 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2020 virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation, and Ecosystem Partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We are theCUBE virtual. Normally we're in person this year with the pandemic. We have to do the remote interviews and wish we could be there. But it's going to be a great conference, a lot of learning, a lot of great conversations, a lot of great community, a lot of great companies who are riding the CloudNative wave and doing it right. One company, pleased to have the GM here on from Commvault Ventures, Metallic I.O., Menojner, GM, Metallic.io, Commvault Ventures. Is it a spin out? No, it's great to see you. First of all, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thank you, thank you. Good to be here. Good to be back with you guys. So you're a CUBE alumni, I've been on many times. You're now heading up this venture, Metallic I.O., which is doing extremely well. Good case of great timing and good, good savvy business planning and strategic vision and execution. But I want to just kind of get something straight real quick. Is it a spin out of Commvault? Is it a separate company? What's the relationship with Metallic I.O. and Commvault? Yeah, so it's set up as a complete startup. It's incubated and fully owned by Commvault. But we have our full company, just like running my separate startup, Metallic is set up as a startup. And it's some people joke, right? It's like one of those millennial kids. I get to have a deep pocketed parent Commvault and the access to a lot of IP and great customers at the same time, be a startup and drive fast in this cloud native SaaS world. We also have the Microsoft deep partnership. So that's the other angle here with Metallic having a deep strategic partnership with Microsoft. You know, the theme this year and all the shows, especially KubeCon in particular, is modern application with speed, speed and relevance, right? That's critical. Congratulations. Good to have a boss Sanjay over there looking over your shoulder, but you got freedom. You're running hard as a startup and you got a good track record. Take me through real quick, give a quick business update before we get into some of the container conversations. You guys really caught the tailwind of COVID kind of like the Zoom caught a big tailwind because everyone's doing video. Now cloud endpoint protection. I mean, come on. Everyone's at home. Everyone's at the edge, edge point protection. I mean, tell us, give us a quick update. Absolutely. You know, a year plus since we launched it, I think initially the company was thinking Metallic would be a really good fit for the mid-market. And maybe the low-end enterprise was always built to be enterprise grade. And, you know, come March all of us get, you know, stunned by what's happening in the world. We decided to make our endpoint offer available free for our customers jointly with Microsoft. And it was not mid-market. I mean, I had Fortune 50 companies signing up. We had the biggest of the big. Several of them have now become, you know, customers of our paying customers of us. One of the world's largest insurance company came in that way and signed up for all their users to end up being paying customers. And you think about like protecting endpoints, right? That's, you know, all the bad things kind of happened in drove. So we have COVID happening, people going remote and ransomware and cyber attacks taking off 400% as the FBI saying. And that kind of becomes a very high risk point. So to be able to have not just data protection but ransomware detection on those edge devices. I think companies are really starting to see the value of having that kind of a, you know, data protection as a service model. I know, well congratulations on the timing on that. I'll say, you know, there's no such thing as luck as preparation meets opportunity as the expression goes. But I get why it makes sense with the pandemic, but can you explain why cloud-based container protections good for customers beyond the obvious you just mentioned, what else is there? What are some of the downstream benefits as people come out of COVID? You know, the things that people are accelerating, right? It's, okay, we've got to take care of the basics. We talked about endpoint, then it's cloud adoption. Productivity suites like O365 with teams, you know, took off as you were talking about Zoom and how do you protect that? You know, how do you protect all that data being created now in a platform that you were not protecting? So that was kind of that next immediate wave. And now what we're seeing is the hybrid cloud adoption is taking off. Now containers in my mind are intricately linked with in this hybrid cloud journey, right? These are the apps that people build. This is your sensitive, most important IP and, you know, as enterprises adopt containers, it's one of the paths to the cloud. And it is really the most recommended path is you could take microservices, you re-platform, re-architect, use containers to deliver microservices. And these are enterprise applications. So they have state. And so with stateful applications, you know, how do you make sure that you have a cloud native data protection available for them? The second issue is the developers who are adopting and deploying containers in production, they don't want to be going out deploying software to protect, you know, these things. They want a, I just want an API, a service call in the cloud. And they should do what I, you know, I do like any other cloud native service. So, you know, cloud native protection that we're delivering for containers with our announcement today from Metallic is huge in that it behaves like a native cloud service, just like, you know, a developer wants. An API call with a cloud target, no setup, nothing, and it's up and running. Yeah, I mean, cloud native is clear this year at KubeCon, this is the tipping point of, you know, full mainstream adoption of Kubernetes and microservices. So that means IT is going to be impacted, right? So that means, you know, we were all early adopters, let's face it, we're at a point now where it's gone beyond test and dev and cluster testing. You know, Kubernetes has now reached a point where it's penetrating and proliferating rapidly. So I got to ask you the announcements about Metallic for Kubernetes as part of the broader portfolio expansion. Explain how that fits in, because you mentioned hybrid cloud, you got backup as a service, you got recovery. I mean, the world's changed. Who would have thought everyone's going to be working at home? How do you back that up? That's service disruption. So, you know, non-disruptive operations has always been kind of a cliche, but now you've got a complicated operation. How does the Kubernetes fit into the broader portfolio? Absolutely. So it is part of a three new announcements. The new solutions we're announcing today, all connected to this hybrid journey. And you think about that hybrid journey and part of what happens with hybrid, you know, got all these pads, rewrite, re-platform, re-host, and part, you know, you got this whole desegregation of data and compute also happening. So our offerings are, you know, there's a Metallic for virtual machines and Kubernetes as a service. We've got Metallic for database delivered as a service and Metallic for unstructured data, file and object. And all of those are key parts of a, you know, cloud-native stack. You'll have some, you know, RDS, some, you know, Azure managed SQL, some blob storage. And we had to protect all those patterns in different ways. At the same time, virtual machines are not going away. They're going to be there. And, you know, a lot of people say that container is a new virtual machine. So what we have done is we have introduced a VM and Kubernetes module, but anyone who buys that gets container protection for free. So anyone who buys that for the next six months, for the lifetime of the subscription, they get unlimited Kubernetes backup as a service for free. And the reason we're doing that is just, we want to make sure, especially our early adopters are taking full advantage and they're not compromising on the data protection for this cloud-native application as they think through this transition. You know, that's a good business model also. I mean, you're in the cloud, right? So this is leverage. You got some leverage there. It's the new freemium. We'll give you a full protection. You know, what's the gimmick here? There's no trick. You get it for free. It's good because you're going to make money on other areas. Again, this is the whole benefit of the new kind of freemium SaaS. You're in an enterprise model. So yeah, you take care of people. You make it up on the critical infrastructure. I get that. Is that kind of how it's working? This is exactly what we're thinking. Look today, I saw some stats out there. 75% of the people who are adopting containers are not yet thinking about data protection for containers has to be container optimized. You can't just say, okay, the data is in a VM. I'll just do a snapshot and it'll be fine. Now, what about all of the container-specific namespaces, tags, the config maps, pod? You cannot recover this cluster if you don't have a real container-native solution. And so that, you know, part of the pod leadership and education process, we said, let's start by just making it available. Take all the excuses out. And that really, you know, I think over time, our customers are going to really benefit from our approach there. Well, while I got you here, I want to just grab you for a quick definition masterclass. So we see B-A-A-S. Now, if we confuse with SAS or PAAS, platform as a service, B stands for backup as a service. Correct. Everything's as a service these days. That's what cloud's great for. Can you define what that is from, with a cloud standpoint? Because, I mean, backup as a service, it could mean many things, but for, as you guys are doing, because you have success, it's working, what is B-A-A-S as a service? What is backup as a service? What is the definition? Yeah, so backup as a service, in my mind, and some people call it cloud native backup, really includes delivering, you know, turnkey experience, turnkey consumption model. I should be able to go sign up like any other as a service free. Try it. If I like it, immediately do an online experience to, you know, acquire it and be up and running. Our design goal was first backup, even for a complex enterprise workload should be less than 15 minutes from transaction. Today we're able to do it in a matter of minutes all the way from acquisition to being up and running. So I would say that's part of the definition. Part of the definition is never having to maintain your backup software ever. That's not your responsibility. We take care of that. It's always updated. We're using the best of cloud capabilities to do SRE ops and maintain that in a very scalable 24 seven way security of the service, you know, between us and all the security capabilities we provide ransomware detection and all that and building on top of Azure's foundation of 3,500 security engineers, you know, that's the key component. You should not have to worry. This is your data. You're most critical. The last part is cloud adoption is complicated enough for customers. They shouldn't have to worry about things like egress costs and, you know, am I going to get nickel and dime for the service overages? And so just price transparency is a big part that we have focused on. So, you know, our customers are double 365. They don't have to ever pay for any storage, unlimited storage, no egress costs, and the whole thing is a turnkey service. So that's the kind, in my mind, that's backup as a service. Yeah, and pay as you go is classic. And I love the hidden cost thing. You mentioned this demand obviously out there earlier in the interview. What's driving the demand besides COVID? What are some of the architectural shifts that you're seeing? And does it have the same characteristics in all geographies? Because remember, you're talking cloud, you're talking regions, right? So, you know, what's the driving the demand besides COVID and what's the regional impact around the world? No, we're seeing a global impact. You know, we had a plan to have a multi-year global rollout plan. And in the last six months, we have now in 14 countries around the globe. And that just maps to the interest. You know, we're in Australia, New Zealand. We just launched 10 European countries last month in the US, Canada, of course. And that global journey is what we're seeing with our customers. So, you know, that the pain points, you know, the COVID crisis, the economic shift that need to be as a service. Those are the things that are really driving. We talked about remote work. We talked about teams adoption, really driving O365. And people think O365, you know, there's some, you know, folks who just think mailboxes, but you know, you've seen news stories out there with what happens with config changes to teams that just blows out all the chat sessions. And so people understand the need for data protection there. Hybrid IT containers, rapid cloud adoption. Probably the biggest one is ransomware. You know, we launched this metallic cloud story service that is an air gap ransomware cloud stories that can connect to any Commonwealth customer. They don't even have to be a metallic SaaS customer. And that's had a, you know, on day two, we had two and a half petabytes up and running, you know, our first customer and it's just taken off. So, you know, all of those are the trends that are today driving, you know, customer adoption of, you know, of our solution, along with everything else that customers are trying to do. Manoj, I got to ask you a personal question. You're the GM, which basically means you're the CEO of the Commonwealth startup, but we'll call you GM. Are you having fun? Well, I'm having a lot of fun. I mean, this is probably the most fun I've had in a long time. And look, when you are doing things that are really impactful for me, you know, that's, you know, I'm sitting in my startup, you know, garage here in the Bay Area. And, you know, touching customers around the world. We have a global team. And it's been, it's a challenging year, right? From a human perspective, for all the, you know, all of the folks who are impacted by this and our teams are a part of that journey. And so their personal lives that are difficult, but we're all, you know, working on this very, very interesting. And I think, you know, disruptive but impactful offering that we can see how it touches our customers' walls. And I think that's partly what's kept the team and all of us going. So I have, we're having a lot of fun. While we're fellow travelers, we're not on site anymore. I mean, we did an interview in 2015. You and I were talking with Docker back in 25 years ago. And you're still on point. Now you're on the wave. You got to be mindful of the current situation around you and understand reality. And it's a chance to do things differently from the customer, you know, backwards in, not inside out. So, you know, it's fun to have a new category, but also it's a big wave. You don't want to be, as Pat Gelsinger said, driftwood if you make the wrong move. So, keep plugging, you're on the right track. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. Really appreciate the time. Maneuge, Nair, GM of Metallic.io. Check it out. It's a separate company from Commvault, but funded it, doing cloud as a service, back up as a service in the cloud. Very innovative, very smart. Thanks for coming on, Maneuge. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Virtual for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2020. Thanks for watching.