 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020, our 11th year covering VMworld as a global experience so we get to be able to pull in the community from around the globe. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, but a new role, Jill Stelfox, she is the chairman and CEO at Panzora. Jill, so nice to see you, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, Jill, so first, before we get into kind of what you're bringing to Panzora and the direction, we're here at VMworld. Panzora is a longtime partner of VMware. Why don't you just give us the update as to VMware and Panzora and how you support customers together? Yeah, so most of our deployments of Panzora actually run on VMware, whether it's on-prem or at the closest cloud location. So we work really closely in our hundreds and hundreds of deployments across the world. Wonderful, and for most of our audience, if they're not familiar with Panzora, of course, it's very high performance. Really look at that cloud file system is how it's positioned on your website. Bring us as to what brought you to Panzora and what that means to the organization now that you're chairman and CEO. Yeah, so about five months ago now, we purchased the company from the current set of investors. We saw a really interesting technology here and the ability to grow quite quickly, which honestly has come true in the last few months. In Panzora, it's more than just a file system. It is a piece of fabric that allows you to put files in a really high performance way into the cloud and collaborate across the globe. And who knew that five months ago when we bought the company, literally we bought the company a few days before California closed for COVID. And so this is the moment where file storage and collaboration is absolutely key. So great timing for us from that perspective. Yeah, absolutely. We've had so many conversations with companies as they have to really move fast to be able to exist in the, I guess we call it the new abnormal jail. Help us maybe if you've got a customer example of what's bringing the customers to Panzora, especially right now when there's acceleration of cloud. It's the theme we see in the keynote here at VMworld and beyond, but what is it that differentiates Panzora and brings customers to you? Yeah, so we work for example with one of the largest banks in the world that took a legacy wire transfer application and put it out into the cloud because they had no way of managing both the volume of transactions and the breadth worldwide that they needed in order to manage that application. And it would have taken years to rewrite that in a cloud native app and putting it on Panzora works great. We also work with architecture firms, some of the largest in the world where they're able to collaborate on building buildings all from home, which is pretty amazing. And then I would say the last and maybe the coolest is what we do in entertainment. We work with a large majority of the gaming companies and they use Panzora to run all their files and collaborate on those really large games where they can code across the world. And then in the case, we just announced a partnership with the New Orleans Saints where we're taking all their game Dave footage and making it available to all their constituents quite quickly. And the big difference in all of those examples from other solutions and what we do at Panzora is that in other solutions, you have to duplicate that data across the world. We don't, we provide one single file, one single source that's kept securely all the time and available all the time. Jill, help us understand how this fits into the cloud environment. So we talked about your VMware connection. I know Panzora is in the AWS marketplace, lots of discussions, you know, AWS, Azure, even Oracle cloud as to how it fits there. When I think about storing things in cloud, there's some of that just, you know, global replication that can happen or how I can access it. Help us understand really the added value that Panzora has and why that's important for like that New Orleans Saints example that you talked about. Yeah, so one of the great things about the way that we handle data is you don't have to duplicate it. We just do snapshots and it's there and available when you need it. The really important thing about putting this much data, very large files in the cloud is you need to be able to manage your costs and also where you put it. So let's talk about costs for a second. Being able to have a solution that automatically manages cache versus S3 and long-term storage, that's one of our, you know, key, we have 34 patents or something like that. It's one of our main claims to fame is that we can absolutely do that. And that reduces the costs long-term of your storage in the cloud. That's one of the big deals. The other is, look, AWS, pick Google, pick Azure. You likely are using more than one cloud and we have a full hybrid solution. It can mirror what you have going on within your cloud or across clouds, which is perfect. Yep, maybe it would help if you dig in a little bit there. When people talk about hybrid cloud, they talk about multi-cloud. Often there's the red herring gets thrown up of portability. When we're talking about large data sets, we know we're not moving it. I mean, AWS has the big boxes they can ship you or have a truck come to your facility to move it. But most customers, wherever you create your data, you tend to want to keep it there. But it's managing my data and fitting across these hybrid environments or I'll have my data application in one cloud. I'll have a transactional application in another cloud. What are you seeing from your customers out there? How are they dealing and managing this overall cloud environments that they end up with? Yeah, it's actually really interesting because I think the expectations from users day to day is that the cloud works exactly like your laptop or desktop would work in your office environment where you could seamlessly go between an Outlook 365 to a Dropbox. Each of those are on different cloud environments. They're different in terms of how they work. But from a user perspective, you want no latency and immediate access to your data. Well, the cloud doesn't really work like that. And so you need something like Panzera to be the system in the middle, the fabric in the middle that connects all those things together. So that when you want to reach for your big CAD drawing and pull that, it's going to pull just as quickly as an email from Office 365. And you as the user don't need to know whether you pulled that out of cash because it's a file that's used quite often or whether it was over on S3 and in long-term storage or long-term or cheaper storage in the cloud. And I think it's interesting because a lot of people, we, by the way, work with a lot of customers that do move their data around. They have petabytes and petabytes of data and they do move it around based on cost and availability. And we can do it all in the background. And as a user, you would see no degradation in legacy or in latency and you would see no legacy data gone missing, which is kind of cool. Jill, it really sounds, David Floyer on the Wikibon team writes about the hybrid and multi-cloud environments. He says, we've got these planes. So if you think in the networking planes, people in VMware will say that the vision that NYSEER originally had in NSX have is that that interconnected issue for the networking piece, it sounds like you're doing very much the same thing on the data layer to be able to, you sit on top of the storage but provide some consistency in hooks. I know Panzer has been around for a while. Are there certain use cases that are kind of bubbling to the top? You mentioned things like collaboration being something that of course is very active here in 2020, but if there's some of the a couple of use cases that bubble up for you as to key things that customers are driving for today. Yeah, I would say two main use cases in the last five months. One is there is sadly, dealing with a global pandemic isn't enough. We're getting ransomware at a higher level. And if you've got Panzerra and the way in which we take snapshots and we store your data, you can have a ransomware attack and we've seen it with a number of our clients during COVID. You simply in minutes reinstall a snapshot and off you go. You didn't lose a thing and you can completely ignore ransomware, which has been really great for the folks that have had that installed. The second is the need to collaborate at the bitter end, people's houses. So, this is one of the great things about working with VMware is, we can put a VM certainly on-prem but we can put it in your nearest cloud. So for example, let's say you're using AWS but the closest place to a particular group of people's home is a Google area. Fine, put it in Google. It won't matter for our deployment. And so you can get those files really quickly at the very edge and being able to deploy it on VMware just makes it even faster, so. All right, Jill, as you said, you've been on for five months. What should we be looking at from Panzerra through the rest of 2020? It gives us a little bit as to your vision and what we should expect to see. The company is growing really quickly. We've invested a ton of money in our sales partners and customers. So since I've been here, we've literally grown revenue about 65%. And so that's been super fun. We've also, we're investing heavily in R&D and you're going to see some fun things coming from us on the R&D front about how to really support this data services layer that's coming and the kinds of information that we all need to get about what's going on in the cloud and our ever important data. So excited about that. Wonderful, we always love VMworld's one of those times where people go through the show floor and they're like, okay, wait, you're hiring? What positions you have? Any key things that people should be looking for if you say, hey, what are you looking for when it comes to new talent for Panzerra? Yeah, so one of the best things about, by the way, new talent for Panzerra is that we use Panzerra to run our company. And so you can work anywhere in the world and or you live anywhere in the world and work for us. And we're looking for development talent at all levels. We're looking for sales help at all levels. And honestly, there's some internal roles as well. So you can definitely come to our website and see all of those. We're very excited about the growth and hires. Always good to see that growth. Jill, why don't you give us a final takeaways you want people to have about Panzerra, what you're seeing from VMware customers these days and help us give the final takeaways. Yeah, so what we enjoy about Panzerra and VMware is really being able to deploy some of the largest companies in the world where whether it's federal government or a very large worldwide enterprise. And if you are looking for a common fabric that allows you to deploy across, across clouds, we are your choice. Jill, thank you so much for catching up. We need to bring you back. Jeff, Rick's going to want to talk to you more about the technology and football. Glad to see that you're still plugged in with those as we knew you were still still Fox. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Stay tuned for more coverage from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE.