 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2017, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. I'm Stu Miniman, here with my co-host, John Troyer, and this is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE, worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program a startup CEO, David Safaii, Trilio Data, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, so, Dave? Yes? First time on the program, new startup, tell us a little bit about your background and what led to Trilio Data. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Well, first thanks, excited to be here. Trilio Data started a number of years ago, about 2013, and we had focused on what the problem was going to exist within cloud. Now, traditional backup vendors are not going to fulfill the requirements of cloud, the principles of cloud, of course, as you guys know, forever scalable, multi-tenant, self-service, all the things, all the good buzzwords. So, the founders of the company started with those principles and started building out Trilio Data and built it specifically for OpenStack to begin. Yeah, cloud's supposed to be real simple. Couldn't it just take care of that? Can't it just have multiple objects? Everything's automated. You know, automated replication, everything. What's different about building for cloud and then specifically, I mean, OpenStack's core to what you're doing and maybe tease out how you ended up there. Yeah, sure. So, when you look at what we do and how we do it, I think is the interesting part. The traditional backup vendors think about a server or a single VM or maybe just a bunch of files. We have a different approach. We talk about capturing a full environment and that starts with the application blueprint for that tenant. So, that's the app, OS, VM, configurations across the VMs, security groupings, policies, metadata and data as a whole. So, now, when you talk about recovery, recovery is fast. Happens instantaneously. As opposed to trying to stitch together these applications that now reside in the cloud that have all these different components affiliated with it. I joined the group as CEO in 2014 seeing the need that will exist within the OpenStack community, right? As folks start to codify their clouds and the business units are saying, all right, we're ready to move our applications within the clouds. The business assurance needs that we're going to pop up. Data protection absolutely is one of them. So, that's what really excited me. One more question on kind of the base tech. Talk about the application blueprint, sure, apps in the cloud more than just a VM. Do you handle things like the network configuration, connection back to storage and things like that? Everything for the tenant. So, the tenant manages the whole backup and it is everything that can restore that whole environment. So, you think about it as almost environmental capture per tenant. And are people typically backing up from one OpenStack cloud to another? From one OpenStack cloud maybe to a public cloud or what are you saying in the use cases? Oh, good question. I think first and foremost, it's kind of this crawl, walk, run scenario, right? Everyone's looking to get their OpenStack clouds to a great and steady state. And the larger folks have done that. They spent a lot of blood, sweat and tears to do that and they've got these great elastic scalable clouds. And recovery for us is you can recover in place. You can recover in a different availability zone. You can recover into a different data center or different OpenStack cloud. And so as the story continues to evolve and emerge, we'll be showing off hybrid cloud into AWS in the next quarter. And that will be a request from folks in time. And as we start to look at hybrid cloud being one singular cloud, really. And then empowering these people to move workloads to and from is very interesting. Creates new problems, but you still need the ability to control and manage and start providing governance around a hybrid type of an environment. I think most of our audience is probably aware with some of the pain points that we've had with backup for a while. Maybe, what are your early customers? What's exciting them? What can they do now that they didn't before? We know backup windows are long kind of gone in the past, but what does this enable them to do that they couldn't? Why this solution rather than some of the other options out there? Yeah, so first we are completely agentless. So we're talking about environments of scale. And so to manage another agent, that has got to be painful. So we are agentless, which is fantastic. We are non-disruptive. So at any point in your OpenStack journey, you can deploy us and you can roll us out with using Ansible scripts, et cetera. So we try and make that component very easy. And then again, it's empowering the tenant, right? Clouds all about the tenant, alleviating the pain for IT operations. And so having, again, that full environmental capture changes things. You don't have to worry about, I mean, you can replace files if you need be or folders, but IT operations don't have to worry about that anymore. Yeah, I'm curious, as far as I know, there hasn't been like an open source project to solve this kind of issue. Is there open source involved in your code? You guys, close source, how does that fit of the OpenStack to what you're doing? Yeah, that's a good question. We first actually started with a specification called Rockshaw that we put out there. And we quickly closed sourced it. We're built on open source, supernuts. But we did close source it because there is a need. There's a need for the solution today. We're big supporters of the community. We believe in community, but there are certain aspects that is required by the enterprise and they need to move now and they can't wait for projects to spin up. And so you're starting to see a couple of other similar projects appear, but as I said, the need is now. And that's also part of the issue is you're having all these overlapping projects that start to emerge. It's not helping the community. So yeah, we're ready to deliver. And this can be installed in a data center. Is that the delivery mechanism? Absolutely, it's downloadable. We're downloaded as a VM. And then, as I said, we were agentless, so it's a small little Python script that gets deployed on all your compute nodes. And we appreciate scale. I mean, we work with telcos. All the data is small. I was going to ask, right? OpenStack is many things to many people, right? It's not one market. So as CEO, which markets are you looking at that are OpenStack adopters that you would like to be talking about? Yeah, I think it's interesting as you look at the landscape, not just by industry, but by geo too, which has become interesting. Here, it's the large environments that are ready for data protection today. And that really spans across financial services to telco, et cetera. I think in rest of world, if you start talking about data protection and governance things that are happening in Europe, for example, they're very little more sensitive to public cloud. This is the third coming of open source, right? So people are happy to build wherever they can. So we're seeing from a size perspective deployments, the small guys are trying all over the place. South Africa, Japan, Australia, Latin America, and Europe. So here it's a lot of the bigger folks. Everywhere else, people are ready to jump into OpenStack. They're excited. So your product itself, a couple of things. Is it GA, fully GA today? Kind of anything you can share on number, customers, what state of deployment they're in, and then maybe get some of the go-to-market pieces as to how they roll that out? Yeah, no, absolutely. So we are GA. As I mentioned, we were founded in 2013, but because this is enterprise software, it needs to be bulletproof, right? So we wanted to wait. You get one shot to announce yourself. We went GA last year. Since that time, we've had a number, our installs right now is probably the 20 plus. And as I said, the companies range all over the place. And our go-to-market really is subscription-based model, either the smaller end of this spectrum, number of VMs, because the smaller guys understand how many VMs they need to manage. Middle of the market, they know how much hardware they've purchased, so how many compute nodes they need to manage. And the larger end of the spectrum, we're hearing people say, look, I need to manage 10 petabytes, and I need protection for that. And so that's a different conversation for the much larger guys. Now, as I mentioned before, some of these folks that are looking to start smaller folks, let's say in Europe, MSPs are starting to pop up again, right? Or the VARs that are evolving. And of course, everyone's margin sensitive. So we have a different tactic in our MSP program where it's a consumption-based model. This is, and one of the great things about OpenStack is that people see us as a vendor, it's a partnership, it's a clear partnership. And we wanna empower people to use it from the MSP side as well as, you know, I talked to a bank the other day who said, look, we have OpenStack, we don't talk about it in size. Now that I know that you exist, I get to bring stateful information, all these workloads, we get to use more of OpenStack. So we become an enabler, really, for folks. And Dave, you bring up the workloads. Anything particular you do for specific applications, OpenStack, you know, very diverse, is that a way of work cases? What do you do special for different workloads? What do your customers tend to be using from an application standpoint? Yeah, so that's a good question. We'll get, so image level capture, so whatever is running within the image. So if you need application awareness, some of the databases, right, we'll manage Oracle or MySQL or Postgres or whatever it need to be, and then some of the NoSQL market. So we're sensitive to those applications that reside there from the container market. If containers are sitting inside of the image, that's fine too. Containers don't need backup per se today, but they need DR. And so you should use us for that perspective. Same thing on the NFV side. NFV is a really exciting thing. You may not need backup, but you need DR. You lose a site, you need to spun up, right? And it's not just about spinning up a VM. I need to get back to the configurations that it had before, because there's a lot of tweaking along the way, right? So your private company, I understand, you've got investors there. Is there any concern from them in general that they say, hey, we hear all these various things about OpenStack. Should that be a core piece of your business? Yeah, that's a good question. It's exciting for us because it's all been inbound, quite frankly. Just finding out that we exist, people are getting excited. So I think our investors are excited about that. When I talk about 90% of the people are coming to us. And as we start to, this model starts to evolve, right? Data protection is one aspect today. If you think about what we do to recreate a point in time in the cloud, you start talking about migrations, upgrade cycles, managing all those sorts of things. Data protection evolves into resource management as you start bringing in hybrid cloud scenario, right? Being able to recover wherever, whenever I want. And then it broadens into a more business assurance. So we start an OpenStack, we ride the data protection wave, we grow with the customer, we continue to provide great functionality, and then we branch out also with other clouds. Because at the end of the day, right? Cloud becomes this commoditized layer and it comes down to managing my workloads, my applications when and where I want to. You spoke about kind of the crawl, walk, run. Give us a little bit of the forward-looking. What should we expect from Trilio data throughout the rest of the year? What are some of the big things that you're trying to knock down? Sure, next quarter we are announcing, well, we'll be GA with Amazon, the hybrid cloud from that perspective. We already talk hybrid clouds within multiple OpenStack, OpenStack clouds, but we'll have public cloud from there. And first is managing just backup, right? From there, we're going to talk about rehydrating your application in a native format of that public cloud. So now it's taking that next step of that one single pane of glass, if you will, to get to that point. So that's going to be the journey across this year. Dave Saffey, really appreciate you joining, sharing with our community, everything with Trilio data. John Troyer and I will be back. More coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2017. You're watching theCUBE.