 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Samir Nori. He is the Director of Product Marketing at Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Samir. Thanks, Rebecca, and thanks Stu, and thanks for having me on theCUBE. I'm so excited to be here. So you are a tech veteran. You've been in this industry for a long time. You've worked at a lot of different kinds of companies. What drew you to Cohesity? That's a great question. So when I was at MapR, and as you're familiar MapR, kind of sits at the intersection of big data and storage. And what I saw very interesting and fascinating about Cohesity was a similar hypothesis in terms of having built its own file system, but then really applying it to a different realm of the market in terms of secondary data and applications starting with backup as the foundation. And as you're aware, analytics is part of our roadmap and a solution that we enable. And we've got some starter things there, but that's kind of actually what really drove me and the opportunity to really try and be part of another high growth company and apply my experience from prior industries into a different segment. So you lead outbound marketing for Cohesity's cloud solutions. Tell our viewers a little bit about what you do and what your day is like. Sure. So my day oscillates in changes between developing value prop and messaging for our solutions, working with customers to understand their pain points and challenges, being able to translate that into tangible benefits for customers to parlay off of. And then really enabling and working with our sales teams closely to help them arm them with the necessary things they need to go succeed in the market. Samir, you've got an interesting space. Questions I think we all get in the industry is things are changing a lot. What do I do with my applications? If you look at the enterprise, most enterprises have hundreds, if not thousands of applications and it's not a trivial thing to say, oh well, yeah, we'll just put everything in the cloud. That'll be really easy, right? You've got SaaS, Microsoft open the door of the floodgates really pushing everybody to Office 365 to sassify a lot of what you're doing. Public cloud is big growth and then private cloud really modernizing the environment. What are you seeing and hearing from customers as to how they deal with the portfolio of their applications, mobility of what they're doing and where does Cohesity play and advise and help with those solutions? Sure, that's a great question, Stu. So I think really what we see from customers is a combination of a couple of things. As you said, they've got thousands or maybe a hundred of applications. They're not going to take a big chunk of those and just move them to the cloud as it, right? You got to select the right workloads and the right data. And do the assessment and the viability fit in terms of what makes sense. I think where our sweet spot really is is kind of back to what I said earlier, really sort of using backup as the foundation for what customers can do. And our core hypothesis has always been that backup should not be just an insurance policy. You can do a whole lot more with it. So what we see customers doing is taking their backups on premises which are oftentimes just idle with alternative solutions. Reusing them in the cloud for test dev purposes where it makes sense. So the easy way to sort of convert format. So if you're in VMDK format to the VHD format in Azure, spin it up, run your test of processes. At the end when you're done, you can sort of move those things back on premises and really sort of use it in that context. So for us really, I think it's a combination of assessing the right use case and the right application of the workload and then making that, and really helping customers with understanding that and making that shift in that case. So talk a little bit about the biggest customer pain points and then how you develop the right solution for them in this customized and tailored way. Sure. So I think for us, from our perspective, what we've seen the challenge is really customers, their backup data is sitting idle. It's shocking actually sometimes to hear that if we're talking to IT and storage teams and the application test and development teams with their peers, they often sometimes have to wait weeks or sometimes even months to get a copy of data that they need. I think in today's world that shouldn't be the case, right? So our value prop really there is to help eliminate those expensive copies of data that are getting made. And because our platform is so purpose-built and agile with respect to reusing that backup data for test dev, that's actually where we really see the sweet spot coming together. And it's customers that you can ask them, for example, on our UI, can you actually provision sort of test dev data and make it more self-service in nature right from that viewpoint? I think that is something we're looking into and to what makes sense there from a capability. But that's kind of really actually where we see the challenge and how we're enabling customers and so on solving that. Yeah, Sameer, I want to go back to something you said at the beginning about the premise of, I've got all my applications and I'm going to have intelligence, usually called machine learning and the like. How are these going to come together? Here at Microsoft, really talking about that, that's the future. Sajid Nadella is well-known. AI AI AI AI is kind of one of the main things he talked about. How is that similar with the Cohesity Division? Yeah, so I think when we think about the application world and how we're taking advantage of things like AI and machine learning, our recently announced capability and product around Helios, which is really sort of the, from our perspective, the global management piece to manage all your secondary data and apps, we've injected machine learning and AI capabilities there to help customers with smart assistant type of mode and capability to help them predict their, how much, when they need more capacity, smart alerts to tell them what's happening in their system. And that's kind of both actually on-premises and in the cloud. So for us, really that's, I think where we see specifically AI and machine learning coming together. I think as customers are injecting those in the applications they're using, I think definitely the data side of it and how that affects the underlying data landscape will make a difference in terms of how we accommodate that. But I think from a core ML and AI perspective, Helios is kind of our focal point in terms of what we're doing to bring those capabilities to bear. So what has the customer response been to that? I mean, it sounds very cool. Our customers using it, are they finding that it is helping them a lot in terms of, as you said, notifying if they need more capacity? Yeah, so I think it's early days for us when it comes to Helios, right? It's a pretty new product. We're working with customers actively, especially our existing base, to get them really on board with the product and really the service. Be able to collect and assimilate all of their data and help them with the usage of it. Because I think the more data we collect, as you know with machine learning and AI, the more data you collect, the richer samples that you have, and you can do a whole lot more with it. I think when it comes to the application side of it, the discussion we had earlier on application mobility and making that, I think the University of Pennsylvania is an interesting example of a customer we have where they have about 40 different websites internally and externally. And they had a planned, powered building shutdown for like a day. And they had a problem where they couldn't get to recreate those sites easily from their prior infrastructure. So our cloud spin capability, which is what really helps customers take their on-premises VMs and reuse them in the cloud, really sort of came to their rescue with helping them very easily make these websites quickly operational. And for them it's been a few simple clicks. And then when they're done with that, when the disaster, in this case, a planned disaster was done, they will sort of go back to their operational on-premises. So that's I think a great example of our capabilities coming to light and really shining in the app mobility arena, but also actually spill over into sort of disaster recovery. So Simi, I'm curious, one of the other things in the application space is a lot of the new applications. Call them cloud native apps, if you will. What are you hearing from customers? And does Cohesity, is there something different about, you know, new type of architectures and how that ties into Cohesity solutions? Yeah, absolutely. So I think what we're seeing from customers is when it comes to everything that's, you know, our applications born in the cloud, oftentimes I think what we see is backup is kind of actually, you know, a rear guard. It's not even thought of in the context of cloud native. And I think we see that being a challenge because customers, I think what they've done with backup in the cloud today, they've got either a combination of manual scripts, they've got some, you know, processes that are running there, there's a lack of automation. And so we've actually integrated with, you know, the snapshot APIs of, you know, of Azure, for instance, and Azure disks. And we bring through a combination of what we do on the platform side and that integration, we're actually able to bring enterprise class backup capabilities to that, you know, cloud native app and the backup that, you know, they can experience there. So that's kind of, you know, I think where we're looking to actually do more in terms of that. I think we're starting to see more demand in terms of more cloud native backup as relates to applications that are more born in the cloud. And I think with us, the beauty is it's a single platform that's going to work on premises and in the cloud and not have a separate solution that's quote unquote, you know, just for the cloud versus one that's for on premises. One of the biggest challenges that so many companies have regardless of their industry is getting employees to adopt new technologies. I'm wondering how closely you work with your customers to make sure that there is a widespread adoption and a real embrace of the Cohesity solutions. Sure. I think what, to me, what's fascinating is a big sort of value prop and a message for our customers with us is simplicity. That ranges all the way from the way they can do their upgrades with us, the way they actually, our interface presents itself. So in most cases, actually, I think what we've heard from customers is with little to minimal training, they're able to actually get up and going with Cohesity. And that actually, I think, speaks volumes to the fact in terms of how the product and the UI and everything else was designed. And we definitely have a support and services team that is as we're starting to go more enterprise and work with larger customers, starting to have those programs in place to enable customers to get up to speed quickly. But actually, in oftentimes, more often than not, it's more the case of, I could just set it up, get it up and going, and I'm off to the races. Sameer, it's our first time here at Microsoft Ignite. Over 30,000 people are here, 5,000 organizations. What takeaways do you have for people that haven't been able to attend the show? What have you seen so far? Sure, no, I think what I've seen is that, from our viewpoint, we've seen a lot of customers, we've had some great sessions with customers, we've got a couple more coming up. I think the hybrid cloud message is definitely mainstream, right? And so I think for customers who are not taking advantage of the services that A, Microsoft has to offer and then B, other ISPs like us plug into that ecosystem very closely, I think customers definitely should be embracing that in full steam and sort of moving forward with their hybrid cloud initiatives. Great, well Sameer, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, it was great having you. Thanks Rebecca, thanks Stu, appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit.