 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering ZertoCon 2018, brought to you by Zerto. This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillan. We're here in Boston for ZertoCon, and with me is Rob Strichey. He's the senior vice president of product for Zerto. And Rob, I understand here, one of the big items of news is Zerto7 is being announced. Tell us about what's new in Zerto7. Yeah, so we're announcing Zerto7. It will be out in Q1 of 2019. We're really excited because really it's the first time that the IT resilience platform that we've put out will also include in the convergence of backup, disaster recovery, and cloud mobility, all into one single platform. We've been building upon this platform for years. People have come to know us for continuous data protection and our journal-based data protection. And now we're extending that over time to give people a better view and better resiliency across the near-term and the long-term. Well, now I think a backup is being kind of table stakes in the resilience game, but this is, the backup features are actually new for you in this release, is that right? Absolutely, what we've done is enhanced what we had, we had some backup features in there already, we already get used for recovering for things like ransomware, using our journal file level recovery where people can go back like a DVR a few seconds before they got hit. Be able to pull the file, the folder, or an entire virtual machine back and pull that out like we were using a backup. In fact, much quicker, our customers tell us than legacy backup. But table stakes is having enhanced indexing and search capabilities across all your different platforms, having dedicated workflows that are integrated into the current recovery workflows, things of that nature that really are in Zerdo 7 that will take us to the next level. Now, backup is a fairly painful process for most IT admins. What is Zerdo doing to make that simpler? Yeah, I think the great thing is we have over 6,000 customers already that utilize us and trust us for data protection on a daily basis. We're extending those workflows to say, okay, I need a weekly, a monthly, a quarterly, or a daily even, and I want to keep that for a certain amount of time. Right now they would see maybe one day to 30 days back in what we call our journal. And now we're extending that so they see the points in time beyond that and helps to simplify those workflows for those customers. Because really, the complexity comes from, I have a media server, I have single points of failure, I have to worry about did I get that backup or not. The journal technology that we have actually alleviates that. Plus, we've been doing this at scale for many years with many thousands of customers and we know that that's been one of the pain points for our customers around backup too. We didn't take this lightly to go further into this market. We thought that really, the market was ripe for convergence of these products. Oh, now go one layer deeper on journaling. I mean, that's a technology that's been around for a long time, but really not so much in the backup space. What are you doing that's different with your approach to journaling? Yeah, so we actually brought this out back in 2011, so we've been doing it for about seven years now and we took a different approach to disaster recovery. It allows for a lot more granular recovery in seconds. So you have recovery point objectives that are very near and then you get quicker recovery time objectives as well. So a lot of this journaling technology was how do you have the right order fidelity of all of these systems as an application. Now doing that and saying, okay, I want to take a point in time and I want to keep it as my gold copy for three months because I have a business or a corporate mandate that says this is the retention periods that I have really brings together what we've been doing in journaling for years as we went from being the first to put out a hypervisor based replication and journaling system. Then we took it to what they call the DR as a surface market. Then we took customers to public cloud in 2014 and back from public cloud in 2016 and now we really have to any to any technology across those different platforms all using that same underlying journaling technology. But it doesn't need different ways in clouds versus say in VMware's hypervisor. Now how do you coordinate the complexity of that environment? You've got customers who have some backup on-prem, some backup in the cloud, they maybe have multiple clouds. How do you coordinate all that backup? Yeah, I think it's been really one of the things that we've been working on for some amount of time already. So they're starting to see the fruits of our labor about how you have a distributed scalable system that automatically does that. So we're not just a replication engine or just a journaling system. We actually embed the orchestration in automation into the system. That way it's wrapped in. It's kind of like having an engine and having the steering wheel at the same time. Then we wrap a nav system which is our analytics product around that to give people guidance on how to utilize it. So to your point, we try to make it easy. And in fact, one of our pillars is it better be simple, like real simple, otherwise we don't ship it. There are a lot of vendors in the various aspects, backup, DR market. How is Zerto differentiating itself? Yeah, I think that we're not doing backup. We're doing a completely different way of taking this. Backup has been done typically either with agents or snapshot technology. Maybe you go back four hours in time if you get hit with ransomware. Because we already have and can see that data in the journal, seconds of granularity. So say somebody's loading a database on a Friday night, doing an ETL into the database of a terabyte of data. We'll see that terabyte go in and all those changes happen. You could actually utilize the journal after you've actually done the load to take a pre and a post copy of that. So I have before I made the changes and after I made the changes, which really helps customers in a unique way. The, you get into some very large file sizes, I would imagine, when you're doing that many copies of data. How do you manage the volumes? Yeah, we have some technology inside the product that is space efficient, uses things such as compression and other types of technology. For doing the backup and for in Zerto 7 and for long term retention or secondary storage, we're partnering with people like HPE and their store once product set. We have other partners of ours like Exigrid here and their NFS enabled secondary storage. Plus we'll use some of the typical S3 SMB as well as cloud based as targets. Because we think that they have some of that built in hardware and built in technology that really does a better job of doing the compaction. We're not trying to be a purpose built appliance for everybody. We look at being a software company and leveraging those really good secondary storage devices and clouds as the targets. One of the themes of the conference we heard John Morency, Gartner talking about it this morning, was resilience and really moving beyond backup and disaster recovery to business resilience. How well are your customers taking to that message? It's amazing. I think that when I go out and talk to our customers, CIOs, VPs of infrastructure, or just even CIS admins, they're looking for resiliency. They're looking for a single product that can bring together backup, disaster recovery and that cloud mobility. I think you heard one of our customers up on stage with Morency, Jamie from Tinkata that really has embraced that. They're actually kind of, I would say pushing the cutting edge of seven different cloud providers. And utilizing us as that platform. By design, seven different cloud providers. By design. And part of that is if you look at GDPR and all the different regulations across the world they have to deal with, it's easier for them. But they know that they utilize us as an IT resilience platform that enables them to go those different places. You mentioned ransomware earlier. Have you seen the growth of ransomware continue or is that now slowing down, finally being displaced by crypto mining and some other? I think that it's always there. I think that it flares up from time to time and it's not a as Ziv, our CEO and founder said yesterday it's not if you're going to get hit by ransomware it's when. And I think that being resilient and having a resiliency in depth type of approach really is important for that as well. So in time we've got left. Talk about the future. What's the roadmap for Zerdo going forward the next couple of years? Yeah, so this year we're laying out the IT resilience platform, building it out and continuing to build upon what we've done as we see and where we see a lot of our customers going containers are a big thing. And we see that the infusion of containers in our customer base is growing rapidly. So we'll be looking at some new approaches to that. And we think we're uniquely positioned based on our underlying technology to take advantage of that. Cloud-born apps are a big one as well. But because we're already in the cloud working with Azure as one of our key partners in Amazon as well, we get to see how these all come together and we have a unique seat at the table for going forward. Rob, I can't let you go without asking to stand up please and show the camera the official Zerdo colors. If anyone is walking the walk here it's Rob Strache wearing pants with the official Zerdo colors. Where do you find pants with that color? You can find them. The great thing is being in Massachusetts there's a lot of different companies that make Nantucket red, which is not really Nantucket red it's more like a fire engine red. But these in particular I had made for me for this conference this week. So. If you can find anything in the Boston area. Absolutely. Rob Strache, thank you very much for joining us. Much appreciated. Thanks for having me on. I'm Paul Gillan. This is The Cube.