 from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by SiliconANGLE. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Happy to welcome to the program, first-time guest, Kevin Kotecki, who is the Vice President of Sales at Igneous Systems. Kevin, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, so we've been talking at Igneous since really the early days. We've known some of the founders of the team. Before we get into it, tell us a little bit about your background, how long you've been with Igneous, and kind of your day-to-day activities there. Yeah, so I've been with Igneous for three years now. So very early stage, came in pre-product, pre-revenue, been working with our earliest stage prospective customers and our earliest customers from day one. So I've had the pleasure over the last few months of building out the sales organization more broadly, the marketing organization growing as well, as we have achieved that product market fit that every startup's looking for, and going out and solving those problems at scale across the country, and having the feet on the street to help with that. Yeah, it's interesting, we talk a lot on this program about these user groups, they're great for the users to get education. It's also a great place for hiring. I've had, helped lots of friends at this specific event, talk to a number of companies that are like, oh yeah, we're hiring SEs. Everybody's hiring SEs. Yes, some do. And I'm sure you're probably doing some interviews. We are, yeah. While you're here, but it's also loved, I love to watch the maturing of startups. A number of companies I met here at the first time, Igneous has been supportive of this event for a number of years. What brings Igneous, what are kind of the key objectives coming to an event like this? Yeah, so with VTech's Winter Warmer, it's an opportunity to see customers first and foremost and interact with the local Boston companies that are here that fit the profile and have the problems that we solve. But it's also an opportunity to see our partners and to have visibility in the community and show that support of the local business community as well. All right, so let's talk about Igneous. So at this show, it's the changing dynamics of what's happening in the world of virtualization, what's happening in cloud. Igneous sits in those spaces and how does it differentiate itself from this massive market of cloud and storage and everything that's going out there? Yeah, so good question. At a high level, what we do is we help organizations manage their unstructured data wherever it may be, when that unstructured data is at scale and begins to break traditional paradigms for doing so. And the specific problems that we solve start with data protection day one. It's a great way to help customers get insight into their full suite of unstructured file data and build an index around that, it's extensible in powers or other services like archive, like end user search and restore, and also feeds into our policy engine that helps customers tear data to the public cloud and specifically to cost-appropriate cloud products like Amazon Glacier, like Azure Archive. And so that intersection that we sit in between cloud and storage and all of that is really around delivering the entire experience as a service and solving day one very difficult data protection problems. Yeah, we talk about things like scale, can you quantify for us what's kind of the low bar for your customers, where does it start and how big is big? Yeah, so for us, a minimum starting point would be a few hundred terabytes of file data. Okay, which is not that big, right? Yeah, in today's world, not so much. But it certainly does bring clarity to the type of customers that we can help. And it's really, we're not focused on structured data. We believe that there are a lot of great solutions out there for protecting databases and a virtualized infrastructure, and that's not what we do. We partner with those folks. And as far as how big is big, our largest customers have approximately a hundred petabytes of file data. And so approaching kind of the top end of what customers have still on premise today. Okay, so great, sounds like you can start with, I mean, most customers are going to have that kind of data. Do you find maybe it's because it's unstructured? There's plenty of companies that might not kind of fit in your bucket and then you've got plenty of headroom for scale is what I'm hearing. Correct, yeah, and architecturally that headroom is built in day one. I think the focus from a customer standpoint on unstructured data is if we quantify and qualify what that data is and where it comes from, it's really machine generated data at scale. It's application generated data at scale. And so the types of industries where we're really doing well call it electronic design and automation whether that's in a semiconductor space or in engineering use cases. It's in media and entertainment, a traditional place that has large scale file data. It's in legal services, it's in proprietary trading. It's in all the places where that data exists but then it's also in bioinformatics where genome sequencers and next generation 3D microscopes are producing those kinds of data sets. And so not every organization is in that boat today. And so we're really working at machine scales opposed to human scale data creation. Yeah, and it really goes back. I think of when object storage was first discussed, it was you described it really well, kind of the people data versus machine data. All the industries that you went through, there's just the growth portfolio that I have to do things. And we look at how do I take that from being, oh my gosh, this is a challenge to how do I make an opportunity? How do I leverage that data? How do I use it? It's about monetizing the data, right? And if it's just simply data that you're storing, then there's less incentive to invest in platforms that allow the extensibility of that data to come through and be integrated into other applications, other use cases that then can be monetized, right? And if we come back to some of the core problems that we really solve and get us to demonstrate the value of the product and of the approach to customers, it does indeed start with data protection day one, right? And so many of our customers today are protecting their data in a traditional paradigm of whether that be NDMP to tape or just working within backup windows where the goal as an IT organization is to not impact your end users and their ability to create the type of data that they can then monetize, right? So whether that's an engineering organization that's writing code or creating designs, whatever it may be, the goal is to be behind the scenes, right? And so when the scale of data creation, when the density of the file data that is being created creates challenges those traditional architectures, whether that be around metadata management or some other challenge of scale, that's where we come in and we shine. And so we start day one focusing on customers' hardest problems as it relates to file data at scale and protecting it. And then once that data is on our system, the power of that platform, the power of the microservices driven architecture that we've spoken about here on past interviews, the power of the extensible compute context, if you will, that can then integrate into other applications and be leveraged for also very tangible things like archive and reducing your spend on primary storage and also integrating with the cloud, right? Yeah, Kevin, one of the things we've looked at is inside an organization, a lot of times this paradigm shift also goes with organizationally who owns this. When I think about a lot of the applications, it would be that application owner that has the problem, but isn't connected necessarily with the storage admin or virtualization admin or cloud architect. How does Ignis, how do you get involved there and how do you help companies work through some of those organizational dynamics? Yeah, so that's been one of the most satisfying elements over the last year or so of successfully solving customer problems has been actually seeing the closer marriage of those three entities within organizations. So again, the application owner, the backup or disaster recovery owner and the storage owner. And so the most tangible example I can give is in a world where backups were impacting end users, in this case, an engineering organization that would experience latency in their application and then the work they're trying to do, they're traditionally their first order, I guess their first solution is was to contact the backup team and say, hey, are you running a backup? If so, kill it because you're impacting my ability to do my job. And then the storage folks, of course, are experiencing pain around trying to manage the scale of the infrastructure to support that engineering organization. And so in our approach, we don't impact the end users in any way. And we provide continuous and automated protection which allows those data protection team members to focus on other things that are higher order priorities than sitting there managing, actively managing a backup window or a backup itself. That's something software does for them now. And the end users no longer complain and therefore their daily interaction with IT as it relates to data protection is less colored by the IT impacting their ability to do their job through the data protection approaches that they're using today. Yeah, when it comes to kind of some high level data protection, secondary storage, there's a lot of players out there and many of them, it's like, oh, data domain, very different from a rubric or a cohesity. Where does Igneous fit in the spectrum of what's going on? What are some of the companies that you're running up against that make sense for you as opposed to which ones say we're just in the wrong conversation here? Right, so the clear line of delineation between us and most of the other new entrance and traditional entrance in the field is that we're only focused on file data. We believe that the growth of unstructured data is unbounded and will continue to be unbounded and will break traditional architectural paradigms. And so that's the problem that we're specifically focused on is how to help customers manage and protect that. Therefore, we're not focused on protecting structured data, databases and VMs, that's not our point of entry. What that does do within that space is create a lot of opportunities for partnership. Where our architectural approach is unique and is something that is very difficult to pull off if your day one focus is on protecting virtual machines. It's not easy for you to step up to the plate and protect two, three petabytes of file data, right? And so that's an opportunity for best-of-breed solutions where the customer can have the best data protection and two vendors in place for those types of use cases. Okay, Kevin, I want to give you the final word. Maybe you have, you know, customer story, you talked a little bit up the organizational piece, but what's a customer story that you could relate that people might find interesting? So being in Boston, having Boston be such a hotbed of bioinformatics, the one of our recent customers is leveraging new 3D microscope technology to do very important research on, you know, the human body and disease and things of that nature. And that produces, you know, petabyte scale data even once it's been processed. And so what we're helping them do is both protect that and minimize their cost of implementing primary storage, minimize their cost around data protection and not have to implement or put IT folks in play to manage that whole process. It's all very automated in this deployment. But then also even more importantly is from a collaborative standpoint, they leverage us to tear to the cloud to then move that data and share that data with their other collaborating investigators. And then also meet grant requirements of publishing their findings in a publicly available downloadable format. And so that end to end ability to provide a solution for customers that have unique challenges in creating large scale file data has just been really satisfying. All right, well, Kevin Kotecki, appreciate all the updates. We've been saying for the last couple of years, data's at the center of it and need to change from that kind of, you know, challenges around data to huge opportunities out there. Congrats on all the success. Look forward to getting all the updates. Appreciate it. Lots more coverage here at the VTUG 2018. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE.