 Hi, and welcome to a special presentation of theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman here in the Marlboro, Massachusetts office. Happy to welcome back to the program, Ellen Rubin, who is co-founder and CEO of ClearSky Data. Ellen, we talked to you at your stealth, coming out of stealth a year ago. Thank you for joining us again. It's great to be back. All right, so you launched the company a year ago, you've gone through, you know, I'm sure, you know, customer meetings, you've got all of your various constituents. Bring us up to speed on the company. It's true, I was thinking about like that, how much has happened in the year, so it's been really exciting, just a really, really busy year for us. So right after we launched and announced at VMworld, we actually raised $27 million in Series B funding, so it was our second round, we raised close to $40 in total, and it was led by Polaris as a venture investor, and also we have Akamai as a strategic investor. So it's really exciting for us, and we, of course, have General Catalyst in Highland from the first round, and so it's just a really good group of people who are involved. Yeah, any commentary on being a Boston-based company and kind of that interaction with the BC community? Yeah, it's funny when you think about it, it's three Boston-based venture firms and a Boston huge anchor company in Akamai. I think part of the opportunity and the excitement for people like myself who do this over and over again is the infrastructure expertise that's here, and the fact that we're able to draw on people, so I don't know if you know this, but Polaris was the original investor in Akamai. So they have seen this movie, so they had an opportunity to really kind of take a look at what the model looked like and how it evolved over 15 years of seeing that company turn into a really significant player in the market. And for us it's like, this is where we stay because this is where the talent is. Yeah, speaking of kind of Boston talent and everything there, the legislature here in Massachusetts, unfortunately the House and the Senate both have passed bills to overturn or change the non-compete, but they couldn't reconcile it so we don't have any change. What's your take on that? Oh, it's a sad moment on that basis, but a tremendous amount of work got done and I'm hopeful that we'll continue to see progress. There was definitely a strong desire for a real reform, not something just lip service and the Senate really I think kind of nailed it. Exactly the House was a little bit more trying to do something that was more of a compromise and they just couldn't come to agreement, so I'm hopeful that we'll move forward. But for me, what I like to say is there's an opportunity for people in the startup world to kind of make it a moot point. So we've removed that, all of the non-compete language from our contracts. We feel that it's not necessary to protect intellectual property. And really the mode is it's not the most urgent issue in Boston that we should be focusing on per se, building big companies is the thing. It's just one of those things that's really easy to fix. And I'm disappointed that we didn't see the reform, but I hope we'll see it next. All right, so we're pretty excited about some of the innovation going on in the Boston area. Of course, GE is moving up here, which we think will have a big impact on how IoT development happens in the area. Talking to you, machine data in the cloud's been one of the kind of hot topics you guys are looking at. Can you explain what that is and are there connections in the Boston area for what you're doing there? For sure, I'm very excited for GE to join and obviously that's a big strategic focus for them, but more generally, Internet of Things is just huge, huge category and it spans a lot of different industries. The piece that is interesting for us over in the more sort of IT operational side of the world is machine data that is data that's coming off of source systems, all of your IT infrastructure and your systems that are for monitoring and tracking what's going on from a security perspective. And what ends up happening is people know this, but they don't appreciate the magnitude of how much data gets generated. So it's terabytes a day of data. So you end up very quickly with a petabyte problem. And what people are doing these days is they're using tools like Splunk or like Elasticsearch if you're familiar with that on the open source side and other like analytic tools to kind of mine and look at that data to try to figure out what's actually going on. There's a network problem, your servers are down, you know, at the most basic level or hey there's some weird anomalies in people accessing data that maybe they shouldn't be, there's some sort of a strange thing that suggests there could be an attack or a breach. And this is stuff that people use to run their business every single day. So you can't sort of say, well I only feel like gathering this much data, you have to gather it all and nobody ever throws any of it out. So what it does is it creates this sort of sense of urgency for people who are doing that type of mining and analysis to think about how they're gonna handle the infrastructure behind it and storage is a big piece of it, which is where the clear sky piece of the story comes in. But I think what we're really seeing is this desire to be able to have all of the data that you need and to be able to access it, but you always need to be able to do that at high performance and low latency. Yeah, it reminds me, I think of, the term big data got thrown around a lot and most people didn't understand it, but from a storage standpoint, it was the bit flip for me as it goes from, storage is a problem because I have so much of it, to storage is a huge opportunity because I can leverage and take advantage of that data. Absolutely, you know this is, it's funny because several companies ago when I was at Neteza, we used to talk about big data, but of course we were talking about terabyte-sized problems, not petabyte-sized problems. And it was hard for me to imagine back then how much more the data growth was going to happen and it's all analytics driven. That's what's really going on with it and so there's a kind of a strong desire to figure out new ways that are more cloudy, on demand, scalable without having to keep buying racks of gear and have to do all old data center footprint stuff that you used to have to do to handle that kind of stuff. And I think that people have the understanding that it's not just that they don't want to get rid of data for compliance, it's that a lot of the answers that they're looking for are hidden in the data and you start to see a thread of something that's going on, you want to be able to pull the whole thing and really get to the bottom of whatever it is so that you don't have an outage or security problem. Great, so can you tell me what's the profile of a potential customer of yours? I think, boy, Akamai sounds like a company that could definitely leverage technologies like this, but maybe more generally, what are the challenges they're facing, what are they looking for? For sure, and we skipped right over it, but just very briefly, we're actively in the market, generally available. Actually, since we talked last, we've expanded our location, so we're now in New York, Washington, Virginia, Northern Virginia area, Boston and Las Vegas, so we're in four different cities, and we're just kind of moving full speed ahead with early customers that are now paying customers and expanding and moving into production with us, and so it's a very exciting time, but the thing that's similar about all of these different customers across these metros is that they tend to be, they're mostly medium to large enterprises that have very, very similar problems, which is they've been buying traditional storage for a long time, they're moving to the cloud, they're in a transformation, for sure, and they're adopting hybrid cloud, right? That's where are they all at. So if you talk to the CIOs of these different companies, even if they're a $10 billion company versus a $100 million company, what they'll say to you is, we're figuring out what needs to go where, and what we know is that the compute could be anywhere. What do we do about the data, and in particular the primary data? How do we manage that? Because we don't want to keep building out our data center footprint, and we don't want to be stuck in this traditional model as we move forward. And so a lot of the conversation that we have about that journey and how to enable it is, we're just going to make sure that the data is available to the customer where they need it. It can be on-prem, it can be in the cloud, it can be in different clouds, and they shouldn't care because wherever it's going to be, they'll be able to access it at high performance, high availability, low latency. So a lot of the discussion that we have is about the fact that the thing that people are the most nervous about is how to make sure that that data, which has a lot of requirements and is very sensitive and all that, doesn't become a stumbling block for their process. Sure, I mean, we know moving storage is difficult, as Paul along would say, data has gravity. Exactly. So can you explain a little bit, how does that work? Are the applications that span across multiple data centers, is it centrally locating your data, can you help kind of unpack that storage challenge that you guys are helping yourself? For sure, and it actually connects back because a lot of the applications that we're dealing with are these machine data applications. So very typically what's happening is that the application is still, for most of the customers that we're dealing with, on-prem. So they're running the compute locally. They have some applications that have already moved to the cloud, they have cloud native applications they're building from scratch, but more than 90% of what they're doing is still on-prem. So they're in this transitional period and the challenge for them is to say, well, how do I get that data so that I don't have to keep, you know, if it's five terabytes a day that's getting spilled out on these types of applications, what do I do about that? So a lot of the burden for the customer is they don't want to have to figure out all the skill sets, not only just for migration of data and for management and security issues and stuff like that, but they want there to be more of a holistic approach to it. And so for us, that means that we need to provide a fully managed service that allows them to kind of just say, hey, you know, no touch, we don't deal with infrastructure anymore, but yet we need all the things that we always needed, right, we need five nines of availability, we need security, we need compliance, we need all of the things that make an application work, less than 10 milliseconds of latency, you know, all those things are true, but we're still tied to a lot of the things that are physically going on, the source systems that are on-prem, some of the, you know, active directory, other things that sit in their existing footprint. Okay, so in the IT environment, you know, VMware is one of those tools that, you know, most companies are using, does that fit into these applications or are these applications that aren't virtualized? Sometimes they are and sometimes they are not. We see a mix in terms of those particular applications. We're starting to see increasingly other approaches, people using containers instead of, you know, the traditional virtualization platforms, so it's still definitely there and there are still very large virtualization footprints that people are using for a lot of their applications. Machine data just has this very particular behavior pattern that makes it a little challenging. People often run it on bare metal, there's all sorts of stuff that goes on there, but what I would say is nobody's getting rid of their virtualization farms so quickly, you know, it's like mainframes, you're gonna be living with those for a long time. Yeah, okay, how about the public cloud, how does that tie into this whole hybrid discussion? Well, there's no question that people are already adopting the public cloud very actively and they are certainly thinking about what it is that makes sense to be in the public cloud. And I think the things that used to be true at my last company, Cloud Switch, I don't think are true anymore, which is it used to be, oh, it's not secure and I'm scared and who are these crazy book people that don't get, you know, that's all gone. Everybody's like, nope, we got it, we're moving to the cloud and we're gonna probably move to Amazon, although Azure has had this unbelievable growth over the past couple of years that is really impressive. So a lot of it is the decision that the companies are making that they're gonna end up using at least one, if not a couple of public clouds, in addition to all of the traditional virtualization VMware that they had, private clouds, if they went ahead and built some of them, some of which haven't turned out to be so successful for them and they've got all of that stuff coexisting. So if you're a CIO of a medium to large enterprise, you kind of got a large mess on your hands right now. It's not easy, it's gotten actually a lot harder since people kind of figured virtualization out because now cloud is so much a part of the mix and a lot of the work that's happening I think is the decision of what goes where and then also how do I migrate that data over to wherever I want it to be? Yeah, boy, a huge problem's right, it's the multi-cloud world and you've got Edge, data center, service provider hosted in public cloud. Totally, SaaS, you got it all. Absolutely, SaaS is two thirds of the public cloud. Right, when people talk about it, they're always like, oh SaaS, it's like, no, no, that's what really is there. How do you tie into, are there management tools out there that you're seeing or how are companies and CIOs getting their arms around this challenge? I think that they're looking for service providers that can make it easy. So the thing that is great about the, you know, infrastructure as a service providers is that there's so many interrelated services that they can take advantage of, right? You know, EC2, EBS, S3 and all the, you know, database and monitoring services and stuff, but still it's kind of like Lego blocks. Make your own, figure it out. And so there's a desire by enterprises that don't really have the skill sets and may never have those skill sets in any great level of expertise to figure out how to take advantage of those things without having to completely rebuild applications from scratch, which I think they've decided that they don't want to do, or to be able to turn to something that looks like more of a fully managed solution. So SaaS is obviously very appealing because it just takes the whole problem off your, you know, just one person to go yell at, you know, if you have a problem. But for a lot of the things that are more custom applications where the enterprise still wants to have more control over it and have more say about how it gets built and run, they're going to use the public hub but they're going to need help. And so there's, you know, professional services, consulting groups and stuff like that. But I think that the old model of managed hosting has come back. And we're certainly part of that trend where it's truly on demand, fully automated and much, much less expensive as opposed to, or you're going to pay through the nose for managed services. And so that's a good thing, I think for the whole industry. So inside the companies that you're talking to, you know, where are you, you know, who's the buyer? And, you know, is the storage team involved? Is this more kind of a cloud architect? I hear things like automation and things like that. And it's something that storage has struggled with for a long time. So, you know, where is it kind of organizationally? And do you see any changing dynamics in that role? Definitely. So because we're so much part of this whole cloud transformation effort, very often we get to talk to the CIO. So it isn't just a storage conversation for us at all and in fact, that's not usually where we come in. We always deal with the storage team because in the end we're providing storage and we're dealing with the primary data as well as the snapshots and the DR so we kind of span a whole range of things that they might have bought as separate products in the past. But really the conversation isn't usually about that. It's usually about how are you getting to the cloud? Where is the compute going to end up? And where do you want to be in the next three to five years? And how do we, how are we a piece of that story and making it easy for the customer? Because as I mentioned, it's kind of a little overwhelming in some cases. The challenge for a lot of these customers is that they don't yet have anything that shows them like, okay, this ought to go here and that ought to go there and it's obvious and I'm just going to push a button and it's all going to be orchestrated. Like we're like nowhere near that, right? People have to remember that even though like, I know for me, I started in the cloud in 2008 and there are people who were even earlier or possibly yourself included. We're just at the very beginning. So you've talked about some of those changes. I mean, security is no longer a barrier for many of these networking. We're trying to solve some of those challenges there. What do we still need to solve as an industry and look at a little bit, give us kind of the roadmap as to where you see the industry going and how Clear Sky is going to play along there. Right. Well, it's funny because they're the things that used to be the big concerns and that have been mostly resolved like security and some of the, what people used to refer to as lift and shift and if you remember that whole thing, you know, you pick up the VMware and you stick it over in UC2 and that's it. So a lot of those things I think have been mostly solved. What hasn't been solved is the operational 24 seven management of things. And so, you know, again, if you're going to use public cloud services, you're going to have to either buy that from a third party or do it yourself and you know, build up an expertise in house and stuff. So I think a lot of those things are the things that are still really scary to the customer because, you know, you find yourself in a situation where you've got like 10 petabytes sitting in a public cloud like Amazon or Azure and if something goes wrong, that's like a big deal, you know, and you're probably running something pretty production oriented at this point. The days of just doing test dev are behind us. People are doing real production workloads. So I think a lot of that understanding how to keep track of things, how to optimize what's in the cloud so that you're not overpaying for it. These are all the kinds of things that I hear people being more worried about. And there's a little bit of a fear of single sourcing and vendor lock in that now would start like, okay, now I'm really serious and I really put a lot of stuff in, data gravity, right, it's sitting there. You're not going to rip a petabyte of your data quickly and move it from one cloud to another. So people are really trying to think carefully about how do I avoid finding myself in that situation if I wanted to move, how would I do that? And so, you know, it kind of falls on service providers like ClearSky to try to help ease some of those issues and also make it a little more seamless for the customer about if I'm here versus here, that's not going to take my whole company down. Great, and as those of us watching your company, you know, what should we be looking for kind of through the second half of this year in the next 12 months, maybe? Well, we just announced that we rolled out FiberChannel. So we started off, you won't be surprised because you know some of the founder DNA here, but we started off iSCSI and we added FiberChannel because we quickly were finding that the high performance low latency workloads often tended to be involved with FiberChannel on-prem. So we've rolled that out and that's been very helpful to us. Yeah, can I ask you a question on that? So, you know, architecturally, you know, Ethernet, we can do the same, you know, performance characteristics as I came with FiberChannel. Most customers, it's, I want FiberChannel because I have FiberChannel, I have the skill sets and I trust it, not because there's anything architecturally that says that I can't go the other way. Is that what you find? Of course, and I have to say, there's a little bit of religious stuff going on there, which you probably know better than I do, but you know, for me, I'm just pragmatic, right? Like there's sometimes benefits for coming from, not from within the storage industry, where you look at it and you go, look, the customer just feels like they know how to do this and in their minds, whether it's true or not, FiberChannel seems easier for them to manage and maintain, you know, it's kind of the best sense. It's reducing the friction to them, buying your solutions. Exactly, exactly. Also, you know, from our perspective, we're a storage target, so whatever they want, that's what we're going to make available. We'll add NFS to the mix. But, you know, a lot of the work for us this year is just expanding out in more locations, being in more metros, you know, when we launched, we were describing to you how we have this metro-centric approach, kind of like Akamai, where we're always within the 120 miles of where the customers are and stuff, so being in more locations is very important. And working with partners like Digital Realty and Akamai, who are major partners for us, to really help that expansion. Okay, great, and if people want to find out more about ClearSky, where do they go, what kind of ecosystems and meetups and events are you guys going to? You know, we're doing a lot of local CIO events, we're at some of the Splunk events, we'll be adding some Elasticsearch local events, so we're there, we do some of the V-Mug things, so we're very local and, you know, a lot of the stuff we do also is just on the web, so we're at ClearSkyData.com. All right, well, Ellen Rubin, really appreciate the update, look forward to catching up with you in the future as the company grows and love to hear about some of the customers, and thanks for the local update for the Boston area. This is Stu Miniman, you've been watching theCUBE.