 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Microsoft Ignite 2018 here in Orlando. I'm Stu Miniman, I'm happy to welcome back to the program John Murasic, who's the CEO of Amanus Data. It's our first time at the show, but not your first time on theCUBE. Thanks so much for joining us, and tell us, we caught up with you in New York City, talking about kind of the AI, analytics, all those things there. What brings Amanus to Microsoft Ignite? So this has been a great show for us, and what I really see happening here is there's a vibrancy that probably didn't exist in Microsoft events maybe four or five years ago, because Microsoft's really getting their act together on the whole how you migrate and bring people to Azure, right? Because that's their agenda. And so where we fit in there is in our data management platform, we help customers migrate to Azure. So whether it's moving your Hadoop workloads to Azure, or one of the products that's been featured here that we've got a lot of Microsoft support on is our migration tool to move from MongoDB to CosmoDB. So we play really well into the migration story, and it really leverages our platform. Yeah, it's interesting. One of the questions we talk about all the time is customers trying to figure out where things live. And like, well, it's like your cloud strategy. Things are changing over time. Customers have really multi-cloud environments, which really means they're doing a lot of different things and a lot of times they need to move them and sort those out. So what are the challenges you're seeing? How do you help those businesses make decisions today and be able to move things as needed in the future? Yeah, what we see and what we're playing into is really this evolution. Solutions really drive technology. So in a large enterprise, you might have a division or a particular group that says, I need this BI or analytics tool and I need a big data platform to do it. So they build this, they build on top of some either NoSQL or Hadoop, and then they've got this great solution. Well, that happens four or five times across the enterprise and at some point in the enterprise, the CIO or somebody says, you know, we kind of got all these distributed data systems and like, who's managing them? How is that data being moved? To your point about cloud migration, well these are on-prem, these are on the cloud. If we want to put them all on the cloud, how do we do that? And so that's where we're seeing as kind of the call for our product, which is, okay, I need a central way to manage and manipulate this data as a fundamental problem. Yeah, so we all know that data is fundamental to a business. It's one of the most important things. We can use all the tropes of, it's the new oil or anything like that. But when you dig down, it's a lot of complexity into how do I get data? How do I manage data? How do I share data? We're sitting here in Cohesity is where we are in the booth. Can you help us understand what are the solutions that you compliment in the data space? What are the solutions that you replace or are a modern version or compete against in this space? So the way to look at us, at our most general, we're a platform for moving data from one platform to another, okay? And that has many different use cases. But where we're getting a lot of customer uptake is on the backup and recovery. It's like, I've got it here. I want to make a backup. We also see a lot in terms of migration, whether it's the MongoDB or I want to move from on-prem to cloud or cloud to cloud. And where we fit is, if you look, there's a legacy providers who don't traditionally go after the NoSQL and Hadoop space. And so we're a perfect compliment to either those companies or folks like Cohesity. We have partnerships with Cohesity, Veeam, and others where they get an RFP or they're talking to a customer and the customer has a specific request for data management solution for NoSQL or Hadoop platforms and that's where we come in. Because that's what we've focused on exclusively from day one. Yeah, well, being at a Microsoft show, I mean, applications are central to so much of Microsoft does, everything from Office. But on the data side, we spent a lot of time this week talking about SQL, talking about Cosmos DB and cool new things they're doing. And of course, Microsoft's playing in a lot of the modern areas. We see them, you know, big developer space here, even more of it at the Microsoft build show. What do you see in the Microsoft space on kind of the application modernization and you know, sounds like that would tie in quite a bit to what you're helping customers with. Yeah, so we have customers across all the cloud providers. But what we see in the Microsoft case is really people looking for maybe global easy deployment, customer facing as typical examples. So people who are really like pushing the envelope, frankly. And there's almost like a bimodal distribution. There's kind of some folks who are still trying to retrofit the old world and then others who are really embracing some of the new platforms. Yeah, you know, I'm not sure if you were at the keynote on Monday. Sajid Nadella unveiled the Open Data Initiative. You've got Adobe and SAP and Microsoft there. He's talking to one analyst and he's reading some reports and I'm like, well, it's not a coincidence that this was launched the week as Salesforce. That's a lot of data. You know, maybe that's a little bit of an attack there. But you know, data across these big providers is important. I want to be able to share and leverage my data. You're in the data business. What viewpoint do you have as some of these really big providers of the application as they're going through their digital transformation making how do customers get the best value out of their data? So, you know, my background, most recent background, I was in an ad tech company where we're all big data. And the whole play there is how do you manage your audiences, right? How do you have a unifying way to look at audiences? And so this is what's playing out on a more higher level, a more general level of, how do I normalize and create a unified view of the customer and consistent data so that I can then manage it? And so that's an essential requirement to get the maximum value out. Once you have that and you're in your data repositories, it's incredibly critical to protect them to be able to orchestrate and move around. So where we fit in and how we see it is, these things are data, to reuse the term, is the new oil or the new gold. And companies are realizing that it's really time to protect this data. I've put all this investment into getting unified view of data. Wow, what are we doing about, how do we back it up, restore it and move it? Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I've watched the space long enough, you go back to kind of the BINDW days, go through big data, now we talk about a lot more of the analytics and the intelligence there. Help us as to what are we actually realizing today that we were been talking about for years and what are still some of the stumbling blocks as to what we need to kind of mature as an industry to really help unlock data? So, I mean, there's clearly the, what's driven a lot of the machine learning AI is the availability of data. It wasn't so much, algorithms changed dramatically, it was, we have a time, so all the machine learning applications are really benefiting from this. But what we see as some of the immediate things with our customers is they're using big data as they create their front ends engaged with their customers. So how do they have the most up to date real time information to whether it's presented offer to a customer or provide customer service. So a lot of the use case we see is in that really bread and butter customer level interactions and having an appropriate database to front end that process. All right, so one of the biggest challenges of our time is really talking about distributed architecture. When I talk to companies, scale comes on a lot but it means very different things to different people. Maybe talk about what you're hearing from customers and how your solution helps customers for a variety of implementations. Yeah, so we typically are targeting and working with customers in the tens to hundreds of terabytes up to, when our system handles up into the petabytes. Typically, what we see as an evolution is, as I said earlier, somebody will develop a solution in a particular division and then realize we've got this asset to protect. And then so IT starts to get involved and basically look at it holistically. So we had one of our prospects, we went in and pitched at an SVP level and said, what are the problems you're facing? And it was basically this. I have all these silos of data to get the maximum value out of them and have a uniform look, whether it's look at our customers, the market. I need a uniform view to do my BI and AI. And so they brought us in and said, okay, paint a picture of how I can continue to have these groups run autonomously and run their solutions yet at the same time give me a unified view and make me feel comfortable that I've been able to protect the data, move the data and massage the data. Great. Talk to me when I look at this show. I see a lot of customers are still doing things. I'm trying to think how to say it nicely. Kind of the old way. It's like, if you look at them five years ago, it's like, oh, okay, Windows 2019 is there. Great, I'll get there in five years. You play with a lot of more modern applications. What are you hearing from customers? What is the profile of a customer that is taking advantage and being competitive in the world? And what do you advise companies that maybe are a little bit behind the eight ball? So you're right. And there's a really big spectrum of where people are in the adoption curve. And the way we look at it, if people were way before, somebody goes, yeah, we're looking at setting up a big data system. It's like, okay, we'll talk to you in a year once you get the basic setup. But I see kind of two types of things. There's say the smaller, more aggressive companies who are willing to move forward and say, I just got to create a product. I don't care how I do it. I don't have legacy issues. And they've moved ahead. And they're starting to get to the point where they're like, okay, we're mature enough where we actually need to spend on data management. The more typical case though is, as I said earlier, it's like these new apps, larger companies might have bleeding edge groups, right? So it's not being driven centrally. And so you asked about advice, right? So if you're sitting in the top of a large enterprise and say, well, how do we get there? There's kind of the tops down. I need somebody to help me figure out. But there's also, see, let 1,000 flowers, let there be some kind of anarchy, if you will, breaking the model, breaking the mold, let people go build stuff. And then over time start to figure out how to assimilate. So that'd be the biggest thing. Single biggest advice is, yeah, you want to do the top down, but you really want to do the bottoms up because those people really know how to use the technology to provide a solution. Yeah, absolutely. Guy Kawasaki, let 1,000 flowers bloom out there and everything. All right, help bring us in. What kind of customer conversations are you having this week? We talked to the top about, there's real good energy at this show. Definitely, I've felt that. What would you share with your peers that haven't been at this show? So the topics here, typically around the migration, whether it's like to like moving an existing workload as your, or the transformation. We also announced the show Cooperation with Microsoft on moving any of your NoSQL workloads to Cosmos DB. So most of the conversations here have been related to migration, either of, if you will, within the same Hadoop family or like to unlike going from something to Cosmos DB. And that goes back to your early point about people trying to figure out what to do. They know there's this imperative to move to the cloud and they're trying to figure out how do they do it in bite-sized chunks, right? And protect their business at the same time. Yeah, so you mentioned Cosmos DB. We had an interview earlier this week about Cosmos DB. I definitely had heard some good buzz at the show. What is it about that that is drawing customers to it and what's that enable for them? Well, the two things that I'm aware of and that I've seen is again, the global nature and the ability to just kind of deploy anywhere. But also, I've seen a little bit around the dynamic schemas and the ability to map between them as a very quick way to ingest data so you can get up and running quickly instead of doing a lot of manual work to start using it. So those are things that are going to win developers because it makes their life easier. All right, John, want to give you the final word. What should we look to see from a man as over the next kind of six to 12 months? So we're going to continue to push forward with our platform around data management. You've seen in some recent announcements that we're leveraging machine learning in a very concrete way to do anomaly detection around ransomware and also for administrators to be able to basically set rules or set goals and have the software do it. And that really stems from the fact that we're using a big data platform and machine learning to solve the problem of, well, if you're running a big data platform, how do you manage the data? So the whole DNA of the company is built around that. And from a go to market standpoint, partnering with folks like Cohesity and others where you've already got people in market selling a broad solution, but they're missing a piece. So the other thing you'll see from us is more partner announcements as we go forward. All right, well, John Merasic, really appreciate all the updates on a man as data. Congrats on the progress so far and look forward to catching up at a future show. Thank you. We'll be back with more coverage here. Day three of three days live coverage, Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE.