 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. Hi, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, the virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm pleased to welcome from Scalely, one of our long-time CUBE alumni. We have Paul Speciale, the Chief Product Officer at Scalely. Hey Paul, welcome back to theCUBE. Hi Lisa, it's been a long time and it's just wonderful to be back. Thank you. This is our new virtual CUBE set up here where everybody is very socially distant, but socially connected. So, since it's been a while since we've had you on and your years from Scalely, tell us a little bit about Scalely and then we'll dive into what you're doing with HPE. Okay, absolutely. Let me give you kind of a top-down recap of where we're at. So, interestingly, we're now at 10-year-old company. We actually celebrated our anniversary last year. We still have our flagship product, The Ring, which we launched originally in 2010. That is distributed file and object storage software. But about three years ago, we added a second product called Zenco, which is for multi-cloud data management. We do continue to invest in The Ring a lot, both on the file side and the object side. The current release now is Ring 8. The target market for this is pretty broad, but we really focus on financial services institutions. That's a big base for us. We have something like half of the world's banks, about 60% of the world's service providers, a lot of government institutions, but what's been fastest growing for us now is healthcare. We have a lot of growth there in medical imaging and in genomics research. And then I guess the last thing I'll add is that partners are just super important to us. We continue to certify and test with ISV solutions. I think we have 80 of them now deployed and ready to go, but there's a real focus here now on partners like Citera and WECA IO and Splunk, Veeam, HPE Store once. So those partners are critical to our business and we just love to partner with them. So you've been partners with HPE for quite a while. Tell me about the evolution of the partnership as you've evolved your technology. Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, because I just noted this a couple of weeks ago. The company is 10 years old. We've been partners with HPE for over half of that. So about five and a half years. The way to think about us is that we have a worldwide OEM relationship with HPE for the Apollo 4000 server line. The official name for our product is HPE Apollo 4000 Systems with Scalely Ring Scalable Storage. So quite a mouthful, but very descriptive. And then we work very closely with the HPE Storage and big data teams. I'm very tight into the product side, talking to the product managers, but also the marketing side and very much so on the sales side. We've had super success with them in Europe, also here in the US, and there's growing business also in APJ in Japan specifically. You mentioned that one of the sectors right now that's really burgeoning is healthcare. And given the fact that we are three months into a global pandemic, anything that's interesting that you want to share in terms of how Scalely is helping some of your healthcare customers rapidly pivot in this very unprecedented time? Yeah, I would say that there's a couple of very notable trends here. The first one started a few years ago. We really honestly didn't focus so much on healthcare until about 2017, 18. But since that time, we now have something like 40 hospital, hospital systems globally using our product and notably on HPE servers. And that's to retain medical images for long-term retention. These are things like digital diagnostic images, MRIs, CAT scans, CT scans. These hospitals are mandated to keep them for long-term, sometimes for five years, 10 years or even patient lifetime. I would say the newer thing that we're seeing now just in the last year or so is genomics research. There's so much concentration now on pharmaceutical and biotechnology around genomics. That data tends to be very voluminous. It can go from hundreds of terabytes into petabytes. And moreover, they need to run simulations on that to do fast iteration on different drug research. We've now been applied to that problem and a lot of times we do it with a partner or something like a fast tier one file system and then us as the archived here. But we're seeing the popularity of that just grow tremendously within hospitals, hospital groups and also just dedicated research for biotechnology. You talked about volumes there and the volumes are growing and growing each year as is retention periods depending on the type of data, the type of imagery, for example. But from a use case perspective, what is it that you're helping your say healthcare customers achieve? Is it backup targets? Is it disaster recovery? Is it speed of access? All the above. Yeah, so where we focus in healthcare is really on the unstructured data. This is all the file content that they deal with. In a hospital, think about all the different medical image studies that they have, things like digital files for CAT scans and MRIs. These are becoming huge files. One multi-slice X-ray or digital scan, for example, can be gigabytes in size per file and that's per patient. Now think about the number of patients and the retention of all of that. It's a perfect use case for what we do, which is capacity-optimized storage for long-term retention. But we can also be used for other things. For example, backups of the electronic patient records. Those are typically stored in databases, but they need to be backed up. What we found is that we're an ideal long-term backup target. So the way hospitals look at us is that they can consolidate multiple use cases onto our ring system on HPE. They can grow it over time. They can just keep adding servers. And typically what they do is they start with a single use case, what they think of as a single modality, perhaps in imaging, and then they grow over time to encompass more and more and eventually think about a comprehensive image management system within a hospital. But those are popular today. Hospitals are also starting to look at other use cases. Obviously, we mentioned genomics, but hybrid cloud is coming at them as well. Talk to me about that as we see growing volumes of data, different types of modalities, lots of urgent need to, you said backup data, so data protection is critical, but as healthcare organizations move to multi-cloud, how can scalability in HPE help facilitate that migration? Yeah, so what we've noticed is, there's both a feeling that they're fast and they're slow to embrace the public clouds. But one of the things that's obvious is that from a SaaS perspective, software as a service, they've really embraced it. Most of the big EMR systems, the electronic medical records are already SaaS based. So they are there. And in fact, they're probably already multi-cloud, but on the data management side, that's where we focus. And we hear a lot of use cases that would involve taking older data from on-prem and perhaps archiving it long-term in a HIPAA compliant cloud in the US, for example, for long-term retention, but there are other things. For example, they may want to push some data that they've generated on-prem to a public cloud like Amazon or Azure and do some kind of computing against it. Perhaps an analytic service, some kind of image recognition or image pattern detection. The third one that we see now in hybrid cloud is their interest in having second copies of the data just so that they can continue operations. I think we all know that hospitals have an absolute uptime need. They need to be running 24 by seven. One of the things that's starting to happen is rather than a second physical data center, they establish a second site in a public cloud and then they stage their applications and we can help with HPE move the data from on-prem to the public cloud to have this sort of cloud disaster recovery solution. So, Cloud Dear, interesting topic. Do you see there that in healthcare in particular that hospitals and healthcare organizations are getting less concerned about cloud from a security perspective and more open to it as an enabler of scale? I think what they've seen is that the cloud vendors have really matured in terms of providing all of the hardening that you want in terms of data privacy and data security. 10 years ago, if you looked at the cloud you would have been extremely nervous about putting your data up there. But now, all of the right principles are there in terms of multi-penancy, secure authentication based on very strong keys, encryption of the data. One of the first healthcare customers we worked with was completely ready to do this but then of course they said the images that we store in the cloud must be encrypted. So, we were able to work in collaboration with them to develop encryption and actually use their own key management service for encrypting those images so that our system or the HP servers don't store the keys for encryption. So, I would say yes, it's a combination of the clouds becoming super mature. Some of them are now certified and compliant for this use case and the customers are just sort of, they've passed the first step of trying it and they're really to sort of go into these use cases a little bit more broadly. And so, with that maturity of the technologies and the more of the willingness on the part of the customer to try it, tell me how to HPE and scale it and go to market together. Yeah, so what we do is we've really focused on specific market verticals, healthcare being one of them but there are others financial services is where we've had other success with them. The way we do it is that we first start by building very specific swim lanes in HPE parlance and that helps aim the sales force on where we can provide a great solution, not only with Ring, but perhaps with complimentary software like I mentioned HPE store once for data protection backup. They have other partner solutions that we just love to work with. Vendors like Weka IO has a wonderful fast file system that is now useful in biotech and they use a system like the Ring for storing the data from their file system and the snapshots in that. But the way it's been organized is really by vertical and to go and have specialized kind of teams that understand how to sell that message. We jointly sell with them. So their teams and our teams go to calls together. Today it's obviously been very virtual but we've usually collaborated very extensively in the field working kind of air cover at the marketing level. And now one of the newer things with obviously the new way of working is lots of virtual events. We're not only doing a discover virtual experience but we started doing more and more webinars especially with HPE and these other joint partners. I'm curious in this new virtual era where everything like you said this is how we're communicating now and thankfully we have the technology. Couple questions on that related to sales and engagement. One, what are some of the things that the sales teams, maybe the joint sales teams are hearing now from customers that might be changing requirements given the COVID situation? First question. Yeah, I think, well one of the things we've certainly seen is that almost nothing has slowed down in these industries. I mean, we're focused on industries that seem to kind of think long term, right? Obviously healthcare, they're dealing with the current crisis as much as they can. But what we've seen is that they're still planning, right? So they want to build their IT infrastructure. They're certainly thinking about how to leverage hybrid cloud. I think that's become very clear that they see that as not only a way to offer new services in the future but also to save money today. They're very interested in that, right? How can they save on capital expenses and human talent as an example? I think those have been the themes for us. We do have some exposure to industries that might have a little bit more sensitivity to the current climate, things like travel related services. But honestly, it's been minor. And what we're finding is that even those companies are still investing in this kind of technology, really to think about the two to three and horizon and beyond. Have you done any messaging or positioning changes? I know you also have product marketing or corporate marketing that relate to customers. Everybody prepares for different types of disruption or natural disasters. Now we have this invisible disruptor. Any change in your messaging or positioning either at scale or with the partnership with HPE that will help customers understand if they're not on this journey yet, why they need to be? So yeah, we have looked at how we message the technology and the solution, especially in the light of the pandemic. We've stayed true to kind of a top level hybrid cloud data management message. But underneath the covers, what do customers care about? They care about a solution that you provide but they also care about what they pay for it. Let's be honest. One of the things we've done very historically is to have a very simplified pricing model. It's based on usable, protected capacity. So the user says I have a petabyte of data. That's the license fee. It's not based on how much disk they have or how many copies they want to create or how many sites they want to spread it across. So one of the things we want to do is make that a little bit more clear. So that's come out a bit more in our messaging in recent months. The second is that what we feel is that customers really want to know us as a company. They want to feel assured that we're here, that we'll support them in all cases and that we're available at all times. And what that's translated into is a more of a customer community focus. We are very much caring about our customers. We see them invest in our systems today but they also continue to expand. So we're doing things like new community portals where they can engage us in discourse. They can ask questions live, we're online. We have a lot of tech tips and knowledge available for them. So I would say that those are the two changes that we've put in our messaging both on pricing and on a community involved. And where community involvement is concerned, it's even more critical now because we can't get together face to face and have conversation or meetings or conferences. As Chief Product Officer, imagine that was a lot of what you were doing before. Tell me what it is from your perspective to engage with the community but to engage with sales and your partners during this TBD timeframe of we don't know when we're going to get back together. What do you find that works really well for continuing that engagement? Yeah, I think the key word for me has just been transparency. Customers have always bonded to know really what's going on behind the scenes. How does the tech work, right? What's the architecture? And I think now what we're seeing is there's sort of a ramp up on that. For example, what's very important for a community is for people to know what's coming, right? They want to know the roadmaps. They want to be alerted to new things that are not only the next quarter, but in the next year, right? So I think that's our focus here is to make this community a place where people can learn absolutely everything so that they can plan not only for the next year, but like we said, they're thinking three years and beyond. So we're going to do our best to be totally transparent and be as trusted as we can possibly be. Transparent and trusted. Paul, those are two great words to end on. We thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE, sharing what's new at Skillity and with the HPE partnership. It's been a pleasure, Lisa. Thank you for your time. Likewise, for my guest, Paul Speciale, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, the virtual experience.