 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Hey, welcome back everyone. We live in Las Vegas, the CUBE special coverage of VMworld 2017, our eighth year. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE with my co-host, Dave Vellante, also co-host. Our next two guests is Jespreet Singh, CEO, founder of Druva and Matt Morgan and CMO of Druva. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. Be here. So Pat Gelskin basically laid out on the keynote essentially the waves and one of them, you're riding hard, you're a startup. Take a minute to talk about why you guys are excited by this wave, because I think data protection, decentralized, fully cloud world, cloud, IoT and Edge, is creating a huge data environment. Jespreet, take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. Absolutely. So if you look at the big wave, right? The data, as I said, is getting completely decentralized. We have IoT, Edge, the new cloud and the data center is getting disrupted big time. And the more data gets decentralized or defragmented, right? The more centralized the data management has to be, right? Whether on the edge, in the cloud. And the whole notion of cloud, if you think about it, is actually an interesting phenomenon where Amazon is sort of applying retail economies to traditional IT. If you combine them together, you sort of want to manage the data as a service wherever it goes. Be it the Edge, be it the core, you want a simplest ability to sort of protect it, to govern it and to add intelligence to it over time as you gather more and more information. So Druard provides a platform end to end to sort of make it data all managed properly from a single console. Pat Kelsinger was up on stage in his keynote and he just came out, big news, Amazon Relationships got some fruit daring already. And they had to do that because vCloud Air was kind of an interesting point. But he brings up the point about the cloud as a disruption and that the conventional wisdom of the old is no longer the most relevant thing right now. And a lot of customers are paying attention to that. So I got to ask you as a founder and CEO of On the Right Wave, in our opinion and Wikibon's opinion, what should customers look for for success? And because we're early on this new vector, what's different? What should they be thinking about as they look at the cloud, look at this distributed and decentralized edge? What are some of the things that's different? I think if you think about customers and Matt please add to it, for customers this is not just a technology stack, right? It's not a software defined data center all over again. This is more of trying to see how they can consume something at a predictable SLA and price wherever they go, right? That's the whole genesis of cloud. It's a complete business model shift. And so when they look at data and how they holistically manage data, they understand data is likely to outlive more systems by three X. And now when they have this notion of cloud, how can they be on the journey to sort of consume and deliver the value of data as a service in this whole notion of public cloud? And that's sort of the driver promise, right? So Matt, I wonder if you could talk about sort of the brand continuing that brand promise. The ascendancy of the sort of modern backup software in the first part of this millennium was coincident with virtualization and consolidating servers. And we've sort of played that out. And now customers are saying we have to rethink the way we protect data because of cloud. So I wonder if you could address that and talk about the brand promise of Druva in that context. Excellent, yes. We did a survey, 450 VMware customers. And it basically underscores the VMware strategy. There are going to be three tenants to the modern data architecture moving forward. There's going to be physical servers. There's going to be virtualized infrastructure. And there's going to be VMware cloud on AWS or its derivatives. When you move further from left to right, moving from physical to virtual, virtual to cloud, what ends up happening is the approach to data protection of the past fails to scale and frankly is no longer compatible. You can't float an appliance in a cloud. You can't possibly put your own co-located infrastructure within a cloud store to attempt to protect that data. So a lot of people just go without protection at all. What we found in our survey is that three out of four people surveyed really want an as a service solution because they're able to basically protect cloud to cloud. They're able to come in and say, okay, if my data is going to be sitting there, my infrastructure is going to be sitting there, I want to be able to wrap that infrastructure with an as a service solution that will protect it. The real value though, isn't just protecting in the cloud. It's the as a service solution is not limited by the constraints of the past. It can actually be extended backwards. So you can take your virtual infrastructure and protect it with an as a service solution. You can take your physical infrastructure and protect it as a solution. So as a result, we see this as a sea change to this new way of protecting data. So just for you were saying that you've got to have sort of this centralized data management philosophy in order to succeed in this world that Matthew just described. Why is that? Is that because you need a single point of control in case something goes wrong and it's a recovery thing or is it more of a business model sort of an as a service business model requirement? I wonder if you could address that. So the traditional IT boundary is sort of shattering in the cloud world, right? If you're going to have, you know, there's a last incident of sorts, right? If one incident happened in a company, there are many parties looking at what happened there. Is it a breach? Is it a loss? Is it a governance issue? So data has multiple faces now. And the data also touches multiple parties, you know, beat production, beat, you know, the DevOps. So you got to have a holistic view of looking at the data versus traditional approach of, I'm going to put a backup architecture or DR architecture or e-discovery architecture all in silos. And cloud sort of also gives an opportunity for, you know, people not to hug their heart wouldn't say, this is mine, go get yours. They can sort of break boundaries and say, let's work together on this data set, but I can manage the prediction part of it and someone else can pay their dues to manage the governance part of it. So decentralization, the more utilization of data is promoting a sort of a holistic view of management of data purely built from the cloud. Jasper, I want to ask you, you had a pretty busy week. We covered this on SiliconANGLE and so I want to kind of ask it again, since we're here at VMworld, $80 million in funding, congratulations, big news and the Druva Cloud Platform on AWS. Congratulations. Can you share more color to that? It's a lot of cash, 80 million. It's a good amount of money. It's just no replacement for creativity, but it's a good, good fuel to have in the company. Yes, we fortunate to have a great lead, root, capital with all of our existing investors, Sequoia, Nexus, and Aya, including EMC Ventures of the industry in Druva to be in this round. Secondary storage overall is getting disrupted. The legacy isn't material anymore, given the big cloud wave, as I said. So the new wave of providers have to be in the cloud and hence Druva. We've been building historically a very strong foundation of cloud native solution without a hardware approach, with no hardware approach all in the cloud. But in the past, we have taken a legacy architecture of a backup, DR, e-discovery into multiple products, NSYNC and Phoenix to make a ticket of edge data or data center data. And now we're doing a big step forward to say we're going to combine our products into a single platform. Think of it as Amazon services for data prediction. The customer logs in can search for their workload. They want to backup VMs today. They want to search today. And then deliver what they want to the IT right from a single point of console. That's the power of Druva Cloud Platform. Eight years ago, we interviewed D-Raj Pandey for the first time. It was our first time doing the Q2010. And at that time, no one's ever heard of Nutanix. Then Nutanix, Nutanix, a little accent from New Jersey, Massachusetts. I always get it wrong, isn't it? I say Nutanix. Nutanix. D-Raj was kind of crazy. He was viewed in Silicon Valley as kind of a wildcard. No one got his model at that time. Dave and David Floyd were like, this is amazing. They saw it right away. And I'm like, this is really awesome. You guys are kind of out of that same track and the investor along the same line for secondary storage. So I got to ask you, when you're doing your fundraising, you must have had some pretty interesting experiences. Can you share some of the without naming names, the good and kind of weird conversations you had around? Because you got to understand the trends to get your business. Absolutely. I think storage is the new effort, right? So there's a lot of people who don't dislike storage for what happened in the public market recently. So you got to explain them that there's a thesis around making money on public cloud, using public cloud as storage here. So we had various interesting conversations there. And we were lucky to have Riverwood who got the idea, who had the same conviction as the founder to sort of put money behind where the market is going. But still a lot of venture capitalists don't like the venture part of it. They want a predictable story. They want easy money. And they want, you know, big valuations. But the venture and the venture VC capitalists. The idea of venturing is to go take a chance on a bet that's called venture capital, not hedge fund or money market. Absolutely. So you've actually got some pretty weird kind of like, huh, questions? Where's the craziest question you got? That was so off base. You had crazy questions like where's the box? You know, you're selling all the power. Wait a minute, where's the shorted box? Where do I put it? Where do I put the leader? We had one question with someone asked us, so what's your, you know, adoption, what's the word? What's your, you know, the engagement on your software? And we were like, this is your, you know, backup software or a DR software. It's got to perform, got to be durable, but you don't engage with the software as you would with Salesforce.com. But, you know, you got to look for one party or two parties of a strong conviction and sort of go with them. Great story. Thanks for sharing. So you mentioned three things, protect, govern, and add intelligence. And that add intelligence piece is, you know, you don't usually associate that with certainly not backup, but data protection. So in this world of digital business, we think of digital business is all about how you leverage data assets. And when you think of adding intelligence, that's not something that we typically think of in a data protection company. How has Druva different in that regard? And how can you help organizations leverage their data assets? Yeah, we see this as a customer journey, okay? Data protection is the gateway drug to leveraging an as a service model, right? Because it's really obvious. I can protect my data, I can restore it, I can do disaster recovery. Once you get that data into a centralized store, there's incredible things you can do from the fact that it's centralized. Unlike previous approaches that were dozens or hundreds of silos that you never could report across, Druva gives you that centralization effect. So the first logical step to move up the customer journey is to embrace governance, where you can start having a perspective, making sure that you're legally complying with regulations, making sure that you're governing for legal requirements within the company. But when you move past that, you start to actually start to manage for patterns, and that's where intelligence comes in. When you start thinking of data, the associated metadata that surrounds that data is data within itself. And if you wrap intelligence around that, you can start to get predictive around areas that could affect risk for your organization or even open up opportunity. So a good risk example is ransomware. Through intelligence, you can actually see when data that is distributed starts to be encrypted early, so you're able to identify and do what we call the anomaly detection. So that's kind of the journey, if you will. You go from protection to governance, governance to intelligence. So it is kind of the holy grail, right? I mean, companies historically in your business haven't been able to achieve, I mean, EMC tried, it bought documentum to try to achieve that vision, and I mean, I guess it failed, but they sold it for a boatload of money, so they're all good, nobody's crying for EMC, but what's your perspective on this, Jaspreet? I think these are mostly elastic workload, highly elastic workload. You want a search on data, you want it right now, and you want it to be a short-lived search. You want AI, deep AI, which requires a lot of data, but the deep AI, machine learning sort of has to have a holistic amount of data for a very short amount of time. It can burst compute, get the problem solved, and move on. So historically, for lack of architecture, lack of abundant amount of hardware, and also the IT boundaries of not supporting each other decision was a big, you know, limiting factor. Now with Cloud, we have delivered a full-text search, but to a price point, the companies can afford for an investigative search, right? The search was not affordable in the past. They can do searching of pet-a-pet-a data in an instant and go out, right, and likewise, machine learning. Machine learning is a lot easier proposition in Cloud, and the user is pretty easier, right? So you apply deep learning, you understand patterns to what Matt said, you understand ransomware before most customers can see it, and then alert them and then sort of move on, right? So the shaking off IT boundaries and then, you know, the power of Cloud Intelligence sort of is truly helping us build this together. One last marketing question, if I may, your marketing challenge, you got a choice. You can go after the legacy stovepipe guys, which is relatively straightforward, but there's an emerging set of modern data protection folks. How do you sort of pick those two? Do you do both, and how do you differentiate from the latter in particular? Well, I'm really grateful that some large companies have gone forward to advocate public Cloud, okay? Amazon and Microsoft, with Azure, and with even Google, with Google Cloud Platform, they have done a phenomenal job of selling a disruption and a more effective way to do business when leveraging the public Cloud. When you move to that, the data protection conversation must change. There is no option to do things the way you used to do. It will be called the chain of pain, right? So from a marketing point of view, I can attach to all the dynamics of what data protection means in this hybrid reality where some of your stuff will be in the public Cloud, some of your stuff will be below the horizon on premises. I also have the opportunity to talk about the centralization of data. So unlike any appliance vendor that's on the market today or any traditional approach, the idea of stove piping your data limits you. It limits you both in the immediate term and it limits you over the long term by centralizing that information together and delivering it as a service to wrap more of your infrastructure with our protection technology, you're going to be able to gain a lot of value. So I need to focus specifically on that centralization, the move to public Cloud, and then there's a cost efficiencies conversation that I can have on top of all of that, which is about, you know, taking half your cost out. Guys, you had the launch of the Druva Cloud Platform, that's your big news here on AWS with the VMware. Since it's VMworld, which is VMware's ecosystem show, what should they know about your Cloud Platform? The VMware customers, people who have running ops and data centers, obviously the data protection, we've talked about what you just said, which is there's no walls in the Cloud. So it's a completely different dynamic, completely disrupting data protection with Cloud, a completely different ballgame, get that. But VMware customers, what do they do? How do they engage with you guys? Why should they use you? And what should they know? So absolutely, as Matt said, there are about 90% of customers who surveyed, said they're looking at AWS for hosting their VMs in that new model and this new shift towards public Cloud, Druva is only as a service solution, they can consume from Amazon Marketplace, from VMware cross-Cloud services platform, is what they're calling it. Or directly through Druva or our partner channel. So it's a no hardware, simple as service solution, delivered near AWS to consume on-prem and Cloud, directly on to a center of the audience. So you're an ecosystem partner of VMware's. Absolutely. On that chart that Gelsinger put up under data protection, you will have your logo there. Currently we don't, in the near future, yes. They were certain, yes, absolutely, yes. In the near future, we definitely hope to see our logo. Well VMware is still owned by Dell Technologies, AKA Dell EMC, hence the top billing. That's true. Veeam was in there and they've had a little bit of a... That's true. Early on requirements of... That's great. Like I'll say it, you should be in there. But you're certified, it's not like it's in development, it's shipping. The early on requirements by Veeam is pretty simple, that you have to use native Cloud technology, not the classic disk array, but of the storage and you have to have a clean path to talk across AWS and we qualify it very well. So we are in development right now and to be announced pretty soon. All right, so bottom line. Can I buy it and use it today? Yes, you can buy it and use it today. I'm a Veeam work customer. Oh my God, yes. Absolutely, yes. Okay, great. Guys, thanks so much. Drew, with a hot startup, $80 million of funding. On top of a bunch of cash you had, how much did you raise total? 200. About 200 million. $200 million. Plenty of cash on the war chest. Check it out, data protection in the cloud, one of the areas. Being disrupted by this new wave that Pat Gelsinger laid out here at VMworld 2017, we'll be back with more live CUBE coverage after this short break.