 It's theCUBE at VMworld 2014, brought to you by VMware. Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back up here live in San Francisco. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante for our fifth year in a row. Dave's been great. Amazing amount of guests. Our next guest is CEO and co-founder of Data Gravity, entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur out. I'm doing it again, Paula Long. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, glad to be here. So as an entrepreneur, I got to ask you, you guys had a great run, you had a great run in your career, building technologies, great exits, serial entrepreneur and from the Boston area, which is fantastic, big fan of the area. What's it like being in stealth mode for so many years and then being like so popular, everyone loves your message, data aware, reinventing storage, that's getting a lot of attention. What's it like right now for you? So it's been great, fun. Stealth mode's a little weird because if people are sign full fans, we end up talking about muffin tops a lot, right? Cause we talk a little bit about what we're doing, but we can't say specifically what we're doing. And so it's fun, but it's frustrating. So if you watch some of my interviews, I actually said everything we were doing, I just didn't confirm it. I talked about needing data protection, built into the array, I talked about data governance and data availability and I talked about being able to find and discover and trend things all over the place, but no one pieced it together. So it was kind of fun, it was like a puzzle. It's like the IQ Rubik's Cube, if you can put it together, you got it, if not, you're not smart enough, then you don't deserve it, right? No, no, you still deserve it. I was just having fun, wanting to tell the story. John, my co-founder kept wanting to hit mute as I said more and more. Yeah, so when we talked in your in stealth, there was obviously an analytics theme to what was going on and we were excited because we were early on in the whole big data and Hadoop meme and now to see it, you call it data aware storage, but it's all about metadata and actually unlocking some of that data that's been locked up for decades inside of the array. So can you talk about what data aware storage is? Some people have called it a niche, you and I were talking off camera, you said it was a pretty damn big niche, Dave, it's about $20 billion TAM, so can you give us some color around that? Sure, so data aware storage, I wrote a blog recently, said the obvious is sometimes revolutionary and really is what about data aware storage is everybody's trying to figure out how to harness data protection, data governance, and insights and innovations and analytics with the storage outside the storage. Why don't you go inside the house and see what's there? So you can go look at the rooms. So what we have done is we've integrated into the storage array, a layer that captures all the metadata and can do full text editing on your storage or excuse me, full text indexing on your storage so that we can start to give you insights. Let me give you an example. So you come into our storage array and you want to know, my God, we just bought a ton of storage, where did it all go? And we'll show you that you just had 40 gig, 50 gig, just going to video, where's that coming from? Or did you know you had PII issues in this array? Or what's the trend here? What's happening with sales in these customers? And you can get all that information right from the array. The other thing you need to think about is storage is thought about data protection as a backup. Data protection is not just backup. Data protection is understanding who's accessing the information and it's also understanding who should have access to the information and what better place to do that than in the storage? So what we've done is taken these data services and enhanced them through using the storage metadata to surface them with no programming, no professional services, and you know what else? We're not charging anything extra. We think you have the right to have information about the data you just bought to store. So it sounds like it has the potential to be a really killer general purpose storage array, but your, what's your foot in the door? Can you talk about that a little bit? So our foot in the door is going to be content rich data storage. So we're going to get into mid-range departments. You'll see us in colleges, you'll see us in law offices, you'll see us in retail, you'll see us in small financials. Anywhere there's a rich set of unstructured content. And unstructured content is really kind of, probably where you're most exposed and also where you're least looking for data and we're bringing that to light now. So law firms is actually an interesting use case. Mid-size, it's a little bit smaller, it's not a giant enterprise. They care a lot about data protection, they care about knowing who has access to what, they need to search a lot of information. So when you talk about a $20 billion TAM, help me square the circle of, okay, law firms as an example, but it's much, much potentially bigger. So how do we get there? So we're going to cover the entire primary storage space and we're also taking a piece of the data protection space because we have built-in protection and some of the security space. So when you look at it, any startup, if you think you're going to have world domination in day one, you're going to be relatively disappointed. So what you do is like a risk game. You take a couple of states or a couple of countries, you get a good foothold and then you play strategy, right? And you brought it out. So just like with Equalogic, we'll go in and we'll take the places where we add huge value and as we build out the product set, which for a V1 is a killer product set, but it's a V1 and we'll start to grow and take over more and more of the board. We plan to win this game of risk. By the way, I play pretty good. So it's a basic competitive strategy in your part is get a beachhead and build from there, not trying to take over too much and boil the ocean over. With that being said, we had a pre-game crowd chat on Friday, kind of a fun, kind of a flash mob. And one of the things that people said was, there are way too many storage-defined startups out there right now. What's your take on that? Because that's a pragmatic approach. It's certainly, in my opinion, a great strategy. Are people boiling over the ocean? Are people overplaying their hand? Are they out in front of their skis? Whatever metaphor you want to use, what's your take on this area? So for me, Equalogic, which I was the founder of, their innovation was automation and storage, right? So storage was manual, we automated it. With data gravity, the innovation is bringing insights and protection into storage. Now, if you looked at all the storage startups today, and I think they're all great, but they fall into two categories. Either they're weight lifters or they're sprinters, meaning I can de-dupe data better than you can de-dupe data or compress it faster than you can compress it, and I can run faster so I can do more IOPS. Both are really important, but eventually that's going to commoditize, right? Because how fast do you need to run? Do you really need a Ferrari to go get milk? And how much do you need to lift? I think the freest gets the milk. The Ferrari gets on the freeway. The boss takes the kids to school. It's cool, right? You have to be zero to 60 now, what? But in the case of insights to your data, it's really important both for governance, plus fines and reputation, since you know what's going on in your data. And so I believe those startups are really important, but I believe we're sitting a whole new sector. So my follow-up on that is is to brought the weight lifter, that's a great analogy. Let's bring the three question answer, which is are you an aspirin, vitamin, or nice to have for your customers? And how would you look at that? And in some case, you can be a painkiller and relieve some pain. Some is making people stronger. How would you categorize data gravity? So we're a vaccine. We're going to stop you from getting in trouble. We're going to let you live healthier, and we're going to make it better for you. So we're a vaccine, because basically, if you start to let your data get out of control, you're going to have a huge cost, which can be death to your company. You can have huge security risks and reputation risks, which can be death to your company. So we're actually a vaccine, if I were going to go into that. So it didn't exactly answer your question. Vaccines are good, we want to be cured. There's always that question of, at what point are you out on the limb where you can't go back? It's like the old expression, you know, you got to clean up Boston Harbor. At some point it gets more and more expensive and you clean it up, everything's great. So if you want to, you talk to customers, at what point you say, look at every day you wait, the consequences are, what are those consequences if they don't take the vaccine? Okay, so if you are in Florida right now, and with their new Data Privacy Act, if you're violating the Data Privacy Act, it's $1,000 a day for the first 30 days. And then it's $50,000 a day, up to a fine of half a million dollars. I think it's a pretty expensive, you know, illness. You might be out for a little while. Well first of all, before it kills you, it taxes you. Yeah. And finds you, and ruins your reputation, right? But you know, other than that, it's okay. Okay, so the beach head strategy then is to really sort of prove yourself out. Yeah. And, you know, get people to put storage or data on your storage, prove out that you can solve that problem and then the natural. And then grow from that. And then grow from there. Okay. So I was going to ask about the cloud hybrid strategy. I'll see the data center, so we'll define all that great stuff. And then you got virtualization, you got cloud. But the global equation on data is huge, right? We talked about folks on transformation. We were just, Dave and I were talking about global transformation, cloud consumption, and something people want to do. How does the international piece complicate the data gravity question? So we're going to stay in the U.S. for at least the first year. And I think actually the international makes it better because the privacy laws are stronger. And I also think the needing for the insights is greater. So I do think we're going to have a great international launch when we do it. But for us, at least, we think as a startup, you do your beach head in North America and then you grow from there. So the big reason why the TAM, if I'm getting this right, is so large, is you've got information as a liability. Obviously you're- And as an asset. That's your beach head. But the information as an asset is actually potentially much, much larger, right? So are you finding early on that customers are getting that, or is it like the sort of general counsel saying, oh, this is really interesting. Let's put all our data on that and make sure it's protected and it's secure and we can discover things? So what we're finding is for our beta sites. So normally the secret about storage betas is they put about 20 gig on you, they test it for about two weeks, then it sits somewhere so you can say that you had your beta for a long time. I've seen this movie. So with data gravity, we've been in alphas and betas for over a year. They put 20 gig on us, then they put a terabyte on us, then they move 30 terabytes to us, and they're finding patterns in their data. So for example, they're finding that these part numbers match with these POs. They're finding that these cases they've already tried so they can use the content from those cases for other things. They're finding that students, when teachers are going to do curriculums, they don't have to write the full curriculum. That curriculum already exists in another school system. They just didn't know how to find the data in the shares. So what they're finding is, we've got somebody with close to 60 terabytes in a beta on our array, and they're going to probably buy it when we launch. But these people are active, they're active in our Salesforce support force, asking for more features in storage. You're doing IOs per second, capacity, how good is your snapshot integration and then what features are they going to ask for? Not much. We've got tons of new capabilities being asked for. I'm here and lawyers are getting more efficient, which is great. We spend less time searching with the blunt instrument. I'm hearing supply chains are optimizing and then potentially there's revenue generation there. What's your secret sauce around all this stuff Paula? Other than the sort of blocking and tackling of storage. So the secret sauce is we re-architected storage so that we could actually capture all the metadata the storage had. And then when we captured that metadata, we created repositories for that metadata so we could coalesce it and integrate it and answer different facets on the questions. So we have a rich metadata and rich index that we can start to answer more and more complex questions. So we didn't just build these features, we didn't just take a converge play, take a bunch of third-party apps, swizzle it together, have the same problems you would have had if they were in the ecosystem and declared success. We re-architected, so there's zero performance benefit, there's zero performance impact on the primary storage while we're getting all these data services. So it's pretty hard. And as an ISV or a developer, can I get access to that metadata? Yeah, so today we export that metadata using common separated files. We will have REST APIs. You can imagine us talking to a tableau or a clique to integrate our data in, to a splunk to integrate our data in. So we'll become more and more part of the ecosystem. But more importantly, we're going to be in the business processes. And being in the business processes is how storage wins. And the team, yourself, obviously John, you know, former equal get a, talk about the team a little bit, who else? So we have an amazing team. So we brought together on the leadership team, we have, myself and John Joseph have been together for 10 years and are great partners. We brought in Dave Siles, who was at Veeam, who was at a CIO, and he's running our channel program. We brought in Jeff Loom, he was at CLIC, and we brought in Steve Noyes, who was at Oracle and before that he was at Virtual Iron. But on the development side, we took people from Vertica, from Indeca, from Netteza, from the archive part of EMC, and added that to the storage people from EMC, and the ecologic people, and some NetApp folks. And so we took a really rich data analytics team and married them with the storage team, and then we got them to play well together, because we don't all think alike. We do now, but we didn't originally. That's two years of stealth mode. That's two years of stealth mode. Behind closed doors. No one can see the... There's a lot of rock flights. No, no, we're good now. A little while I was like, well I think of it this way, well I think of it this way. We're going to think of it this way. Well it's interesting, my final question. I know we got to break you, but I want to get you to answer this question, is that a lot of the new innovations are stuff that's different outside the box. You're seeing digital 3.0 convergence in social media. You're seeing a lot of hyperconverges going on. You guys are doing stuff that's, like a little bit of everything kind of rolled into one approach. Well, how would you describe your approach on what's different versus the older days of storage? What's that unique thing? Is it convergence? Is it integration of multiple features? How do you describe that new innovation? So up till now, storage was afraid to look inside the box and surface the insights itself. There was this idea that it was okay for these peeping toms to be looking in and reporting on it. That was okay. But doing it inside the storage was hard. Let's just face it, it was hard. And technology's just caught up to make it possible. So what we're saying is we're the first storage array to give storage a voice and to make storage part of your business practices. Not just make it a container. And so our big play is making storage smart. From the beta thing common you mentioned, I would deduce that most people just don't get the full test during beta. But as you guys get more data, you have more insights. As they add data to us, we get smarter every day. Okay, Paula, thanks for joining on theCUBE. Congratulations. Two years of stealth mode, fun ride. That's the new normal. Stay in stealth, come out with a big punch. You guys have a great solution. Hot startup here at VMworld. This is theCUBE live for three days. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you.