 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Actifio Data Driven 2020 brought to you by Actifio. We're back, this is theCUBE's coverage, our ongoing coverage of Actifio's Data Driven. Of course, we've gone virtual this year. Ash Ashatash is here. He's the founder, president and CEO of Actifio. Ash, great to see you again. Likewise, Dave, always, always good to see you. We had, we were at a little meetup, you and I in Boston. I always enjoy our conversations. Little did we know that a few months later, we'd only be talking at this type of distance. And of course, it's sad. I mean, Data Driven is one of our favorite events. It's intimate, it's customer content driven. The theme this year is, you call it the next normal. Some people call it the new abnormal, the next normal. What's that all about? I think it's pretty fascinating to see when we walked in in March, all of us were shocked by the effect of this pandemic. And for a while, we all scrambled around trying to figure out how do you react to this one? And everybody reacted very differently, but most people had this tendency to think that this is going to be a pretty brutal environment with lots of unknown variables. And it is important for us to try to figure out how to get our hands around this. By the time we came around about six weeks into that, almost all of us have figured out this is not something you fight again. This is not something you wait for it to go away, but this is one that you figure out how to live with and you figure out how to work around it. And that we believe is the next normal. It's not about trying to create a new abnormal. It's not about creating a new normal, but it's truly one that basically says there is a way path forward. There's a way to create this next normal and you just figure out how to live with the environment we have. And phenomenal outcomes of companies that have done remarkably well as a result of these actions. Backed if you're being one of them. It's quite amazing, isn't it? I mean, I've talked to a lot of tech companies, CEOs and their customers. And it's almost like the first reaction was, of course they cared about their employees and their broader families. Number one, number two was many companies, as you know, saw a tailwind and initially didn't want to be seen as ambulance chasing. And then of course the entrepreneurial spirit kicked in and they said, okay, hey, we can only control what we can control. And tech companies in particular have just done exceedingly well. I don't think anybody really predicted that early on. Yeah, I think at the heart, we are all human beings and the first reaction was to take care of, you know, four constituencies, right? One, take care of your family, take care of your community, take care of your employees, take care of your customers. And that was the hardest part. The first four to six weeks was to figure out how do you do each of those four? Once you figured that part out or you figured out ways to get around to making sure you can take care of those, you really found the next normal. You really started figuring out how to continue to innovate or continue to support each of those four constituencies. And people have done different things. I know it's amazing how Q continues to operate as far as a user is concerned, they're all watching remote. Yes, we don't have the wonderful desk and we all get to chat and look in the eye. But the content, the message is as powerful as what it was a few months ago. So I'm sure this is how you're all going to figure out how to make through this new next normal. Yeah, and digital transformation kind of went from push to pull. I mean, every conference you'd go to, they'd say, well, look at Uber, you know, look at Airbnb, and they'd put up the examples, you have to do this too. And then all of a sudden, the industry dragged you along. So I'm curious as to how, and I guess the other point there is digital means data. We've said that many, many times. If you didn't have a digital strategy during the height of the lockdown, you couldn't transact business and still many restaurants are still trying to figure this out. But so how did it affect you and your customers? Yeah, it's very interesting. And we spend a lot of time with several of our customers who are managing some of the largest IT organizations. And we talk about a very interesting phenomena that happened somewhere at the beginning of this year. About 20 years ago, we used to worry about this thing called the digital divide. Those who have access to the network and internet and those who don't. And now there is this data divide, the divide between organizations that know how to leverage, exploit and absolutely accelerate the business using data and those who don't. And I think we're seeing this effect show very clearly among organizations that are able to come back and address some of this stuff. And it's fascinating. Yes, we all have the examples of the likes of people who are doing delivery, people who are doing detailing. But there are so many little things. You're seeing organizations. And just the other day, we had a video from Century Data Systems, Century Data Systems, which is helping accelerate COVID-19 research because you're able to get copies of the data faster. They're able to get access to data to their research much, much faster. Sometimes from several days to a few minutes. It's that level of effect. It's not just down to some subtle, you almost think of it as nice to have, but it's must have, life-threatening stuff, essential stuff. Or just addressing today, I was reading a very wonderful article about this supercomputer that's doing analysis of COVID-19 and how it's figured out most of these symptoms. They're able to figure out by just crunching a ton of data. And almost every one of those symptoms that the supercomputer has predicted has been accurate. It's about data. It is absolutely about data, which is why I think this is a phenomenal time for companies to absolutely go change, make the transformation about data acceleration, data leverage, data exploitation. And there's a ton of it all around us. Yeah, and part of that digital transformation, the mandate is to really put data at the core. I mean, we've certainly seen this with the top market cap companies. They've got data at the core. And now, as I say, it's become a mandate. And there's been several things that we've clearly noticed. I mean, you saw the work from home, required laptops and end point security and things of that VDI made a comeback. And certainly cloud was there, but I've been struck by the reality of multi-cloud. I was kind of a multi-cloud skeptic early on. I said many times, I thought it was more of a symptom than it was a strategy, but that's completely flipped. Recently in our ETR surveys, we saw multi-cloud popping up all over the place. I wonder what you're seeing when you talk to your customers and other CIOs. Yeah, so fascinating. You know, we released our first cloud product sometime in 2018, end of 2018. Go, right? Yeah. Yeah, if you go on-board, which is a phenomenal way to completely change the way you think about using object storage in the cloud. For over two years, we saw about 20% of our business, by the end of two years, the beginning of this year, 20% of our business was built on leveraging the cloud. Since March, so that was the end of our, almost the end of the Q1, so now we're just in the middle of Q3. In six months, we added 12% more of the business. Literally, we did it in six months, what we did not do before, for 18 months before that. Right, significantly more than what we did for a year and a half before that. And there are really three reasons. And we see this over and over again. We have a large customer, we closed in January. Ironically, we were deploying out of the UK, a very large marketing organization, got everything deployed, they were running their backup and DR and a separate data center, and they had a practical problem of not being able to access the second site. Literally in the middle of deployment, we steered that customer to GCP, for Google Cloud, because there was simply no way for them to continue protecting the data, being able to develop new applications with that data, they simply had no access. So this was the number one reason, the inability for organization to physically access or put their employees at risk and have, quote unquote, the cloud be the infrastructure. That's number one. So that, first of all, drove the reason for the cloud. And then there's a second reason. There are practical reasons on why some cloud platforms are good at one workload, the other ones are not so good at some other workloads. And so if I'm an organization that spans everything, I've got a PowerPC, an x86 machine, a VM, I've got container platforms, I've got Oracle, I've got SAP. There is no single cloud platform that supports all my workloads as efficiently. It's available in all the regions I want. So inevitably I have to go adopt different cloud platforms. So that's the second practical reason. And then there's a strategic reason. No vendor, no customer, wants to be locked into any one cloud platform. At least two, you're gonna go pay, more likely three. So those are the reasons. And then interestingly enough, we were on a panel with global CIOs. And in addition to just the usual cloud providers that we all know and love inside the US, across the world, in Europe, in Asia, there's a rise of the regional cloud providers. See, you take all these factors, right? You've got absolute physical necessity. You've got practical constraints of what can the cloud provider support, the strategic reasons of why, either because I don't want to be locked into a cloud provider, or because there's a rise of data nationalism that's going on, that people want to keep their data within the country bounds. All of these reasons are the foundation for why multi-cloud is almost becoming a de facto. It's impossible for a decent-sized organization to assume they'll just depend on one cloud anymore. Another big trend we're seeing, and I wonder if you could comment, this notion of the data lifecycle, the data pipeline, it's a very complex situation for a lot of organizations. Their data is siloed, we hear that a lot. They have data scientists, data engineers, developers, data quality engineers, just a lot of different constituencies and lines of business, and it's kind of a mess. And so what they're trying to do is bring that together, so they've done that. Data scientists complain, they spend all their time wrangling data. But ultimately, the ones that are succeeding to putting data at the core, as we've just been discussing, are seeing amazing outcomes. By being able to have a single version of the truth, have confidence in that data, create self-serve for their lines of business, and actually reduce the end-to-end cycle times. It's driving your major monetization, whether that's cost-cutting or revenue. And I'm curious as to what you're seeing, you guys do a lot of work, heavy work in DevOps and hardcore database. Those are key components of that data lifecycle. What are you seeing in that regard, regarding that data pipeline? That's a phenomenal point. If you really want to go back and exploit data within an organization, if you really want to be a data-driven organization, the very first thing you have to do is break down the silos. Ironically, every organization has all the data required to make the decisions they want to. They just can't either get to it, or it's so hard to break the silos that it's just not worth trying to make it happen. And 10 years ago, we set out on this mission. Now, rather than keep these individual silos of data, why don't we flip it open and make it into a pipeline, which looks like a data cloud, where essentially anybody who's consuming it has access to it based on the government's rules, based on the security rules that the operations people have set, and based on the kind of format they want to see data. Not everybody will want to see the data in a database format. Maybe you want the database format converted to a CSV format before you run analytics. And this idea of making data the new infrastructure, this idea of having the operations people provide this new layer called data, it's finally come to roost. I mean, it's fascinating. I was looking at the numbers last quarter. We just finished up Q2. Now 45% of our customer basis uses Actifio for, or reuses the backup data for things that accelerate the business, things that make the business move faster, more productive, or even survive. That was the mission. That was what we set out to do 10 years ago. We were talking to an analyst this morning, and now there's this question of, hey, it looks like there's a theme of backup data being reused. We said, yeah, that's kind of what we've been saying for 10 years. Backup cannot be an insurance. Backup cannot be a destination. It has to be something that you can use as an asset. And that I think is finally coming to the point where you can use backup as a single source of truth only if you designed it right from the beginning for that purpose. You cannot just, there are lots of ways to fake it, make it, try to pretend like you're doing it. But that was the true purpose of making data and new infrastructure, making it a cloud, making it something that is truly an asset. And it's fascinating to see our businesses. You take any of our large accounts and the way they've gone about transforming not just basic backup and DR. Yes, we are the world's fastest backup and most scalable DR solution. That's a starting point. But we were to use that to develop applications eight, 10 times faster. You run analytics a hundred times faster. The more data you have, the more people who use data you have, the better this return becomes. You know, that is interesting to hear you talk about that because that has been the holy grail of backup was to go beyond insurance to actually create business value. And you're actually seeing some underlying trends. We talked about that data pipeline and one of the areas that is the most interesting is in database, which was so boring for so many years. And you're seeing new workloads emerge. They take the data warehouse beyond reporting, never really lived up to its promise of 360 degree view. You mentioned analytics. That's really starting to happen. And it's all about data. John Furrier used to say that data is the new development kit. You call it the new infrastructure and it's sort of the same type of theme. So maybe some of the trends you're seeing in database, I'd love to talk about that for a little bit and then pick your brains on some other tech like object storage is another one that we've rarely seen take off. Yeah, so I think our journey with object storage began in 2016, 2017, as we started to adopt cloud platform in response to the user requirements. We did more, like most companies have done and unfortunately continue to take the on-prem product and then just move it onto the cloud. And one of the things we saw was there was a fundamental difference of how the design points of a cloud engineering is all about. What did they design it for? Object storage is one of those primitives. So fundamental storage primitives that the cloud providers actually produced that nobody really exploited it. It was used as a graveyard for data. It's a replacement for me, place where data goes to die. And then we look at it very closely and say, well, this is actually a massively scalable, very low-cost storage, but it has some problems. Now, it has an interface that you cannot use with traditional servers. It has some issues around not being able to read, modify, write the data. So it feels like you're consuming a lot of storage. So we went out to solve those problems. It took us a good two years to come back with something called OnWall that fundamentally treats object storage like this massively scalable, high-performance disk. Disk, except it's ridiculously low-cost and optimized the capacity. So this thing called OnWall that we patented has really become the foundation of how everything in cloud works without using CPU. Today, there is simply nothing at a lower TCO than active. You want to do basic backup, DR, more importantly, use that to do this massive analytics. Now you're talking about data warehouse, data lakes. I guess now there's something called data lake house. All of these are still silos. All of these are people trying to take some data from somewhere, put into another new construct and have it being controlled by somebody else. This is auto sync. It's just, you just move the silos from some place to another place instead of creating a pipeline. If you want to really create a pipeline, object storage has to be an integral part of that pipeline, not a separate bucket by itself. And that's what we did. And same thing with databases, you know, most business, most of the critical business runs on databases and the ability to find a way to leverage those and move them around, leverage in terms of whichever format a database is accessed, whichever location it's accessed doesn't matter how big it is. Lots of work has gone into trying to figure that one out. And we had some very, very good partners and some of our largest customers who helped take the journey with us. Pretty much, you know, all of the global 2000 accounts you see across the board, but an integral part of our process. You know, you mentioned the word journey and a triggered thought is your discussion with Ravi, the CIO of Seagate was a customer of yours. And what he said, I liked what he said, of course he used the term journey, we all do. But he said, you know what, I kind of don't like that term because I want to inject a sense of urgency, essentially what he was saying, I want speed. You know, journey is like, okay, kids, get in the car, we're going to drive across country, we're going to make some stops. And so while there's a journey, he also was really trying to push the organization hard. And he talked about culture as some of the most difficult things. And it goes like many CIOs said, oh, the technology is almost the easy part. It's true when it works, you know? That's true, that's true. But I thought that was a great discussion that you had. What were some of your takeaways with Ravi? I think Ravi is a very astute IT executive who's been around the block for so long. And one of the fascinating things when I asked him this question about, hey, what's the biggest challenge? We've just gone through this a couple of times. What is the biggest challenge? Taking an organization as venerable, as well known as Seagate is. This is a data company. This is at the heart of all of our half the world's data is on Seagate stuff. How do you take this old company that's been around for long in the middle of Silicon Valley and make it into a fast growing transformation company that's responding to the newer challenges? And I thought he was going to come back with, well, you know, I've got to go through three pieces. I picked this technology, that technology. And surely that is exactly what I expected he would end up with. It was nothing to do with technology. In this day and age when you can have, when Elon Musk can send a card to Mars, there's not many technologies that we can really solve. Maybe COVID-19 is the next frontier we got to go solve. But frankly, he hit upon the one thing that matters to every company. It is the fundamental culture to create a bias to action. It's a fundamental culture where you have to come back and have a deliverable that moves the ball forward every day, every month, every quarter, as opposed to have this series of, like you said, a journey that says, and we all know this, right? People talk about, oh, we're going to do this in phase one, we're going to do this in phase two and we're going to do this in phase three. Nothing ever happens in phase three. Nobody gets around to phase three. So I think he did a great job of saying, I fundamentally had to go change the culture. That was my biggest takeaway. And this I've heard this so many times. The most effective idea exists, we've made the transformation. It actually shows in the people that they have. It's not the technology, it's the people. And some, this history is replete with organizations that have done remarkably well, not by leveraging the heck out of the technology, but truly by leveraging the change in the people's mindset. And of course, that mindset leverages technology where appropriate. But Ravi is an insightful person. Always such a delight to talk to him. It's a delight for him to have chosen us as a foundational technology for him to go pull his data warehouses and completely transform how he's doing manufacturing across the globe. You know, I want to add some color to what you just said, because some key takeaways that from what you just said, Ash, is, you know, you're right. When you look back at the history of the computer industry, it used to be very well-known processes, but the technology was the big mystery and the big risk. And you think about with COVID, were it not for technology, we didn't know what was coming. We were inventing new processes literally every day, every week, every month. And so technology was pretty well understood and enabled that. And when you think, when we talked earlier about putting data at the core, it was interesting to hear Ravi, he basically said, yeah, we had a big data team in the US, a big data team in Europe. We actually organized around silos. And so you guys played a role. You were very respectful about, you know, touting Actifio with him. You did ask him, you know, what role you play, but it was interesting to hear him talk about how he had to address that both culturally and of course there's technology underneath to enable that unification of data, that silo busting, if you will. And you guys played a role in that. Yeah, I always enjoy conversation with folks who have taken a problem, identified what needs to be done, and then just get it done. And it's, that's more fascinating than, yeah, of course Actifio plays a small part in a lot of things and we're proud to have played the small part in his big initiative. And that's true of, no, the thousands of customers we talk about. But it's such a fascinating story to have leaders who come back and make this transformation happen and to understand how they went about making those decisions, how they identified where the problem was. These are so hard. And we all see them in our own lives, right? We see there is a problem, but sometimes it takes a while to try to understand, you know, how do you identify them and what do you have to do and more importantly, actually do it. And so whenever I get an opportunity with people like Ravi, I think understanding that, and if there's a way to help, we always make sure that we play our own small part and we're privileged to be a part of those kinds of journeys. Well, I think what's interesting about Actifio and the company that you created is essentially that we're talking about the democratization of data, that whole data pipeline discussion that we had, the self-service of that data to the lines of business. And, you know, you guys clearly play a role there. The multi-cloud discussion fits into that. I mean, these are all trends that are tailwinds for companies that can help sort of, you know, flatten the data globe, if you will. Your final thoughts, Ash. Yeah, you said something that is so much at the heart of every IT exec that we are talking to. If data truly is the fundamental asset that I finally end up with as an organization, the democratization of data where I do not lock this into another silo, another platform, another cloud, another application, has to be part of my foundation design. And therefore, my ability to use each of this cloud platform for the services they provide while I am able to move the data to where I need it to be, that is so critical. So, you almost start to think about the one position an organization now has, and we talked about this with the group of CIOs. They might be some pretty soon, not too far off, but if data is truly an asset, I might actually have a data market, just like you have a stock market, where I can start to sell my data. You know, imagine at COVID-19, there's so many organizations that have so much data, and many of them have contributed to this research because this is an existential issue, but you can see this turning into a next level. So yes, we've got activists help move the data to a one level higher, where it's become a foundational construct for an organization. The next part is can I actually turn this into an asset where I actually monetize some of this stuff? And it will be not too long when you and I would talk about how there's this new exchange and what's the rate of data for from this company versus that company, and there'll be future trading options. Who knows? It's going to be very interesting. Well, I think you're right on. This notion of a data marketplace is coming and it's not that far away. Well, Ash, it's always great to talk to you. I hope next year at Data Driven, we can be face to face, but I mean, look, this has been, we've dealt with it. It's actually created opportunities for us to kind of reinvent ourselves. So congratulations on the success that you've had and thank you for coming on theCUBE. No, thank you for hosting us. And I'm always a big fan of CUBE. You guys, we've engaged with you since early days and it is fascinating to see how this company has grown. And it's probably many people don't even know how much you've grown behind the scenes and all technologies and culture that you've created yourself. So it's hopefully one day we'll switch the table and I'll be on the other side and ask you about transformation, digital transformation of CUBE itself. I'd love to do that. And thanks again and thank you everybody for watching our continuous coverage of Actifio. Data Driven, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. Thank you, Dave.