 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering VTUG's New England Winter Warmer 2017. Now your host, Stu Miniman. And we're back at one of the largest virtualization user groups. It's the VTUG Winter Warmer 2017, 11th year of the show. Happy to have it be. I believe it's the fourth year we've had theCUBE here. theCUBE, of course, SiliconANGLE Media's live program with a worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage. And really happy to welcome him onto the program. Second time he's been on the program, not a local. He actually flew all the way from Hollywood, California to, you know, brave the cold here of the Northeast. Rawlinson Rivera, who, as I said, first time he'd been on the program as now, global field CTO of Cohesity. Rawlinson, always great to see you. Thanks for joining us. Pleasure, my pleasure. All right, so, you know, we'll talk about the Patriots and, you know, Tom Brady's domination a little bit later. But last time we talked to you, of course you'd worked at VMware for many years. I think it was VMware, we had you on with Yan Bing. So glad to have you back on. What brought you to Cohesity? What's going on in your world? And what's your new job? Well, let me tell you, start with like, what brought me to Cohesity? So obviously there's a lot of innovation on what's being done on the particular space that they focus. Obviously for most of my career, my time at VMware, we predominantly focus on primary storage space, performance, performance, performance. We've made V-SAN to be the best thing in the world. I got an opportunity to see what Cohesity was going to do to a space where, within minutes, I was able to very quickly identify the value and the opportunities to be had in that particular space. It happened quick. It happened to a point where I could not stop thinking about it. And I wanted to be part of it. You know, it's an opportunity, and it was just how to do it. You know, the amount of possibilities in that particular space to fix and be part of something new. I mean, V-SAN is great. You know, we are what we are with that product. It was incredible. It's still incredible. It was killing it. But now we're, I see this other opportunity in a different space to compliment even that and others in that particular space. It's actually very passionate about that. All right, so Rawlinson, you know, those people that watch the storage industry, in the storage industry, you know, some people used to call it snorage. Had a joke out there and said, you know what's more boring than primary storage? Come on, it's secondary storage. So why is it so exciting? You know, why is now, you know, really interesting? Because there's a few companies in the space that are kind of reinvigorated that, you know, Cohesity being one of them. Well, this is what I found interesting for me and what really resonated well. So obviously in the point, and the time I made it where I'm now, you see there's a lot of sort of security things that are happening, leaks, and all the things having to do around data. And there's obviously a sort of gap, not only in the traditional way in which data's handle and manage in the enterprise, but the fact that there's this exponential growth in data these days, and it's not going to stop. So it's not just about, I'm going to protect my data. I need to manage the data. How else, what else are we going to do? From a Cohesity perspective, I saw that, you know, Cohesity's way into the particular market is protecting data as a way to ingest that data so then they can do the rest that they can do. If you look at a traditional infrastructure and I live this life, and I know, this is why I was like, I can relate. Protecting, backing up, archiving, replicating, those are things that are performed by individual products, features, capabilities, all disconnected, right? All made to work together, not organically, but someone with the right skill set would have to do that. We have to find the right level of integration so you can see how that becomes complex. There's a lot of risk in that. We as humans are a risk period. And when you have that much complexity, it becomes very challenging to survive in today's world. The world of the internet of everything, when cars are producing four petabytes of data daily, how are you going to manage that? Sure, not every admin lives that world or that life, but we somehow all do. So how do I manage and deal with that? You know, there are sensors that are, you know, the more they are, the more they're on, the more data's coming. It's not just about collecting it, it's not about just protecting it, it's the rest of it. The whole data management domain is a space that needs help. And what Cohesity's doing there is what immediately got me sort of like, we could do so much here. And some of the things that I know and how to integrate with other components of the piece and some ideas, it's an incredible opportunity. You know, the data's not going to stop. I think we're at a point now where you can say that the requirement for infinite data retention is here. Businesses today make their money, make their value by retrieving data from back in the days. Right? How is it that a car company today can say, I'm going to give you Accent Forgiveness? Or you know how many drivers are going to be in a day? Where was that data coming from? Right? Now they're able to pull that kind of stuff and over another competitor say, we're going to offer this, but this other vendor's not doing it. Why? Maybe they don't have access to that type of data. So data now becomes more and more viable for this kind of stuff. Yeah, absolutely. There's been a really good discussion, I think, in the industry of the last few years is storing data is not the interesting thing. We, yes, the day-to-day lose, I'm going to have more data tomorrow. I'm going to have less people and less dollars to be able to put towards that, but I need to be able to turn that, I said the bit flip in thinking is all of that data needs to become an opportunity. How can I leverage it? How can I do more? Talk about your users. What kind of, you mentioned an interesting one on, I think it was like insurance, but what kind of things can I do now using these new kind of techniques that I couldn't do in the past? So just think about, let's just some really practical examples. In the enterprise, some of the sort of, what do we say? Some of the leaks that have been caught, right? Some of the things that have come out, not necessarily applicable to government, but to the enterprise. A lot of companies have been sort of infiltrated and things have been lost. So imagine when, if we could reduce the process, the cost, the inefficiency that exists on curating data, on looking at the information that I already have, without having to spend the time, the money, the effort, the dollars to just get it in and get it out just to get this information to continuously be able to do that, right? Those are the things that we can do in the enterprise today. When it comes to healthcare, we have to retain data, data that needs to adhere to certain levels of compliance. HIPAA, I want to do PCI, there's your social security number there. Do you have top secret information here? Those are the things that in the enterprise and our industry are relevant. And these are tangible things that you can actually see today. We can talk about the fact that, sure, they enter things, the cars and how they drive themselves. Yeah, how do you think that car is going to skip the next hole on the road? Data collected in the different places it's going to be. And that's what, when I look at these things, what we can do today that wasn't there to, and even we could do some of that today, if we change, if we take the road to make the change to the more efficient thing to do in those, but if we remain how we are, it's just not going to happen. It's just going to continue to cost money. Companies will go out of business at some point because they don't have the actual data, the information to remain relevant of what they need to do today. All right, so, Rawlinson, one of the big things I hear from customer these days, get beyond the buzzword of cloud, they're all trying to figure out that strategy, where they put their data, where they put their applications. SaaS has grown big time, public cloud, very robust, turning over what's happening into on-premises environment. Talk to us about how hybrid cloud fits into, the Cohesity fits into the hybrid cloud. Absolutely. So number one, my believe, my take, and I believe Mohit sees in the same way I do it particularly here, when it comes to cloud, cloud is at a place. It is basically a consumption model for IT to do things when it needs to be done, when it fits wherever it is. I think within the next three years, this whole cloud thing that we've been going in hybrid, internal, private, will go away. Everyone will consume multiple clouds. Our play, particularly there, is the fact that we can exist anywhere. We could be already on the mega public clouds. We could be on your private cloud or on your hybrid cloud, but the interesting piece where we can also now be, in any shape or form of the offerings that Cohesity has, which by the way, could be software, hardware, any way you want it, is in the edge. The next, where the data is really being generated, where data is not about, I'm going to back it up, I'm going to protect it, it's where I need to retain the data, look at it, move it in places, in a way that is feasible, consumable, in a way that can deliver actually some value, and being able to be not just the whole cloud conversation, but being in the edge, being able to deal with the data that's coming from all of these different things that are being generated today, is where it's actually important. We are placing the perfect spot to take advantage of that. Right, and to be clear, as you said, primarily, Cohesity, it's a software company, so you can live in the public clouds, you can live in appliance, but totally agree, edge is definitely growing, that doesn't mean that the centralized public cloud is going away or anything less. We saw Amazon put out the green grass, but as we look at machine-centered data, that whole IOT space, lots of it is happening at the edge, which is very different from the traditional data centerpiece. Yeah, absolutely. And I think initially, and I'm still new, right, but one of the biggest misconceptions I find with customers here talking to people is that, when you talk about what Cohesity is, they tell you back up, and I'm like, great, that's one of the things that Cohesity does. It's beyond that, when it gets really interesting, because we can actually, the protection is a form of data ingestion, so we can do what we do. And the fact that it plays into many things, you don't have to replace X, it's a software-defined solution, right? Yes, it comes with an appliance. It's the value and the principles of hyper-convergence, right? Taking these principles, simplicity, scalability, being able to do things effectively, which fit into a particular world, which we typically know as either Nutanix or VSAN or things like that, but those principles are the same that are applied at Cohesity onto X86 standardized commoditized boxes. But they don't have to be those boxes. But then not only doesn't it have to be our boxes, it could be Cisco's box, it could be HP's box, or you just want it in IBM. Either way you want it, it's the same platform across the different places. Yeah, not to get in some of the terminology too much. When I hear hyper-converged, I think that I can also run kind of my compute applications on it. Can I run that in the Cohesity environment too? One of the best things that I can tell you we do is the fact that when it comes to copy data management, and being able to run test and dev use cases, you can run the sort of type of scenarios on Cohesity, run compute, bring up the VMs right there because we have the ability to, instead of going out to them, we bring it closer. We have that data. Now obviously we have absolutely no interest whatsoever on primary storage, zero. When you run on Cohesity for test and dev, it works because you're not trying to test optimum performance. You're not going to get the performance Vsign gives you in a Cohesity box. That's not going to happen. That's not our play. But we can effectively give you test and dev because we have the ability to provide costless snapshots, things that are not going to constrain you from capacity using and things of that nature. But they're also already there. So that's one of the things, one of the particular use cases that we play actually really well into. Great. Last thing, can you talk a little bit about the culture of Cohesity? Mohit's the founder. What did he bring there? What's the kind of early core team that he's bringing together? And what's it like working for a small company? It's amazing, to be honest. I mean, obviously I went from VMware, like I spent over a decade there. Awesome, awesome, bunch of culture. They're still really, really good. When you come to Cohesity, it's an open sort of approach. Everyone's really, I mean, these guys work late every night. And it's just because they want to, because what they do when they're innovating, Mohit sits in the corner somewhere looking at a wall. That he's not on the wall, but he's doing his thing there too. We all sort of kind of very open, very collaborative environment. It is really, really cool. It's a really good experience for me because I didn't have that experience in the past. This is my first time at a startup. I just got into VMware when it just kind of, after the bubble burst, but they were already a big company. So this is a really new experience. And I'm loving it, I'm loving the ride right now. All right, well, Rawlinson really appreciate catching up with you. Look forward to seeing more from Cohesity in the future. We'll be back here with more coverage here from the home of the New England Patriots, Gillette Stadium. This is the V-Tug, Winter Warmer 2017. You're watching theCUBE. Go Brady!