 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, coming to you from our Boston Area Studio, and today, March 31st, 2020 is World Backup Day. Joining me is one of our CUBE alumni, Simon Taylor, who's the CEO of Haiku. Simon, we had you a couple of weeks ago in our studio. Of course, today we have you joining us remotely. Thank you so much for joining us, and great to see you. Great to see you as well, Stu, as always. So there's certain dates that everybody circles on the calendar and gets ready. In your industry, I have to imagine, normally World Backup Day would be a huge party, cake, and everything like that. Just, and I'll just, my understanding, Haiku did not create World Backup Day, but it is fortuitous to talk about that, and it's something that's been around for a few years. Let's start there. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, absolutely, Stu. And again, thanks for having me back on. You're going to get sick of having me on your wonderful program if we keep visiting too much, but I do appreciate it. I'm actually calling in today, as you can imagine, from Vermont, as we sort of escape the city here and get out of the countryside away from all the hectic and the crisis. And speaking of the crisis, I think that World Backup Day really could not have come at a better time in some senses. It's so important, I think it was created to help the world remember that their data loss is such a major issue. And then if we don't watch out for our data, if we don't back up our data, if we don't put proper data protection practices into place, we really can have a problem. And I think when we are moving to work from home environments, when we are moving out of the office, when the world is in such a state of flux as it is today with coronavirus, these are the moments when you want to really know that your data is protected, that you're safe. We're seeing a rise in ransomware attacks, we're seeing all sorts of things that are tangential to the crisis with COVID-19. And I think us all taking a moment to kind of realize what an issue data loss is in the world, there just couldn't be a more important time to do that than during a crisis like this one. Yeah, Simon, unfortunately, it's scary times also for the IT department because bad actors are definitely making even more attacks right now in the midst of the global pandemic, something that people are concerned about. When I've been looking out at the community, there's been conversations about, what does this mean for digital transformation and cloud adoption? And some of the things I'm hearing, especially over in Europe is there were certain companies, and if you look at certain countries, take Germany for one example, where they might have been a little bit slow to say, up, I'm not sure if I want to do the cloud. Well, if everybody's working from home for a little bit and IT needs to keep the business running, there's been a push even faster to the cloud. And one of the main things we're going to talk about today is your partnership with Microsoft Azure. So we'd love to hear what you're hearing from your customers out there, especially ones that normally, oh, I'm going to make my plan and we know how fast they're slow, the enterprise normally moves. And now there's a little bit of an acceleration to say, hey, we need to get involved in the cloud and my backup, my data protection is absolutely even more critical when I go to the public cloud. Oh my gosh, Stu, I mean, absolutely. You're right on all counts. I mean, one of the most horrific issues that we're seeing over and over and over again with our customers, and it's such a shame, is that there are bad actors out there. There are bad individuals out there who are trying to take advantage of this crisis. And what they're doing is they're understanding that they can now exploit the fact that there's so much work from home. We're seeing more man in the middle attacks. We're seeing more customers who are calling us up and saying, I've just been hit with a ransomware. All my data's locked down. Somebody didn't follow protocol while they were working from home. And boom, all of a sudden, we're being asked to pay a million dollars in Bitcoin. What do I do? I'm really, really proud of my team for stepping up during the crisis. We've actually seen more than 10 different customers just in the last month who've called us up and have said, I'm supposed to pay this Bitcoin ransom. Can you get my data back in all 10 out of 10 cases because of how natively integrated Hike who is into the platforms we support, we were actually able to recover that data within the next few hours, days, get it back for them before they had to pay out those ransoms. So again, not just a plug for Haiku, a plug for backup and recovery in general, a plug for everybody who's thinking about, how do I keep myself safe when I'm moving to the cloud? Absolutely, this is the time to keep yourself safe with proper data protection strategies. You know, I think the second thing that you bring up very rightly so is that there were a lot of countries, Germany's one of them, but there's many who had sort of been on the back foot during this crisis and had always expected that on-prem was going to be a majority of their infrastructure for the foreseeable future. They were all dipping their toe in the cloud water, the cloud pond as it were, but you didn't see a lot of folks in Europe who were 100% committing to cloud. Well, wow, has that changed? As we moved to work from home, you need a lot of that dynamic scaling that only true cloud environments, public cloud can provide. But I think the second thing and maybe more importantly, is we don't want to see our IT departments having to go into the office. We don't want to see them having to put themselves and potentially their families at risk simply to go in and manage data. So being able to work off of infrastructure as a service, hugely critical during the crisis, and to the fact that Haiku is a natively integrated service into those different enterprise and public clouds means that you can do all of it remotely. And I think this is where the whole Haiku, the simplicity is a pillar and a guiding principle for the company has become so important. I can't tell you how many customers have called us up and said, you know, I wanted to be at my home with my family, the other backup companies, the legacy, you know, deployments we had just simply wouldn't have allowed me to stay at home. I would have needed to go back to the office. Do you have something that's as a service? And that certainly brings me to my, I think your third point, which is we are absolutely thrilled here today on World Backup Day in the midst of this crisis to be announcing the launch of Haiku for Azure. And again, this is a natively integrated service that customers can literally just, you know, VPN to their set data center, go directly to their cloud, right? Go directly to Azure in the marketplace, turn on Haiku for Azure and boom, you're going to have all of that wonderful natively integrated purpose-built backup recovery as a service. You're going to have all that application support. You're going to have all of the things you've become sort of used to when we talk about Haiku, natively integrated into Azure as well. And again, I think because of this crisis, because we want people to stay at home, we want to flatten that curve. The fact that we've got this new service for Azure, which is so important to everybody, I think it's just critical of this particular time. Yeah, definitely hugely important. We've been talking to you and Haiku for a number of years. Simon, of course, started out very focused on really Nutanix environments, broadened out to really the virtualization environment and really going with your customers heavily into the cloud environment. So Azure, really important. You know, when I was at Microsoft Ignite last year, CEO Satya Nadella, I could sum up his main theme in one word and that was trust. So number one, it was a knock against a certain company in the cloud that mainly drive their revenue from ads. But when he talked about customers and partners, he wanted Microsoft to really be the company that people trust in that environment. We've seen Microsoft, one of the biggest movers from an application standpoint, the real push to Office 365, got people to really embrace and trust SaaS. Would love to hear, you know, your early customers that you've been working through for this announcement, you know, why this is so important, that Haiku, not only, you know, supporting and integrating with Azure, but in the Azure marketplace and what your customers are telling you. Gosh, that's such a great question, Stu. You know, first, just talking about Satya Nadella, I really think the world of him, I think, he does truly believe it. When he, you know, if you've read his book at Refresh, you do start to see a man who truly cares not just about the bottom line or even the top line for that matter, but really strives to drive real customer value. And I think one of the things he really did at Microsoft is he talks a lot about how the solutions that they're selling, you know, have real world effects that cross so many different industries. It's the net result of the technology that I think he cares about as opposed to just the sum of its parts. So it's really, really interesting, I think, when we think about him in his leadership style to think about how Haiku kind of fits into that. And you know, one of the things I'm really proud to announce is here on, you know, World Backup Day in the midst of this horrible, you know, pandemic, what we're doing as we launch Haiku for Azure is we're actually going to give it entirely free, no costs, no strings attached to the entire world for the next three months. And the reason we're choosing to do that is we believe that, you know, data protection is so important that it's a situation like this. It's incredibly important that people don't take life-threatening risks, things that could threaten not only them, but their families going into the office to do this. You know, and I think one of the great things about Haiku and also Haiku with Prodigy are multi-cloud data management platform is that you can now migrate your data from on-prem to the cloud with the touch of a button. From home, you can literally go sign up. It's free of charge for all the Haiku backup you want for the next three months. You know, get on there and protect your data. That's number one. You know, that adds real value to customers in the midst of this crisis. Number two is you can use Haiku Prodigy to then migrate entire workloads, keep them safe, whether it's applications, whether it's databases. You know, we want customers to know that they can trust a third-party like Haiku to be able to automate the process of migration to the cloud. And then, you know, in the midst of a crisis like this, everybody's thinking about disaster recovery. Well, guess what? We can even let data back on-prem using a runbook and we can actually drive true disaster recovery preparedness as well. All for Azure customers. You know, Stu, you and I were talking about this offline a few minutes ago, but the reality is we've interviewed our customers and 72% of them, and that's in seven countries now around the world, funnily enough, but 72% of those customers are Azure customers as well. So when we talk about our on-prem business, 72% of our on-prem business is also using Azure. So the ability to dynamically move these workloads to the cloud, move it back again for DR, as well as protect that data wherever it's sitting and do all of that from home with simplicity and for the next three months, no cost, I think that's how we're trying to drive value and trust into the Azure marketplace. Yeah. First of all, Simon, that's really a lot of good pieces here. It almost becomes a little bit trite when we talk about, oh, well, I want to, you know, build optionality into my product. I want to be, you know, ready to change and adjust things, but the environment and landscape that we're living with today is we understand companies need to be able to react really fast and they need to be able to adjust with this changing landscape. So what they're doing last month versus what they're doing today versus what they might doing in a couple of months, you know, I don't want to get locked in. I don't want to make any big decisions. So therefore, you know, it's great to see you're giving customers flexibility there. They've got both the, you know, the free usage of the software, but also that migration built into high-crew protege. You know, how do I move my data around? How do I make sure it's still protected? So important that, you know, we've been talking for years about the ability to make changes fast and to move with speed. But, you know, I think today's landscape really just put the point on, you know, we've been planning for this in some ways, and these are the, you know, this might have been the exact thing we're planning for, but this is the reason that this technology is so important. It's so well said, Stu. I mean, honestly, just like you said, we started out with the purpose-built backup and recovery for Nutanix. Then we added GCP. We added VMware. Now, of course, we're launching Azure. But in each case, we said it's got to be natively integrated. It's got to be super simple. We've got to automate every process we can. We want to make sure the customers can wake up in the morning, you know, log into their cloud infrastructure, whether it's GCP, now Azure, you know, turn this on as a service. We always say there's nothing to download when it's a true service, right? And I think that's so important now. It used to be kind of a talking point, but I think now people are really seeing the true value, which is when you don't need to go into your data center, when you don't need to VPNN, when you don't need to figure out all the rest of this architecture, but when people are moving enormous amounts of data and buying so much VDI and deploying all these work from home modules to sort of protect their infrastructure and create an environment that works for the current conditions, the last thing they have to do is put themselves at risk for the backup. And I think because this is purpose-built, because it's a true service, because it's a natural extension really of the cloud provider that's chosen or multiple, I think we make that really, really easy for customers. And we're very proud of the work we've done on that front. All right, Simon, just want to give you the opportunity. What kind of feedback have you had from customers over the last couple of weeks specifically? You talked about how important Azure was for them. Of course, I did this announcement, but just anecdotally, we'd love to hear just viewpoints as to customers you're talking and working with in these challenging times. Sure, sure. So first of all, everybody's hard-pressed. I mean, there's a crunch everywhere. People are feeling this sort of potential for a really, really systemic downturn into the economy, but at the same time, there are real urgent needs in terms of acquiring mission-critical infrastructure to support the move to work from home. And I think that's caused massive shifts in the way people are thinking about purchasing technology and specifically infrastructure technology in the marketplace. People truly want services now. Before it was something that maybe drove the valuation of a company, et cetera, et cetera, but now people are saying, hey, there's nothing to do with that at all. I just want a service that I can scale up and I can scale down. I want it now, I want it fast and I want it simple. So I think anything that's natively integrated and is acting as a SaaS, through SaaS offering has a real advantage in today's marketplace. I think the second thing is that as customers are moving in droves to VDI, I think there's a lot of talk right now about whether it's ever going to move 100% back. I think as people are discovering how effective and powerful we can be as we work from home, I mean, still look at us right now having this very conversation. I think it's amazing what we're able to achieve with the technology that's out there. And I think that's really reduced the panic. And I think it's something people aren't talking about. Imagine what the panic would have been if we didn't have Zoom, if we weren't able to do a go to meeting, if we weren't able to log in with a VPN and access our infrastructure. I mean, the entire world would have shut down like this. Now there's arguments being made that it may still shut down, et cetera. But we have at least delayed that process. I think we've created a lot of support for the economy and the environment through all of the technology that the marketplace is presenting to customers. And I think the next step in that is making sure that we recognize a couple of things. We're seeing again, a huge rise in ransomware attacks. There are many, many bad actors out there looking to exploit and take advantage of this situation, which is why I say, you don't need to buy our product, but please, if you've got Azure, go and turn on the backup. Why wouldn't you? Protect your data, make sure it's recoverable. God forbid anything bad happens or you do get attacked. Make sure you can get that data back from a third party. Make sure it's really easy to recover. Make sure all your mission critical applications and databases are supported. And I think if we do those things and we work together to protect our customers and for just a very short period of time, really don't worry so much about how much money we're going to make off of them, but think about how to protect them truly. I think that's where the value is and I think that's how we as human beings can sort of do a better job of protecting each other. All right, well, Simon, thank you so much for all the updates. Happy World Backup Day. Definitely look forward to chatting with you soon and thanks for joining and please be safe. Stu, always a pleasure. Please stay healthy as well. Take care. All right, I'm Stu Miniman. You've been watching theCUBE here with some of our remote interviews. Check out thecube.net for everything online and thank you for watching theCUBE.