 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to CUBE Conversations. Over the last several months, we've been talking to IT practitioners about their data protection environment, and we're pleased to have Peter Altavote here. He's the CEO of Korten. Korten is a service provider. Peter, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Hi. Hello, so tell us a little bit about Korten. Korten, and in the Netherlands, Korten, we are an internet service provider, and also we have a software and an internet company in the Netherlands, and we are the market leader of the people transportation market in the Netherlands. So we also have, in our data center, our software as a service. Our bigger customer is one of our software as a service companies, Korten Software, and Korten Internet, and we deliver SaaS service to the Dutch people transportation market. So you started the company about eight years ago, and in the last five years, certainly the move toward service providers and the cloud generally has been really taken off. 18 years ago. Oh, 18. Oh, I'm sorry. I misunderstood. So I started by myself after my study, alone, 18 years ago, and at this moment, we've got 68 employees. So, and we have one solution, it's our IT company called the Computer Communication. It's an internet service provider. And we, yeah, we are today a cloud service provider and deliver cloud services from our data center. And the other part is more the software and internet company and they deliver software as a service and also use our data center. And in 2001, we started with our first data center and the last transformation of the data center, each four, five years, you will transform your complete data center to the new technology. And that's for the last 50 years, it's still going on. Well, so like many of the practitioners in our audience, you've seen a lot of waves of technology. Live through the client server wave and the internet and now the cloud piece. So we were talking and you said about five years ago, if I recall correctly, you transformed your data protection environment. So you moved toward a VMware environment, cloud was accelerating. What was keeping you up? If you go back to that timeframe, what was keeping you up at night about your data protection environment? Yeah, the most important thing was five years ago, we saw transformation that Cisco started with servers and I saw a presentation that they had a different view of the IT. Till five years ago, centrally, the server was centrally and we're building the hardware and the services around the server. And Cisco started to build servers around the network to place the network centrally. And I was fully believing in this concept. So five years ago, we won one of the first internet service providers and we started with the Cisco UCS servers with the VMware Enterprise Plus virtualization environment. And then first we started with NetApp. So later, they called it the Flagspot environment. And in the last two years, we transform our storage more and more to EMC, to the EMC Phoenix storages and also the EMC, the data domain, the data domain backup services. Peter, why? What was the impetus? What problem were you trying to solve? What was your issue? Now what we also do with NetApp, you can make snapshots, it's really nice technology. And with SnapFault, you can replicate the data. But the problem is your snapshot overhead is so high. And we had a lot of problems to edit our customers will not pay for the big amount of snapshot overhead on the system. So the cost will be higher and higher. And since we transformed the data domain, at this moment with data domain, we had a duplication ratio higher than 90%. So that saves a lot of storage capacity and also the amount of hours from our employees also in the maintenance cost. So we save a lot of money to do it in that way to be competitive with our competitors in the balance. Of course, that's important for you because you're passing that cost onto the customer or the savings onto the customer. Can you talk about the project itself? What was that like, specifically bringing in the infrastructure? How long did it take? You mentioned data domain, I think Avamar. Talk about the project a little bit, Peter. Yeah, we did two things. We also made a change each five years. So from November, we started, of this summer, we started a project. And in November, our IT projects were starting to transform our new data centers. And what we built in the last months, we built a twin data center concept in Amsterdam and in Utrecht, so that there are two places. And we've got a fiber environment, our own fiber environment, and we rented the fiber, the dark fibers, and all, yeah, everything we did it by ourselves. So we've got a four times, four clear 10 gigabyte connection between the data centers. And also we've got for the EMC feeplex environment. So we've got two Phoenix storages in two data centers. And there's also connection between the storages. So if you've got an active, active storage environment, each bit will read and write at the same time in two different locations. So we are able to have physical two data centers and we are able to deliver really high availability of the service of our customers and also the service of our SaaS, the service platform. And specifically the backup. So how does your backup work? You're using both a combination of Avamar and Data Domain, is that right? Yes, we do, yeah, Avamar and Data Domain, yeah. Okay, and so you installed those roughly five years ago, is that right? How do you use each and when? Well, the backup project we started, I think, two years ago. Two years ago we started with to implement, first we did the data domain implementation because that's, yeah, that's separate from our, you can do that project separately from your, from our IT on data center project. So there's two different projects. And what we did is still we are transforming yeah, the backup solutions to our backup as a service solution with Data Domain. Okay, so you've got lower cost infrastructure, you're able to monetize that for your customers. You've also got a, I guess, an active, active capability. What, how would you describe the business results, the business impact for both you and your customers? Yeah, with the business impact, we are able to deliver a really high and enterprise, a high availability for their business critical applications. And therefore, we are able to use our TwinData Center concept. But we also are able to, to use, to give the possibility to have a less expensive solution to have a single, in a single data center. Or what we also are able to, we're also able to integrate public cloud service for test or expectation environments that we're able to use the max of Azure, Azure public cloud. So what we did with, we, in our, over our TwinData Center concept, we also add the wide label that's called Azure Pack. And that's the wide labeled version. And we are using the same layer of the maintaining our environment. So we are able to do hybrid cloud computing, business critical on our active, active TwinData Center. And for test environments or for applications with a lower service level agreement, we're able to use the public cloud. And so we are able to use, to make a real hybrid cloud solution for our customers. Peter, a lot of customers are looking at cloud. It's a confusing situation for many of them. They're concerned, particularly as it relates to cloud generally, but also specifically backup. What advice do you give to customers around moving to the cloud? Yeah, that's right. The problem, I said, from my perspective in the last 18 years, 80 years ago, our customers also don't go to the shop and they buy a server. It's not over the server. Today, we've got a lot, we have the cloud, but the cloud we just, it's just the beginning of a new period in IT. Because what I see, we've got public cloud solutions. We've got private cloud solutions. We've got on-premise IT in different companies. So we are a knowledge company and we are able to help our customers for example, to start to maintain the on-premise IT environment, to deliver a backup as a service from their data to our data center. The next step is that we deliver from our private cloud and some infrastructure as a service on their own network. And what we see with our customers, is you make a road, you make a trip together from the on-premise environment to the private cloud to help them to integrate some public cloud service. So it's all about the business of our customers, how you can use the cloud services, what are available in the market. So we are just a knowledge company. It's the same as eight years ago that they don't ask us a server. No, we need a server to deliver a solution for them. And it's the same with cloud. Peter, my last question, we're running out of time here, but what do you got cooking for 2015? Any particular initiatives that you can talk about that are exciting you? And initiative, yeah, I see internet of things. We see more and more and more IP devices connecting to the network. And what we see, all the devices generates data and also the data will grow enormously by our customers. So data management is an important topic. And so, yeah, we are able to deliver the different types of storages, the most active, active, high available till public clouds and everything between. And I think that's really important to help our customers to make that steps. So you're providing that as a service. I can dial it down or dial it up based on my RPO and my RTO requirements and my cost and my budget. That's right. With the day to the main, we are able to do the backup as a service. And it's really important, what's the RPO? What's the RTO to get the right solution? What's necessary for the business of our customers? All right, Peter, I'll devote CEO of Korten. We're going to have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights with our community. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante from Wikibon headquarters. You're watching CUBE Conversations and we'll see you next time.