 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage, live at VMware Explorer. This is our second day of coverage, but you know that because you've been watching. You know we have two sets, Lisa Martin here with John Furrier, Dave Vellante, Rob Stretzky on the other set of their live at the same time. We have a great segment coming up next. We're going to be talking about data protection, security, ransomware, all that interesting stuff. One of our alumni is back, Mike Kale, the CTO of Primary IO and Lorenzo Sali, founder and CEO of Primary IO. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having us and having us back. All right. Our pleasure. You're going to be an alumni in about 20 minutes. Very excited to be here. Thank you so much. Thank you. Talk a little bit about Primary IO, mission, vision, what gaps in the market did you see in from a data protection disaster recovery perspective that led you, inspired you to start the company? Certainly. So we initially started as a migration platform for VMware workload. So knowing that close to 80, 85% of all enterprises are virtualized and are using vSphere is a size VMware platform for virtualization. So we focused on that segment initially. And kind of the secret sauce was we worked very early on with VMware vSphere APIs for IO filtering via product initially. And since we're sitting in the IO path, our algorithms were able to capture only the hot data set. So in other words, we were able to move VMs or applications to the cloud at a fraction of the time like any other product. And from a migration technology, we started looking into disaster recovery, disaster recovery as a service. And as you know, recent activities in the ransomware space. So we saw a gap for a product that could deliver a continuous data production in the disaster recovery space. What's been said with the feedback from customers? As ransomware is a household word, we talk about this done all the time. It's, I'm pretty sure my mommy has even heard of it. But it's also, nobody wants to become the next headline. Right, and that's a huge risk customer churn, brand reputation. Talk a little bit about how the ransomware landscape has evolved, especially the last few years as we've seen some big breaches. Indeed, so a few years back, disaster recovery was something nice to have. And with AI and technology growth and especially the cloud users, the cloud consumption, obviously the bad guys probably start thinking about it the same way. So it ends in the last 36 months plus that the market has been enormously into towards disaster recovery and ransomware adds to that actually. Guys, on the product and technology side and also the business model, we're here at VMware Explorer, what's the relationship with the VMware ecosystem? Okay, and as multi cloud or super clouds we see coming, the operating model with cloud crossing environments is an opportunity for exploits. And the surface area is now larger, obviously, and cloud native. How does that influence your product as customers start to architect the multi cloud, super cloud environment? They have to start getting, they got to start thinking like a systems concept, systems thinking, not just, I got to pull some security on. How do you guys look at the multi cloud? And that's really AI as a gift, so I'm serving the AI in there, but as they start, as enterprises start designing in their strategy to implement this environment, how do you guys vector into that? What's the pitch? What's the story? And how do they engage? First of all, just to answer the ransomware question a little bit further, you can't recover from a ransomware incident unless you're protecting your data. And you have to have a comprehensive data protection strategy, which is why we were one of our product, Protect.io, which is our disaster recovery as a service platform, not a product, was one of the top five announcements here from IBM. So we have a good, deep partnership with IBM. With respect to multi cloud, I think you have- Before we go into multi cloud, explain the relationship with IBM real quick. I'll let Lorenzo give the business context. Okay, we'll come back to that. And then I'll talk about technology. Stay with the tech for now. Okay, go ahead, continue on multi cloud. So we'll come back to the- Multi cloud, because VMware workloads in this whole super cloud architecture that they've been talking about, and kids been talking about it for at least a year, I believe, because we're embedded into VMware with the VAO framework, because we've taken the initial VAO filter that the migration product used, moved that into a replication filter. So we're doing continuous data replication of changed blocks versus backup or snapshot. So you, and we're replicating that into cloud object storage. So you think about the cloud object storage can sit anywhere, and you can attach that cross cloud. So then you have a data fabric and a protection fabric across your application workloads, wherever there exists. And then you can recover back into them, because we're- Got everything. And we orchestrate with vCenter APIs. So we're, you know, the rehydration instantiation of VMs on demand, the cloud provider doesn't really matter because we're abstracted away into the VMware environment. So that's basically an air gap for you guys and they use a bad analogy, but vCenter's what, the console, right, for that? Yeah, vCenter's the command and control aspect. So you guys are basically taking the data, putting it in the cloud, if they get ransomware to attack, you just recover and say, I'm not paying Bitcoin, we just come back and bring the data back. So you recover and we have the ability to recover up until a given point in time, because we keep the metadata of the blocks. And because you don't want to replicate, ideally you don't, basically, when you were infected with ransomware, and you want to recover up to a point before that. And we want to do it into an isolated environment to make sure so you don't proliferate ransomware into your cloud DR. So we've, we're integrating, and we'll announce this more formally later, probably in Barcelona, but integrating into IBM's cyber resiliency platform. So we're the data protector and provider into that. And then we'll orchestrate the failback once the security team makes sure the environment's clean. So the only way for the ransomware bad guys to get the stuff is to hit the cloud too? Correct, and they have to breach us. Which is almost impossible. And they have to breach the cloud provider too, because. Okay, Lorenzo, IBM, we met, saw you guys the first night we hear in the hallways of the event. I noticed you were with a lot of, can big contingent of IBM, I saw some old friends there, multiple entrepreneurs, big crowd, big relationship with IBM. Can you explain your relationship with IBM and how that fits into VMware Explorer, VMware and disaster recovery and ransomware? Certainly, so it's probably well known that IBM is the largest VMware operator, or VM, a number of VMs in the world. So our product being based on Viya platform, VMware, vSphere, then obviously it was a very natural path to make sure that the cloud that we pick, and that our disaster recovery and migration is working on is someone with largest number of VMs and happened to be IBM cloud. And now, not to drop names, in 2018, at the VM world, at the time it was called VM world in Barcelona, I run into Mr. Arvind Krishna. At the time he was a GM of the five VM cloud. So I had seven minutes to pitch. Nice. So we pitched the product and it was based on the hot data sets, the migration and hot data sets. And he loved the idea. We were introduced to the CTO at the time. And then from there, it was just a fast track as a technology partner. So therefore in the last three, four years, we've done quite a few migration projects for IBM and that partnership became deeper and deeper and it's an excellent partnership because a lot of poll we get introduced to a lot of customers. And we are a product company, a tech company. However, over time throughout COVID, there was a lot of demand for some services. And I think if you guys remember GTS, now Kinjal, I was in a spinoff. So there was some request and requirements for services as well. So over time we actually build our own services team that is being led by our field CTO out of London today. So now we've got a migration as a service and then naturally we talk about the disaster recovery as a service. So unlike other tools in the marketplace, we're just not a license that somebody has to go ahead and a customer has to do with themselves or they probably would have to find a professional services to do it. It's all in-house from discovery to migration to disaster recovery managed service. As a service, no product to install. You guys are running the service for the customer. Subscription based? Correct. Okay. It's software as a service. Software as a service, perfect. So it's easy to consume. What's the profile? I'm imagining probably of a range of high enterprises to small, medium sized, large businesses which are hit a lot by ransomware. What's the profile of your customer? Everybody? Almost, yeah. SaaS in a software as a service product. And this is the first authentic SaaS product on IBM Cloud, by the way. For VMware workloads. For VMware workloads. Exactly. So we're focused on those. So people who have VMware are mostly all their customers. Pretty much it's your profile. So, believe it or not, and these are all life opportunities that we have delivered in the last 18 months. We have seen as little as 50 VMs, as many as 2,500 VMs, 3,000 VMs customers. So, to answer your question, yeah. SMB, SMEs, as well as Enterprise. What's the IBM's interest? Because they have customers with a lot of VMware, right? Is that why? They like that? We believe that roughly there is about 900,000 or a million VMware VMs being managed by IBM Cloud today. Yeah, IBM has a good present. And IBM Cloud, because they offer bare metal servers in VPC, is a technology differentiator for the other clouds. Like, because now your workloads operate the same as they do on-prem, but you just don't have to manage the metal, which customers that resonate with. And because when we do failover, it's on demand, your total cost of ownership of our platform is much lower. Because you don't have to have the product running, because we're running the SaaS central console for the UI and we manage the data plane as well and the infrastructure creation and tear down. Mike, talk a little bit about disaster recovery as a service. Obviously, every industry is fair target for ransomware. It's a matter of when it's going to happen to us, not if at this point. But are you seeing any industries in particular being early adopters of the bandwagon of true disaster recovery as a service? I think the profiles and customers we've spoken to and are working with runs the gamut from education to SMB, to large enterprise, Fortune 100, Fortune 20 customers. Because it's top of mind for everybody. Like every day there's a bad ransomware headline, like our Field CTO found one today. I think it was in the UK where, it was a Danish company, Cloud Nordic, they were completely wiped out. They can't recover, they're not paying the ransom. So imagine you're a customer of anybody. And then think about financial sector, critical infrastructure, ransomware gets through that. Like we have a big problem as a country. Yeah, and ransomware is brutal, I mean it's devastating. And they don't discriminate, I mean they're looking for it open. The impact is, I mean, if an infrastructure out of the data center is down for a week or longer, that you can imagine what the financial impact on that. Catastrophic. As I mentioned earlier, it's not a nice to have anymore. It's a must have. My last question before we wrap up is, what is the current state of the art for you guys? What do you do next? What's on the horizon? So obviously, focusing on the product, especially the combination of disaster recovery as a service and an extension of that being ransomware recovery. With the size of our company, we are laser focused on IBM Cloud customers and their requirements. So we talk to the customers very closely. And there is a list of additional roadmap items that we're focused on for the next 12 to 18 months to bring on board and working very closely with the customers from IBM Cloud. And the beauty is that the customer success management, tech sales and IBM and Cloud sellers were connected to all of those three organizations to take it in front of the customers. Let's make some good bank with IBM. What's the product focus? I think one of the most interesting potential features we're thinking about or I'm thinking about is because we sit in the data path, looking for anomalies, whether data is being encrypted all of a sudden, there's different signatures, which means there's probably been an event and then you can at least stop, try to block and then recover faster with a greater assurance of when you were infected to get back up and running without paying a ransom or paying cyber insurance, which probably won't cover it anyway. And then having to tell your customers you lost the data. So being more predictive I think is a good next AI hashtag, hashtag AI feature. Right. Last question, Mike, take us out with, if you have a favorite ransomware recovery story that you can share, don't have to name the customer where primary IO was the primary reason that they were able to return to business as usual? I think the main one was a customer was hit. They had no idea when it happened and they were trying to restore from backup tapes. And that's a slow process in general. And then if you keep going and going and going, so they're a good reference customer to like, we need your solution because we can't go through this again. And we're not sure we won't have to go through it again. So now how do we have proper protection? They had no idea where that mark was. No, no. So they were blind. Yeah, yeah. So they spent, it was weeks, maybe months of trying to get back. Just to add to that, he asked about verticals. Honestly, so almost every vertical is affected by this and that the customer that Mike was referring to, it was a large retail chain. So anywhere from retail to financials to medical billing systems, these are the two, three customers that we've worked very closely with that, you know, complete different verticals. Right, education as well. Yeah, yeah. Education space, exactly. Yeah. Taxation, by the way, the tax company here in the U.S. that benefit from it. So all verticals, excellent guys. So primary IO.com is the website. Go there, check it out, check out this technology, how it can help you really implement true disaster recovery as a service. Guys, Lorenzo, Mike, great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining us, spending some time and sharing what primary IO was really enabling organizations to achieve. We appreciate it. And thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thanks, thanks. All right, our gas sensor, John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explore Day two. Stick around, our coverage continues next.