 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Lynn Lucas. She is the CMO of Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on the program, Lynn. Oh, just so excited to be here with you guys and host you in the Cohesity booth for the first time at Microsoft Ignite. It's been a lot of fun. There's a lot of buzz around here and it's fun to be right, to be your neighbor, exactly. Great. So today, there's been a lot of news, some new exciting announcements of integrations with Microsoft. I wonder if you can walk our viewers a little bit through what Cohesity announced today. Absolutely, so we have been partners with Microsoft for some time and today we announced extensions to our capabilities with Microsoft Azure and Office 365. So Cohesity now extends data protection and backup for Office 365, including granular recovery of mailboxes and granular search for discovery purposes. We also have extended our integration with the Azure data box and we also are increasing our DR capabilities for our customers with Azure. So we now have fail back from the Azure cloud for disaster recovery purposes. So just continuing to see tremendous growth, hundreds of Microsoft customers with Cohesity and these new capabilities are going to expand the possibilities for them. Yeah, Lynn, it's an interesting conversation these days because in our research and we've talked about this, data is at the center of everything and the challenge for customers is data is everywhere. You look here at the Microsoft show, well, I've got all my traditional stuff, I've got my SaaS stuff, my public cloud stuff, now Edge with like the data box things there. Microsoft plays across there and it sounds like Cohesity's playing in all of these areas too. Absolutely, and I thought Satchit did such a good job in the keynote yesterday of really laying out the imperative for digital transformation, data being at the heart of it, but also laying out one of the key challenges which he pointed out which is the data silos. And I think Cohesity is right smack in the center of that conversation because we've always been about consolidating secondary data silos. And our partnership with Microsoft really, I think reinforces what they've been talking about which is also a hybrid strategy that the bulk of customers that we talk to see that their data is going to be on-premise, it's going to be in the cloud and increasingly it's going to be at the edge. And we span all of those locations to create this one operating environment so that things like the new open data initiative I think will be much easier for customers because they won't be wondering, well, is my data all in one place to be operated on? So talk about the problem of the data silos because as you said, it's one of the biggest challenges that companies face today. They are data rich and yet this data's here and this data's here. Can you describe a little bit about what kind of problems this is for companies and why this matters? So I think it's just something folks are starting to really get a handle on. As I talk to individual folks here at the show, you'd be surprised at how many aren't even really sure maybe how many islands they have. So even mapping where is all my data I think is a capability that many organizations are still getting their arms around. And the challenge of course is that in today's world it's very expensive to move large data sets and so you want to bring compute to the data which is what hyperconvergence and cohesity is about. And when you look at the imperatives at the board level, the CEO level, they increasingly see that data becomes really the true competitive advantage for most organizations and yet if they can't operate or bring compute to that data and do something with it, they're really at a handicap. We call some of the newer companies they're kind of data centric or data natives, the Airbnb's, the maybe Netflix's of the world. Not everyone aspires to be them as well. Not everyone has the resources that those companies may have had or just a short period of time. Most organizations have the benefit of years of data. We want to level the playing field and allow them to become competitive with their data by providing that single foundation. Lynn, it's a big show here. They said 30,000 people in a really diverse ecosystem. What really surprised me is just the spectrum of customers that you have here. I mean, we know Microsoft has long history in like higher education. We spoke to one of your customers in a Brown University and of course the long history they have with Microsoft. What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers? Maybe what's different at this show than some of the other cloud and kind of younger shows that we might go to? This show's been around about almost 30 years now. Yeah, isn't it hate to give away our ages, but I think we've been doing this for a while, right? Microsoft has been part of the IT ecosystem in a major way and it's great to see the vibrancy here and how they're talking about AI and ML and moving forward with it. What strikes me here is that a lot of the organizations here are now really understanding the pragmatism of having a hybrid strategy of what makes sense in the cloud as well as what may continue to be on-prem for them. I think we compliment that well. I'm really excited too about the idea that we are going to be using machine learning to be doing a lot more that humans simply can't keep up with in terms of the data growth and then doing something productive with that. And I think that's a conversation that we're just tapping the surface of here at this show. Yeah, you said something that really resonated with me. We have people that have been in the industry a while. I look at your founder, Mohit. This isn't his first rodeo. He'd been looking at data back from a couple of generations of solutions and people are very excited machine learning, as you said. We used to talk about automation and intelligence around this environment. I lived in the storage industry for quite a while and we talked about it but it feels poor real when I talk to the architects and the people building this stuff. They are just so excited about what we will be able to do today that we talked about a decade or so ago but now really can make reality for customers. No, absolutely. And I think we have our own investment in that. Helios, which we announced just last month, provides that machine learning capability because what we hear from our customers is what they love is the ability to have simplicity because let's face it, IT environments continue to grow in complexity. They're looking for ways to subtract that complexity so they can apply their talents to solving the primary mission, as I call it, of their organization, whether that be public sector or private sector and doing that in a simpler way. Look, one of the great stories that one of our customers is talking about here is how Cohesity helped him with a standard thing that most IT organizations have, which is we're going to do a power shutdown and we've got to perform a DR failover and this particular organization, University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg, had a set of 12 websites which the professors and the students rely on and it was going to take them literally almost a month to try to move them and they didn't have that kind of time and with Cohesity with our DR capabilities, he was able to do that literally with a few clicks, kept the community of professors and students happy and didn't spend, more importantly, 20 days trying to rebuild websites for a standard IT event, right? That's the kind of real life story in terms of what IT gets back that they can then invest in other more important focus areas for their business. Well, for their business and also just for their lives, giving people their time back, their weekends back, their time at night with their families, yeah. We all need that. Satya Nadella is such a proponent of improving workplace productivity. Even 5%, he says, can make this big difference. Can you talk a little bit about how you view that workplace productivity at Cohesity and sort of your approach to giving people either time to concentrate on more value add for their companies or just their lives? So again, a super story that we have from another customer that is here at Microsoft and is an Azure customer and a Cohesity customer, HKS, one of the world's most respected architectural firms. Design AT&T Stadium. There's a new major pediatric hospital going into Dubai. They operate in 94 countries with remote designers and architects and because of their inefficient backup processes and archive processes, they literally were having their associates have to work weekends as well as losing time on their projects and time is money and they, you know, in some cases are penalized if they don't make certain dates. And so I think these are really pragmatic examples. On average here, polling some of the folks here, I've heard that they can get a day, a week back, sometimes for their administrator who now doesn't have to do repetitive manual tasks anymore. Yeah, one of the things we always love digging into is you talk about people's jobs and some of the new careers that are happening. We talked to one guest earlier this week, he said, if you're a customer and you learn Azure as what you're doing, like your resume is gold. We talked to, you know, in the really like early edge, like site reliability engineering, he said, don't put SRE on your resume or, you know, every recruiter will be calling you up and you know, you won't even be able to answer your phone. Cohesity, you're doing a bit of hiring also. Maybe you can talk about- We are. What are you seeing from customers and what are you looking for internally? Well, yeah, no, we have tremendous good fortune. We grew 300% in revenue year over year. We're hiring in our RTP offices in our San Jose in India around the globe. You know, we look for the best and the brightest, a lot of engineering talent, marketing talent as well, really across the board. But you know, I think to the point you just made for the IT folks that are here, looking forward as to how are you going to help your business with your data infrastructure or data flows throughout their organization is to me where some of the career movement is happening when you hear the talk about how important it is to so many aspects of the business. And what are the sort of challenges that you're having with hiring? Or are you having, you're a red hot company, but are you finding it difficult to find the kind of skills, the kind of talent that you want? I mean, what's the candidate pool like? You know, so I think what's really interesting, we are a red hot, we have a lot of applicants. So I'd say in general, no, we're very blessed that way. I think though more businesses, including ours, are finding it's difficult to get, say those data scientists, right? Some of these also front-end or back-end developers, you know, it's not just the technical companies that are recruiting for that anymore. It's not just the cohesities and the Microsofts that are looking for that talent, but it's now also the Netflix's or, you know, the eBay's, et cetera, right? They are all looking for the type of talent that we are. And so in general, I think this bodes well for young people or folks really anywhere in their career watching about thinking about where the talent needs are, and there's a lot of activity and interest in people with those kinds of skills. Yeah, we'll just follow up on that. So Cohesity is a Silicon Valley-based company, but as you mentioned, you've got an RTP location. We've seen quite a lot of Silicon Valley-based companies that are starting to do a lot more hiring outside because it's, to be honest, really expensive to live in the valley these days. So any commentary on that dynamic? Well, you know, I think you're in Boston, not the lowest-cost market either in the country. Yeah, you know, I think with a lot of the technology that's out there, you know, people don't have to be co-located, and we certainly also look to develop and invest in other communities around the globe. So we're not looking solely in San Jose, but also in RTP. We've got headquarters in Europe, as well as, of course, in India. So we look for talent everywhere in my own personal team. You know, I have folks basically around the US as well as across parts of the globe because talent, in many cases, is what matters and where you are physically. You know, some of the great technology that's out there can help break down those barriers of time and distance. Finally, this conference, it's 30,000 people from 5,000 different companies around the world. What is going to be, I mean, we're only on day two, but what's been your big takeaway so far? What sort of the vibe you're getting here at McKnight? You know, the vibe has been one of energy, of excitement. I've talked to a lot of folks from around the globe. I've been actually pretty amazed at some of the people from different countries around the globe that are here, which is fantastic to see that draw in. And I feel like there's a general sense of excitement that technology and what Microsoft's doing can help solve some of the bigger challenges that are here in the world and for their own businesses. And we really look forward to Cohesity helping them lay that great data infrastructure foundation, consolidate their silos and help them build a foundation for doing more with their data. Great. Lynn Lucas, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite and theCUBE's live coverage coming up in just a little bit.