 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by David Noi. He is the VP of Cloud at Cohesity, which is where we are. We're in the Cohesity booth, so I should say thank you for welcoming us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me here. So you are pretty brand new to the company, along to a tech veteran, but new-ish to Cohesity. Talk a little bit about what made you want to make the leap to this company. Well, you know, as I was, I mean, it was time for me to move from my prior company. I won't go into the reasons there, but as I looked around, I had to kind of see who were the real innovators, right? Who were the ones who were disrupting? Because my success is in the past, I've all been around disruption. When I really looked at what these guys were doing, you know, first, it's kind of hard to figure out, then it was like, oh my gosh, this is really something different. Like, it's bringing kind of the cloud into the enterprise and using that model of simplification and then adding data services. And it's really groundbreaking. So I just like, and the other thing was, I'll just throw this point out there. I read a lot of the white papers and the technology and I looked at it and having been a tech veteran for a while, it looked to me like a lot of people who have done this stuff before got together and said, if I had to do it again and do it right, like what were the things I wouldn't do and what are the things I would do right, right? So that was just fascinating. Yeah, so David, I was reading a Q&A recently with Mohit, you know, founder of Cohesity and it really is about that data. You mentioned data services. Bring us inside a little bit. We in the storage and IT industry get so bogged down in the speeds and feeds and how fast you can do things in the terabytes and petabytes and the like here. But we're talking about some real business issues that the product is helping to solve. I totally agree. Look, I've been in the storage industry for a while now and multi-petabytes of data and the problem that you run into when you go and talk to people who use this stuff is like, well, geez, I start to lose track of it. I don't know what to do with it. So the first thing is how do you search and index it? That's, you know, so I can actually find out what I have. Then there's a question of being able to go in and crack the data open and provide all kinds of data services from, you know, classification to, oh, is this a threat or does it have vulnerabilities in it? It's really a data management solution. Now, of course we started with backup, right? But then we're very quickly moving into other services, backup, target, file and object. You'll see some more things coming out around test and dev, for example. If you have the world's data, it's one thing to just keep it and hold it, but then what do you do with it? How do you extract value out of it is you really got to add data management services and people try to do it, but this hyper-converged technology and this more of a cloud approach is really unique in the way that it actually goes about it. Can you speak a little bit of that cloud approach? Yeah, so I mean, you know, Mohi comes from a cloud background, right? He wrote the, he was big author of the Google file system. The idea basically is to say, let's take a look at a global view of how data is kept. Let's basically be able to actually abstract that with a management layer on top of that and then let's provide services on top of that. Oh, by the way, people now have to make a decision between am I going to keep it on-premise or keep it in the cloud? And so the data services have to extend not just to the on-prem, but they have to actually extend to cloud services as well, which is kind of why I'm here. I think, you know, what we do with Azure is pretty fascinating in that data management space too. So we'll be doing more data management as a service in the cloud as well. So let's get into that a little bit. And there's been a lot of announcements this week with Azure Arc and other products and services, but let's dig into how you're partnering and the kinds of innovative things that Cohesity and Microsoft are doing together. Well, we're doing a lot of things. So first of all, we have a very rapid cadence of engineering to engineering conversations. We do everything from archiving data and sending long-term retention data into the cloud, but that's kind of like where people start, right? Which is just ship it all up there, you know, and however it's held, right? But then think about doing migrations. How do you take a workload and actually migrate it from on-prem to the cloud? I know we can do wholesale migrations of people's environments who want to go completely cloud-native. We can fail over and fail back if we want to as well. So we can use the cloud as actually a DR site. Now you start to think about disaster recovery as a service. That's another service that you start to think about. Oh, what about backing up cloud-native workloads? Well, you don't just want to back up your own workloads that are in the on-prem data center. You want to back them up also in the cloud. And that includes even Office 365. So you just look at all of what that means and the ability to then crack that data open and then provide all these additional, when I say services, I'm talking about classification, threat analysis, being able to go in and identify vulnerabilities and things of that nature. That's just a huge tremendous value on top of just the basic infrastructure capabilities. David, you've been in the industry, you've seen a lot of what goes on out there. Help us understand really what differentiates Cohesity because there's a lot of traditional vendors out there that are all saying many of the same words. They're cloudifying and there's even newer vendors than Cohesity out there. Totally get it. Look, I mean, here's kind of what I find really interesting and just attractive about the product. I've been in the storage industry for a long time. So many times people have asked me, can I move my applications to the storage? Just moving the data to the application, that's hard. But moving the application to the data, wow, that makes things a lot easier, right? And so that's one of the big things that actually we do that's different. It's the hyperconverged platform. It's a scale-out platform. It's one that really looks a lot more like some of the scale-out platforms that we've done in the past, but goes way beyond that. And then the ability to then say, okay, let's abstract that away so make it as simple as possible so people don't have to worry about managing lots of different pools and lots of different products for service one versus service two versus service three. And then bringing applications to that data, that's what makes it really different. And I think if you look around here and you talk to other vendors, I mean, they'll provide APIs. That's one thing that's great and that's important. But to actually bring the applications to the data, that's what all of the cloud guys do. They look at Google, they put Gmail on top, they put Search on top, they put Google Translate on top. Is all of these things are actually built on top of the data that they store? Yeah, such a detail of this morning in the keynote talked about that there's going to be 500 million new business applications built by 2023. How was Cohesity positioned to both partner with Microsoft and everyone out there to be ready for that cloud-native future? That's a great question. Look, we're not going to put 500 million applications on the product, right? But we are going to pick some key applications that are important in the top verticals, whether it's healthcare, financial services, public sector, and so on. Life sciences, oil and gas. But in the same time, we will offer the API's extensions too. So if you think about going into Azure, if we can export things as Azure Blobs, for example, now we can start to tie a lot of the Azure services into our storage and make it look like it's actually native Azure storage. Now we can put it on Azure cold storage, you know, hot storage. We can decide how we want to tear things from a performance perspective, but we can really make it look like it's native. Then we can take advantage of not just our own services, but the services that the cloud provides as well, and that makes us extraordinarily powerful. In terms of the differentiator of Cohesity from a services standpoint, but what about from a cultural standpoint? We had Satya Nadella on the main stage this morning, talking a lot about trust. And I'm curious, particularly as a newer entrant into this technology industry, how do you develop that culture and then also that reputation too? Here's one of the interesting things. When I joined the company, and I've been around for a while and I've been in a couple of very large brand names, I started walking down the halls and I'm like, oh, you're here? Oh, you're here? Wait, you're here? It's like an all-star cast. And when you go into some of the customer base and it's like, hey, we know each other for a long time, that relationship is just there. On top of that, I mean, the product works. It's solid, people love it. It's easy to use, and it actually solves real problems for them. And we innovate extraordinarily fast. So when customers find a problem, we are on such a fast release cadence, we can fix it for them in extraordinarily, in times that I've never seen before. In fact, it's a little bit scary how fast the engineering group works. It's probably faster than anything I've ever seen in the past. And I think that helps to build a customer's trust because they see that if we recognize there's a problem, we're going to be there to solve it for them. There's trust of the company. When we talk about our data, there's also the security aspect. How does Cohesity fit into the story with Microsoft and beyond? The security part is extraordinarily important. So look, we've already, as I said, built kind of an app marketplace, and we're bringing a lot of applications to do things like ransomware detection, vulnerability detection, data classification. But Microsoft is also developing similar APIs. And you heard this morning that they're building capabilities for us to be able to go and interact with them and share information. So if we find vulnerabilities, we could share it with them, they could share it with us, and we could shut them down. So we have the native capabilities built in. They have capabilities that they're building of their own. Imagine the power of it being able to tie those two together. I just think that that's extraordinarily powerful. What about growth? This is a company that is growing like gangbusters. Can you give us a roadmap? What we can expect from Cohesity? Look, I've never seen growth like this. I mean, I joined specifically to look at a lot of the cloud and the file and object services. And obviously I have a background in backup and data protection as well. I haven't seen growth like this since my old days when I started in Iceland back in the way, way old days. I can't give you exact numbers, but I'll tell you, it's way in the triple digits. And it's extraordinarily fast to see. From an Azure perspective, we're seeing close to triple digit growth as well. So I love it. I mean, I'm just extraordinarily excited. All right, on the product side, give us a little bit of a look forward as to what we should be expecting from Cohesity. Absolutely, so from a look forward perspective, as I said, we protect a lot of on-premise workloads and we protect obviously Azure workloads as well. So we protect Azure VMs. But as we think about some of the Azure native services like SQL and other services that are kind of built native within Azure, we'll extend our application to be able to actually do that as well. We'll extend kind of the ease of use and the deployment models to make it easier for customers to go and deploy and manage. It really seems like a seamless single pane of glass, right? So when you're looking at Cohesity, you should think of it as, even if it's in the cloud or if it's on-premise, it looks the same to you, which is great. If I want to do search and index, I can do it across the cloud and I can do it across the on-prem. So that integration is really what ties it together and makes it extraordinarily interesting. Finally, this is not your first ignite. I'm interested to hear your impressions of this conference, what you're hearing from customers, what the conversations that you're having. You know, it's a lot of fun. I've been walking around the partner booths over here to see like, who can we partner with to add some more of those data management services because we don't think of ourselves again. You know, we started kind of in the backup space. We have an extraordinarily scalable storage infrastructure. I was blown away by the capabilities of the file and object. I mean, I was just, as a file guy for a long time, it was unbelievable. But when you start to add those data management capabilities on top of that, so that people can either, you know, again, either to your point, make sure that they can detect threats and vulnerabilities or, you know, find what they're looking for or, you know, be able to run analytics, for example, right on the box. I mean, I've been asked to do that for so long and it's just, it's finally happening. It's like, it's a dream come true. The future is now. It's like, you know, everything you ever wanted. Software defined, bringing the applications to the data. It's just like, if I could ever say like, hey, if I could take all of the things that I always wanted at previous companies and put them together, it's cohesity. And I'm walking around here and I'm seeing a lot of great technology that we can go and integrate with. Well, David Noy, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. You are watching theCUBE.