 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, and welcome to a special presentation of CUBE Conversations here in our Boston area studio. Happen to welcome back to the program. It's been a little while. Brian Regan, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at a local company, Actifio. We've been watching since the early days, Brian. So good to see you. Great to see you, Stu. Thanks for having me in. All right, so Brian, it comes as no surprise to you. You've worked on it in this industry for many years, but when we've looked at kind of our predictions out of the Wikibon community, no matter which one of these big mega trends we're talking about, whether you're talking machine learning, IoT, cloud, data sits at the center of it and really is super critical. There's the old tried and true. Data is the new oil, but why don't you bring us up to speed? Actifio is a company that people probably started out as it's in this weird storage ecosystem today, but I think data is also at the center of your business. Absolutely, I mean, if you think just really simply about any business in the world, they have customers, they have partners, they have products, they have employees, all that's data. And the problem with data these days is it just keeps getting big. And when it's big, it's slow. And it's slow to use for application development. It's slow to use for insights and analytics. It's just slow to use if you want to move to the cloud. Actifio has really been in business for nearly nine years now to help virtualize that data, make it more portable, make it easier to use for all those reasons to help drive those businesses. And that is our value proposition. You're right, we sort of started in that sort of are you a storage company? We're storage agnostic and today we're cloud agnostic. It's about the data. Yeah, I mean, it's really your software company, correct? We're a software company. So hit on a key thing that I've looked at for a while is everybody's talking about how do I as a company, how do I become more agile, how do I move faster? CICD is kind of table stakes these days for so many companies. How does Actifio help companies prevent that storage from being an anchor weighing them down and slowing them down? Sure, sure. I mean, CICD is great and you can move at speed as long as you're talking about very lightweight elements of an application, the JSON files, the XML, all those lightweight application elements, logic. But when it comes to that big database sitting behind the scenes that's actually powering that application, that's the gravitational pull that slows CICD down. Typically, we've seen it take 80 plus percent of the software development lifecycle just to stand up those environments so people may compromise as they subset it. They do all the crazy things to try and avoid the storage or infrastructure tax when it comes to setting up those environments. We can help bypass that, again, it's virtual data so now we can start to port it, we can move it, we can parallelize it, and we can get it ready for these developers through our automation and orchestration in minutes as opposed to hours or days in many cases for the service levels. All right, so Brian, you mentioned developers there. Definitely kind of the infrastructure world has been like, oh gosh, how do we deal with developers? How do we fit in this whole world? DevOps and like infrastructure, a lot of times been oil and water. What are you hearing from your customers? How does that play into what they're doing? Yeah, I mean developers for us are the consumers, right? They are the end users of that data and the infrastructure team or the operations or DBA teams are really the providers of that data and they have to stand it up, they have to stand up the infrastructure, they have to stand up the data, they have to do all the roles, the log roles and the like and data prep. And so if we can help them really collapse that time to access the data because it's always in its native format, prep the data so it's ready for use and then parallelize it so that way we can actually do multiple test streams or multiple development streams or we can do those more agile scrum projects and get more done in a given calendar quarter, now all of a sudden those consumers are happier because they're getting the data in its full state more of it, more rapidly than they ever have and the operations teams are happy because they don't have to buy more storage to do it, they can actually go on and do other projects instead of have to sit there and manually get data set for developers. One of the challenges we hear from customers these days is where they develop it and how they do that versus production, very different. A lot of times some things have been doing in my data center, some are in the public cloud, how does the whole kind of where it lives fit into, your environment, I know if you just had a big announcement around some of your cloud pieces. Sure, we just released our eighth major release of our software since our founding and it was really probably from an engineering time standpoint the largest release since our first one and it was very cloud centric. Our starting point as a company was really to try and be infrastructure agnostic. Wherever you wanted to put your data from a storage or compute standpoint, we wanted to give you that freedom to do so. Now it's just as relevant in the cloud. You should be able to choose the cloud for the given workload or the given data payload. Don't have to get frozen into one or locked into one, let you choose and then also once you've chosen, give you the freedom to actually port from cloud to cloud if need be because you might choose whether it's economic arbitrage or whether it's just different PAS capabilities and different clouds suitable for different workloads. We want to give you that freedom. All right, but public cloud, come on, it's supposed to be easy. They've got so many features. What's the gap? If I'm deploying, choose your favorite public cloud with AWS Azure, GCP, Oracle, IBM, et cetera. What's the piece that Actifio delivers that's still needed by customers that's not kind of native? It just comes back to that data. Boy, it's always the data. It's always the can that gets kicked down the road because again, those lightweight elements of applications are so easy to move and then we just get stuck with this big gravitational pull of data. And the fallacy or the popular myth about public cloud is it's going to be easier and it's going to be cheaper and it can be both and it can be both, particularly when you can get the data in there and it's in a suitable state to actually use for these development analytics, all these different workload characteristics that while it's stuck in non-native format in its very large state, it's just unusable in those clouds. You meet with a lot of customers. Been doing a lot of travel recently. Any specific stories you can sell or kind of aggregate, what are they struggling with with cloud? What's working well with them? Of course, how you're fitting into that. Yeah, there's sort of three camps that I've seen over the last several weeks particularly. There's the camp that, whether it's regulatory pressures or just internal policy, they're not going to move, but they still want to change their operating model to a cloud model. And so they're implementing and instrumenting their internal environments, their private cloud to operate just like an Amazon or Azure or Google, but all behind the firewall. And they still need all of that capability for the data automation. They want their data on demand for those applications. They want self-service. They want infrastructure as code and they want to take advantage of Actifio to help power that internal cloud. That's camp one and that's still a pretty hefty camp. Camp two is, I would call more traditional companies who are not born in the cloud, but have embraced the cloud and really want a fast on-ramp to get their data into one or more public clouds so they can get out of the data center business. And they're using Actifio really as an on-ramp first, but then once it gets into the cloud, they're using the native data management capabilities that they can take advantage of in the public cloud so they can keep their agility moving at the speed of their VMs, at the speed of their lightweight components. And then the third camp, which has really been interesting to watch is the born in the cloud guys. And really starting to realize that the native capabilities of these public clouds are very powerful, but they don't really take the place of traditional backup, for example. There is no backup software native inside of AWS. An EBS snapshot is a great snapshot. It's not a backup though. You can't really use it as a time machine and when you go region to region, you do fulls and so it becomes very heavy and very costly. So Actifio can really play a role for even those native born in the cloud applications to provide the enterprise class data management, but in a public cloud. You know, Brian, you know, bring us up to speed kind of, you know, how do you characterize your customers? You know, how many customers do you have? Sure. You know, how much of them are kind of the new class versus you know, I've got, you know, my data center kind of kind of sitting on these things. Yep. Well, we've since our founding, we've really focused on that upper mid-market and enterprise customer. We just crossed over the 3000 customer mark the end of last quarter. We operate in 37 countries today and I would say, you know, they run the gamut from the Fortune 50s to that sort of Fortune 10000s. But they all have very common characteristics. You know, as you would expect, we thrive in environments where data is growing and growing fast. We thrive where data is regulated or under some sort of internal or external pressure around management. And we really thrive in environments and industries that are truly embracing this digital transformation. They know that, like you said, the data is the new oil. Data is their best currency today and the fact of crypto data is currency. And so they're truly embracing that and they want to move faster and they want to move faster with the data that they have today. And whether they choose to do that on-premise or in the cloud, or in the cloud at some point in the time, they want the freedom to make that choice when it's right for their business. All right. Brian, I have a personal question for you. You brought up digital transformations and today you were in a CMO hat. You've had a number of different roles. Other, you know, C-suite roles in the past. What is the changing role of the CMO today, especially with that landscape of digital transformation? Right. Yeah, it's fascinating to watch just the change of what my budget line items are aligned around. You know, I probably spend as much on software and other licensed models, SaaS models to support my business, to support my digital and inbound marketing efforts, to support my analytics efforts around what's working, what's not. How do I tune the best marketing mix to really cater to this, you know, the changing role of a consumer of content and then all the content syndication and content marketing. So, you know, to some degree, I think part of the changing nature of a CMO is they have to be very technology focused or I should say technology aware, focused on the business outcomes, but understanding how technology can play a role to really affect those business outcomes. In my case, whether that's increasing the exposure of the company, whether that's increasing the lead flow to our sales organization, whether that's making our different routes to market more optimized and enabled for higher velocity sales. All of those things can be technology enabled today. So you have to be much more conscious about, it's almost like a CIO junior role inside of an enterprise. Yeah, really interesting, right? We've debated for years, you know, where will the IT budget be driven from? Sounds like you've got an impact on that. I love the discussion you talked about, you know, kind of how technology is helping to transform businesses. Do you have any customer examples? Customers are just doing some cool stuff with technology that could kind of be useful. So I'm going to go use a company that would probably be the last industry you would expect me to bring up, but I think they're a fascinating use case. So Waste Industries is a, they're in the trash disposal business. And as the CIO has corrected me on numerous occasions, it's okay to say the word trash. And so we were talking, they used Actifio first to help them solve, you know, very classic modernized my DR strategy, you know, part of the business. But then they started to realize that the power of using that data for other purposes to accelerate analytics, because it turns out in the trash disposal business, they actually instrument a lot of, they instrument their trucks. They instrument with sensors, their canisters. They do route optimizations based on data that they're getting from all of these devices. So as this CIO is fond of saying, they're not in the internet of things, they're in the internet of trash. And so they're using data to help them be a much more innovative and frankly optimized organization today. And then as they start to think about where the future of their business goes, now that they're starting to become a data company, they can start to really comprehend what does it look like with autonomous vehicles in trash disposal? What does it look like in terms of, you know, using different types of vehicles to do routes? Maybe even an Airbnb type of model or a Uber model where maybe it's not even just our people doing the routes, but it's other organizations that we can start to sell data to to help them become a greater part of our organization. Fascinating, you know, probably the company on the surface that you think would probably not be a data company at all, but I think it personifies where we are as an industry today. Every company is a data company. And the companies that win in the market are the companies that truly embrace being a data company and taking advantage of that. Yeah, definitely not one would be first I'd be thinking of. All right, right, last question I have for you. We're heading into 2018. Yes. What should we be looking for? You know, the Brain Vectifio, people that are watching. Yeah. What do we expect next year? So I think, you know, very exciting year for us. We, as I mentioned, we just released this major, you know, software update, the customer adoption already has been, you know, tremendous. We see, you know, really the embracing the cloud, whether it's behind the firewall or embracing the public cloud, multi-cloud, being a big theme for us. You know, I think that, you know, we have a Gartner analyst said to me a few weeks back. He said, you know, you've been around, you're disruptive still, though, but you're proven. And being disruptive and proven is a really powerful thing. And so, you know, we feel like we've got, you know, a great punching weight in terms of, you know, market presence. We have amazing customers in every industry. We see this, you know, 2018 is a really great year to continue our scaling, continue to be, you know, a very profitable and growing organization, and really helping to meet the needs of some of these, you know, incredibly interesting use cases around data in the business. Profitable and growing. You must be an East Coast company. That's right. Well, Brian, yeah. Well, Waltham, Massachusetts, appreciate having you on. Thank you, Stu. Right down the road here from our East Coast studios. Always good talking up and look forward to talking to you more next year. And thank you so much for watching us. Be sure to check out the theCUBE.net for all of our interviews, all of our upcoming events. And hit us up if you have any questions. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.