 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 19, brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Google Cloud Next 2019, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman, John Furrier is also here. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage of Google's big cloud show, customer event. This is day two. Ashok Ramu is here, he's the vice president of cloud and customer at Actifio, Boston base, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Good to be here. So, big show, Actifio. Category creator, grinding it out, battling in a very competitive space, doing very well. Give us the update on what's going on with your company. So first of all, we are super excited to be here at Google Next, right? With one of the strategic partners for Google we've been working well in all the departments. We had a great announcement today, we announced Actifio Go for Google, which is our SaaS offering, and it's dedicated to the Google platform. We want to have the Actifio experience be that much more better and easier for people running data sets anywhere, particularly in Google. So, and Google has been one of our premier partners over the last, I would say three years or so. They've gone from strength to strength. So very happy to be here and super excited to be launching this offering. So when you guys started Actifio, it was clear you saw a market beyond just backup, beyond just insurance. You started to develop, you popularized copy data management, you had that term, everybody uses that today. You sort of focused on other areas, DevOps, analytics and things of that nature. How has that gone? How has it resonated with customers? Where are you getting the most traction today? So great question. I mean, it's gone really well, right? We've kind of been the leader, like you said, setting up the category and basically changing the way data is looked at and being managed, right? Data now as a commodity is no longer a commodity, but it's an asset. And we are kind of enabling companies to leverage that asset in many different ways. And cloud is here. Everybody wants to go to the cloud. Every customer we talk to, every prospect we touch wants to leverage cloud. And Google is coming in with a lot of strength with a lot of capabilities. So what we are building in terms of data transformation, the data aware application aware technologies we have is resonating very well. The DevOps space we talked about is the tip of the spear for us. It accounts for over 70% of our business. And the last I checked over 60 to 70% of our customers are leveraging cloud in some form. I'd beat for DevOps, cloud bursting, DR and all of those categories. And having a very strong enterprise DNA makes us deal with scale very easily. We take complex applications and make it look simple. And that's been our strength for the past nine years. We continue to innovate and that strength and work with Google to make the platform even more stronger. When I think back of those early days, you said enterprise architecture, it was like, okay, let me understand that architecture. The building blocks, the software IP that you have. But it's been quite a different discussion I've been having with your team the last couple of years. Because as you said, cloud is front and center and not surprising to hear that DevOps is a big piece of, help us update kind of that journey. And a full SaaS offering today, how you got from kind of the origin to the company to a SaaS offering. Sure, right? I mean, we always knew we had a phenomenal product, right? And a phenomenal set of customers. We have a number of Fortune 1000, 2000 customers with us. And what we realized is the adoption of, to understand how cloud works and understand how customers can easily manage the cloud, the experience becomes much more important. And so the SaaS offering is more about how do you experience the same great active your technology with a push button ease of use. So we enable the implementation, installation, ingestion of data in a minute. So by the time you're done with the whole process, you're already starting to leverage the active your technology in the cloud of your choice. And active your go for Google particularly targets SAP HANA, SQL and other complex workloads. So these workloads are traditionally been, you know, very infrastructure heavy, very people heavy in terms of managing. And what we've done is to radically transform how you manage those workloads. Lot of organizations in the conversations I've had over the last 24 hours has been HANA this and HANA that. How do I make HANA simpler? I've heard active view is the way to go for managing SAP HANA. How do you guys tackle it? And these are very interesting conversations with a lot of thought leaders who help us not only build a better product but also improve the experience of how they take it from there. So that's how I would see the transformation for the company. Why? Why is active view make HANA simple? What is it specifically about you guys that differentiate you? I think it's a great question. So HANA in general has been a very complicated hard to install, hard to manage application. So what active view brings in is native application technology. So we don't go after infrastructure. We don't go after just storage but we look at the application as a whole. So when you talk application down we learn the application. We figure out how it works, how it works best and how does the best way to capture it and present data back, which is what it's all about. And when you start from there it's a hard problem to tackle. So it takes a little bit of time for us to tackle that problem but when the solution comes out it works one way across all platforms. So we've had customers moving data from on-prem to the cloud and they don't see a difference. They used to go left, now they go right but as far as the application tool thing works it works the same way. A developer using HANA is using HANA the same way yesterday that he was today because even though the database has moved from on-prem to the cloud. So that transformation requires the level of abstraction and understanding the application that we have automated and built into our engine. Okay, the hard question for data protection, data management folks today is how are you attacking SAS? Yep. Most companies that we ask that question to is that as roadmap, roadmap and maybe that case for you too but what is your strategy with regard to SAS because something triggered me when you talked about the application and I know Ash, I know his background, his systems view, application view has always been his expertise and your company's expertise. Is that an opportunity for you guys? Is it one that you're actually actively pursuing? If so, explain if not, why not? Is it on the roadmap? No, it's certainly an opportunity of pursuing and we're working with a number of SAS vendors to figure out again, a sense of where is the critical data mass? SAS has a number of components to it and the essence of any particular application is where is the workload, what is the state machine and how do you manage it? That's the key element and once you tackle that, the SAS application is like any other application. So we have people working with us to build custom connectors for Office 365 and other elements of SAS products. So as time evolves, you'll see us, we'll start working, we'll have announcements for the cloud SQL and other Google platform as a service offerings, Amazon RDS, so those offerings are coming and we will be basically, we're building the platform and once the platform comes, just like Actifio has done, we will tackle the SAS applications one at a time. It's not a technical challenge, it's a business challenge, isn't it? Absolutely, it's a business challenge and for us, we have to focus on where the enterprise customers want to go and SAS at this point is, I would say, emerging to be a place where enterprise wants to adopt it at a scale that they want to adopt in. So we are certainly focusing on that. And I think there's a perception too, Stu, that, well, the SAS vendor, they're in the cloud, they got my data protected, it's all good. Yeah, well, we know that's not the case. We need to worry about that. And I said protected and that's not fair to you guys because you're much much wider scope. So, but, you know, back when we were talking about SAP and we've watched some of these, you know, big, tough applications and they're moving to the cloud. There's a lot of choices out there. You've announced them specifically about Google. What can you tell us about why customers are choosing Google? And if you have any stories about joint Google customers that you have, would love to hear that. Oh, Viva, I would say, let's start off, you know, I would thank Google because it's one of the key partners for us. We've done over, you know, many, many million dollars last year and we want to double the number this year, right? And it's been all the way from companies that have 15 to 20 VMs to companies that have 20,000 VMs. So it spans the gamut. You know, from an infrastructure perspective, Google is the best of the breed. Nobody knows infrastructure compute memory better than Google. Nobody knows networking better than Google. Nobody knows security better than Google. So these are the choices why enterprises now are saying, okay, Google is a choice. And as I see on the show floor today, last year was, I have a project, maybe Google. This year is, how do I do ABC with Google? So the conversations have shifted off. Should I do Google versus how do I do ABC with Google? And when you marry Actifio's technology which is infrastructure agnostic, we don't care where the application runs. And with that mantra, you marry that Google infrastructure. It creates a very powerful combination for enterprises to adopt. So just as a follow-up to that, when we talk to customers here, multi-cloud is the reality. So how does that play into your story? And where do you see that fit? We were always built multi-cloud. So right from day one, Actifio's platform, architecture, everything has been infrastructure agnostic. So when you build something for VMware or Amazon, it works as is in Google. And with the latest capabilities around cloud mobility that we announced a few months ago, you can move data seamlessly between different cloud platforms. SAP, in fact, has just chosen Actifio to run, be it's de facto data protection platforms on all cloud platforms. So you'll soon hear Actifio also being supported on Ali Cloud. So that will be the only cloud platform that is this golden standard to protect complex workloads like SAP has. You mentioned you have a team in Hyderabad. What are they working on? Is it sort of part of the broader development team? You know, cloud focus, Google focus, what's... The team in Hyderabad is very much integrated to our engineering team out of Boston. So, you know, they're basically equivalent. We all work together collaboratively. The talent in Hyderabad is now building a lot of our cloud technologies and as well as the emerging technologies. So we've been able to staff up a very strong team and set up very strong partner teams to kind of help us augment what we have here. So, leaders here are basically leveraging the resources in Hyderabad to kind of accelerate the development. Because, like you know, there's never a shortage of work. Yeah, so you're following us on and the talent pool in that part of India has really exploded and you've seen- Absolutely. Big companies, all the cloud providers, all the new rideshare companies are there. Oh yeah. War for talent, isn't there? Exactly. Good. So, talk road map a little bit. What can we expect going forward? You know, show us a little leg if you would. So, you can see a lot more announcements around Actifio Go for Google. We'll be enhancing the experience around, you know, adopting and ingesting SAP and SQL, et cetera. We'll be looking at a lot of our SaaS integration offerings that are coming out. You'll talk about Office 365, Cloud SQL, Amazon RDS, things like that. We'll have a migration suite to talk about, you know, how do you ingest and manage Kubernetes containers because that's becoming a common place today, right? How do you tackle complex container environments, microservices, so that's an area of focus for us. And continue to, you know, build and integrate further into the application ecosystem. Because these applications are not getting simpler. SAP is continuing to build more complex applications. How do you tackle the diverse road map and keep up with it? That's going to be what we're going to be focusing on. So, Actifio Go, we talked about that a little bit. That was an announcement here. That's your hard news. Yes. It's, when's it shipping and when's it available? It's ready to go. It's a SaaS offering, so there's nothing to ship, you know? So, in the actual SaaS pricing model? It's an actual SaaS pricing model, SaaS offering, one-click purchase, wizard based install, so yes. Stu's laughing because so many sasses aren't a true cloud pricing model. Three years can only grow up, and it's not an entity for reporting. It's not an entity that just gives you a bunch of glamour screens. It is actually taking your HANA workloads and giving it to you for data protection, backup, disaster recovery, right? So, it is true Actifio, the time-tested Actifio Enterprise product now being offered a SaaS, so. And how are you going to market with that product? So, we have a number of vendors as well as Google partners here to work with them to kind of generate demand and awareness. So, this has been in works for over six months now. So, it's not something that came out of the blue, and we've been working with Google in formulating the roadmap for us. So, what's the Actifio ecosystem looking like these days? How is that evolving? It's, I would say, you know, the customers are the front and center of our ecosystem. We've always built a company with customers' first mentality, and they drive a lot of our innovation, because they give us a lot of requirements, and they reach us in different angles. So, they've helped us push the cloud roadmap. They've helped us push to the point where they want faster adoption, easier adoption, and that's kind of where we're going. The ecosystem is now still around enterprises, but the enterprises are trying to innovate themselves because now data is readily available, right? So, AppJ with large financial institutions, GDPR. So, these are all the requirements that they're throwing at us, okay, you can manage data, how do you air gap it? How do you work with object storage? How do you work with different kinds of technologies they want to work with us? And, you know, we've always stepped up to the plate saying, sure, if it's a new piece of technology that we feel is viable and has a roadmap, we'll jump at it and solve the problem with you. And that's always been the way we've partnered and grown the company. Yeah, you mentioned air gap. Something we haven't talked about this week is ransomware. We talk about it at most conferences. It's one of those unpleasant things that's a tailwind for companies like you. Right, right. And we have an offering around ransomware, right? If you look at cyber resiliency, we are the only product in town wherein, if you're hit by ransomware, you can instantly recover and say, oh, my ransomware hit me on the 17th of January. Anything after that is gone, but at least I can get to the 17th of January and start my business up. Otherwise, everything else, every other product out there, this will take weeks or months to figure it out. So, you know, that's another type of solution that came up. Not, we're not happy about ransomware, but that does happen. So, we have a solution for the problem. All right, Ashok, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It's great to have you. Absolutely, happy to be here. All right, we'll see you back in Boston. Thank you. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is theCUBE, we'll be here tomorrow, day three, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante and John Furrier. Google Next, big cloud show, we'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching.