 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and John Walls. Welcome inside the Mandalay Bay facility here. I'm John Walls, I'm with Stu Miniman. We continue our coverage here on theCUBE at VMworld. And we are now joined by the newborns, you might say, Nuba, a company that just launched yesterday. Officially so, Mike Davis is the CMO and Yuval Demnick, who's the CEO and co-founder of Nuba. Gentlemen, congratulations. Thank you. Big week for you. Very exciting. Yeah, if you would tell our viewers a little bit about your company, and if you would about the name origin, I was doing some background reading and found that very interesting. So, how did we cover that one? Yeah, so how we started with the name, and we wanted some reading. Wait a minute, let me do this. Oh, first off, there's a little magic pink thing going on here, but that has to do with the brand and the logo and what have you. And Yuval, even down to your wristband, I noticed on your watch. This is my watch, yeah, my fancy watch. Very nice. Yes, anyway, okay. So, if you will. So, when we started out, we looked for a name that would represent the company values, which I'll get back to in a second, but everything is new and we wanted nubes, but that was 80, 100 bucks on GoDaddy, but GoDaddy said, we'll give you nuba for $3.99. And we said, well... $3.99. Yeah, $3.99. We said, well, we'll start with that and we'll see how that goes. And it's stuck, and if people like it, it sounds nice, got a nice vocal to it, so yes, we'll stick with it. And the asset test of whether it's really working for us is people come up to us all the time and say, where did you get that name? And say, well, explain that to you, but help me understand your storage environment. All right. Lots of good conversations. Core competencies, then, a little bit. You're bringing it to storage, what you do, because your differentiation, you think, into the marketplace and why you've got a place. So I would say that we've seen, we've been part of the storage industry for many years, and we've seen the process that customers go through in evaluating storage, implementing it, going through the cycles, and then migrating three to five years. And then we saw the cloud and the cloud is great. We just open an account and you can use that and that's easy and nifty, and if you're unhappy, you just cut the cords. Well, there's a huge gap there, and we think there's a great opportunity for us to fill out that gap, and that's what Nuba does. Nuba provides with the most agile solution for unstructured data that you can implement everywhere. I mean, everywhere could be on-prem, on the cloud, in between, we don't care. Actually, the customer shouldn't care. The customer is in control, and the customer chooses which resources he wants to use when and at one point. And that is a great point where we give ownership to the customer rather than saying, this is a service someone provides to you rather, you own the service, you make the choices for you when you run your stuff. Okay, so you've launched the company here at VMworld. We spent the last decade trying to fix what server virtualization broke. So how does virtualization fit into your story and the way you describe it? I'm assuming that this is a software-based solution how does that then fit with all the hardware options? Can you help us unpack your stack? Of course, so all in all, our design considerations were we have to design to an ever-evolving future. An ever-evolving future means that we don't know how to predict the future. We don't know whether the future is on-prem, cloud, or anything in between. We don't know what the platform, the draft platform, and or other server platforms will be there. So actually what we've implemented is software-only solution that actually looks at the resources that you provided and it learns them and adapts them as time goes by. So example, everybody's talking about we're using commodity hardware. We do not use commodity hardware, we have no awareness of the hardware that we're using. We can be ran in only a VM environment, a pure VM environment, and we would learn the traits of those servers that we're using and we move data around to accommodate those traits. So because you cannot predict what's the platform and how you're going to use it for three, maybe you can, but we can't. Three to five years from now, it's much better to adopt a system that learns the platform, learns the environment, and basically puts a mix and match of the best of bid for that data. Okay, so where are you with the product itself? Is it generally available? What customers have played with this? So what we announced this week is general availability of our community edition. So we've been in beta for about five or six months. A lot of customers have been contributing a ton of feedback to us, technically, and allowing us to integrate with different workloads. What we're releasing now is a product that's stable and hardened and people can put it in production. They can come to our website, download it for free, deploy it on any hardware that typically they already have in place, and then grow from there. Now this is a community edition product, so we'll be releasing an enterprise edition later that supports much greater scalability and additional features. And so that's news that's gonna be coming later this year, but we're very anxious to now expand our customer footprint and just make it easier for people to deploy frictionless storage. Okay, and can you speak to kind of, what are the early use cases? What's the problem that a customer has and any specific applications that they're saying, hey, this is a reason I reach out to Nuba? Yeah, of course. So the reality today is that without structured data, in the past, most of the data was created by users using files and can share applications. Now, as more time progresses, we see more and more data being created by applications. It could be log applications like a Splunk, could be archiving such as Commvault, could be IoT, could be cameras, could be media. So all these workloads are actually application-driven and not user-driven. So our first cornerstone that while we went after is Splunk and Elk archiving, those produce large amounts of data, they require high performance, and there's a great pain because the customers cannot anticipate what the growth of the data would behave like in the next year. So going back to the values that we say, you cannot predict the future. So we say, if you cannot predict the future, use Nuba to archive your Splunk, and in the future, you can choose whether you add servers, you go to the cloud, you have an in-between, or you move totally to the cloud. That's totally fine. The next stage would be archiving, general archiving, files and can share, et cetera. And the third one would be media and entertainment, industry-specific, this is what we're chasing. So when we talk to customers, and we ask the question about how many terabytes do you have, a customer that comes back and talks about 500 terabytes, a petabyte, et cetera, usually that's all the indication we need to know that there's a very good opportunity there. And so we're working with those customers, and along with their ISV solution providers, and tighten and tighten the integration, provide hardened solutions, and that's where a lot of the work's going to be in the next six months for us. So when you knock on the door, I'm sure you're introducing yourself, right, to a lot of people who aren't familiar with your particular offerings, or your expertise, what have you, what's your calling card? How do you try to get that foot in the door in a fairly competitive situation right now? So I was saying, yeah, it's a good question. So we compete in the general category that we call object storage. We compete in the sense that we use APIs similar to Amazon's S3 API. But that's where the similarities at. And with this substantially different architecture, with this much more agile feature set, it's very easy for us to position aggressively against the competition that's out there. And one example is for many of the solutions that are in the market, even software defined storage, sort of modern open source type solutions, it can take weeks to actually put a system in place and debug it and get it working and evaluate it. Our system can be downloaded, installed by the customer himself and deployed and running in 15 minutes. And this is the, because we have this agility that really doesn't have these hardware dependencies, it allows a customer to experience the product, test it much more easily with much less investment. And what that means is we've found ourselves in so many cases, we're very quick to get on the shortlist when it comes to an evaluation. So we may go into a customer and compete for the same type of opportunity, but we're finding that there really isn't a competition in the sense that there's an architectural bake-off. It's the customer deciding, does he want this kind of an agile architecture or does he want appliances from a big three-letter systems OEM that they have a long-standing relationship with? And this is where we are right now as a startup and it's very exciting because we can almost always win that one. Because like you said, when you ask the customer, the first question you ask is, predict for me what your compute and storage infrastructure looks like four years from now? We can't possibly do that. That'd be irresponsible of us to predict that and we've won. We just tell them six letters are better than three. Yeah, there you go. Price is good. Yeah, that'll work. So you talked about APIs, are you like Amazon S3 compatible with the APIs? So we are compatible with the API. You can use any application that's currently using those out of the box. And we will look for additional interfaces in the future, but currently what was important for us as Amazon is deleting in the cloud arena, this is the reality. We wanted to have a quick foot in the door as you mentioned and now most often than not, the applications are the ones driving the need for us. So it's mostly about, it's not like in the past, you try to go to the IT and describe to them what are the benefit of object storage versus file. This is not longer the case. It's most often than not, which applications you have, what backend targets do they need? And then the discussion is about this to me. Yeah, it's interesting. You actually mentioned object storage and object storage can come in ups and downs and waves. I know I spoke at an interop probably five years ago when a panel, and we talked about future storage and everybody on the panel, including myself, was like, and yes, the future looks like object. But most people didn't talk about object. I see certain companies out there. Scality, it doesn't even talk about object that much. And then you saw, AmpliData and ClevverSafe being acquired. So what's the state of that market? I mean, object cloud, most clouds are underlying object base, but is the Enterprise Data Center ready for this? Is it going to live in service providers? How do you see that looking? Yeah, absolutely. Five years ago when you marketed an object storage product, it was an argument and a debate over proprietary APIs. But a lot has changed since then. In particular, the adoption of Amazon. So the development community is used to supporting Amazon APIs, Amazon is the 800 pound gorilla that has led to an ISV community very broadly, supporting out of the box shrink app software, supporting these interfaces. And that's made all the difference. And like you said, it's not, we don't even talk about object storage anymore. It's, this is the most agile, most future flexible storage you can deploy for your Splunk environment. Okay? And so what it really comes back to again, and it's good marketing strategy to begin with, targeted workloads and having a targeted market strategy that absolutely delivers known value for specific workloads. And that's how we're going to market with things like Splunk, and then Commvault and Enterprisevault and gradually expanding into vertical markets and other areas. All right. So you've all, you know, maybe we should have covered this at the beginning. Can you give some of the speeds and feeds? Can you talk about any investors, kind of number employees, where your locations are? Sure. So our investors, we are VC backed primarily by JVP, the fund behind Xemayon. So we have great experience in infrastructure. What we're saying in our investors, companies speed between Israel, Israeli development team, and we have some representation here in the Bay Area doing product sales and marketing. I'm currently in between, both in both occasions. And the company is currently 14 employees growing and now getting close to the launch. We're going to grow that as well. Great. And how much was the funding? Can you say? Well, I'd rather not. Okay. They're fair enough. Well, we will never forget the pink guys. Yeah. You certainly made your mark here on theCUBE, but we appreciate the time you take with us here. Okay, we have some people seeing us from a hundred yards away across the show floor. It's how I know that guy. Oh, yeah. It's perfect. It's like a new ball, right? That's right. All right, good luck. Glad the launch went off on a good note and it sounds like you're off and running. Congratulations on that. Very exciting. Thanks. Good deal. Thank you gentlemen. We'll be back with more from VMworld here in Las Vegas on theCUBE in just a moment.