 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to the The Yomura Explorer 2022, live from San Francisco. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Good to be sitting next to you, sir. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm in a big set. And we're very excited to be welcoming back one of our esteemed alumni. Sanjay Poonan joins us, the CEO and president of Cohesity, nice to see you. Thank you, Lisa, thank you, Dave. It's great to be with you all the time and the new sort of setting here, but I'm delighted. It's the first time we've been in West. Is that right? We've been in North, we've been in South, we've been in Las Vegas, right? But West is nice. Well, I mean, it's also good to be back with live shows with, you know, after sort of the two or three or hiatus, I know it was a hard time for the whole world, but I'm kind of driving a little bit of adrenaline just being here with people. So. You've also got so much adrenaline. Sorry, Dave. Yeah, you're good. Because you are new in the role at Cohesity. You wrote a great blog that you are identified the four reasons I came to Cohesity. Tell the audience, just give them a little bit of a teaser about that. Yeah, I think you should all read it. You can Google and Google find that article. I talked about the people. Mohitz is a fantastic founder. You know, he was the architect of the Google file system. And you know, one of the senior Google executives was on my board, Bill Corrin said, one of the smartest engineers. He was the true father of hyper-converged infrastructure. A lot of the code of Nutanix he wrote, I consider him really the father of that technology which brought computer storage. And when he took that same idea of bringing compute to secondary storage, which is really what made this scale-out architecture unique. And we were at your super cloud event talk about that, Dave. So it's the people. I really got to respect his smarts, his integrity, and the genius, what he's done. I think the customer base, I called a couple of customers. One of them, a Fortune 100 customer, I can't tell you who it was, but a very important customer, I've known him. He said, I haven't seen tech like this since VMware 20 years ago, Amazon 10 years ago, and now Cohesity. So that's a special league. We're winning very much in the enterprise in that type of segment. The partners, you know, we have HPE, Cisco, as investors, Amazon's an investor, so, you know. And then finally, the opportunity. I think this whole area of data management and data security now with threats like ransomware, big opportunity. Okay, so when you were number two at VMware, you would come on and say, we love all our partners, and of course, okay. So you know a little bit about how to work with VMware. So when you now think about the partnership between Cohesity and VMware, what are the things that you're going to stress to your constituents on the VMware side to convince them that, hey, partnering with Cohesity is going to drive more value for customers. You know, put your thumb on the scale a little bit. You know, you got an unfair advantage somewhat, but you should use it. So what's the narrative going to be like? Yeah, I think, listen, with VMware and Amazon, they're probably their top two partners. Dave, you know, like one of the first calls I made was to Raghu, and he knew about this decision before. That's the level of trust I have in him. I even called Michael Dell, you know, before I made the decision. There's a little bit of overlap with Dell, but it's really small compared to the overlap, the potential with Dell hardware that we could compliment. And then I called four CEOs as I was making this decision. Andy Jassy at Amazon, he was formerly AWS CEO, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Thomas Corinne at Google, and Arvind Krishnan at IBM to say, I'm thinking about this, making this decision. They are many of the mentors and friends to me. So I believe in an ecosystem, and you know, even Chuck Robbins, who is CEO of Cisco as an investor, I texted him and said, hey, finally we can be friends. It was harder to be friends with Cisco, given the overlap with NSX. So I have a big tent towards everybody in our ecosystem. With VMware, I think the simple answer is there's no overlap, okay? With the kind of the primary storage capabilities with VSAN, and by the same thing with Nutanix, we will be friends and extend that to be the best data protection solution. But given also what we could do with security, I think this is going to go a lot further. And then it's all about meeting the field. We have common partners. I think the narrative I talked about in that blog is just like Snowflake was replacing TerraData and ServiceNow replaced Remedy and CrowdStrike replacing Symantec, we're replacing them with legacy vendors. We are viewed as the modern solution, cloud optimized for private and public cloud. We can help you and make VMware and VSAN and VCF very relevant to that part of the data management and data security continuum, which I think demands VMware. And by the way, the same thing into the public cloud. So most of the places where we're being successful is clearly with VMs, but increasingly there's this discussion also about playing into the cloud. So I think both with VMware and Amazon and of course the other partners in the hyperscaler, server storage, networking place and security, we have some big plans. How much do you see this, how do you see this multi-cloud narrative that we're hearing here from VMware evolving? How much of an opportunity is it? Our customer, you know, we heard about cloud chaos yesterday at the keynote. Our customers, do they admit that there's cloud chaos? Some probably do, some probably don't. How much of an opportunity is that for Cohesity? It's tremendous opportunity. And I think that's why you need a Switzerland type player in this space to be successful. And you know, you can't explicitly rule out the fact that the big guys get into this space. But I think it's, if you're going to back up Office 365 or what they call now Microsoft 365 into AWS or Google Workspace into Azure or Salesforce into one of those clouds, you need a Switzerland player, it's going to be hard. And in many cases, if you're going to back up data or you protect that data into AWS, banks need a second copy of that, either on-premise or Azure. So it's very hard, even if they have their own native data protection for them to be dual cloud. So I think a multi-cloud story and the fact that there's at least three big vendors of cloud in the US, you know, one in China if you include Alibaba, creates a Switzerland opportunity for us that could be fairly big. And I think, you know, what we have to do is make sure while we'll be optimized, our preferred cloud is AWS, our control plane runs there. We can't take an all-in AWS stack with the control plane and the data planes at AWS to Walmart. So what I've explained to both Microsoft and AWS is that data plane will need to be multi-cloud so I can go to Walmart and say, I can back up your data into Azure if you choose to, but the control plane is still going to be in AWS. Same thing with Google, maybe they have another account that's very Google-centric. So that's how we're going to believe them. The control plane will be in AWS, we'll optimize it there, but the data plane will be multi-cloud. Yeah, and that's what Mohit explained at SuperCloud. You know, I talked to him, he really helped me hone in on the deployment models, where the Cohesity deployment model is instantiating that technology stack into each cloud region and each cloud, which gives you latency advantages and other advantages. And single code by same platform. And then bringing it, tying it together with a unified, you know, interface. That was, he was, he was, in fact, I wrote about it recently and gave him and the other 29 other people. You've probed down quite a bit in that session. Yeah, because no. So he went deep with you. I mean, with Mohit, when you get a guy who developed a Google file system, you know, who can technically say, okay, this is technically correct or no, Dave, you're way off here. So that's why I had to go. I thought you did a great job in that interview because you probed him pretty deep and I'm glad we could do that together with him. Next time we'll maybe do that together here too, but no, he's a key reason I'm here. So you say data management is ripe for disruption. Talk about that. You talked about this Switzerland effect that sounds to me like a massive differentiator for Cohesity. Why is data management ripe for disruption and why is Cohesity the right partner to do it? Yeah, I think, listen, everyone in this sort of data protection back up from years ago have been saying the Switzerland argument. 18 years ago, I was at Veritas, an executive there. We use the Switzerland argument. But what's changed is the cloud and what's changed is the threat vector and security. That's what's changed. And in that, the proposition of a Switzerland player has just become more magnified because you didn't have a sales force or work there service now then, but now you do. You didn't have multi-cloud. You had hardware vendors, you know, Dell, HPE, Sun at the time, IBM, it's now Lenovo. So that heterogeneity of on-premise server storage networking, hyper-cloud and the apps world has gotten more and more diverse. And I think you really need scale-out architectures. Every one of the legacy players were not built with scale-out architectures. If you take that fundamental notion of bringing compute to storage, you could almost parallelize, imagine you could parallelize back up recovery and bring so much scale and speed and that's what Mohd invented. So he took that idea of how he had invented and built Nutanix and applied that to secondary storage. So now everything gets faster and cheaper at scale. And that's a disruptive technology a la what Snowflake did to Teradata. I mean, the advantage of Snowflake is when you took that same concept, data warehousing is not a new concept. It's existed from since Ralph Kimball and Bill Inman and the people who are fathers of data warehousing. They took that to web scale and in that came a disruptive force to Teradata, right? And Snowflake and then of course now Databricks and BigQuery, similar things. So we're doing the same thing. We just have to showcase to customers, which we do. And when large customers see that, they're replacing the legacy solutions. I have a lot of respect for legacy solutions, but at some point in time of a solution was invented in 1995 or 2000, 2005, it's right for change. So you use Snowflake as an example. Frank Slooban doesn't like when I say playbook because he says, Dave, I'm a situational CEO, no playbook, but there are patterns here. And one of the things he did is to your point, go after Teradata with a better data warehouse, simplify, scale, et cetera. And now he's constructing a TAM expansion strategy same way he did at service now. I see you guys following a similar pattern. Okay, you get your foot in the door. Let's face it. A lot of this started with just straight backup. Okay, great. Now it's extending into data management, now extending to multi-cloud. That's like concentric circles in a TAM expansion strategy. As a CEO, that's part of your job is TAM expansion. Yeah, I think the way to think about the TAM is, I mean, people say it's 20, 30 billion, but let me tell you how you can piece it apart in size, Dave and Lisa. Number one, I estimate there's probably about 10 to 20 exabytes of data managed by these legacy players of on-prem stores that they back up to. So you add them all up in the market shares that they respectively are. And by the way, at the peak, the biggest of these companies got to 2 billion and then shrunk, that was Veritas. When I was there in 2004, it was 2 billion. Every one of them is small and they stop growing. You look at the IDC charts, many of them are shrinking. We are the fastest growing in the last two years. But I estimate there's about 20 exabytes of data that collectively among the legacy players, that's either going to stay on-prem or move to the cloud. So the opportunity, as they replace one of those legacy tools with us is, first off, to manage that 20 exabytes cheaper, faster with a web-scale architecture class. Or for the cloud guys, we could tip that into the cloud. Okay, but you can't stop there. Okay, now we're not doing just back up recovery. We have a platform that can do files, we can do test dev, analytics, and now security. Okay, that data is potentially at a risk, not so much in the past, but for ransomware. How do we classify data? How do we govern that data? How do we run potential, the same way you did antivirus, some kind of XDR algorithms on the data to potentially not just catch the recovery process, which is after fact, but maybe the predictive before to know, hey, there's somebody loitering around this data. So if I'm basically managing in the exabytes of data and I can proactively tell you what this is, one CIO described this very simply to me a few weeks ago, and she said, I have 3,000 applications, okay. I want to be prepared for a Black Swan event, except it's not a 9-11 planes hitting the buildings. It is an extortion event, and I want to know when that happens, which of my 3,000 apps I recover within one hour, within one day, within one week, no later than one month, okay. And I don't want to pay the bad guys a penny. That's what we do. So that's a security discussion. We didn't have that discussion in 2004 when I was at another company, because we were talking about floods and earthquakes as a disaster recovery. Now you have a lot more security opportunity to be able to describe it, and that's a boardroom discussion she needs to have. So that digital risk, okay, go ahead. I was just going to say ransomware attack happens every one, every 11, 9, 11 seconds. And the dollar amounts are going up, you know, in terms of what people pay. The dollar amounts are going up, yep. And when you pay the ransom, you don't always get your data back, so that's not. And listen, there's always an ethical component whether you do it or not do it. If you don't do it and you threaten, they may have left an Easter egg there. Listen, I feel very fortunate that I've been doing a lot in security, right? I mean, I built the business at VMware, we got it to over a billion. I'm on the board of SNEAK, I've been doing security, and then at SAP, I ran. So I know a lot about security. So what we do in security and the ecosystem that supports us in security, we will have a very carefully crafted, stay tuned, next few weeks, months, you'll see us really rolling out a very kind of disciplined aspect. But we're not going to pivot this company and become a cybersecurity company. Some others in our space have done that. I think that's not who we are. We are a data management and a data security company. We're not just a pure security company, we're doing both. And we do it well, intelligently, thoughtfully. Security's going to be built into our platform, not voted on, okay? And there'll be certain security things that we do organically. There's going to be a lot that we do through partnerships. Security market's coming to you. You don't have to go claim that you're now a security vendor, right? The market very naturally saying, wow, a comprehensive security strategy has to incorporate a data protection strategy and a recovery in the things that we've talked about around somewhere. I want to ask you, I've been around a long time, longer than you actually, Sanjay. So, but you've seen a lot, thank you. That's all good. Oh, it shocks. So, the market. I've never seen a market like this, right? Okay, after the dot-com crash, we said, and I know you can't talk about IPO. That's not what I'm talking about. But everything was bad after that, right? 2008, everything was bad. I've never seen a market that's half full, half empty. Snowflake beats and raises, the stock goes through the roof. Dev, if it's the cherry that announced today, MongoDB, beat and raise, the things getting crushed, and the aftermath, never seen anything like this. It's so fed-driven and hard to predict. And of course, I know it's a marathon. It's not a sprint, but have you ever seen anything like this? Listen, I've worked through 18 quarters as COO of VM where, you know, I've seen the public quarters there. And, you know, we're very fortunate thanks to the team. I don't think I missed my numbers in 18 quarters, except for maybe once close. But it's tough, being a public company officer, the company is tough. I did that also at SAP. So the journey from 10 to 20 billion at SAP, the journey from six to 12 at VMware that I was able to be fortunate, it's humbling because you really, you know, we used to have this, we'd do the earnings call and then we'd kind of ask ourselves, what do you think the stock price was going to be a day and a half later? And we'd all take bets as to where this, I think you just basically as a C-level executive, you try to build a culture of beat and raise, beat and raise, beat and raise, and you want to set expectations in a way that you're not setting them up for failure. And, you know, Dave's a wonderful CEO, as is Frank Slutman, so it's hard for me to dissect. And sometimes the market are fickle on some small piece of it. But I think also, I encourage people to say, take the long-term view. When you take the long-term view, you're not bothered about the ups and downs if you're building a great company over the length of time. Now, it will be very clear over the arc of many, many quarters that your business is in trouble if you're starting to see a decay in growth. And like for example, when you start to see a growth, start to decay significantly by five, 10 percentage points, okay, there's something macro going on at this company and that's what you won't avoid. But these ups and downs, my view is like, if you've got both MongoDB and Snowflake are fantastic companies, they're CEOs of people I respect. Dave's actually kind of an advisor to us as a company. He knows Moe's very well. So we respect him, respect Frank, and there have been other quarters where Frank's, you know, the Snowflake's had it down as a result of that. So you build a long-term and they are on the right side of history, Snowflake, and both of them in terms of being a modern, cloud-relevant, in the case of MongoDB, open-source to data technology that's, you know, we would like to be like them one day. As the new CEO of Cohesity, what are you most, what are you most anxious about and what are you most excited about? I think, listen, you know, everything starts with the employee. I always believe I wrote my first memo to all employees. There was an article in Harvard Business Review called the Service Profit Chains that had a seminal impact on my leadership, which is when they studied companies who had been consistently profitable over a long period of time, they found that not just did those companies serve their customers well, but behind happy-engaged customers were happy-engaged employees. So I always believe you start with the employee and you ensure that they're engaged. Not just recruiting new employees, you know, I put on a tweet today, we're hiring reps and engineers, that's okay, but retaining. So I want to start with ensuring that everybody, sometimes we have to make some unfortunate decisions of employees who we've got a part company with, but if we can keep the best and brightest retained first, then of course, you know, recruiting machine. I'm trying to recruit the best and brightest of this company, people all over the place. I want to get them here. It's been so, I mean, heartwarming to come to VMworld and just see people from all walks kind of giving me hugs. I feel incredibly blessed. And then, you know, after employees, it's customers and partners. I feel like the tech is in really good hands. I don't have to worry about it because Mo is in charge. He's got this thing. I can go to bed knowing that he's going to keep innovating the future. Maybe in some of the companies that are worried about it, the tech innovation piece, but Mo is doing a great job there. I can kind of leave that in his capable hands, but employees, customers, partners, that's kind of what I'm focused on. None of them are for me like a keep up at night, but they're opportunities, right? And sometimes there's somebody you're trying to salvage to make sure or somebody you're trying to convince to join. But you know, customers, I love pursuing customers. I love the win. I hate to lose. So Fortune 1000, global 2000 companies, small companies, big companies, I want to win every one of them. And it's not like, I mean, I know all these CEOs and my competitors. I texted them the day I joined and said, listen, I'll compete honorably, whatever have you. But it's like Kobe and LeBron, Kobe's passed away now. So maybe it's Steph Curry or LeBron, whoever your favorite athlete is. You put your best on the court and you win. And that's how I am. That's nothing, I've known no other gear than to put my best on the court and win, but do it honorably. It shouldn't have been the one that you're doing it on ethically, you're doing it personally, you're not calling people's names, you're competing honorably. And when you win, the team celebrates. It's not a victory for me, it's a victory for the team. I always think, I'm glad that you brought up the employee experience and we're almost out of time, but I always think the employee experience and the customer experience are inextricably linked. Employees have to be empowered. They have to have the data that they need to do their job so that they can deliver to the customer. You can't do one without the other. That's so true. I mean, it's my belief. And I've talked also on this show and others about servant leadership. You know, one of my favorite poems is a Brindanath Tagore. I went to bed in life. I dreamt that life was joy. I woke up and realized life was service. I acted in service was joy. So when you have a leadership model which is, it's about, I mean, there's lots of layers between me and the individual contributor. But I really care about that sales rep and the engineer that's the leaf level of the organization. What can I get obstacle out of their way? I love skipping levels and going, write that sales, let's go and crack this deal. You know, so when you have that mindset, yeah. I mean, you empower, you invert the pyramid and you realize the power is at the leaf level of an organization. So that's what I'm trying to do. It's a little easier to do it with 2,000 people than, I don't know, either 22,000 people, the 35,000 reported to me at VMware. And I made a similar number at SAP, which was even bigger. But you can shape this now. We're not a startup anymore. We're a mid-sized company. We'll see, maybe along the way, there's an IP on the path. We'll wait for that when it comes. It's a milestone. It's not the destination. So we do that and we are, I told people, we are going to build this green company. Cohesity is going to be a great company like VMware one day, like Amazon. And there's always a day of early beginnings, but we have to work harder. This is kind of like the, you know, eight-year-old version of your kid as opposed to the 18-year-old version of the kid. And you got to work a little harder. So I love it. Good luck. Thank you. Best of luck. Congratulations on the roll. It sounds like there's a tremendous amount of adrenaline and momentum carrying you forward. Sanjay, we always appreciate having you on for the round. Thank you for having me on your show. Our pleasure. Thank you. For Sanjay Poonan and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 2022. Stick around. Our next guest joins us momentarily.