 You're on hi. This is Stu Miniman with wiki bond here at SNW here with silicon angle I've pushed John Furrier over to the third seat for this segment So we've got Josh Goldstein VP of marketing from Certis So kind of talk a little bit about cloud storage and how they all fit together. Thanks for joining us. Thank you It's a great year. So here at SNW. We're talking about innovation. We're talking about new ways of taking You know what was harder to do and more expensive to do and making them easier and making things more efficient today And I think you know from a cloud standpoint, you know, Certis is helping to do that So can you give us a little bit of background as to who Certis is and what you guys do? Yeah, absolutely Certis as a company Is helping people solve the challenge of how to connect their enterprise into cloud storage and make use of it as a resource Without having to learn how to do everything all over again So with our technology with our products they're able to connect to the cloud as if it were just another local storage array and then use the Infinite resource of the cloud and gain all kinds of capabilities in terms of improved backup and disaster recovery Josh and you say connect to the cloud give us a couple examples Who can I connect to using your technology? You could connect to Amazon S3 You know connect to AT&T synaptic storage as a service You can connect to any EMC at most based provider whether that's public or private Okay, so so I've heard of sometimes you're called a gateway to the cloud That's exactly right, but but but you're more than just just a gateway Can you tell us a little bit about kind of your box and what you do locally? Sure, so gateway kind of refers to the the concept of being able to translate Normal storage protocols like iSCSI, NFS and SIFS into things that are this the vendor specific APIs that the cloud providers operate with We do much more than that So what we provide is a standard storage experience meaning that you have capabilities like thin provisioning You have capabilities like space-efficient snapshots Volume management all the things that you expect out of a normal storage system We're mapping on top of the cloud even though those capabilities don't natively exist in the cloud Okay, so when you think about those kind of cloud providers You would sometimes line to business grabbing a credit card and going out to pay to use Amazon This is you know looks and acts much more like a traditional standard storage environment and your storage guy will understand How to use it storage guy will innately understand how to use it So he can get up and running in about a half an hour and he's using the cloud But the experience is if he was using local storage so half an hour as opposed to you know The weeks or months that's right for yeah There's no more no more provisioning nightmares no more cabling all the disc drives and shelving them up and okay And you know we one of the themes we've been talking about John is about cut cloud washing and you know What is cloud and what isn't cloud and there's without a doubt you plug into the cloud You're an enabler for for moving to the to the cloud. Yeah, I think in our case We're not cloud washing at all. We're really in there with what I kind of think is the true cloud So Josh, I mean I got I got to kind of ask I mean obviously you guys are heavily funded from siliconing Silicon Valley VCs NEA Bessemer the big guns, you know Shasta, so, you know What's what do they see in you guys when you go when you could talk to those guys? Do you mean it's hard? You know those guys are good names. What's the value proposition? What's the game-changing vision for you guys now see back up archiving storage is great clouds early What's the what's the dream that they're buying into right? Well, so the so with us There's a couple things so one is they talk to enterprise customers And they're in a tremendous amount of pain with respect to their storage environments. It's it takes up too much space It's too costly. It's too hard to back it up and we help with all of those things But fundamentally, I think you have to believe in the long term that companies are going to want to leverage cloud Technology in a much bigger way than what they're able to do today We're not really like what well. We're not about backup to the cloud. You can certainly do that through our product We're really about enabling primary storage in the cloud where you don't have to do backup anymore, right? So we're talking about enterprise usage for your technology exactly, right? Can you tell us maybe walk us through a couple of use cases that you're seeing from your customers today? Sure you bet Actually, one of our customers will be here at SNW talking tomorrow. Okay, that's David Jones from Alexa pharmaceuticals. We'll be talking to me exactly. He's given a session. Yeah, he's giving a session 1030 tomorrow morning, okay, but use cases for our stuff. So you see people doing a lot of things with their file shares Where that would go to the cloud? A lot of people doing their enterprise content management applications where the content repositories are now actually living in the cloud And that's a high growth area for their storage Some people are doing server logging where they're keeping the histories of their logs out in the cloud and Any kind of archiving app makes perfect sense So if you're running enterprise vault and you're doing email and file archiving that's that's an ideal use case as well Great good to hear a customer that said one of the things we've we found a little bit lacking at this show Is a lot of vendors talking about technology. We like that customers talking about their real-world environment So, you know kudos to you guys for bringing in a An end user. Oh, thanks. How many customers you guys have you guys talk about that? We can't talk about hundreds Yeah, I can't digits my my millions my CEO You're in the product side right so you're in the price I am on the product so on the road map talk about the road map I mean without giving any details I mean how so you don't want to be known as backup and backups out there for everyone's hospital as a standard operating Kind of ante up to do that right the primary storage is a hard nut to crack in the cloud I mean, it's not trivial, right, right Zeta tried to do that others try to do primary backup. What makes you think you can pull it off? Well, I think you got to look at the problem a little bit differently So one of the the key things that we're doing that that really other people hadn't brought to the table before is that the Technology heritage and the company comes from the WAN optimization space And that's a really critical component for two reasons One is getting the performance you need in order to make this all work the way it's supposed to work and give you the experience You expect the other one is it's the only way you can make the economics work So WAN optimization technology has nice side effects in terms of reducing the amount of storage you're putting in with the cloud provider And reducing the amount of data that you're transferring back and forth. So that changes the economic game quite a bit The other thing that's pretty different is we're not the guys operating the back end of the cloud So some of the companies you were mentioning they were trying to get your data in but then they're guys operating the back end as well We're relying on best-of-breed providers who can do that and do it at a scale that service as a young company wouldn't be able to ever achieve So you're not trying to take that the lunch from anyone else Maybe nibble at some breakfast, but you're not trying to eat someone else's lunch like an EMC maybe or someone else Well, I know well, I mean I think it's the age of co-op petition I think so so you partner with the ammo side, but you're competitive to the traditional on-site storage, right? Yeah, I think that's a fair way to look at it So customers who are buying and deploying our technology are definitely making a choice between Expanding or replacing existing on-site storage rays versus moving some of that data out to the cloud So it's great and anything you can talk is so we can't talk numbers, but you know generally You know, what does the storage community think of you and how are customers finding service? We've had a tremendous response. So the company came out of stealth mode in late September 2010 Since then the response has been really fantastic So that our ability to you know to communicate with customers get evaluation systems out into the field wind deals has really gone Beyond our expectations. Okay, great in you know, so you talked about kind of the cloud hostings. What about partners? How are you going to market these days? So we go to market two different ways So for selling our own product is a completely hundred percent channel model and so we have traditional storage bars and resellers We have networking resellers. So for example, we have some guys who've been big Cisco shops and have thought about bringing storage on but Doing it in kind of a traditional way didn't make a lot of sense to them They had to learn too many new things and the cloud is a lot easier to understand and take advantage of with our products So that's worked out very well for us And then we also have very strong partnerships with the providers themselves So we get a lot of recommendations a lot of pull into and to end user deals coming from the cloud provider side Okay, and I guess from a pricing standpoint working with the providers Is it still kind of the traditional buy by a technology or you know, a lot of the clouds are kind of pays you grow Type thing so so how does that work out with you guys? So in our case you're buying our appliance and deploying it So that's kind of your one-time fee and then the recurring fees are to the cloud provider So there aren't any for using our product Yeah, but still I have to think from an economic standpoint. You're you know, very competitive with a kind of a traditional storage array Oh, it's more than competitive with additional storage right people are seeing TCO You know, we have a very extensive TCO model We work through with end users and they see paybacks that come within a matter of months Excellent talk about what's going on the show here. I mean honestly, you know my two questions My first one is You guys are cutting edge startup. You recently funded. This isn't kind of an existing industry show What's different here or could be different? I mean we're talking earlier our last session that some of the big vendors Some got cut flat-footed with the whole how fast the cloud was approaching and you know, it's all speeds and fees But you know that people are looking for that innovation edge What are you seeing here at SNW that catches your eye? That says hey, that's a that's a mega trend or that's a trend That's emerging. Well, the one that it's funny I was here with my my product manager and we were both commenting on it as it seems that this is the year of flash Which it seems like maybe that was you know happened in the last few years But there's there's a tremendous amount of technology here at the show that has to do with you know Flash drives flash PCI cards integrating flash into your storage controller. There's flash in your box, right? There is flash in our box. Yeah, absolutely. Everybody's got flash everywhere So flash is anti anti up table stakes for storage. I think it's getting that way I mean, I don't think it's there yet, but it's certainly the you know It's kind of coming from the bottom up right the controller technology is improving The cost points are coming down and everybody's starting to build it in and figure out how to make better use of it So I think you know you fast forward a couple years. It'll definitely be it So what's the culture of your company? You mentioned that you come from the way and optimization background also That's a that's a network-based phenomenon. That's important with cloud stuff is a company culture Better yet, you guys are so you're hiring you're growing What's the kind of people you're looking for in the product and engineering group? Is there a skill set? Is there a unique edge to you guys that's different? I don't know if I would say that I think you know all technology companies are trying to hire aggressive eight players And you're still looking at Valley so it's hard, right? It is So the things we look for are you know, we want high IQ guys who understand startup culture and are willing to work hard And then come from good backgrounds where they've you know, they've developed this type of technology in the past So some of the stuff we're doing nobody's developed in the past But if you have certain types of networking or storage or protocol experience that it makes a lot of sense for us Did you see this Steve Wozniak keynote yesterday? I missed it One of the lines he said you know everything that he did was a first first floppy disk So you guys sounds like you're doing a lot sounds something similar you guys are doing something that's completely new That's right. Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of our technology that's never been done before and so you learn a lot of stuff along the way So that's part of you know, when you're asking about who do we try to hire, right? You need fast learners and guys who can okay, you know quickly prototype do their experiments and fix how many employees you guys have I think we're about 30 right now. So growing in a startup That's about a 50% growth in the last like, you know, six months to a year, right? Yeah, it's coming up quickly I mean, we've always got positions open. We'll keep an eye on them. Excellent. You know, service is hiring And so this is Stu Miniman with John Furrier talking to Josh Goldstein of service here at SNW and up next We're gonna have Wayne Adams of SNEA. All right. We're inside the cube. Okay. Thanks, Josh for coming by. Appreciate it Yeah, thanks John. All right, Stu, good job. I appreciate it. In the head seat there Appreciate it. Okay, you can leave. We'll bring in Wayne We'll talk behind your back when you leave Stu, what do you think about those guys? I mean, you know, I like that entrepreneurial startup Yeah, yeah, so Surtis definitely has some really interesting technology There's kind of kind of this new Gary Ornstein wrote a great post about a year ago talking about all of these cloud gateway Technology companies out there. That's the thing. I'm looking for from this show is that you know was said it I want to see first where does innovation come from we talked about is it come from the big companies or come from these Little startups that have to be acquired or replicated. I think this is this is the kind of company We want to see in the cube which is pushing the envelope hiring doing things for the first time Yeah, these little 30 person, you know the Silicon Valley with some VCs. VCs love that They love IPO. We doing something for the first time, you know get the big money 10 million dollars is you know a good amount of funding