 From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Actifio 2019, Data Driven. Brought to you by Actifio. Hello everyone and welcome to Boston. In this theCUBE special coverage of Actifio, Data Driven 19, I'm Dave Vellante. Stu Minim is here. Got a special guest, John Furrier is in the house from Palo Alto. Guys, theCUBE, we love to go out on the ground. You know, we go deep. We're here at this data theme, right? We were there in the early days, John. You call me up, say, get your butt here. We're going to cover the first Hadoop world. And since then, things have moved quite fast. Everybody thought Hadoop big data was going to take over the world. Nobody even uses that term anymore, right? It's kind of, now it's AI and machine intelligence and blockchain and everything else. So, what do you think's happening? Did the early big data days fail? You know, Frank Jennings, this morning, called it the experimentation phase. I mean, I don't really think Frank has a good handle on what's going on in my opinion because I think it's not experimentation is real. That was a wave that was essentially the beginning of not experimentation of realization and reality that data, unstructured data in particular was real and relevant. Hadoop looked good off the tee, middle of the fairway, as we say. But the thing about the Hadoop ecosystem is that validated big data. Every financial institution jumped on it. Everyone who knew anything about data or had data issues or had a lot of data knew the value. It's just that the apparatus to build via Hadoop was too expensive. In comes cloud computing at scale. So, as cloud was accelerated, when you look at the Amazon Web Services Revenue Chart, you can almost see the D mark where the inflection point is on the hockey stick of Amazon's revenue numbers. And that is the point in time where Hadoop was on the declining of failure. And Hortonworks sold to Cloudera. Cloudera's earnings are at all time low. A lot of speculation of their entire strategy. And their venture-backed company went public, but bet the ranch to be the next data warehouse. That wasn't the business model. The data business was a completely new industry, completely being transformed. And far from experimentation, it is real and definitely growing like a weed, but changing because of the underpinning infrastructure dynamics of cloud-native, microservices, and that's only going to get highly accelerated. And the people who talk about context of industries like Frank are going to be off. Their predictions will be off because they don't really see the new picture clear enough, in my opinion, so I think he's off. So it's not so much of a structural change like it was when we went from mainframes to PCs. It's more of a sort of flow and evolution into this new area, which is being driven, powered by new technologies. We talked about blockchain and machine intelligence. Well, I mean, the makeup of companies that were building, quote, big data solutions, were trying to build an apparatus or mechanisms to solve big data problems. But none of them actually had the big data problem. They none of them were full of data. Another one had a lot of data. The ones that had the problems were the financial institutions, the credit card companies, the people who were doing a lot of large scale with Google, Facebook, and some of the hyperscalers. They were actually dealing with the data tsunami themselves, so the practitioners ended up driving it. You guys at Wikibon, we pointed this out on theCUBE many times that the value was going to come from the practitioners, not the suppliers of so-called technology. So, you know, the Claudairs, the world who thought Hadoop would be relevant and growing as a technology, were right on one side. On the other side of the coin was the cloud decimation of that sector. The cloud computing just completely blew away that Hadoop market because you didn't have to hire a PhD. You didn't have to hire specialty skills to stand up Hadoop clusters. You could actually throw it in the cloud and get agile quickly and get value out of data very, very quickly. That has been real. It has not been an experiment. There's been new case studies, new companies born, new brands. So it's not an experiment. It is reality and it's only going to get more real every day. And I add, you know, of course, you mentioned Claudair and Hortonworks. I also got map bar reeling. Sue, let's talk about Actifio. So they coined the term copy data management. They created the category. Of course, they do a lot of backup. I mean, everybody in this space does a lot of backup. And then you saw the Silicon Valley companies come in, particularly Cohesity and Rubrik. You know, to a lesser extent, you got some other guys like Xerto and Dhruva. But it was really those two companies, Cohesity and Rubrik. They raised more money in their D round than Actifio has since its inception. But yet, except Actifio keeps, you know, plotting along, growing, you know, word is, they're profitable. You know, they're not like this really sexy, very East Coast versus kind of West Coast mentality. What's your take on what's going on? Yeah, so Dave, right. You look at the early days of Actifio and you say, great, copy data management. I have all these copies of data. How do I reduce my cost, get greater utilization that I have and leverage the data? I, you know, love the title of the show here, data driven. You know, we know at the center of digital transformation, if you can't become data driven, like a CMO Brian Regan got up on stage talking about that industrialization data. How am I going along that journey being this? I collected data versus now, you know, data is the reason that I make decisions and how I make decisions that get smarter. The cloud of course is a huge enabler of this. There's all these services that I can instantly access to be able to get greater insight and move along with that environment. And if you look underneath all of these backup companies, it's really how I can change that data into business value and drive my business, the metadata underneath it, all those pieces, not just the wonky storage and technical solutions that make things better and I get a faster ROI. It's that data at the core of what we do and how do I get that as a business accelerant because we know IT needs to be able to respond back to the business and data needs to be that rocket. Is it the case of data haves and data have nots? I mean, Amazon has data, Facebook has data. I'm talking about Actifio, you brought that up, okay, on the segment, the insight segment, which is cool, they're here at the event. But they have a good opportunity, but also they got some challenges. I mean, the thing about Actifio is, to my earlier point, which side of the wave are they on? Are they out too much out front with virtualization and Amazon, the cloud will take them away? Or are they riding the cloud wave and making that an enabler? And I think what really I like about Actifio is because they have a lot of virtualization capabilities. The question is, can they scale that stew to containers and microservices because the real opportunity in this market, in my opinion, is going to build on the virtualization trend and make container aware microservices capabilities because if they don't, then that would be a tell sign. Now either way, it's a hot M&A market right now. So I think being in the market, horse on the track, as you say, you look at the Tableau Salesforce deal monster numbers, we are in clearly a hot IPO market and a major roll up market on the M&A side. I think clearly there's two types of companies, old and new, and that is really what people are looking at. Are they part of the old guard? Are they the new guard? So this is to me, it's going to be a tell sign of what they do next. Can they make the data driven value provision that articulates stew, actually a reality, is going to come from the technology underneath? Well, I think it's really interesting point you're making because stew, as you probably know, that Amazon announced the Amazon backup service, right? And you talked to all the backup guys and they're like, oh yeah, it's backup, but it really doesn't do recovery. It's really not that robust. It's part of me says, uh-oh, watch out. You better move fast because Amazon has stated, hey, if you don't move fast, we're going to just keep gobbling and you've seen Amazon do this. You know, what are your thoughts on that? Can these specialists, can they survive? John's talking about M&A, you know, can the market support all these guys along with the big, you know, traditional guys like Veritas and Dell EMC and IBM and Commvault? Right, well, so Actifio started very much in the data center. They were before this cloud wave really took off. It's really only in the last year that they've been satisfying their products. So the question is, does that underlying IP, which wasn't tied to hardware, but, you know, sat at really more of, you know, reminded us of that storage virtualization battles that we talked about for years, Dave, but now they're going to the cloud. They've got all the partnerships in the cloud, but they are competing against those new vendors that you talked about like Cohesity and Rubrik out there and there's big money chasing this environment. So, you know, I want to talk to the customers here and find out, you know, what, where they are using them and especially some of those first customers. But they clearly need a cloud play because that's clearly where the action is. But if you look at what's going on with Amazon, Azure and Google, you see a lot of on-premises stew because that's where the customers are. So just because the customers are currently not migrating their existing workloads to the cloud, doesn't mean it's not going to happen. So I think there's an opportunity for any company like Actifio who may or may not be behind the curve, behind the curve on the tech side. One little misfire on a tech bet could cripple the company and also make the companies. A lot of high risk-reward ratio, how they handle containers, how they build on virtualizations. Virtualization is going to be part of the future with cloud. These are the kind of the dynamics that are going to be in play and they got some time on their hands because the on-premises growth is because the clients are trying to figure out what to do and they're not going to be migrating, lifting and shifting workloads a lot to the cloud. NetNU will be cloud-based, but that enterprise is a proven why we're in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud conversation that the enterprise on-premises is not going away anytime soon. I want to ask you guys, John, you specifically about the sort of new Silicon Valley growth model and how companies are achieving escape velocity. When you and I made our first trip to Barcelona, I was having dinner with David Scott, who was the CEO of 3Par, and he said to me, when I came to 3Par, the board said, hey, we're willing to invest $30 million in this company. And David Scott said to him, I need way more, I need $80 million. I mean, today $80 million is nothing. You saw pure storage hit escape velocity with just throwing money and growing at the problem. You're seeing, you know, cohesity. Well, you could debate that. I mean, if you have to, you know, build the rocket ship, hit critical mass, and you want to fund that, you're going to need it in the enterprise. However, there's arguments on the SaaS side that you can actually get flywheel effect going early with less capital. So again, that's three. But so this is my point. Well, that's 3Par. That was 2000 and whatnot. Yeah, so it's early days. So that was, that's ancient history, but software is generally supposed to be a capital efficient market, yet these companies are raising many hundreds and hundreds of millions, you know, half a billion dollar raises, and they're putting it largely in promotion. Is that the new model? Is that sustainable? In your view? Well Matt, I think you get the, I think you're conflating capital market dynamics with the, you know, viable companies to invest in. I think there's a robust seed in series A market, but the series A market in Silicon Valley is, you know, 15 to 25 million. It used to be three to five. So the dynamics are changing on funding. There's just not enough companies, horses on the track to deploy capital at tranches of 30, 50, 80 million. So the capital markets are clearly going to have the money available. So it's a market for the startups and the growth companies. That's separate from actually winning. So you've got slacks going public this week. You have other companies that have built business on a SaaS flywheel, and then everything else is gravy in terms of the go-to-market. They got a couple hundred million. I think the slacks got close to a billion dollars of cash that they've raised. So they're flooded with cash. They'll never spend it all. So there are some companies that can achieve success like that. Others have to buy market share. They've got to push and build out a sales force, and it's going to be a function of the role of customer customization, specialism, and whatnot. But with AI machine learning, there's more efficiencies coming in. So I think the modern company can do more with less. What do you think of the ride shearing IPOs? Uber and Lyft, do you a bull? Do you like them, or do you think they're losing too much money and can't sustain it? I was thinking about that this morning after looking at the article in Wall Street Journal and our coverage on SiliconANGLE. You look at Zoom communications. I like models that actually can take a simple concept in an existing, mature market and disrupt it by being cloud efficient and completely SaaS and data-driven. That is an example of success. That to me, Zoom communications and Zscaler, another company that we talked to. These are companies that were built with a specific value proposition that made the product, and they were targeting mature markets with leaders in a video conferencing, WebEx, Citrix. Zoom came out of nowhere, optimized on simple value proposition and used cloud-scale and data and crushed it. Uber, Lyft, a little bit different issue. They're losing money, but I would bet on the long term that that is going to be the use case for how people will help transportation. I think that's a long game, and I think that without regulatory kind of pressure, without, if there's regulatory issues, that's really the big risk. But I believe that Uber and Lyft absolutely will be long-term brands. And just like Facebook was early on, although they threw off a lot of cash, those guys are building for penetration. That's where the funding matters. Penetration is critical. Now they're the standard, and people really don't take taxes anymore, but they're really using the ride-sharing. And you got the scooters, you got the bikes. They're all sequencing into these adjacent markets, which drains more cash, but builds the brain. Well, that's what I wanna ask you. So people compare the early Uber, Lyft, taxi ride-sharing to Amazon selling books, but there's all these other adjacencies. You ever thought on this? Well, just, you know, right. Uber Eats is a huge opportunity for that environment, and autonomous vehicles, everybody talks about, but it's still quite a ways out. So there are a lot of different. We're in San Diego, last week we had eight zillion scooters. San Diego had fun going around their electronic scooters. Boy, talk about the gig economy. They pay people at night to go pay by the recharge. You do on that. It's what is the future of work. That's a great point. Uber's got to look like Amazon. You subsidize the front-end retail side of the business. But look at the data that they throw off. Uber's data is that they're gathering on not only customer behavior, but just mapping services. 3D mapping's going to be huge. So you've got these cards that essentially bots on the road, providing massive mapping and traffic analysis. So you're going to start to see data driven, like Actifio's slogan here, be a big part of all design decisions and value proposition from any company out there. And if they're not data driven, I think they're going to be coached. It's that data and that machine learning underneath that can optimize where the people are, how I use the systems. Such a huge wave that we're watching. How about one last topic, which is heavily data-driven, is Facebook. Facebook, obviously, data-driven company. Facebook crypto play. I love it. I love Facebook. I'm a bull on Facebook. I think it's been beat up. And I think two billion users is hard to replicate. But what's your thoughts on their crypto play? Well, it's kind of the middle finger to the United States of America, but it's a great catalyst for the international market because crypto needed a way to come in and bring all those users in. Bad timing in my mind for Facebook because given all the antitrust and regulatory conversations, what better way to show your threat to the world order when you say we're going to run a banking system with a collection of international companies? I think the U.S. is going to look at this and say, oh my God, they can't even be trusted to handle personal information. And we're going to now let them run a banking system, run monetary, basically world bank equivalent infrastructure. No fricking way. I think this is going to be a major road to hoe. I think Facebook has to really make this an ecosystem play if they want to make it work. That's their telegraphing move. Hey, we want to do it for the community, but we've got our own wallet and we've got our own network. But they bring a lot to the table, so it's going to be a really interesting dynamic to see the coalescing around Facebook because they could make the market. Look what Instagram did to Snapchat. They literally killed the company, took all their users. That is what's going to happen in the digital money economy. When Facebook brings billions of users, user experience with money, what happened to Snapchat with Instagram? It's going to happen to the world bank if this continues. Do you stand on the government breaking up Big Tech? So, Dave, we look at these companies, it's not easy to pull those apart. I don't think our government understands how most of Big Tech works. Take Amazon and AWS, that's one company underneath it. Facebook, Microsoft, Microsoft, we went through all these issues. Question Dave, we've had lots of debates on Twitter. Are they breaking the law? Are they not doing trust? I have some trust issues with Facebook myself, but most of the big companies up there, I don't think the anti-rust kicks in. The Facebook story, let's do it, the Facebook story and the YouTube story is simply this. They have been hiding under the platform rules, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and they are a editing platform, so you can't sue them. Once they become a publisher, they could be sued, just like CNN, Fox News, and everybody else. And we're publishers. So they've been hiding behind the platform. That gig is up. They're going to have to address, are you a platform or are you a publisher? You're making editing decisions around what users can see with software. You are essentially editing the feed. That is a publisher role. With that becomes responsibility, and then obviously break it through. Facebook is conflicted right now. They're trying to figure out which side of the fence to go on. No, they want one side, the platform side. They're making billions of dollars. But they're making decisions about which content to show and whether or not they monetize it. And when it's controversial content, they'll turn down the ads a little bit, but they won't completely eliminate it sometimes. You've seen that. The only thing that the partisans and politics seem to agree on though, is that big tech has too much power. What's your take on that? Well, so I think that if they are breaking the law, then they should be moderated. But I don't think the answer is to go hard after Elizabeth Warren, hard after men break them up. I think you've got to start with, okay. Because you break these companies up, what's going to happen is, they're going to be worth more, it's going to be AT&T along the way. Well, you guys were at Cisco Live. We covered this at Avansion Web Services, Public Sector Summit. The real issue in governments too is there's too much tech for bad on the PR side, and there's not enough tech for good. Tech is not bad. Tech is good. There's not enough promotion around the apps around there. There's real venture funds being created to promote tech for good. That's going to where the tide will turn. When does the tech industry start doing good stuff, not bad stuff? All right, we got to wrap. John, thanks for sitting in. Thank you for watching. But right back, we're here at Actifio, Data Driven 2019 from Boston. This is theCUBE. Right back.