 Hi, this is your host Saptan Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of TFR. Let's talk and today we have two guests Satya Sankaran, Chief Operating Officer at Cloud Casa by CataLogic and Richard Oliver, Chief Executive Officer at OnDead. Satya, Richard, it's great to have you both on the show. Thank you. Thank you, Saptan. Thank you, Richard. We cover both Cloud Casa and OnDead here. So our audience, they are fully aware of both companies. So I will not ask you to tell us about Cloud Casa and OnDead. But what I'll ask you is that talk a bit about this partnership. What does it look like? How you folks are partnering? Or is this the first time you're working together or you have been working together for a long time? OnDead has been active in the ecosystem for some time, working with the CNCF. And we've been working with the goal of being open and integrate with variety of different platforms like different Kubernetes providers and also with backup. And we've been working now closely with Cloud Casa for some time since inception, really. And we've just achieved a certified integration and now we're collaborating on our joint go-to-market. Yeah, no, it's been awesome working with OnDead and Team. Look, I think we kind of go hand in hand in this ecosystem. A lot of what Richard and his team does is really just enabling customers to run stateful applications at scale. If you need to maintain state, you need to have great storage. You need to have great availability. You need to have great performance. But you also need to have good backups, right? So I think our partnership is all about enabling those customers to have a functioning application and a good night of sleep. Backup can be seen in so many different ways. Like not having a backup is like flying without a parachute or a seat belt in a car or things like that. Talk a bit about what are some of the pain points that you have seen in the industry as the market is also with the Kubernetes market has matured, production workloads are there. Where you felt that, hey, you know, we should work together to bring more value to the whole ecosystem. I can talk to what we're seeing in the storage side of the house. And that is just an ever-increasing number of critical workloads moving into Kubernetes. And as you've mentioned, the more critical the workload, the more important it is to have backup and recovery. So whereas it's inception, backup and recovery was less important for some of our customers because we're still in the dev cluster being tinkered with. But now we're seeing really serious financial workloads, telco workloads where you can't operate without having a good backup and recovery solution, which is why working with Sathya and the Cloud CASA team makes complete sense. The lineage for Kubernetes is all about stateless applications. It was everything was FM metal. Everything was elastic, everything was FM metal. But I think as you start using these applications in production, you realize that you have important data that needs to be stored in some shape or form. What's the point of being able to do compute if you can't actually store the results somewhere? And what's the point of being able to do analytics if you can't log the output somewhere? All of these are essentially driving and it's making stateful applications kind of while Kubernetes lineage is stateless, it is as you go mainstream, stateful applications are here to stay. And you're seeing CNCF surveys, you're seeing data dog surveys, all of these guys are basically projecting that, look, this is growing at even faster rate than people adopting Kubernetes itself, right, because everybody sees once they go production, they need to run stateful applications. And that's really what we're enabling. We are essential service for these stateful applications. This is not a nice to have. If you are running stateful applications, you need storage, you need that storage to be performant, you need that storage to be available, you need that storage to be replicating, and you need to have good backups. So we're really just essential service to enable those stateful applications to run, and that's where mission critical applications are running stateful sets. When DevOps teams, platform engineering teams, they take leverage of this combined offering that you folks have versus what they were doing earlier, to kind of how their day-to-day operation changes for day two. We also talk about developer experience or depends on how you look at it, operators experience, that with this offering suddenly their life has become much more easier. I'll also talk a bit about some industry movement which is happening, where a lot of folks are looking at cost cutting, layoffs are happening, so teams have to become more efficient. So these offerings are going to, the vendors are going to help companies become more efficient. So talk about that. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the primary drivers for moving data into Kubernetes is to reduce cost. So moving away from managed database offerings or moving from legacy systems into Kubernetes and using the existing teams to run those applications more efficiently in a cloud native way, not necessarily in the cloud, more often hybrid cloud. And so one of the unique values that we collectively have is helping the engineer, so the person on the call phase having to go and solve these problems quickly and efficiently and serving them in a way that they want to be served, which is ultimately through a self-service channel, through as a service type offering. And so this is very much an extension of what's happening in even the mature ecosystems around VMware and so on. What you do see is you tend to pick the best-of-breed storage vendor, you tend to pick the best-of-breed backup vendor. And in order to put together your stack, it's not so uncommon that you're running a Dell EMC for storage, but a WIM or a rubric or a Cohesity for backups. Those kind of combinations are something that our users are really used to. They see it going on in their enterprise. It's happening so far in the VMware side. And now I think the same requirements do exist. You do want a best-of-breed storage solution. I think on that run some benchmarks to show that they're faster than perhaps any other solution out there in the market today. And you do need a best-of-breed backup solution. It's again an essential service that you don't want to be doing a lot of self-managing for. And it's a service that is primed for being delivered as a service model, where folks are happy to just sign up for an SLO or an SLA and then just make sure that the backups are getting taken and have that peace of mind for those users. There was a recent report that found that on that delivers kind of the most efficient performance for throughput and latency compared to other solutions. You did talk about, you know, boardworks in terms of cost, but let's also talk in terms of performance as well. Yeah, thanks, Wotmio. We did conduct a report quite recently by the independent Alice Chris Evans from Architecting IT. That was really focusing on the real world workloads like running MongoDB or Postgres and doing a benchmark comparison where we came out about 30% performance advantage over other solutions in the market. But actually surprisingly, our customers with this new world of hybrid cloud are more focused on the cost. And when you're paying for every IOP, increased performance means reduced cost. And so the reason we can do that is through our architecture. Ultimately, we've been designed from the ground up to be container native. All of our data services are in line. So from application to disk, it's a single threaded approach. And that's how we get the low latency performance. The other thing is that we're platform independent. We don't have any, what you can refer to as kernel modules, which also create complexity in terms of data operations, but impact performance. But moreover, running in these hybrid cloud environments where the Kubernetes and Linux layers are more locked down such as Linux real time, other cloud storage solutions can't run in those environments. And we can run down to a single or three node cluster in AWS. And so that independence gives us the advantage not only to be faster to reduce cost, but to solve this hybrid cloud problem that our customers are trying to move towards to give them more choice. And of course, to do that, we need to have, we need to have a backup platform that enables us to solve the same problems in the same way. CloudCasa were named a leader and out performer in its radar for Kubernetes data protection report by GigaOM. Talk a bit about that report. And of course, as I said, you answered a lot of questions that I was going to ask that why they saw you as a leader there. Yeah, Sopnil really humbled and happy and proud of our team to have gotten that leader and out performer tag. Only a handful of vendors got the leaders tag and even less number of vendors got the out performer tag. And we're one of, I think just a couple of vendors that got both the leader and the out performer tag last year. I think it's a reflection of two things. One, I think it's a focus on the Kubernetes ecosystem and the cloud native ecosystem. Every one of our features that we've added, whether it's about enabling security scans and vulnerability assessments on the clusters that we are protecting or enabling backup of cloud configurations and not just your Kubernetes ecosystem resource protection. All of this is about delivering the right outcome for our customers. And that's been our focus. And this report, I think, took the right approach and said, we're going to focus on who is delivering the best protection in the cloud native and Kubernetes ecosystem. I think our focus there certainly helped us here because if you look at that report and who we're surrounded by, we're surrounded by hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and hundreds of millions of dollars in acquisition and billion-dollar companies in the backup space. And yet I think we're placed in the core and that's without having raised any funding until today and with a fairly small Nimble team and all with the ability to focus very clearly on Kubernetes. We're called out performer just based on our performance in the last year. In the last year, we've added support for all three big cloud providers, EKS, AKS, and GKE. And that means we walk with the cloud providers directly and we can inject our agents back up how this is configured and again use that infrastructure to spin up new clusters. We've added security capabilities. We're adding support for KubeWat which is again where you're going to see a lot more. This is why VMware has been scared about Kubernetes to some extent because it's only a matter of time before VMs are running inside Kubernetes. And you need to be able to support that and our job is to follow the data. If the data is going to these workloads, our job is to protect those workloads and deliver that best outcome. And we're again very happy and humbled that GigaOM and team gave us kudos for our focus on this space and also recognized what we've been able to deliver in the last year and don't take that for granted. We want to be there even closer to the nucleus in the report next year. But it's great recognition for our team and something I'm very proud of. I think, Sathya, it was a very good point talking about being Kubernetes focused. That's where we have absolutely something in common and two things come from that. And the first one is our developers don't want to talk to traditional storage salespeople. Our customers just want to self-serve. They want great documentation. And then the second thing is, if they need help, they need to speak to a Kubernetes expert. It's not a storage problem generally in these type of situations. It's how do I architect my solution for Kubernetes and think Cloudcast and on that together are Kubernetes experts. And that really what makes us unique in as a combined solution, delivering for that developer platform engineer DevOps engineer persona. Sathya, Richard, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this collaboration. And as you folks said, the whole focus is on the Kubernetes and making things also easier for teams there. So thanks for sharing those insights. And as usual, I would love to have you folks back on the show. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Sathya.