 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to San Francisco everybody. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, John Troyer. This is day three of VMworld 2019. Two sets, this is our 10th year at VMworld theCUBE is the leader in live enterprise tech coverage. Mario Glendini is here. He's the CMO and Chief Evangelist at Tintree by DDN. Yes, sir. And he's joined by Graham Brees, who's the field CTO at Tintree. Also by DDN, recent acquisition. Gents, great to see you. Likewise, as they say. We're back. Well, I like to call it a hibernation in the sense that people may have not known where DDN or Tintree is. And Tintree by DDN, as the name implies, we were acquired a year ago at VMworld August 31st of 2018. And in the year since, we've been able to invest in engineering support and my joining the company in marketing to take this solution. We've been able to save thousands of customers, millions of man hours and bring it to a larger number of users. We're so excited. So we always, when we first saw Tintree, we said, wow, this is all about simplification. And John, of course you remember that when you go back, you know, to the early, early theCUBE days of VMworld, very complex storage was a major challenge. Tintree was all about simplifying that. Of course, we know DDN as well as the high performance specialist and have worked with those guys for a number of years. But take us back, Mary, to the original vision of Tintree. Yeah. Is that original vision still alive? How has it evolved? Well, I'd say that it's the number one reason why we're a part of the DDN family of brands because as a portfolio company, they're looking to bring technologies. I'm the marketing guy for our enterprise or virtualization audience and the product sets that cover high performance computing have their own audience. So for me, I'm focused on that. Graham's also focused on that. And really what continues to make us different today is the fact we were designed to learn from the beginning to understand how virtual machines end to end work with infrastructure. And that's really the foundation of what makes us different today, the same thing, right? So from the very beginning, we were built to understand the workloads that we service in the data center. So that was virtual machines. We service those on multiple hypervisors today. In terms of being able to understand those workloads intrinsically, gives us a tremendous capability to place IO. Again, understanding that infrastructure, network, storage, hypervisor, we can view that end to end in terms of a latency graph and give customers an insight into their infrastructure and how it's performing. I would say that we're actually extending that in some further ways in terms of additional workloads that we're going to be able to take on later this year. So I know a lot of storage admins, although I only play one on TV. But consistently throughout the years, right? Tintry user experience is the forefront there. And in fact, some people have said to me, when I really want to get something done, I grab my Tintry box, right? And so can you talk maybe some examples of what an example of how the user experience is different or why it's different or how it's different? I'll start off by saying that I had a chance being new to the company just two weeks to meet a lot of Tintry users. And prior to taking the job, I talked to some folks behind the scenes and they all told me that same thing. But what I was so interested to hear is that if they didn't have Tintry, they'd otherwise not have the time to do the automation work, the research work, the strategy work, or even the firefighting that's vital to their everyday operations, right? So it's like, of course I don't need to manage it. If I did, I wouldn't be able to do all these other things, and I think that's, it rings true, right? That it's hard to quantify that time savings because people say, oh, one half of an FTE, that's really not much in the greater scheme of things. I don't know, one half FTE working on strategic programs is a huge opportunity. I'd say the value of Tintry to our end users, and we've heard from a lot of them this week, actually this has been a fantastic event hearing from many of our passionate consumers. And from the very beginning, we've wanted to build a product that ultimately customers care about. And we've seen that this week in droves. But I would say the, going back to what they get out of it, it's the values of what they don't have to do. So they don't have to carve up loans, they don't have to carve up volumes. All they have to do is work with the units of infrastructure that are native to their environment. VMs, they deal with everything in their environment from a virtual machine perspective. A virtual machine's one thing across the infrastructure. Again, they can add those virtual machines seamlessly, they can add those in seconds. They don't have to size and add anything in terms of how am I going to divide up the storage? How am I going to provision IO? How am I going to get the technical pieces right? They basically just to get place VMs and we have a very simplistic way to give them a visualization into that because we understand that virtual machine and what it takes to service it. It comes right back to them in terms of time savings that are tremendous in terms of that. So let's deal with the elephant in the room. So Tintry, we've talked about all the great stuff and the original founding vision, but then ran into some troubles, right? And so how do you deal with that with customers in terms of just their perception of what occurred? You guys did the IPO, et cetera, et cetera. Take us through how you're making sure customers are cool with what you guys got going on. I'm not sure that Glass is half full kind of guy, maybe from previous times on theCUBE. The interesting thing is not a lot of people actually knew. Maybe we didn't create enough brand recognition in the past for people to even know that there was a transition. There were even some of our customers, and Graham, you can pile on this, that because they don't manage the product every day, because they don't have to, it's kind of so easy, they've even forgotten a lot about it and don't spend a lot of time. I'd say that the reason why we are able to continue to invest today a year after the acquisition is because retaining existing customers was something that was very successful. And to a lot of them, you can add comments, it wasn't easy to switch to something, they could just switch to something else because there's no other product that does these automatic things and provides the predictive modeling that they're used to. So it's like, well, what would we switch to? So they just kept going, and to them, they've given us a lot of great feedback. Being owned by the largest private storage company on planet Earth has the advantages of strong sources of supply, great reversal logistics, partnerships with suppliers as a bigger company to be able to service them long term. So it wasn't broke, so you didn't need to fix it. And you were able to maintain obviously a large portion of that customer base. And what was the service experience like and how is that evolving? And what does DDN bring to the table? So, boy, DDN brings so many resources in terms of bringing this from the point when they bought us last year, a year ago today. I think we transitioned with about 40 people in the company, we're up to about 200 now. So serious investment, obviously that's been a pretty heavy job in terms of building that team back up. Service and support, we've put all of the resources, the stated goal coming across the acquisition was to have Tintry support, Tintry by DDN support be better than where Tintry support was. We put the money- Both of great scores too. So it was hard to go up from there, right? And I would say what we've been doing on that today, I mean, in terms of the SLAs, I think those are as good as they've ever been from that perspective. So we have a big team behind us that are working really hard to make sure that the customer experience is exactly what we want a Tintry experience to be. So big messages at this show, of course, multi-cloud, Kubernetes, solving climate change, fixing the homeless problem in San Francisco. I'm not hearing that from you guys. What's your key message to the VMworld customer base? Well, I personally believe that there's a lot of opportunity to invest in improving operations that are already pretty darn stable. Operating these environments, talking to folks here on the floor, these new technologies you're talking about are certainly going to change the way we deploy things, but there's going to be a lot of time left still operating virtualized server infrastructure and accelerating VDI deployments to just operationalize things better. We're hoping that folks choose some new technologies out there. I mean, there's been a lot of hype in past years about what technology to choose. We are all flash infrastructure, but I like to say we're intelligent infrastructure. Yeah, we have 10 and 40 gig ports. We're all flash, but that's not why you choose this. You choose this because you're able to take your operations and spend more of your time on the apps because you're not messing around with that low-level infrastructure. I think that there's a renaissance of investment and opportunity to innovate in that space. And to Graham's point about going further up the stack, we now have database technology that we can show gives database administrators the direct ability to self-service their own cloning, their own staging, their own operations, which otherwise would be a complex set of trouble tickets internally to provision the environment. No, everyone loves to self-service. That's really the thing I think our customers love. It's the self-service aspect. I see the self-service and the ability to do, again, not have to worry about all the things that they don't have to do in terms of, again, not having to get into those details. As Mario mentioned in terms of the database side, that's a workload, the workload intelligence that we've already had for virtual machines. We can now service that database object natively. We're going to do SQL server later this year. Being able to, again, being able to see whether or not they've got a host or a network or a storage problem. Being able to see where that unit they're serving, having that insight is tremendously powerful. Also being able to snapshot, to be able to clone, to be able to manage and protect that database in a native way. Not having to worry about going into a console, worrying about the underlying infrastructure, the lungs, the volumes, all the pieces that people would have to get involved with, maybe moving from production to test and those kinds of things. The simplicity is all the things that you really don't have to do across the getting down in terms of those lungs, the volumes, the sizing exercises. One of our customers put it best today. I hear a lot of things back from different customers. If he says the Tintry box is the best employee he has. I can see that, because I have to do it. I have to do it. Hey, reinvest, I haven't heard a customer yet that talks about reducing staff. The IT staff is really, really critical. They want to invest up. Can I throw a buzzword out there? DevOps, you didn't mention that. It's all about DevOps, right? And one thing that's interesting here is we're a technology that supports virtual environments and how many software developers use virtual environments to write, test, and basically develop programs. Lots, and being able to give those developers the ability to create new machines and be very agile in the way they do their test dev is awesome. And in terms of just taking big amounts of data from an app, if I can circle an app, which is these virtual machines, be able to look at that on the infrastructure and moreover, copy data so that I can do stuff with that data all on the fly in virtualization. We think of DevOps as being very much a cloud thing. I'd say that virtualization, specifically server virtualization, is the perfect foundation for DevOps-like functionality. And what we've been able to do is provide that user experience directly to those folks up the stacks. The infrastructure guide doesn't have to touch it. I wanted to pull a couple of threads together. And I think because you talked about the original vision, they're kind of VMware-centric, VM-centric, kind of multiple hypervisors now, multi-cloud here at VMworld. So what are you seeing in the customers? Is it a multi-cloud portfolio? What are you seeing your customers going to in the future with both on-prem, hybrid cloud, public? So where does Tintree fit into this storage portfolio? They kind of fit all over the map. And I think in terms of most of the customers that we have ultimately have infrastructure on-site and in their own control. We do have some that ultimately put those out in places that are quote-unquote clouds, if you will. But they're not in the service vendor clouds. Actually, we have a couple folks, actually, that are cloud providers, actually, customers. So they're building their own clouds to service customer communities. Super interesting market with differentiated services for service providers. And better DR offerings because they can offer something that's very end-to-end for that customer. And so it's more- They monetize it. Yeah, and I think those type of customers like the more regional provider or more of a specialty service provider rather than the roll your own stuff. I'd say that, generally speaking, folks want to have a level of abstraction as they go into new architectures. So multi-cloud, from a past life I wrote a lot about this, is this idea that I don't have to worry about which cloud I'm on to do what I'm doing. I want to be able to do it, and then regardless of which cloud I'm on, it just works. And so I think that our philosophy is how we can continue to move up the stack and provide not just access to our analytics because all that analytics stuff we do in machine learning is available via API. We have a VRO plug-in and all that sort of stuff to be able to allow that to happen. But when we're talking now about apps and how those apps work across multiple pieces of infrastructure, multiple VMs, we can now build a composite view of what those analytics mean in a way that really now gives them new insights as to how can I move it over here? Can I move it over here? What's going to happen if I move it over here to over there? And I think that's the part that should at least delineate from your average garden variety infrastructure and what we like to call intelligent infrastructure. Stuff that can actually, that's doing stuff to be able to give you that data. Because there's always a way you can do it the long way. Just nobody has time to do it the long way, huh? No. And I would actually say that, what you just touched on, going back to a fundamental tintry differentiator, getting that level of abstraction right is absolutely the key to what we do. We understand that workload, that virtual machine is the level of abstraction. It's the unit of infrastructure within a virtual environment. In terms of somebody who's running databases, databases are the unit of infrastructure that they want to manage. So we align exactly to the fundamental building blocks that they're doing in those. Containers certainly moving forward. It's certainly another piece we're looking. And we've actually, I think for about three years now we've been looking pretty hard at containers. We've been waiting to see where customers are at. Obviously VMware put some things on the map this week in terms of that they're, that we're pretty excited about in terms of looking in terms of how we would support those things. Well it certainly makes it more interesting if you're going to lean into it with someone like VMware behind it. I mean I still think there are some questions but I actually like the strategy of, because if I understand it correctly, a vSphere admin is going to see vSphere but a developer is going to see Kubernetes. So that's kind of cool. And we just want to give people an experience that allows them to self-service under the control of the IT department so that they can spend less time on infrastructure. Because at the end of the day, I haven't met a developer that even likes infrastructure. They love to not have to deal with it at all. They only do it out of assess. Even database folks, they love infrastructure only because they had to think about it. They wanted to avoid the pitfalls of bad infrastructure. Infrastructure's code is, you know. Yeah, so we believe in that. Question of go-to-market. You've preserved the Tintree name. So that says a lot. What's the go-to-market like? How are you guys structuring the organizations? Well in terms of a parent company perspective, we're a wholly owned subsidiary of DDN, so Tintree by DDN. Our go-to-market model is channel-centric in the sense that still a vast majority of people who procure IT infrastructure prefer to use an integrator or reseller or some sort of thing as far as that goes. What you'll see from us probably more than you did historically is more work with some of the folks in the ecosystem. Let's say in the data protection space, Cohesion and Rubrik is an example, and I think you can talk to some of that. Beam, where historically Tintree hadn't really done as much collaboration there. But I think now, given the overall stability of the segment and people knowing exactly where value can be added, we have a really cool joint story. And you can talk a little bit about that because your team does that. Yeah, so I would certainly say, in terms of the go-to-market side, we've been very much channel-led. Actually, it's been very interesting to go through this with the channel folks. I'd say there's also a couple other pieces I mentioned. We mentioned some of the cloud providers. Some of those certainly cross the lines between whether they're MSPs, whether they are resellers, especially as we go to our friends across the pond. Maybe that's the VMworld Barcelona discussion, but some of those are all three, right? So there are customer, their service providers, their channel partner, if you will, in terms of a reseller. So that's been pretty interesting from that perspective. I think there's a lot of opportunity in terms of that. Certainly, I would say where we're at in terms of we're trying to very much, we understand customers have ecosystems. I mean, Mario mentioned the backup spaces, right? Customers are doing new and different things in there, and they want us to fit into those pieces. And I'd certainly say in the world that we're in, we're not trying to go solve and boil the ocean in terms of all the problems ourselves. We're trying to figure out, are the things that we can bring to the table that make it easier for them to integrate with us? And maybe in some new and novel ways. So question, so what's the number one customer problem that when you guys hear, you say that's our wheelhouse, we're going to crush the competition? I'll let you go first. So I'd say, you know, if they have a virtualized environment, I mean, we belong in their environment. Actually, somebody said this best earlier again today in the booths. Like, you know, the person who doesn't have dentaries, the person who doesn't know about dentary if they have a virtual environment. Yeah. So I, you know, the, I would say that this week's been pretty interesting, lots of customer meetings. So it's been pretty, pretty awesome getting a lot of things back. But I would say the things that they're asking us to solve are not impossible things. They're looking for evolutions. They're looking for things in terms of better insights in their environment, maybe deeper insights. One of the things we're looking to do with the tremendous amount of data we've got coming back. We've got almost a million machines coming back to us in terms of auto support data every single night. About 2.3 trillion data points for the last three years. So we're looking to make that data that we've got into meaningful, consumable information for them that's actionable. So, you know, again, what can we see in a virtual environment? Not just entry things in terms of storage or those kinds of things, but maybe what patches they have installed that might be affecting a network driver which might affect a certain configuration and being able to expose and give them some actionable ways to go take care of those problems. All right, we've got to go. Mario, give you the last word. Stated simply, if you are using virtualization to abstract infrastructure as a way to accelerate your operations, i.e., you run VMware, if you have 100 virtual machines, 150 virtual machines, you can really benefit from maybe choosing a different way to do infrastructure. I can't say the competition doesn't work. Of course the products work. We just want and hope that folks can see that doing it differently may produce a different outcome. And, hey, different outcomes can be good. All right, Mario Graham, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's great to see you guys. Thank you very much. All right, thank you for watching. John Troyer, Dave Vellante. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE.