 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to theCUBE's Boston Area Studio. Welcome back to the program. CUBE alum, Ashuk Ramu, Vice President and General Manager of Cloud at Activio. Great to see you. Happy New Year, Stu. Happy to be here. 2020, hard to believe. It feels like we're in the future here and talking about future. We've watched Activio for many years. We remember when copy data management, the category was created. And really, Activio, we were talking a lot before cloud was the topic that we spent so much talking about, but Activio has been on this journey with its customers in cloud for many years. And of course, that is, your role is working, building the product, the team working all over it. So, give us a little bit of a history, if you would, and give us the path that led to 10C announcement. Sure thing. We started the cloud journey early on in 2014 or 2013, when Amazon was the only cloud that really worked. We built our architecture. In fact, we took our enterprise architecture and put it on the cloud and realized, oh my God, you know, it's a world of difference. The economics don't work, the security model is different, the scale is different. So, I think with the 8.0 version that came out in 2017, we really kind of figured out the architecture that worked for large enterprises, particularly enterprises that have diverse data sets and have requirements around, you know, marrying different applications to the data sets anywhere they want. So, we came up with efficient use of object, we came up with the capability of, you know, migrating workloads, taking VMware VMs, bringing up on Azure, bringing up on GCP, et cetera. So, that was the first foray into Actifio's cloud. And since then, we've been just building strength after strength, you know, it's been a building block, understanding our customers. And thank you to the customers and the hyperscalers that actually led us to the 10C release. So, this I believe, you know, we've taken it up a notch wherein, you know, we understand the cloud, we understand the infrastructure, the software auto-tunes itself to know where it's running on, taking the guessing game out of the equation. So, 10C really represents what we see as a launchpad for the rest of the cloud journey that Actifio is going to embark upon. We have enabled a number of new use cases like AI and ML. Data transformation is key. We tackle really complicated workloads like HANA and CyBase and MySQL, et cetera. And in addition to that, we also adopt different native cloud technologies like cloud snapshots, like recovery orchestration of the cloud, et cetera. Yeah, I think it's worth reminding our audience there that, you know, Actifio has always been software. Absolutely. And when you talk about, you know, I think back to 2013, 2014, it was the public cloud versus the data center. And we have seen the public cloud in many ways looks more and more like what the enterprise has been used to. Absolutely. And the data centers have been trying to cloudify for a number of years. And things like containerization in Kubernetes is blurring the line. And of course, every hyperscaler out there now has something that reaches their public cloud into the data center. And of course, technologies like VMware are also extending into the public cloud. Or we've looked SAP, of course, is now in all of the cloud environments. So with hybrid cloud and multi-cloud as kind of the waves of driving, you know, help us understand that, you know, Actifio lives in all these environments and they're all a little bit different. So how does Actifio make sure that it can provide the functionality and the experience that users want regardless of where it is? Absolutely. And you said it right. I mean, Actifio has always been a software company. And you know, it is our customers that showed us by cloudifying their data centers that we had to operate in a cloud. So we had on-premises VMware clouds a lot before we were on Amazon and Azure and Google. So that evolution started much early on. And so from what, you know, Actifio is a very customer-driven company, be it, you know, all segments of the company are driven by the customers. And in 2019 and even before, when you see a strong trend to migrate workloads, to move workloads, we realized there is a significant opportunity because the hardest thing to migrate is the volume of data because it's ever-changing and it is ever-growing. So the key element of neutrality was the application itself. Microsoft SQL is SQL no matter where you run it. It could be on a big Windows machine in your data center or in GCP, it makes no difference. So Actifio's approach to start application down basically gave us the freedom to say, are we gonna treat SQL as C? I don't know if you're running in Azure, Google, your data center or Ali cloud, it makes no difference to me. I understand SQL, I understand SQL's availability groups, I understand logs, I can capture it and give it back to you. So when we took that approach, it kind of automatically gave us infrastructure neutrality. We really didn't care. So when we have a conversation with a customer, it basically goes around the lines of, okay, Mr. Customer, how much data do you have? And what are your key applications? Can you categorize them in terms of priority? It usually comes out to be databases or the crown jewels. So they're the number one priority in terms of data management, migration, test dev, et cetera. And then we basically drill down into the ecosystem that databases live into. So because we walk application down, the conversation is the same whether the customer is in the data center or in the cloud. So that is how we've evolved. And that's how we're thinking from a product standpoint, from a support standpoint, the overall company is built that way. So it makes it easy for us to adapt a new platform that comes in. So when you talked about how does each cloud is different, you're absolutely right. The security concepts are different. Microsoft is built on Active Directory, Google is built on something very different. So how do you neutralize and how do you make this work? We do have an infrastructure layer that basically provides cloud-specific capabilities for various cloud platforms. And that has gotten to a point where it understands and tunes itself from a security standpoint and a performance standpoint. Once that's taken care of, the rest of the application stack, which is over 90% of our software, stays the same. There's no change. And so that is how we kind of tackle this, because in the ecosystem we live in, we have to keep up with two people. We have to keep up with the infrastructure people who are making it bigger, faster. And they also have to keep up with the application people who are making it fancier and more complicated. So that's unfortunately the ecosystem we live in and taking this approach as given as a mechanism to insulate us from a lot of the complexities of these two environments. Yeah, that's great, because when you talk to customers and you say, what's going on in your environment, change is difficult. So how many different pieces of what I'm doing, do I need to move to be able to take advantage of the modern economics? On the one hand, if I have an application and I like it, well, maybe I could just lift and shift it. But if I'm just lifting, shifting, I'm not necessarily taking advantage of the full cloud native environments, but I need to make sure that my data is protected, backup, you mentioned security are of course top concerns. So it sounds like in many ways you're talking, helping customers work through some of those initiatives, being able to take advantage of new environments, but not need to completely change everything. Maybe I'd love to hear a little bit when you talk about the developers and DevOps initiatives that are happening inside customers, where does that impact, where does that connect with what Actifio is doing? I think that's a great question. So let me start with the real customer example. So we have this customer, ACI investments who basically their business model is to grow by acquisition. So they're adding on tens of, hundreds of developers every quarter. So it's impossible to keep up with infrastructure needs when you grow at that pace. They decided to adopt a cloud platform. And with each cloud platform comes some platform specific piece that all these developers now have to retool themselves. So I'm a developer, I used to come in the morning, open up my machine and start working away on the application, now I have to do something different. And if there is 300 of me, and the cost of moving to the cloud was a lot less than training the developers. It was much harder to train the developers because it has to be an ongoing process. So we were presented the challenge of how do you avoid it? So when we are able to separate the application layer from the data layer because of the way we operate, what we presented a solution was to say, just move your, what is the heaviest layer you have? That's the database, okay? And what are the copies you're creating? I'm creating hundreds of copies of my Oracle database. Okay, let's just move that to the cloud. All of the front end application doesn't see a change thanks to the great infrastructure worth the cloud providers do, you have 10 gigabit to everywhere. So network is not a problem, compute is not a problem, it's just available on an API call. So you provision that. All they did was a data movement, moved it from point A to point B, gives you the flexibility to spin up any number of copies you want in the cloud. Now, your developer tool sets haven't changed. So there's no training required for developers, but from an operation standpoint, if completely ease the burden of creating 100 more copies every month, this cloud is built for that. So you take the elasticity of the cloud, advantage of that, and provide the data in the last mile to the cloud. Thereby, developers are able to access the application with the same level of ease. So that is the pattern they're seeing. They're seeing, in some of our customers, there is faster and better storage provision for Actifio because there are 190 developers working off Actifio where there's only about a handful of people running production, right? So it's a paradigm shift is where we see it. And the pace at which we bring up the application, we're able to bring up 150 terabyte Oracle Database in three hours. Before Actifio, it used to be maybe 30 days if you were lucky. So it's not just an order of magnitude, it is what you can do with that data, is where we're seeing the shift going to. Yeah, it's interesting. When you go back and look at some of the changes that have happened in the cloud, cloud storage was one of the earliest discussed use cases there. And backup to the cloud was one of the earlier pieces of the cloud storage discussion. Yet, we've seen changes in maturation into what can actually be done. Explain a little bit how Actifio enables even greater functionality when you're talking about backup to the cloud. Absolutely. You know, the object storage technology, it's probably the most scalable and stable piece of storage known to mankind. Because nobody can build that level of scale that Amazon, Azure, and Google have put into it. From a security standpoint, performance standpoint, and scale standpoint. So I'm able to drop my data in Boston and pick it up in Tokyo seamlessly. Right, that's unheard of before. And the biggest impediment to that was a lot of legacy application data didn't know how to consume this object storage. So what Actifio came up with our onboard technology was to light up the object storage for everybody. And basically make it a performance neutral platform wherein you take the guessing game out of the customer. The customer doesn't need to go research S3 or Google Nearline or Google Persistent Disk and say, I want 10 copies here versus five copies there. Actifio figures it out for you. You give us your SLA, you give us your RTOs and RPOs and we tell you, okay, this is the most cost-effective way to store your data. You get the multi-year retention for free. You get the GDPR, you know, app check, kind of protection for free. You get the geo redundancy for free. All of this is built into the platform. In addition, you also can run DevOps of the object store. You can run DR of the object store. So we enable a lot of the legacy use cases using this new technologies. That is kind of where we see the cusp wherein in the cloud there's always a question and a debate, does DDoop make sense? DDoop consumes a lot of compute, takes a lot of memory. You need to have that memory and compute whether you want it or not. We're seeing a lot more adoption of encryption where the data is encrypted at source when you encrypt data, DDoop is just a big compute churning platform. It doesn't do much for you. So we went through this, you know, this debate actively, I think four or five years ago and we figured out object store is the way to go. You cannot get storage. I mean, it's a bucket terabyte in Google and dropping. How can you get storage that's reliable, scalable at a lower cost? All we had to do was actuate the use of that storage and this is what we did. Yeah, I'm just laughing a little bit because, you know, gosh, I think back a dozen years ago, the industry knew that the future of storage would be object, yet it's taken a long time to really be able to leverage it and use it and the cloud, the hyperscalers, of course, have been a huge enabler on that, but we don't want customers to have to think about that it's object underneath and that's the bridging the gap that I think we've been looking for. Absolutely. There, what else? We talk about really being able to extract the value out of cloud, data protection, disaster recovery, migrations are all things that are top of mind. Absolutely, all those use cases and we're seeing some of the thought-lating CIOs talk about AI and ML. We've had a couple of customers who want to basically take their manufacturing data from remote sites and pump it into Google BigQuery. Now, we all know manufacturing happens in Taiwan and China and Singapore and all those locations. Now, how do you take data from all of those publications, normalize it into and pump it into Google BigQuery and get your predictable results on a quarterly basis? It's a challenge because the data volumes are large. So with our cloud technology and our on-world capability, we're able to funnel the data directly into Google Nearline and on a quarterly basis, on a scheduled basis, transform it, push it into BigQuery and bring out the results for the end user. So that journey is pretty transformative from a customer standpoint. What they used to have five people do maybe once a year, now with a push of a button happens every quarter. So it's a change in how the AI and ML analytics evolve. The other element is also our partnership with IBM, we're working very closely with their cloud pack for data. Cloud pack for data is an awesome platform built to analyze any kind of data that you might have. With the ActiveFuse normalization platform, you basically can feed any data into ActiveFuse, and it presents a unified interface into this cloud pack. So you can build your analytics workloads fairly easily. So we've talked a lot about cloud. One of the other Cs in the 10C, of course, is containers. If we look at containerization, when it first started, it was stateless applications. Most applications that are running in containers are running for a very short period of time. So help us understand where ActiveFuse fits there, what's the problem statement that you were solving? Absolutely. So containers are coming up and up and coming and out of reality. And as we see more applications flow into containers, you see the data that lives outside the container, because containers are shortly of their microservices, they come up and they go down, and the state is maintained in a storage platform outside the container. So ActiveFuse tackles containers by taking the data protection strategy we have for the storage platform already well-defined, but enhancing the data presentation into the container as it comes up. So a container can be brought up in seconds, maybe less, but the container is only brought to life when it can read the data and start working again. So that's the bridge ActiveFuse actuates. So we understand the architecture of how a container is put together, how the container system is put together, and basically we marry the storage and the application consistent data in the storage into the container so that the container's database or applications come to life. And that could be in a customer's data center in the public cloud, Kubernetes is enabled, all of that. Absolutely, it can be anywhere. And with 10C, what we've done is we've also integrated with cloud native snapshots. So if you talk about neutrality for the container platform, if it's on-premises, we have all kinds of access to the storage, the infrastructure on the platform, so our processing is very different. If you take it to the cloud, let's say Google, Google Kubernetes platform is a fairly, it's a black box. You get some storage and you get containers, and you have an API access to the storage. So in Google, we automatically auto-tune and start taking the Google Cloud snapshots to take the storage protection. So that's the other way we kind of neutralize the platform. Yeah, you've got a thinking about just from a customer standpoint, one of their big challenges there is they've got everything from their big monoliths, their major databases, through these microservice cloud native architectures there. And it sounds like, is that just one of the fundamental architectural designs to make sure that you can span across those environments and give customers a common look and feel in between those environments? Absolutely, the single pane of glass is a big ask and a big focus for us. Not just across infrastructure, it's across geos and across all platforms. So you could have workloads running AIX, VMware in the cloud all the way through containers and manage it all through a single console to know when was the last code backup, how many copies of the database am I running? And each of these databases could have their own security constructs. So we normalize all of those elements and put them in a single console. Okay, 10C shipping today? 10C shipping today. We have earlier access to a few customers. The general availability release is possibly in the February timeframe. Okay, and if I'm an existing Actifio customer, what's the path for me to get to 10C? Our support will reach out and do a simple software upgrade. It's available on all cloud platforms. It's available everywhere. So you will see it on all the marketplaces and the regular upgrade process will get you that. Okay, and if I'm not an Actifio customer today, how easy it is for me to try this out? Well, it is very easy. With our Actifio Go SaaS platform, it's a one-click download. You can download and try it out, try all the capabilities of the platform. It's also available in all the cloud marketplaces for you to go access that. All right, well Ashok, a whole lot of pieces inside of 10C. Congratulations to you and the team for building that and definitely look forward to hearing more about the customer deployments. Thank you. We have exciting times ahead. All right, lots more coverage from theCUBE throughout 2020. Be sure to check out at thecube.net. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE.