 From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, and welcome to theCUBE studios for another CUBE Conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. The difference between business and digital business is simple. It's the role that data plays. In a digital business, it's an asset that drives business innovation, it drives customer experience, and drives profitability. In an otherwise business, it's not. It's something that's just associated with applications, but that's why traditional businesses are transforming, to make better use of data. As businesses start to invest in data as an asset, they need to invest in the capabilities that take care of data as an asset. And that's one of the major challenges that all enterprises face today. It's an extremely hot domain, but not all options take full advantage of the cloud. Now what does that mean? What does it mean to have a set of data protection, data management capabilities be fully embedded with cloud and native cloud services? To have that conversation, we've got Pujon Kumar, who's a CEO and co-founder of Clumio with us today. Pujon, welcome to the show. Thank you Peter, nice to be here. So give us the update on Clumio. So Clumio is a two-year-old company. We just recently launched out of stealth. So far, we came out with an innovative offering, which is a SaaS solution to go and protect on-premises, VMware and VMC environments. That's what we launched out of stealth. Two months ago, we won our best of show when we came out of stealth in VMware 2019. But ultimately, we started with a vision about protecting data irrespective of where it resides. So it was all about on-premises, on-cloud, and other SaaS services. So one single service that protects data irrespective of where it resides. So far, we executed on-premises, VMware and VMC. Today, what we are announcing for the first time is our protection to go and protect applications natively built on AWS. So these are applications that are natively built on AWS that Clumio as a service will protect irrespective of them running in one region or cross-region, cross-accounts, and a single service that will allow our customers to protect native AWS applications. The other big announcement we are making is a new round of financing, and that is testament to the interest in the space and the innovative nature of the platform that we have built. So when we came out of stealth, we had raised two rounds of financing, $51 million in series A and series B rounds of financing. Today, what we are announcing is a series C round of financing of $135 million. The largest, I would say, series C financing for a SaaS enterprise company, especially a company that's a little over two years old. Well, congratulations, that's going to buy a lot of new technology and a lot of customer engagement. But what customers, as I said up front, what customers are really looking for is they're looking for tooling and methods and capabilities that allow them to treat their data differently. Talk a little bit about the central importance of data and how it's driving decisions at Clumio. Yeah, so fundamentally, you know, when we built out the data platform, it was about going after the data protection as the first use case on the platform. Longer term, the journey really is to go from a data protection company to a data management company. And this is possible for the first time because you have the public cloud on your side. If you truly built a platform for the cloud on the public cloud, you have this distinct advantage of now taking the data that you're protecting and really leveraging it for other services that you can enable the enterprise for. And this is exactly what enterprises are asking for, especially as they, you know, make a transition from on-premises to the public cloud where they're powering on more and more applications in the public cloud. And they really sometimes have no idea in terms of where the data is sitting and how they can take advantage of all these data sources that ultimately Clumio is protecting. Well, no idea where the data is sitting. Take advantage of these data sources. Presumably facilitate new classes of integration because that's how you generate value out of data. That suggests that we're not just looking at protection as crucially important as it is. We're looking at new classes of services that are going to make it possible to alter the way you think about data management. Have I got that right? And what are those new services? Yeah, so it's a journey, as I said, right? So starting with, you know, again, data protection, it's also about doing data protection across multiple clouds, right? So ultimately we are a platform, even though we are announcing, you know, AWS, you know, application support today, we've already done VMware and VMC. As we go along, you'll see us kind of doing this across multiple clouds. So an application that's built on the cloud, running across multiple clouds, AWS, Azure and GCP, whatever it might be, you'll see us kind of doing data protection across applications in multiple clouds. And then it's about going and saying, you know, can we take advantage of the data that we are protecting and really power on adjacent use cases? You know, there could be security use cases because we know exactly what's changing when it's changing. There could be infrastructure analytics use cases because people are running tens of thousands of instances and containers and VMs in the public cloud. And if a problem happens, nobody really knows what caused it and we have all the data and we can kind of, you know, index it in the back end, analyze in the back end without the customer needing to lift a finger and really show them what happened in their environment that they didn't know about, right? So there's a lot of interesting use cases that get powered on because you have the ability to index all the data, you have the ability to essentially look at all the changes that are happening and really give that visibility to the end customer and all of this, one click and automating it without the customer needing to do much. I will tell you this, that we've talked to a number of customers of Clumio and the fundamental choice, the Clumio choice was simplicity. How are you going to sustain that even as you add these new classes of services? Yes, that is the key, right? And that is about the foundation we have built at the end of the day, right? So if you look at all of our customers that have, you know, on boarded today, it's really the experience where in less than, you know, 15 minutes they can essentially start enjoying the power of the platform. And the back end that we have built and the focus on design that we have is ultimately why we are able to do this with simplicity. So when we think about, you know, all the things we do in the back end, there's obviously a lot of complexity in the back end because it is a complex platform, but every time we ask ourselves the question that, okay, from a customer perspective, how do we make sure that it is one click and easy for them? So that focus and that attention to detail that we have behind the scenes to make sure that the customer ultimately should just consume the service and should not need to do anything more than what they absolutely need to do so that they can essentially focus on what adds value to their business. It takes a lot of technology and a lot of dedication to make complex things really simple. Absolutely. Hujan Kumar, CEO and co-founder of Clumio. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you, Peter. And thanks for joining us for another CUBE Conversation. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time.