 Welcome to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson and we are running one of the largest, most important hybrid events in the technology business. We've got two live sets here in Las Vegas along with our two studios back home. And I'm absolutely delighted to have two fantastic guests with me. I'm joined by Stephen Manley, Chief Technology Officer from Druva. Stephen, welcome. Thanks, great to be here. Welcome back to theCUBE. I know, love theCUBE. Along with Jake Burns, Enterprise Strategist from AWS, which I think stands for Amazon Web Services. You are correct. Thank you. Fantastic. So the first question to you, Jake, is, well, first welcome again. Enterprise Strategist, what does that mean exactly? Yeah, what do you do? We're a team of former CIOs and CTOs who have all spent most of our time as customers and have all had large scale success digitally transforming our organizations using the AWS cloud. And now we work for AWS and we advise and work with some of our largest customers, share what worked for us, what didn't and help them with the beginning stages of their cloud journey. Fantastic. Dave, Dave, you got to ask him, in the last year, how many customers have you met? Oh, in the past year, I'm averaging about 150 to 200 different customers per year. So in the last three years, it's about 550. Nice. So can you remember all their names or do you do a lot of, hey, buddy? It's a lot harder with the masks on, but I recognize faces better than I remember the names. And Steven, tell us about Druva. Yeah, so Druva, we are a SAS data protection company. We built the first data resiliency cloud. So think of this as, you might have data in endpoints, your data center in AWS, in SAS applications. And we're really shifting the discussion from, it's not just about backing it up, it's not just about protecting it anymore. It's about how do you recover it? How do you make sure your data's always on, always available to you? And that's really where we're trying to take the conversation, is making sure that your data's there when you need it. And to be clear, this isn't just about resiliency for data that's in the cloud, this is also on-premises, IT as well. On-premises, you might have VMs, you might have NAS servers, you might have Oracle databases on-prem. Again, you might have endpoints, you might have Salesforce data, all of it. We want to make sure all your data's available to you. So let's focus on the relationship between Druva and AWS for a minute. It's always interesting to hear about success stories. Let's talk about inhibitors. What are the things that keep the two of you up at night? What are some of the things that you talked about, former CIOs and CTOs, CTOs like Steven? You're working with existing CIOs and CTOs in all sorts of organizations. What are the things that are preventing them from leveraging cloud as well as they could be? Steven, start with you on that. I'll say, the first thing is everybody right now is terrified of ransomware, right? I met a CIO last night and he said, my entire agenda for 2021 and now 2022 is security, security, security, and everyone is just searching for solutions to say, how can I make sure that my environment is secure? How can I make sure my data is secure, especially from these pretty much ubiquitous ransomware attacks? Because until I get that taken care of, it's really hard for me to get on these cloud transformation journeys. And so a lot of the discussion we have with them is again, Druva in combination with AWS can actually help solve that ransomware challenge for you so that instead of thinking it as do one and then you can do the cloud transformation, let's put those two together, right? But for me, that's the number one thing is people are just worried about how they're going to deal with security. So they're worried, but Jake, isn't it true, do a little Perry Mason here, tell me the truth. All right. Isn't it the case that some people still think that effectively their money is safer under their mattress than in a bank? In other words, I feel safer with on-prem IT than I do having it in some cloud somewhere. Are we still facing that sort of cultural divide between reality and perception? Yeah, there's definitely an education, widespread education effort going on right now, training and certification, which AWS has a lot of experience with and has fantastic courses. I went through when I was a customer, my team went through when we were a customer, we were able to get upskilled very quickly. That fear of the unknown, really, the way to solve it is through information, through knowing how the cloud works. And it's so funny, I was just having a conversation right before this with an executive team of one of our largest customers and they were talking about how their CISO was dead set against the cloud and then one day did a complete 180. And we're seeing this all the time. When they realize what the cloud is, all the compliance and controls that we have, all the redundancy that we have, all the benefits of being in the cloud, then it seems to be like there's just a moment where it clicks and then people become strong advocates. So there is still a lot of work to do in that area, but we find that people get it very quickly. Yeah, Steven, you've had a long, an illustrious career, I say that seriously. There you go. And so you're living that bridging the divide between the old world of on-premises IT and cloud. What are you seeing in that regard in terms of where people's emotions are? Oh yeah, and that transformation that Jake talks about, I see it all the time where I'll sit down with a customer and it is exactly that. Well, I have this on an appliance and because that appliance is under my control, I feel safer. And then we start talking about what the real threats are, that let's face it, ransomware can come through your environment and it gets in anywhere and it can spread everywhere. And internal threats, you know, and internal bad actors, they can get at your appliances and it very quickly shifts that conversation from, oh my gosh, how am I going to maintain all this? I have to do security patching and upgrades and I've got to watch everything. And Druva sort of sits and says, you know, one of the great things that we had because we're built natively on AWS, a lot of the problems I worried about back when I built appliances are gone. I don't have to worry about capacity planning because AWS always gives me more. I don't have to worry about provisioning new equipment because it just automatically scales for me. I don't have to worry about, you know, a lot of the networking challenges that I used to have to worry about because it's built into the environment. And so a lot of what we talk to them about is, you know, by taking these, you know, sort of daily routine things off the table, you can actually focus on the higher level value. You can focus on making your environment more secure because you're not just doing the basic blocking and tackling because it's being done for you. And that really gets people sort of across that chasm. So you talk about basic block and tackle. In the keynote today, it was mentioned that there are 475 different types of instances within AWS. That gave me a little jolt to the heart because I was thinking back to Steve Jobs saying, we can only have three of everything. And so sometimes with choice and with flexibility comes complexity. How does Druva manage the potential complexity that exists in the AWS space? How do you take what's best from AWS and deliver it to Druva customers to achieve what they want to achieve? I think for us, that's really the benefit of being a SaaS provider is, you know, we've designed a system from the ground up for AWS. And so, you know, whether you're talking about the different storage types, right, you've got S3, you've got Glacier, you've got Glacier Deep Archive, you have all the different instance types, you have, you know, different container services, ECSE, KS, there's all these choices. And frankly, it's something that we've spent a lot of time working on. And honestly, tons of people like Jake inside of AWS willing to help us, you know, we characterize our workload and then they walk us through what's sort of the best practices so that we can deliver an end-to-end solution for the customers. So that for our customers, it's just one simple cost, right? How much data are you storing? That's it, right? All the things happening in the background we take care of and we take care of because we have AWS helping us design and implement this the best possible way. And so, Jake, with all of the customer conversations that you've had, I'm sure we can guess what some of the themes have been over the last year or two with the pandemic and with things related to security. What are some of the other conversations that you're having with customers that people might not expect based on what's going on? I think the biggest thing that would be surprising to most people is that vast majority of our conversations are about culture and about people, not about technology. We've gotten to a point where, and I've said this for a number of years, there's never been a better time to move to cloud, but that just keeps being more and more true as time goes on, as the technology gets more mature and as we have more and more examples of people who are very successful doing it. But like you said earlier, there's still some people who are used to the old way of doing things. So it's really largely an education issue, it's a culture issue, it's getting people to wrap their heads around this new way of doing things, and once they see that, they get very excited about it. We very rarely see people who are kind of neutral about it. The very, very beginning stages, sometimes they're fearful when they learn what it is, they get very excited and they get very enthusiastic. And my advice to customers is to get your team excited and enthusiastic as early as possible and they'll solve all of those process and technology problems very quickly and very easily. What are you seeing in terms of any skill gaps or skill divides? We, coming from a background where we're bridging the divide between sort of the legacy world and cloud, you have IT practitioners that have been doing this stuff for a long time, that either need to move into the future or not, or you need to hire new people. Are there any challenges there in terms of finding the skill sets you need versus training up existing people? Yeah, so this is something I talk about a lot and you do have a choice between hiring and trying to use the people you have and get them up-skilled. I strongly favor the second. For one, it's very difficult to hire for cloud skills because it's such high demand right now. But you use that to your advantage and by training your staff, it's one of the kind of carrots you can use to get them excited about it. You learn this, you will be valuable in the marketplace. And when you frame it that way, they get very excited to learn. And when you combine the training with the first-hand experience and give them opportunities to use it, and this could be everyone in the organization. It doesn't have to be like your engineering team or your infrastructure team. I had people in the help desk that learned how to become cloud engineers. When you give them that opportunity, you give them the tools to do it and the opportunity to use it with the training, it tends to be a much easier recipe for success. And then your problem becomes retention, but like I said, you're going to have either the problem of hiring or retention or you're going to have the problem of having people who don't have enough skills. I'd rather have the problem of retention. And if you have that capability of up-skilling people, then you don't really need to worry about it because there's more people all the time that are becoming more and more skilled. The other thing is, it's a lot easier to overlay cloud skills on top of people who already know your organization and your applications than bring in new people who have cloud skills, try to retain them and then teach them how your organization works. So there's a lot of advantages to using the people that you have and the training is a lot easier than people think. So who are the people in those organizations that are making the decision to go with Druva? And who are the people in organizations who are then managing Druva environments moving forward? Do you need a PhD in Druva? To be able to manage an environment like that? Yeah, I'll tell you, one of the things that I talk to a lot of customers about that are going through sort of that how do I up skill is the first thing we try to remind them is, don't just think about what you did on premises and then say, and we're going to do the exact same thing in cloud because that is usually a path to either frustration or failure. I had a physical appliance, I'm going to run a virtual appliance. That's not usually the right answer. So a lot of times we spend time walking them through, here's how you think differently. Again, cloud is dynamically scalable. You want something that breaks apart those limits. Cloud gives you 475 options, which means you have purchasing power that you never had as a company, that you can have so many different options in front of you. So think of these not as how you thought of your on premises environment, but think of it as a new way of doing things. And so what we find is the people who tend to be most attracted to Druvar, those customers who are saying, I'm spending too much time, effort and money on my data protection environment, which basically is everybody. Nobody wakes up and says, I wish I could spend more time and money doing backup. And then in terms of who runs it, what we find is it often gets absorbed in sort of a cloud administrator task, right? Where they're looking more broadly across the organization. It's not just about backup, it's backup, it's disaster recovery, it's security, it's compliance, because they're looking at the data as opposed to the infrastructure at that point. And that's where they can really start to grow their careers and have a lot bigger impact inside their companies. So I can tell that you're an awesome guy to have at a party because you'll talk about all the risks that we face. You know, talking about data center fire drills, you're literally talking about fires and drills at that point. Got it. But so what's on the horizon for Druvar? What are the things that you, when you look out into the future, in the area of resiliency, what are some of the things that you're thinking about? There's a couple of things for me. I think one of them again, ransomware is everywhere. And so many people right now are still focused on, just can I get a clean copy? Can I get a safe copy? That's built into Druvar. So we're beyond that. The real focus for me is, how do we streamline your recovery process? Because for so many customers, they make this assumption that a ransomware recovery is just like a disaster recovery. And it's not. It's not as if you just had a system outage. Someone has invaded your environment and you need to make sure that the data, the environment is clean before you recover. You're going to want clean sandboxes to play around with things before you put it in. You're going to need to work with your legal teams. So a lot of what we're working with is helping them orchestrate at a larger scale. I think the other area that gets really interesting is this notion of autonomous. We talk about self-driving cars. Again, nobody wants to spend time tuning and managing their backup environment. So as Druvar moves forward, it's how can we just do this automatically for you? Again, we're built in the cloud. Everything scales automatically. You as a customer shouldn't have to be doing anything. You shouldn't be babysitting this. Let us take care of it for you. So for me, those are the really two big things. It's cybersecurity, that full end-to-end recovery, and it's around the autonomous protection. So Jake, reality check. Anything that he just said that sounds like, sounds out of line based on your experience talking to customers last year? No, I agree with that. And I think we're touching on something that's really powerful here because you're kind of alluded to the choice that people have in AWS, and we're creating new services all the time, and new features all the time, right? So these are building blocks that companies can use. And there's a lot of builders and a lot of companies that get very excited to see all these building blocks. It's about using the right tool for the job. So by giving you more choices, we're giving you more of an opportunity to find an exact fit for the workload you have. But if you just want it to work, then we have this partner of ecosystems, Druvar being one of my personal favorites. That build on AWS use these very resilient, very secure building blocks to build something that's turnkey for a customer. So I think it's a great marriage. I think it, and it benefits customers ultimately, so it makes us happy. All right, well, 2022, we expect this gentleman here to see at least 300 customers to meet his goal. That's what we're expecting from you, Jake. All right, I'm on it. Thanks to all for joining us here at theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I almost said 2022, live from Las Vegas. Stay tuned for much more from the leader in hybrid technology event programming, theCUBE.