 We're back at Veeamon 2022. We're here at the Aria in Las Vegas, Dave Vellante with David Nicholson. Bill Andrews is here, he's the President and CEO of Exigrid, MassBoy. Bill, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So hearing a lot about obviously data protection, cyber resiliency, what's the big picture trends that you're seeing when you talk to customers? Well I think clearly we were talking just a few minutes ago, data is growing like crazy. Right this morning I think they said it was 28% growth a year, right? So data is doubling almost just a little less than every three years. And then you get the attacks on the data which was the keynote speech this morning as well, right all about the ransomware attacks. So we've got more and more data and that data is more and more under attack. So I think those are the two big themes. So Exigrid's a company we've been around for a long time, you've kind of been the steady kind of eddy if you will. Tell us about Exigrid, maybe share with us some of the differentiators that you share with customers. Sure, so specifically let's say in the Veeam world, you know you're backing up your data and you really only have two choices. You come back that up to disk. So some primary storage disk from a Dell or you'll pack it or an ad app or somebody. Or you're going to back it up to what's called an inline deduplication appliance. Maybe a Dell, Data Domain or an HPE store once, right? So what Exigrid does is we've taken the best of both those but not the challenges of both those and put them together. So with disk you're going to get fast backups and fast restores but because in backup you keep weeklies, monthlies, yearly retention, the cost of this becomes exorbitant. If you go to a deduplication appliance, so let's say the Dell or the HPEs, the data comes in, has to be deduplicated. Compare one backup to the next to reduce that storage which lowers the cost, so it fixes that problem. But the fact that they do it inline slows the backup down dramatically. All the data is deduplicated so the restores are slow and then the backup but no keeps growing as the data grows because they're all scale up technologies. Restores are slow because you've got to rehydrate. You've got to rehydrate every time. So what we did is we said you've got to have both. So our appliances have a front end disk cache landing zone. So you're right directly to disk. Nothing else happens to it. Whatever speed the backup app can write at, that's the speed we take it in at. And then we keep the most recent backups in that landing zone ready to go. So you want a boot of EM, it's not an OWL like a deduplication appliance, it's a minute or two. Secondly, we then deduplicate the data into a second tier which is a repository tier where we have all the deduplicated data for the long-term retention which gets the cost down. And on top of that we're scale out. Every appliance has networking, processor, memory end disk. So if you double, triple quadruple the data, you double, triple quadruple everything. And if the backup window is six hours at 100 terabyte, it's six hours at 200 terabyte, 500 terabyte of petabyte doesn't matter. Because you scale out. Right. And then lastly, our repository tier is non-network facing. We're the only ones in the industry with this. So that under a ransomware attack, if you get hold of a rogue server, or you hack the media server, get to the backup storage, whether it's disk or a deduplication appliance, you can wipe out all the backup data. So you have nothing to recover from. Right. In our case, you wipe it out, our landing zone will be wiped out. We're no different than anything else it's network facing. However, the only thing that talks to our repository tier is our object code. And we've set up security policies as to how long before you want us to delete data, let's say 10 days. So if you have an attack on Monday, that data doesn't get deleted until a week from Thursday, let's say. So you can freeze the system at any time and do restores. And then we have immutable data objects and all the other stuff. But the combination of a non-network facing tier and the fact that we do the delayed deletes makes us the only one in the industry that can actually truly recover. And that's accelerating our growth, of course. Great description. So that disk cache layer is a memory? It's a flash? It's disk. It's spinning disk. It's spinning disk. No different than any other disk. And then the tiered is what's less expensive spinning disk? No, it's still the same. It's all SAS disk, because you want the quality. So it's all SAS. And so we use Western Digital or CGA drives, just like everybody else. The difference is that we're not doing any deduplication coming in or out of that landing zone. They have fast backups and fast restores. So think of it like this. You've got disk and you say, boy, it's too expensive. What I really want to do then is put maybe deduplication appliance behind it to lower the cost. Or reverse it. I've got a deduplication appliance. It's too slow for backers and restores. I really want to throw disk in front of it to have fast backups first. Basically, that's what we did. So where does the cost savings bill come in, though, on the tier? The cost savings comes in the fact that we've got deduplication in that repository. So only the most recent backup data. But let's say you had 40 copies of retention. 10-week lease, 36-month lease, a few-year lease, all of that's deduplicated. OK, so you're deduping the stuff that's not as current. And only a handful of us deduplicate at the layer we do. In other words, deduplication can be anywhere from 2 to 1 up to 50 to 1. It's all over the place, depending on the algorithm. Now, it's what everybody's algorithms do. Some backup apps do 2 to 1. Some do 5 to 1. We do 20 to 1 as much as 50 to 1, depending on the data types. Yeah, so the workload is going to largely determine that in combination with the algos. The content type. So the part of the environment that's behind the logical air gap, if you will, is dedupt data. Yes. So in this case, is it fair to say that you're trading a positive economic value for a little bit longer restore from that environment? No, because if you think about backup, 95% of the customers' restores are from the most recent. From the disk cache. 95% of the time. Because if you think about why do you need fast restores? Somebody deleted a file. Somebody overwrote a file. They've come to work. They can't open a file. It's encrypted. It's corrupted. That's what IT people are trying to keep users productive. When do you go for log or term retention data? It's an SEC audit. It's a HIPAA audit. It's a legal discovery. You don't need that data right away. You have days and weeks to get that ready for that legal discovery of that audit. So we found that boundary where you keep users productive by keeping the most recent data in the disk cache landing zone. But anything that's long-term, and by the way, everyone else is long-term at that point. Yeah, so the economics are comparable to the Ddupe upfront. Are they better? Obviously, you get the performance advantage. So we will be a lot. The thing we replace the most, believe it or not, is disk. We're a lot less expensive in the disk. I was meeting with some VM folks this morning, and we were up against Cisco 3260 disk at a children's hospital, and our quote was $500,000. The disk was $1.4 million. Just to give you an example of the savings. On a data domain, we're typically about half the price of a data domain. Really? No. The reason why is their front-end control are so expensive. They need the fastest chip on the planet because they're trying to do in-line duplication. So they're chasing the chips all the time. They need SSD on it to move out of the hash table. In order to keep up with in-line, they've got to throw so much compute at it that it drives their cost up. But now, in the case of ransomware attack, are you saying that the landing zone is still available for recovery in some circumstances? Or are you expecting that that disk landing zone would be encrypted by the attacker? Those are two different things. One is deletion, one's encryption. So let's do the first scenario. The first scenario is? I'm talking about malicious encryption. Absolutely. So the first scenario is the threat actor encrypts all your primary data. What's your go for next? The backup data. Because he knows that's your balance of spend is to not pay the ransom. If it's disk, he's going to go in and put delete commands at the disk, wipe out the disk. If it's a data domain or he still wants it, it's all going to be gone because it's one tier. He's going to go after our landing zone. It's going to be gone too. It's going to wipe out our landing zone. Except behind that, we have the most recent backup deduplicated in the repository, as well as all the other backups. So what will happen is they'll freeze the system because we weren't going to delete anything in the repository for X days because you set up a policy. And then you restore the most recent backup into the landing zone, or you can restore it directly to your primary storage area. Because that tier is not network facing, it's fenced off, essentially. People call us every day of the week saying, you saved me. You saved me again. People coming up to me here, you saved me. Tell us a story about that. I mean, I don't have to name names, but how's that? I'll actually do a funnier story, because these are the ones that our vendors like to tell, because I'm self-serving as the CEO of Exigrate, of course. It's your 15 minutes job. Yeah, my 15 minutes of fame. So we had one international company who had one Exigrate at one location, 19 data domains at the other locations. We ran some more attack. Guess what? 19 data domains wiped out the one Exigrate, the only place they could restore. So now all 20 locations, of course, are Exigrates. China, Russia, Mexico, Germany, US, et cetera. They rolled us out worldwide. So it's very common for that to occur. And think about why that is. Everyone who's network facing, you can get to the storage. You can say, well, the media servers are buttoned up, but I can find a rogue server and snake my way over to storage. I can. Now we also, of course, support the Veeam Data Mover. So let's talk about that since we're at a Veeam conference. We were the first company to ever integrate the Veeam Data Movement. So we were the first actually ever integration with Veeam. And so that Veeam Data Mover is a protocol that goes from Veeam to the Exigrate. And we run it on both ends. So that's a more secure protocol, because it's not an open format protocol like SIFS. So with running the Veeam Data Mover, we get about 30% more performance. But you do have a more secure protocol layer. So if you don't get through Veeam, but you get through the protocol, boom, we've got a stronger protocol. If you make it through that somehow, or you get to it from a rogue server somewhere else, we still have the repository. So we have all these layers so that you can't get at it. So you guys have been at this for a while, I mean decade and a half, plus. And you've raised a fair amount of money, but in today's terms, not really. So you just had really strong growth, sequential growth, I understand it, and double digit growth year on year. Yeah, about 25% a year right now. 25%. What's your global strategy? So we have sales offices in about 30 countries already. So we have three sales teams in Brazil, and three in Germany, and three in the UK, and two in France, and a lot of individual countries. Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, Saudi, Czech Republic, Poland, Dubai, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, et cetera. We've just added two sales territories in Japan, we're adding two in India, and we're installed at over 50 countries. So we've been international all along the way. The goal of the company is we're growing nicely, we have not raised money in almost 10 years. So you're self-funding. We are cash positive and self-funded, and people say, hi, we've done that for 10 years. You know what's interesting is, I remember Dave Scott, Dave Scott was the CEO of 3Par, and he told me when he came into that job, he told the VCs, they wanted to give him 30 million, he said, I need 80 million, I think he might have raised closer to 100, which is right around what you guys have raised, but like you said, you haven't raised it in a long time. And in today's terms, that's nothing, right? 100's, 500 in today's terms. Yeah, right, exactly. And so the thing that really hurt 3Par, they were public companies, so you could see all this stuff, is they couldn't expand internationally. It was just too damn expensive to set up the channels, and somehow you guys have figured that out. 40% of our business comes out of international, we're growing faster internationally, we are domestically. What was the formula there, Bill? Was that just slow and steady? No, so what we did, we said let's build Exegrid like a McDonald's franchise. Nobody's ever done that before in high tech. So what does that mean? That means you have to have the same product worldwide. You have to have the same spares model worldwide. You have to have the same support model worldwide. So we early on built the installation so we do 100% of our installs remotely. 100% of our support remotely, yet we're in large enterprises. Customer racks and stack stay appliances, we get on with them, we do the entire install in 30 minutes to about three hours. And we've been developing that into the product since day one. So we can remotely install anywhere in the world. We can have spares depots all over the world, we can bring them up really quick. Our support model is we have in theater support people, so they're in Europe, they're in APAC, they're in the US, et cetera. And we assign customers to the support people so they deal with the same support person all the time. So everything is scalable. So right now we're gonna open up India. It's the same way we've opened up here every other country. Once you've got the McDonald's formula, we just stamp it all over the world. Same pricing, same product, same model, same everything. So what was the inspiration for that? I mean, you've done this since day one, which is what, like 15, 16 years ago? So our whole thought was, first of all, you can't survive anymore in this world without being an international company. Because if you're gonna go after large companies, they have offices all over the world. We have companies now that have 17, 18, 20, 30 locations and they're in every country in the world. You can't go into this business without being able to ship anywhere in the world and support it for a single customer. You're not going into Singapore because of that. You're going into Singapore because some company in Germany has offices in the US, Mexico, Singapore, and Australia. You have to be international. It's a must now. So that was the initial thing, is that our goals become a billion dollar company and we're on path to do that. You can see a billion. Well, I can absolutely see a billion. And we're bigger than everybody thinks. Everybody guesses our revenue, always guesses low. So we're bigger than you think. The reason why we don't talk about it is we don't need to. That's the headline for our writers. Exegrid's a billion dollar company. A billion dollar company. Oh, it's way to billion. That's right. Not disclosing. But that's awesome. I mean, that's a great story. I mean, you kind of are a well-kept secret, aren't you? Well, I don't know if it's a well-kept secret. Smaller companies never have the awareness of big companies, right? The dels of the world are 100 billion, IBM 70 billion, Cisco 60 billion. Easy to have awareness, right? If you're under a billion, I'll give you a funny story then. I think we've got to close out here. So this is a funny story. So I was talking to the CIO of a super-large 4 to 500 company. And I said to him, just so who do you use? I use IBM DB2, and I use Cisco routers, and I use EMC, primary storage, et cetera. And I said, would you ever switch from DB2? Oh no, the switching cost would kill me. I could never go to Oracle. You know, would you ever, so I said to him, look, would you ever use a pure storage, right? A couple billion dollar company. He says, who? Interesting. I said to him, all right, so skip that. I said, VMware, would you ever think about going with Nutanix? Who? Those are billion dollar plus companies, and he was saying who. Public companies. And he was saying who. That's not uncommon when I talk to CIOs. They see the big 30, and that's it. That's interesting. What about your partnership with Veeam? Tell us more about that. Yeah, so I would actually, and I'm going to be bold when I say this because I think you can ask anybody here at the conference. We're probably closer, first of all, to the Veeam sales force than any company there is. You talk to any Veeam sales rep, they work closer with Exigrate than any other. Really? Yeah, we are very tight in the field and have been for a long time. We're integrated with the Veeam data boomer. We're integrated with Sobo. We're integrated with all the integrations with the product as well. We have a lot of joint customers. We actually do a lot of selling together where we go in as Veeam, Exigrate, because it's a great end-to-end story, especially when we're replacing, let's say, a Dell Avalmart, a Dell Data Domain, or a Dell Network, or a Dell Data Domain. Very common at Veeam, Exigrate, going together on those types of sales. So we do a lot of co-selling together. We constantly train their systems engineers around the world. Every given week we're training either inside sales teams or we've trained the customer support teams in Columbus and Prague. So we're very tight with them. We've been tight for over a decade. Is your headcount public? Can you share that with us? So we're just over 300 employees. Really? Wow. We have 70 open positions, so. Yeah, what are you looking for? Everything, right? We are looking for engineers. We are looking for customer support people. We're looking for marketing people. We're looking for inside sales people, field people. And we've been hiring, as of late, major count reps that just focus on the Fortune 500. So we've separated that out now. When you hire engineers, I mean, I think I saw you a long time ago, DG, right? Is that true? Yeah, way back in the 80s. With systems guys. Right, systems guy. I mean, I remember them well. Ed DeCastro and company. Tom West. The MV series. Tom West was the hero of ours. The MV4000, the MV20000, right? When we were kids, the Soul of the New Machine was the inspirational book. But anyway, are you looking for systems people? What kind of talent are you looking for in engineering? So it's a lot of Linux programming type stuff in the product, because we run on a Linux base. So it's a lot of Linux programs and it's people in those storage. Cool. Bill, hey, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Learned a lot. Great story. It was fun. Good luck. Thank you. Thank you for watching theCUBE's coverage of Veeamon 2022 Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break. Stay with us.