 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, we're here at VMworld 2019 in the lobby of Moscone North, back in San Francisco where it all began 10th year of theCUBE covering VMworld. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is John Troyer. Spensive time working for VMware. It's been doing theCUBE with us now for over three years. It was VMworld that we brought in the first time. I believe I was working with you on the other side that year. Absolutely, and welcoming first back to the program, one of our CUBE alumni, Rawlinson Rivera, who's the CTO of the global field at Cohesity. Thanks for joining us again. My pleasure. And always excited when we get to talk to a customer, it's a customer, and a service provider, Brock Mowery, who's the chief technologist at WoW. Correct, thanks for having me. All right, so we're going to get to WoW in a second because we really want to dig in an interesting name. I'm sure you guys have some fun with that, I would hope. But Rawlinson, first of all, VMworld always big celebration, back in San Francisco celebration, but 10 years of theCUBE too. What's it all mean to you? Amazing, the fact that I've been here a couple of times, now it's great, it's a great way to put a stamp on my existence here at VMworld too. Yeah, amazing ecosystem and lots of, as we said, we just had Jerry Chen on it. It's the VMware mafia. I'm sitting here with two former VMware employees too, even when they've left, they're still tight with a lot of going on there. Still in the heart, still in the heart. All right, Brock, you've been to this event a few times. Before we get into WoW, just tell us, what does VMworld mean to you? So VMworld is obviously, it's a huge networking event. You get to not only see your peers, but also other players in the industries and be able to evaluate their products and see what they have. All right, so tell us a little bit about WoW. So WoW.com was founded in 2013. We tout ourselves as a cyber secure cloud platform. We've done more than just stand up the VMware bits for hosting. We've actually integrated some threat protection and some network defense items around that infrastructure. All right, give us a little bit of the breadth, how many locations, locality, all that kind of stuff. So our headquarters is in Hollywood, Florida. We have a data center presence in Miami, a data center presence in Grand Rapids, Michigan and one in Switch LV in Las Vegas. So that gives us coverage over the United States. All right, I've toured one of those facilities. You've probably gotten one. They're amazing facilities. So, yeah. Well, can you tell us a little bit about WoW's business? And I'm particularly interested in being a service provider in 2019, right? A lot of noise about the big public clouds, but as the folks here at VMware know, there's trillions of dollars flowing through an IT ecosystem that, you know, some of it's going to the public cloud, but there's lots of need for service providers providing specialty services or hands-on services I'm kind of curious, what is your business and how does it intersect with data, which is where we're getting to here? Yeah, absolutely. So with our focus on compliance, that's really one of the major differentiators from us with the hyperscalers or the big three is a lot of people like to call them. That gives us the ability also to tune and make sure that their workloads are precise and running the way that they want with the security models around them. Plus it's the, you know, you can reach out and you can contact us. We pick up the phone, we support all of our customers. We love to go above and beyond and make sure that they're happy. So we want to kind of give them that boutique type feel and be able to provide those services out. And we're talking verticals, like? Yeah, so healthcare is a big one, obviously. And then there's, you know, huge requirements around that for data protection and data isolation and so forth. And also, you know, on the cybersecurity side, CyberScan, the new release from these guys is something that we're definitely foaming at the mouth to get at. It's something that we're ready to put into play because it's a value add back to our customers and having their product in that position gives us an advantage. All right, Rollinsen, he teed you up. But, you know, in general, you know, we know where Cohesity has played in the enterprise and what's been happening in a lot of the environment. It gives a little bit of the landscape for the service providers and where Cohesity plays. We know that that's been a great, not only customer, but almost a channel for many technology in this space for a number of years. Well, you know, we have our own sort of like division within the Cohesity, just for the service provider market. And what we're doing now is we're enabling them to provide their customers with the value that we gave our enterprise customers already. So opening up more than just the backup, right? So one of the things that Brock mentioned is this new capability we have of performing scans, vulnerability scans within the systems. When have you ever been able to do that on something that just sits there and it's just an insurance policy in the past? Now we can give you the ability to provide your customers the ability to look into their data, whether they have a vulnerability or not, in place and tell them before they do it, right? Did you want to restore this? Do you want to protect it with X amount of vulnerabilities? Do you want to fix it before you do it? And that kind of level of service that's being provided delivers immense value to customers everywhere. So Brock, is this the first product that you use in Cohesity or have you been using other Cohesity products? So we obviously, we dove in head first with data protection. Our previous data protection product wasn't living up to its claims and that sparked us to go out and start looking at other vendors and it actually happened at VMworld a few years ago, came across Cohesity, worked with their guys, we did a POC, we attacked some of our major pain points right off the bat and Cohesity handled it without any problems. I'm kind of curious, so we're talking about Cohesity's secondary storage platform, backup is a use of it, but once you, we live in a world now, we still put some of the things on tape, but okay, the bits are live, they're on a disc somewhere and I've backed them up. So as an example of this for the security scans, some of this ransomware stuff can lie dormant for months before turning on. So it's not a matter of like, oh, I've just restored the backup from last week, you may have to go search through all your checkpoints, right? So that's an example of how having a secondary storage platform really enables a lot of security. So that's my understanding. So Raul, maybe I'll tee you up. Can you talk about the secondary storage data platform in general and security is one aspect, data protection is another? I don't know. What's going on? You're right. The thing about what we do is that we as a data management platform, which we've now kind of fallen into that, there's many facets to managing the data. We started with the data protection piece. Now we're adding other value to the areas which I just pointed out. There's a lot of dark data that you don't get to see because of the distribution of silos and I don't really use that. Now we have the ability to provide that value that everyone else in the service provider business can leverage because now they have, like you said, I have to go look through all these different iterations of that protection job that I'm doing. Now we do that instantaneously, we do that at the core. So now you're able to identify and report on that and be able to correct the before you have to go through that process, which is incredible. And that's on the data protection side. We also now have the ability of using, you can use Cohesity as a filer if they want to do that. Now we're talking to live information that's being accessed. The same suite of capabilities and tools are there and can report the same way. Yeah, if I can add to that too, one of the really cool features that I like that Cohesity does is when you're using filer services and things like that, you still have the ability to protect that data as well. So you can replicate those snapshots out to other locations and so forth. So we found that was a pretty good benefit for us. We have a configuration management platform that we ended up putting them out on one of those servers and we want to protect that in our other location and this is our own internal operation. So we leveraged the Cohesity platform as well. We protect that data by replicating it to another geo. Yeah, Brock, connect the dots for us. We understand you had some pain points, but what is this Cohesity solutions that you're using mean for your ultimate end user customers? Confidence, that's knowing that when that backup report comes in and hits their inbox that all of those jobs are going to be successful and ultimately what that turns into is when they need that data back, they need to restore it, it's going to be there for them. Anything you'd add about the impact on the customers when you're working with service providers, any kind of broader discussion of the service providers? I mean, it's great, the things that we do because now we're not only, typically we enable our enterprise customers to do this, now we're enabling our service providers to enable their customers to do that as well. And you know what, we're just in the background. It's their business, right? They're the ones who are providing the service, making a service for the customers based on what they need. And it's good for us to kind of enable that and let them do what they need to do which is make money, make money, protect their money and make more money. So Brock, I'm kind of curious, you and your customers, right? A lot of talk of digital transformation, agility, we've all got to make money. We've all got to move fast. And I'm guessing, again, in the ecosystem where there are very big players and very small players, part of it, you still have to move fast and your customers expect you to be delivering new services and reliable services, et cetera. Can you maybe just, I mean, talk a little bit about kind of what your customers are looking for? You know, how the relationship goes with maybe with a provider like you have a team in Cohesity building, how fast can you turn on these services? How fast has the ramp up been maybe with the community? Sure, so it's funny because I've actually been having some other conversations on how we can improve the existing workflow. But the workflow has been not, we've had to re-architect a couple of network items to be able to facilitate external backups, for example, because being a service provider, I don't just back up VMs within my environment. I back up VMs in customers' environments as well. So laying the foundation to be able to have these units replicate between each other eases that path. And again, it comes down to revenue. The faster I can get that box coming in, the faster that I can realize revenue on that product. Yeah, Brock, a lot of discussion in this show about some of the future things. VMware is talking about containerization and building Kubernetes into vSphere, talking about their multi-cloud connectivity that they're having. I know Cohesity's got a strong play partnering with all the public cloud environments. Give us a look out as to how does that impact your business? Where do you see that going from your roadmap standpoint? Absolutely, so with the Cohesity platform, especially with the big three hyperscalers, for example, we're actually looking at a way to put our long-term storage out on those services. We'll keep our short-term storage internal or on-prem wherever the customer's scenario might be, but we want to leverage that long-term storage so that we don't have to manage that data over a seven-year period. We do manage it. We leverage your guys' tools to be able to do it, but it's in a hyperscaler. I don't need to worry about it. And to add to that, we're also as VMware moves along and catches on the wave of the Kubernetes and all that stuff, we also do that already. So we can actually provide protection of namespaces for the Kubernetes environment, some of the things that you'll start seeing, you'll see we release very soon. So we already, given the service providers the ability to compete with the hyperscalers, providing those newer cloud-native services that need to be available for them too. So we're going to make that, we're going to enable that for everyone and they'll have it, they'll be able to offer it very soon. Well, that actually brings up a question, Brock. How are in terms of being cloud-native, either you guys spinning up more services, more cloud-native apps, or your customers? And I'm not sure if they're bringing off the shelf apps to you, or if they're building custom apps. I mean, where do you see the evolution of this whole field in terms of DevOps and cloud-native? Definitely, so cloud-native is a very interesting architecture play, especially with the microservices and dynamically building machines on the fly and things like that. It's very exciting, very intriguing. Our workloads tend to be more traditional VM type workloads. I have been having conversations with customers, technical groups, hey, you guys should start looking at microservices. This is something that you guys can improve your service delivery with. We haven't gotten there yet. We're using some container services internally for our own operations, but externally, we're still trying to, you know, part of the digital transformation, work with your customers to provide them solutions. All right. Brock, when, you know, one of the things we come to this show, we always get, okay, great, here's where we are today, here's where we're going tomorrow. Usually I have a wish list, you know, we know service providers, yes, if you can make it a little cheaper, you know, we need to be able to pass those margins, you know, down to our customer. What's on your wish list? What would make, you know, your company's life easier? Well, Cohesity's done a very good job of that already. So again, you know, having confidence in your backups and being able to sleep at night is definitely huge. So on my wish list, I like the direction they're going with the integration and a lot of the workbench products and so forth. Honestly, I don't have a ton of wish list. I'm more sitting back watching what these guys are going to come out with, because CyberScan's one that actually came out of left field for me and this is awesome. What I think is interesting about Cohesity's architecture is that there are this app layer that they're now introducing, that yes, there's Kubernetes there, but it's a lot of apps, data services that are very close to the data. I don't know, what do you guys have in store? What are you talking about here at the show in terms of new services? Because now you just containerize it, you dockerize it and stick it in your thing and you're plain and they are on the device. The focus for us is basically continue to deliver value on the platform that people only thought it was data protection. It's way more than that. Here comes the vulnerability scanner as being one of them, but also opening the platform for customers and sales, service providers. You know what services you need to create and develop for what you need to do. Do it and put it on us. Do not move the data away from where it's safely stored and located, bring the application to it. That eliminates risks of data leakage and all these kinds of things. Because now you have a secure centralized location that's scalable, everything you want, it's all in place. Yeah, I think it's a great point. When the company first came out, it's like, okay, well here's the product at the day, but Mohit is building a platform. That is his history and that's what he's doing and I know that's what excited a lot of people in the early days and as you said, your data management platform now. So we now actually, or at least at the early stages of where the company is going with the overall solution. You know Mohit's very methodical. He decided to go one thing at a time, right? We're not a Swiss Army knife. We're not trying to boil the ocean. We come out, we master the one thing that was the most painful so far, data protection. We've fixed back up and now we're going to give you the rest of what you can get from the platform after we master that. All right, Brock, want to give you the final words. You've been going through this journey now for a few years. When you talk to your peers, what advice would you give them? Anything you've learned along the way. I said, oh, it's great, but boy, I wish I could have shortcut certain things or plan something a little bit different. What learnings can you share? So definitely plan your deployments. There's some new features and new items that are coming out, but again, one of the great things about Cohesity, you have a virtualization VE series. Go in there and break it on the VE series and then deploy it on your hardware. All right. Brock and Rollinsen, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate all the updates and congratulations on the progress you've been making. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage at the midpoint of three days wall-to-wall coverage, two sets, 10th year of theCUBE at VMworld 2019. Thanks as always for watching.