloud native born in the cloud applications and providing the same data protection and platform abilities in the cloud. That is number one. And then the second aspect, I would say, is continued reinforcement of our hybrid message. The fact that we can solve this pain point for our customers in the on-prem world and in the cloud world, really from a scalable standpoint, from an API-driven standpoint and the ease of use and management. Those three themes is something that you will continue to hear from Cohesity. All right, Simon Cunden with Cohesity. Thanks so much for bringing us to the update. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from AWS Summit, San Francisco. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks.