 From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Activio 2019, Data Driven. Brought to you by Activio. Welcome back to Boston, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in on-the-ground tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman's here. John Furrier's also in the house. This is Activio's Data Driven conference. The second year that they've done this conference, hashtag Data Driven19. Ash Atos this year is the founder and CEO of Activio, good friend of theCUBE. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Likewise, Dave. Always good to see you. Yeah, so second year, you chose Boston. That's great. Last year was Miami at the very swanky Fontainebleau Hotel. It's a great location. Right in the harbor here. So, got a nice crowd. And you guys focus on the substance. Not a lot of Activio marketing stuff coming at us. You market through substantive content. Explain that theory. Well, I think from inception, there is a very fundamental culture that the company has had. It's about driving customer success. And that is the number one and probably the only mantra we drive by. If you truly are focused on customer success, when you bring a whole bunch of customers together, having more customers talk about their success, so that they help and share. Other customers who are looking for some of these initiatives almost becomes natural. We need to become tired of seeing and sometimes even participating in our own user conferences where you would bring a whole bunch of very enthusiastic users, lock the doors and start talking about your vision. And start talking about your roadmap, your new launch, your new partnership. One, we believe we should be doing that throughout the year with our customers. Two, it was a lot better if the customer actually talked about how it mattered to them versus how it mattered to us as Actifio. So that was the theme for why data driven in general. And even before that, we used to have something called eCloud Summit as you were transitioning into into use of hybrid cloud in 2016 across the board. I think this is one theme you'll hear from Actifio and the users who are here is we pay a very, very close attention to what users want and we give them a forum to explain that and share it with other users across the board. Well, it sounds like a great way to build a company, focus on the customer and the customer's success. Sounds simple, it's not. It's very challenging and you've been a successful entrepreneur. When I've asked you in the past and David kind of why you started the company, you focused on a problem. And you guys created the category of copy data management, which is a problem. We had copies everywhere, copy creep. And you felt as though, okay, we can help people not only organize that but maybe even get more out of their data. And so, and that has evolved. Obviously on that journey, people wanted to use you for backup. I mean, that's the big problem. And so you created the category, you kind of monetized the backup space and try to change the way people thought about that. And then all of a sudden, all this VC money started flowing into the whole space. From your standpoint, what's going on in the marketplace? Why is it so hot today? Yeah. So I think as you see this conference, it is absolutely no doubt about how data is a strategic asset. And you see the more recent acquisitions of Tableau, of Looker or even Qualtrics where the use of data, which is what actually users see, has become one of the killer apps for anybody who's running a cloud. Your own business here, right? It's a use of data. And that's the first app that's out there that's happening across the board. But right behind that, there's an entire ecosystem around supplying that data to these applications that becomes really important. And we figured this out almost nine years ago. We figured out that for an enterprise, having data available as a strategic asset wherever, whenever they need, and whoever, as long as it's complied to the operations requirements, instantly is absolutely what we should provide. Now, in order to do that, the first place to make data available for users was to capture it. And the best place to start was backup. And we always treated copy data journey begin through capturing data. And backup happens with the best use case, one that you already spend money on. And that's how we always treated backup as a starting point for the journey. We have over 3,600 enterprise users who range from some of the largest financial services, energy, retail, airline, industries, service providers. And the focus has been on companies that are at least 500 million sometimes, more normally, about a billion or more, who really view data as a strategic asset in the additional transformation. And almost 78% of our business now comes from people developing applications faster. So a small percentage, almost 20% now is coming from people using active year data or running machine learning and analytics faster. And almost 100% of them obviously collect the data from backup. That's how we view the market. We view it as application, analytics, machine learning, DevOps down. And infrastructure happens to be a place where you start. It's not lost in anybody in the market that data is important. It's not lost in investors who see this as an opportunity to pursue in a different way. And so you have different approaches being taken. One that starts with more infrastructure. How about I provide infrastructure to keep all these copies? And we've always focused on the one thing that really matters to the customer, which is applications. And one that matters to every other application that's using this application, which is the data for this application from a point in time. So you see a lot of backup-centric appliances. You see a lot of consolidation appliances. So it's a bottom-up approach. It's a great approach for people who want to buy another single-purpose storage. We fundamentally believe we're not going to build another storage system. We think there's a lot of companies who do a phenomenal job. And we're better off being suppliers of a multi-cloud data management, multi-cloud copy data management that could leverage all this infrastructure. No box. Completely no box. In fact, that is the reason why in 2016, when we saw the emergence of cloud in our user community here, it took us two years, but we have the world's best multi-cloud copy data and data management solutions. The largest software company, enterprise software company, the world uses Actifio today to manage their SaaS offerings in four different public cloud platforms. We couldn't do that if you had a box. You could not. Because it wasn't scale. Well, firstly, you can't take your box and go into a cloud. They already have infrastructure. You can't build a scale-out stuff because they already have scale-out. You can't take your scale-out and put it on another scale-out. And if you start from bottom-up, you're fundamentally providing infrastructure on top of an infrastructure that's already provided as a service. What you really needed to do was to allow the applications to come back and use any infrastructure that is most relevant for their workload, for their use case, and most importantly for that particular time. It's really important, especially data is persistent. It stays there for 20, 30, for whatever. The opportunity for me to come back and leverage infrastructure that just happens to be the right one, and that's what we try to strive for. We always say in theCUBE that the difference between a business and a digital business is how the business uses data, how it leverages data. So that's been a real tailwind for you. You guys have been on the data virtualization, it was part of that. It seems to me that one of the challenges that incumbents have is their data is locked in silos. Frank Jens talked about it today, sort of his maturity model. Actually, no, it was Brian Regan talking about the extension maturity model. To the early stages, it's siloed. And it's not easy to go from that silo data that's built maybe around a bottling plant or a bank to this virtualized vision. So that's something that you guys caught early on. Clearly digital transformation has been a tailwind for you guys, but how are your customers capitalizing on your solutions to transform themselves into a data-driven company? As the first thing we are seeing is, as I mentioned, until 2016, 100% of our use cases were people who wanted a backup and DR solution that was 100x faster, maybe 50%, 90% cheaper, and managed large sets of data. From 2016 into now, we have a massive shift of almost, between 56% on DevOps, another 20% on machine learning. So think about it, you have a bunch of customers, large enterprises, whose number one focus is now around how to use data, and these are people who are consumers of data, not custodians of data, who are our previous customers. And the best part is, as you saw, the whole evolution of DevOps where there's a merge of the consumers and custodians managing as agile system, that's exactly what's happening in our customer base. These are people who maybe have a role of a chief data officer, whose job is to supply data, but also make sure it complies with the governance rules. So, there's a big shift of how data is now the new infrastructure, data is now the one that I have to provide and enable access to wherever I need, and that does require a very, very different approach than build a box, build something that centralizes all these silos into one place. I mean, when you build a box, fundamentally, you create another silo, because you just broken the whole idea about I need something that is top-down, that is more global, has a single namespace, versus a box that is providing a single namespace and somehow I'm going to assume that nobody else exists in the world. I want to come back to sort of building a company in your philosophy there. I have a couple of questions I have for you. So you mentioned cloud and how you embrace cloud early on. Amazon announces a backup service. They talk to the backup vendors and they say, yeah, but recovery is wonky and it's really not that robust, but it's Amazon. And if you don't move fast, Amazon is going to go up. You saw it with the Hadoop vendors. Down to Cloudera, MapR is reeling, and it's like that was going to take over the world. How do you think about that? Maybe not in terms of competition, but in terms of staying ahead of getting Ubered by Amazon. Thoughts on that? I think number one, as Amazon and every other cloud provider has proven, and one we started nine years ago, enterprise cloud is hybrid. And it's hybrid, not just on-prem and cloud, but it's also on-prem and multi-cloud. Number one, two, it's about applications. It is not about infrastructure. It is not about providing a single function that ties to a single platform. I, as a customer, and we have several of those, I want to be able to manage my enterprise applications exactly the same way whatever cloud platform I choose to have, and that opens up a very different engineering, marketing, sales challenges. Most importantly, keeping the focus on the user. Not if I'm Amazon, I have to focus on my platform, not exactly the 15 other platforms you want to support. That's what we focus on. We focus on the 15 other platforms we do want to support. That's number one. Second, you know, there's this whole notion of a stack fallacy, and we've heard of this paradigm where it's a lot easier for people from top of the stack to come down. It's a lot harder to go from bottom up. So if you're Amazon, you're trying to drive infrastructure as a service, it takes a little while to go up the stack. It's a lot easier for somebody like us to come down from the stack, which is why we also announced that if you go, or SaaS offering, that today, our version runs in Amazon, providing a much more robust, much more multi-cloud, much more heterogeneous, and much more enterprise-class, and enterprise-grade solution. And we also announced one for ActiveEoGo for GCP, or IBM Cloud, and that's how our customers want it. And it's a much more facile experience for the customers. It seems to me to make sense of what you're saying, is you're happy to build on top of Amazon's infrastructure. For them, you know, frankly, people always say, is Amazon going to get into apps? To me, maybe someday, they don't have to. Give developers tools to build apps, seems to me. Last question I have is just the philosophy of building a company. You know, you've raised, I think, $200 million since inception. That's a lot of money. Software's a capital-efficient business. But it pales in comparison to some of what the West Coast companies have done. You know, you guys, you know, I'm from Massachusetts, we're maybe more conservative. You are very deliberately building a company. How do you think about, you know, the craziness in the West Coast? I call it craziness, but it obviously works. You saw Pure Storage, you know, they hit escape velocity, Nutanix had a very successful IPO. You're kind of slow and steady. Your philosophy there, explain that. Yeah, I think a couple of things. One, it was about creating a sustaining company that was growing responsibly. Two, it's also the speed of how much our customers in the market can absorb. If I had a time like what we are trying to drive. And most importantly, the class of customers we're focused on, these are, like I said, one billion plus in revenue and above. Yeah. Sales process for them is longer, which is actually where the money goes. The money isn't on software development. It's about supporting these customers on their initiative. Many of these customers are, some of them are eight years with us and continue to expand. Some of the largest financial institutions started with about 500,000 and almost 20 million with us. So that journey of making the customer successful cost money, but it builds long standing, just a customer whose foundation is built on active fuel. We are the data provider for these customers. We are not a widget who throws something in there and calls you in three years when your maintenance is up. That is not the business we're building. So I don't think it's about East Coast, West Coast, as much as it about what we deliver requires being at the customer's side, working with them over years as they go through transformation. And I don't think we can do that by supporting 10,000 users at the same time. Maybe we can support 1,000, 2,000. And that's just the product and the market we're going out. True to your mission, close to the customers, clear differentiation at the app levels coming, as you say, top down. You guys have been talking about it, but database affinity, some of the unique things you have going on there. Ash, it's great to see you. Congratulations on all your success and you'll keep it going. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Dave. Thank you again. Welcome again for Data Driven 19. All right. It's great to be here. Activity of Data Driven 19, day one, the Cube from Boston. We'll be right back right after this short break. Thank you.