 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. One of the biggest topics we've been digging into as we head through 2020 has really been multi-cloud and that's customers as they're really going through their own transformations, understanding what they're doing in their data center to modernize what's happening between all of the public clouds they're using and all the services that fit amongst them. Happen to bring back one of our CUBE alumni to dig into a specific topic. Simon Taylor, who's the CEO of Haiku, of course, data protection, a big piece, big buzz in the industry for a number of years and one of those areas in multi-cloud that's definitely of a big importance. Simon, great to see you. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me back on. It's exciting to be here. All right, so Simon, first, give us the update. 2020, we've seen you at many of the conferences we go to, you're based in Boston, so not too far for you to come out to our Boston area studio here, a 40-minute drive without traffic, so. Not bad at all. Give us the latest on Haiku. Certainly will. And Stuart, thanks again for having me into your studio. It's gorgeous, everything looks great. It's a lot easier than traveling over to Europe to see you. So this is very, very convenient, actually. But since we last spoke, which I think was about six months ago now, Haiku has been growing fast and furiously. You know, we started out with the world's first purpose-built backup and recovery product for Nutanix, of course. We added VMware, we added Google Cloud, we wrapped all the data together into multi-cloud data protection as a service, and we called that Haiku Protégé. Well, I'm so thrilled to announce that in just the three months since we've launched Protégé, we have seen hundreds of customers flocking to it. And what we're finding is that customers are calling us and they're saying things like, let me get this straight. I'm already backing up my data on-prem with you. I can now migrate to the cloud, bring it back again for disaster recovery as a service. And it's all part of Haiku. And we say, yes. You know, and they say, and this is all offered as a service? Yes, and it's natively integrated into all the platforms that I'm using? Yes. And I think so, customers today are more and more in need of the kind of expertise that Haiku's providing because they're looking now much more strategically than ever before at what workloads to leave on-prem and which workloads to migrate to the cloud. And they want to make sure that that entire data pathway is protected from beginning to end. Yeah, it's really interesting stuff. I think back to early in my career, that data protection layer was like, well, this is what I'm running and don't change it. Think about like when you rolled out like virtual tape as a technology. It was, I don't want to have to change my backup because that is just something that runs and I don't do it. For the last five years or so, it feels like customers, there's so much change in their environment that they are looking for things that are more flexible. You talked about some of the flexible adoption models for payment and the like that they're looking for. So, you know, what do you think customers are just more embracing of that change? Is it just that changes their day-to-day business and therefore data protection needs to come along with that? Well, it's funny you asked because just a few years ago I was on theCUBE with you and you said to me, you know, you guys have a perpetual license model. What are you doing about that? And I said, don't worry, it is shifting to as-a-service. It's going subscription, which was super important for the market as you know. I've had conversations with folks who are selling cooking gear and they're trying to sell that as a service. You know, I saw yesterday somebody, I think Panera Bread is offering a coffee as a service. You know, I think what we've started to realize is that the convenience of the as-a-service model, the flexibility, which I would argue was probably driven by cloud technology and cloud technology adoption is something the market is truly embraced. And I think anybody who's not moved in that direction at this point is probably very much being left behind. Okay, another technology that often goes hand-in-hand discussion with data protection is security. Of course, ransomware is a hot topic conversation in the last few years. How does that fit into your conversations with customers? What are you seeing? That's a great question Stu. You know, one of our advisory board members, his name is Kevin Powers, and he runs the Boston College Cybersecurity Program. I had the privilege and the honor of attending the FBI Boston College Cyber Program recently at a large scale event at Boston College. And FBI Director Ray was actually on hand to talk about this problem. And it was incredible, you know, he said cyber crime as a service is becoming a major issue. You're talking about the commoditization of hard to build malware that's now just skyrocketing, you know, off the charts, the amount of, you know, cyber exploitation that's going on across the world. This is creating massive, massive issues for the FBI because they've got so many thousands of cases they've got to deal with. And while they're doing a fantastic job, we believe prevention is certainly the key. So one of the things that has been really, really wonderful as a CEO to watch has been the way that some of our customers have actually been able to crack the code in terms of not having to give in to these bad actors. We've had actual customers who have had ransomware attacks, had millions of dollars in data, literally stolen from them. And they've been told, you've got to deposit, you know, $5 million of this Bitcoin account by midnight or we're deleting the data, right? Because Haiku is Linux based, because Haiku is not Windows Server based, because Haiku is natively integrated into all the platforms that we support, we were able to help those customers get their data back without paying a penny. So I think that that's one of those moments where you really sort of say to yourself, God, I'm glad I'm in this business. You know, we've built a product that doesn't just do what we say it's going to do, it does a heck of a lot more. And I think it's absolutely a massive problem and data protection is really a key part of the answer. Yeah, it's great to hear the success stories there. You know, I think back to earlier days where it'd be like, well, you know, what have I set up for disasters and data protection and things like that? Well, maybe I haven't thought about it or maybe I kind of implemented it, but I've never really tested it. But there's more and more reasons why I might actually need to leverage these technologies that I've deployed. And it's nice to know that they're there. You know, it's not just an insurance thing that I've never used. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So I started off our discussion, Simon, talking about multi-cloud. So you talked about earlier, you know, we first met, it was, you know, at the Nutanix shows in their environments. And some of that, you've gone along with Nutanix as they've gone through, you know, hybrid and multi-cloud, what they call enterprise cloud messaging. Sure. And play with those environments. So bring us up to speed. What have you ever been customers doing in cloud? Where does Haiku fit in? And what are the updates on your product? Yeah, sure. I mean, I'll start off by saying that at this point about a third of all AHV customers are using Haiku for backup and recovery. And just for our audience that doesn't know, AHV, of course, is Nutanix's acropolis hypervisor. Absolutely. That comes baked into their solution as an alternative to people like VMware. Perfectly said, as always, sir. Yes, very much. And you know, we've been thrilled as the rise of AHV and Nutanix has sort of taken the market by storm. And when we started out, you know, we came on the show with zero customers and a new product and said, we believe in AHV and we think it's gonna be great and we're gonna back it up. And that's really, you know, paid off in Spain for us, which was wonderful. But we also recognized that customers needed that VMware backup. So we built a VADP integration and then we started going after the public cloud. So we started with Google Cloud and we said, we're gonna build the world's first purpose built backup and recovery as a service for GCP. We launched that last year and it was tremendous. You know, some of the world's largest companies and organizations and governments are actually now running Haiku specifically for Google Cloud. So we've been thrilled about that. I think the management team at GCP has done a terrific job of making sure that Google can be really competitive in the cloud wars and we're thrilled to support them. Yeah, and I'm glad you've got some customer stories on Google because, you know, the industry watchers out there, it's like, well, you know, Google, they're number three. And you know, we know that Google has some really strong data products, you know, where they're very well known. But I'm curious, when you're talking to your customers, is there anything that's kind of commonality as to why customers are using Google and you know, what feedback you're hearing from your customers out there? Sure, I mean, I'll start off by saying this, we've pulled our customers and we've now got over 1,300 customers in 56 countries. So we pulled all of them and we just said, how many, you know, data silos do you have? How many platforms, how many clouds? The average was five, right? So the first thing to say is that I think almost all of these large enterprise customers and public sector and private sector are really using all of them. You know, the extent to which they may be using AWS versus Azure versus GCP, you know, versus Nutanix versus VMware on-prem, you know, we can argue in debate, but I think all customers at this point of any size and scale are trying them all out. I think what Google's done really well is they've started to build a really strong partner program. I think, you know, where they were a little bit sort of late to the party in terms of, you know, AWS and Azure being there sort of first. But I think what Thomas Curian did when he came in is he sort of tripled down on sort of building out that ecosystem and saying, you know, what's really important to make cloud customers comfortable that their data is going to be as safe on Google Cloud as it was on-prem. And, you know, I'm thrilled that they've elected to make data protection sort of one of the key pillars of that strategy, not just because we're a data protection company, but because I do think that that was one of the encumbrances in terms of that evolution to cloud. Yeah, absolutely. You've seen a huge growth in the ecosystem around Google. The other big cloud provider that has a very strong partner ecosystem is the one when I went to the show last year, their CEO Satya Nadella talked about trust. So of course, talking about Microsoft and Azure, you know, very large ecosystem there, you know, trying to emphasize maybe against others. And by the way, you saw this as much of a shot against Google, you know, how do I trust Google with my data and information from the consumer side? As AWS is, I might be concerned that they might be competing against them. So how about the Microsoft relationship? It's a great question. So again, so when we started on-prem, you know, with our initial purpose-built backup and recovery products, we added Google Cloud. You know, I'm now thrilled to announce that we're also going to be launching Azure backup and recovery. It's also native. It is purpose-built into the Azure marketplace. All of the things that you've come to expect from Haiku backup, this simplicity, the fact that it's SLO-based, the fact that you can actually go in and decide how many times a day you want a different recovery point, et cetera, all of those levels of configuration are now baked in to Haiku's own purpose-built backup and recoveries and service for Azure. But I think the important thing to remember about this wonderful, wonderful new addition to our portfolio is that it is a critical component of Haiku protege. So getting back to your question from before about multi-cloud data protection and what we're seeing, you know, we call this the year of migration. Because for all of these cloud platforms, what are they really trying to do? They need to move massive amounts of data in a safe and resilient manner to the cloud. So remember, after we built out these purpose-built backup and recovery services, Azure is now one of those. We then pulled all that data together under a single pane of glass we called it Haiku protege. We then said to customers, we're going to enable you to automatically migrate with a touch of a button an entire workload to the cloud and then bring it back again for disaster recovery and we will protect the data on-prem in the cloud and back again. Yeah, it's interesting because when we kind of look at what's happening in the marketplace, you know, for many years it was a discussion of what's moving from the data center to the public cloud. Some things are moving back from the environment, edge of course, pulls things even further. Often it's, I say it's not even migration anymore, it's just mobility because we are going to be moving things and spinning things up and building things in many more places and it's going to change. As we started out that conversation, there's so much change going on that. So you're giving customers some optionality there so that, you know, this isn't just a one-way, you know, let's stick it on a truck or put it on this thing and get it to that environment, but I need to be able to enable some of that optionality and know what I'm doing today, but also knowing that, you know, six months a year from now, we know things are going to be different and it needs to be some of those environments. Absolutely, we call the 3Ds, data assurance, data mobility and disaster recovery. So I think the ability to not only protect your data, whether it's on-prem as it journeys to the cloud or whether it's in the cloud, the ability to actually assist the customer in the migration and what I hear time and time again is, oh, but Azure has a tool or Google has a tool for migration, of course they have tools for migration, you know, but I think the challenge for customers is, how do I affect that data resiliency? How do I ensure that I can move the data as a complete workload, moving an entire SAP HANA instance, for example, to the cloud and it protected the entire time as it journeys up there and then bring it back for the disaster recovery without professional services because again, you know, Haiku, it's about simplicity. We want to make sure that these customers can get the same level of readiness, the same ease of deployment that they get from their cloud vendor when they're thinking about the data protection and the migration. All right, I want to click down one layer here. We're talking about multi-cloud, you talked about simplicity. Well, Kubernetes might not be the simplest thing out there, but absolutely is a fundamental piece of the infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment. So, you know, your partners Google with GKE, Azure with AKS, and Carbon with a K from Nutanix. Everyone now, you know, I say it's not about distributions, it's really every platform that you're going to use is going to have Kubernetes built into it. So what does that mean from a data protection standpoint? Do you just plug into all of these environments? You've tested it, got customers using it? It's a great question. It comes up as you can imagine all the time. I think it's something that, you know, is becoming more and more ready for prime time. A lot of the major vendors are moving to it, making heavy investments in Kubernetes. We ourselves have over a hundred customers that are actively using Kubernetes in one form or another and backing the data up using Haiku. So there's no question in my mind that, you know, Haiku is Kubernetes ready. I think what's really exciting for us is some of the native integrations we're working on with Google and with Nutanix. So whether it's carbon, whether it's GKE, we want to make sure that when we work with these platforms that we mimic how the platform is supporting Kubernetes so that their customers can get the same experience from Haiku that they're getting from the platform provider itself. All right, Simon, I want to give you the final word. You know, bring us inside your customers, what they're doing with multi-cloud and where Haiku fits there here in 2020. Sure. You know, we talk about prime time. Cloud for many years has been something that I think large enterprises have talked a big game about but have been really dipping a toe in the water with. What we've seen the last two years is a massive, massive at scale migration to the largest three public clouds, whether that's GCP, whether that's Azure or the other one. We're thrilled to support GCP and Azure because GCP and Azure, we believe, do provide the most value to our customers. But I think the name of the game here is not just supporting a customer in the cloud. It's understanding that every customer today, Stu, is on a journey, whether they're on-prem, whether they're journeying to cloud or they're in cloud, those three Ds, data assurance, which is our backup, data mobility, which is the automated migration or disaster recovery readiness, that's the name of the game and that's how Haiku wants to help. All right, Simon Taylor, always a pleasure to catch up with you, thank you so much for the Haiku updates. Stu, thanks so much for having us on. All right, be sure to check out the cube.net for all of our inventory of the shows that we've been at, the videos we've done. You can even search on keywords in companies. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube.