 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Ed Walsh is here, he's the CEO of CataLogic Software. Ed, it's like old home week here at Edge. You were at the first Edge in Orlando. You were at the time an IBM executive, so how's it feel to be back? It's good. In fact, it is a little bit like old home week, seeing clients and different things. I said, walk through the halls. It was pretty interesting. They let you in the building. That's good. This thing's pretty good then. I don't know how it's been. It is interesting as far as how it's grown. So if you look at Edge from four years ago, actually five years ago to now, it's really grown. They've done a good job. I actually like the show. A lot of interaction with clients, so it's good. Yeah, and they've expanded it now. The scope with more Z and power and a little bit of middleware in there. So it's not just a storage show. They've done great. So yeah, I was at the first Edge. So the first keynote, I was announcing core technology being added onto the platform called real-time compression with the acquisition. Store-wise, that was kind of cool. So it's a little deja vu. So here we're back, not as an acquisition, but ecosystem partner announcing new capabilities onto the platforms with copy data management. So it's a little bit deja vu. And I got a couple of comments this morning about exactly that, so it's interesting. Yeah, so CataLogic software, you guys are going after that whole copy data management space, but with a different strategy. You're not basically coming and saying, here's our stack. You have to buy our stack. You're trying to leverage other copy services. So NetApp was really where your main focus has been, assuming something going on with IBM. So give us the update. Yeah, so we're announcing today, so it's a little bit ahead, but we're announcing today that we're integrating with, and we're very excited about it, integrating with IBM's product lines, their flagship product. So we're with the Store-wise product, SVC, their all flash array, which is their V9000, and also the flash copy manager. So in all those environments, you download our software, we agentlessly discover them, and we allow you to leverage those environments for things like automatic DR, test dev, analytics, so you get the power of getting more data leverage, but also you save a lot of copies. You don't need these separate environments for test dev or DR, et cetera. So talk about CataLogic's strategy, relative to say other guys in the business. So you kind of hit upon it. So and this is, we're excited to be partnering with IBM, but also it's part of our core strategy. So where we believe our architecture is fundamentally different is we're more aligned with how the enterprise can consume copy data management, but also how the ecosystem wants to deploy it. So we're software only. We don't make you move your bits from your platform onto our platform. We literally say, listen, keep it in place. In fact, we're the only ones who can do copy damage in place. You already have application consistent snapshots, local remote, you have snapshots abound. Let's let you leverage that. The key thing is data management lasts two decades all of it about making one more copy. If you have a problem, let's make a copy. Test dev, oh, copy, analytics, multiple copies. It's hard to keep up with that. And you're in a situation where you have all these copies killing your budgets and you have no idea how to get to that data access. So what we're talking about copy data management is really the key thing is that we allow you to see what you have, your copies and leverage them. But we're doing it across platforms. So it's software only. So we're not saying move your bits to mine. We're saying, hey, if you're a NetApp shop and IBM shop and then dot, dot, dot, we're also announcing with VMware in two weeks, but you'll see other platforms. Keep it in place and we'll give you all this value without you changing. You bought your VMware, your IBM or your flash copy manager on purpose for good reasons. Keep it there. I'll let you add on top of it with a very simple software layer. So, you know, heterogeneous support's been one of those big challenges in the storage world. You know, IBM's done one of the better jobs with SVC and they kind of put that in front and put everything behind it. Look at EMC, kind of the failed Invista effort and other technologies. You know, how does catalogic do it differently? Yeah, so, you know, people use a control layer and data layer. So we're the control layer. So we're not trying to be at the data layer. So SVC does a great job. In fact, we're integrating with SVC. We're not competitive. If SVC takes all that storage and virtualizes and creates great snapshots for replication, real-time compression, all the things that they do great, the reason you bought SVC, all we do is on top, just through public API work of the VMware, the hypervisor lever and the storage, we're able to get all these use cases. So we're not at the data layer, which is really quite hard, right? So we're not a RAID stack. We don't do replication. There's no agents. We're literally just allowing you to see what you have and leverage what you already have in your environment. So that makes it easier. So we announced in February with NetApp only, and people said, NetApp only, that's interesting, but I might have more than that in my environment. So four months later, we're back. Now we have VMware, any VMware environment, regardless of what storage is on, we can give you copy data management. But also we can do on these key IBM platforms, which is all the store-wise family, SVC, the all flash array and then flash copy manager. Those are key pieces of the IBM portfolio. So our software defined, also they're talking about software defined about having agility and control. That's exactly what we fit. We only control plane more than data plane, which makes it easier. And also I think four months to do all that work, it shows that the platform and our ability to build these providers quickly is playing out. And you'll see more announcements every four months as we release, release train. So a lot of people today talk about, I'm a platform, I'm a platform, I'm a platform. You're not trying to be a broad platform. You're basically saying we will ride on top of other people's platforms and we'll add value to it. Is that fair? Yeah, I know that's fair. What we use the term platform is you can add to it, right? So this software platform we can add to it. Like for instance, we added just different, some clients wanted a key ability to charge backs. Now because we, in order to work on other people's environments, the way we do it is we catalog your environment. We have an actual catalog through APIs. But, and then we use that to orchestrate and automate your environment. But we also have all this data. So people use it for charge back. But we did that, so it's a simple thing in our marketplace, you can download these software players, it adds onto our software. The other thing about platform is we don't do an integration with a particular storage or hypervisor like we're doing a Hyper-V in September. It's more that we do a provider and it plugs into the architecture which is our platform. So our concept of platform is very extensible in the way that we do it. And your, yeah, as you define that platform, it's sort of a, it's not a RAID stack that's 40 feet deep. Other people do that. Yeah. And we're not going to do that. But at the same time, you're expanding your TAM by knocking down new areas of compatibility, innovation, VMware, IBM. Clients all have multiple RAID sites. Even if they're called IBM shop, they have multiple IBM solutions. They always want to keep multiple vendors. We do across it. So our job is to now go across all the storage ecosystem, both the RAID side and then what you do, hypervisor or cloud OSs, which you see a very aggressive roadmap during this calendar year. And you'll continue to see that as we go forward. And how about Flash? So we've been doing a lot of work on Flash and how it relates to copy data management and how it affects developer productivity. What are you seeing in the marketplace? So again, Flash is, we're announcing with the V9000, which is IBM's all Flash array, great value set, but Flash is kind of a tipping point. You can do a lot more with it. Now we can work our solutions with storage because we're cataloging your environment and we're using off-site, off-primary copies of your data. So you don't affect production. But in a Flash environment, every time you do Flash, it's mission critical. It's either a critical application that you're rolling out or it's a critical piece of your environment that you want to get access. In business units, either test dev or analytic teams always want access into that data. Also DR becomes critical. So if it's that critical, you're going to want to do daily DR, you're going to want to know you can come up and running like that, right? Leveraging the architecture you bought, like the V9000. So specifically copy data management, it's kind of a killer app. In those environments, without changing anything, out of band, we're not in line. No one wants to be in line in a Flash place, it's all about latency. So we're not in line, we're just talking to APIs. Literally without changing anything, I can give you a way to have automatic daily DR, which you can't do with any other solution set. I can give you a test dev, borderline on DevOps, take an environment, eight different VMs, present it up to a particular environment and a fence network environment, let them play with it, roll its production and do that over in it. Now you have a DevOps automation. The other thing about Flash, and you guys picked up on it, is you can do these snapshots. We can, again, give it last good snapshot with a VMware envelope in a separate fence network. Now you can give that to multiple developers. And what we're seeing is the OPEC saving is huge. If they're offshoring test dev or QA, now what they're able to do is instead of losing half their shift, if you would, to just setting up the environment and tearing it down, we're able to do that automatically just through public APIs. So you gave them back like half of your development. Also, analytics. If it's on Flash, it's important. People want to get after it for operational analytics. You can choose to do it the old way and do some population, or I can give you that environment in full fidelity as it looked an hour ago if you're doing hourly snapshots, and I can refresh that mount point for the analytic workload as often as you're doing snapshots. So for Flash, it's like a killer app. Well, we can do it without Flash, but Flash is, people talk about these Ddupe ratios. We do 20 to one. Now in Flash, people are talking about developer. They can give 20 to one. They can take the same data base and they can give to 20 different developers where they can't do that with storage. So Edwin, I think back to David Fleurer's research in that space specifically. It's great when we can save companies money. It's even better when you can save them operationals that are a little bit soft and everything, but the real amazing opportunity is when we're really transforming businesses, they're able to move faster. They get value back to the business. What are you seeing in your customer base that using this technology helps them get more value? Well, I think the DevOps is the biggest thing. They can literally take their traditional storage and do DevOps. They can do more releases. So if a release schedule is critical for an application, if it's on Flash, it is critical. That's why they're actually paying the Delta, but we can do it quickly and get more development, more releases out. Which if you can speed up a release train by 30, 45 days, it's huge in the enterprise. Because they used to do yearly releases or twice a year releases. Now they're doing releases on a monthly basis. As they go even further in a DevOps, they can do it daily, but that's not where the enterprise is at. They're really at the, hey, can I do monthly type of releases? So there's a couple things we're talking about here. So if I understand it, it's the number of copies that you can essentially share and serve out of a single device. Whereas with disk, you've got to replicate those copies on multiple devices. So you're using different devices, this management headache and so forth. So I don't know what the ratio is. If I can support, I don't know, let's say two use cases with the same spinning disk, I can maybe support, I don't know, five, six, seven, 10N out of Flash. So I'm more efficient there. But the bigger thing that I'm hearing, so first of all, is that right? It's probably 20X. Yeah, okay, so it's a whole difference. It's not going to happen in a step function, but maybe it will actually. It might just step function up. The other piece that strikes me is the developer productivity and you sort of touched on this. So I'm hearing that I can now work up, operate up a live data set essentially, an hour old data set. So I can do my test and dev on real data as opposed to some dummy data that's a month old. Less errors, faster, better feature sets, all the reasons that you want to, it's better development. Yeah, so that drives developer productivity in a way that affects the organizational productivity. You were saying typical releases twice a year? Well, in the end of the year, you're seeing once a month? Right, we're seeing it accelerate at least two X or three X. And it's just, it's simple. They're using Flash, which gives them a lot better agility on their own side performance. And then what we're doing is orchestrating what you already bought. In Flash, let's say an Oracle environment or a particular application, local copy, you're doing snapshots, you do a remote for DR, and you typically do a second for resiliency. What do you do with a second, third copy? Nothing. Well, guess what? We give you visibility in lineage and location so you know what it is. No one wants it, even in Flash, they don't want to use a production snapshots. They want to use their secondary DR application consistent an hour ago and use those. So that plays in hard disk or in Flash, but now in Flash you can serve those copies up to 20 X developers, full fidelity, letting them go after it very quickly. So Ed, this is not your first time around the block in a small growth oriented startup. So talk about catalogic and where you're at relative to some of the other companies that you've managed, how you're approaching it. You've got a development team in Israel. So you probably spend a lot of time over there. You're building out sales and marketing. Maybe talk about where you're at. So it is a little bit issue with my career as you're going back. So store-wise was Israel. So this company is actually in New Jersey. So I made the USA. So 74 developers out of Northern New Jersey. But as far as where we are, this was a spin-out of a private equity company. So basically a private equity spin-out, excuse me. So we've been shipping private over 18 years. So it's more robust. We have service and support locations in the Netherlands and the United States. We're worldwide. We have more girth to the overall opportunity. What we do is hard. All the major guys try it. IBM, NetApp, EMC, all try it. It's really hard. Everyone knows the problem. They want to solve it, but it's really hard to do at scale. Because we're not talking thousands. We're talking billions of objects, right? So I think we're better off. I think the ecosystem gets this easier. Avamar, which data demand, it was hard to get Dduke to be understood. Store-wise, get people understanding. You can do compression with no performance degradation. That was kind of hard-rowing. This one's really easy for people. They say, if you can do it, I'm in. It's very straightforward. Both the ecosystem and the enterprise gets this particular problem. And that's because it's not as sensitive to the performance of the system. It's more, okay, I can see how this is going to affect my productivity. If it works, I'll take it. And so your challenge is then ticking off those different platforms. So you get NetApp, you got IBM, you got VM, where I thought I heard Hyper-V coming. Yep. Or are you working in Amazon? So what you're going to see is that our platform's been built, and we've been telling people since February announced, but in four months, we've made it now to two of the top three players. And you'll see those players be knocked down in the next year. So you're going to see a very aggressive move. And the architecture allows us to do that very simply through public APIs. We don't need any deep integration. That's on purpose, but it's easy. Once you do this plug-in, you get all the capabilities. And how about to go to market specifically with IBM? What's going on there? So we'll have IBM part number, but we're still going to meet in the channel. So look at this strategic vendor. It's not an OEM arrangement. It's a resale arrangement. But also, more importantly, we're going to go to market with their software defined storage teams. And this becomes, hey, let's tell Spectrum Control or Spectrum Protect. This becomes, if you think about it as an add-on to give those platforms even more capabilities. And it's a nice play. Their software defined with our software only, or you can call it software defined, copy data management is a perfect fit. And all we do is one-on-one is three. We don't do anything they do. We literally plug on with no agents, nothing in band, and we allow them to do all these use cases that they couldn't do without us. Well, they must have to be more receptive to you than some of the other guys that you're competing with that are trying to bring in the full stack and say, basically, don't use the NetApp stack or the IBM stack, use our stack. You guys are coming in adding value on top, so I presume they're more receptive. Yeah, again, I think it plays to, we're just more in line with how the ecosystem wants to deploy, but also enterprise. Enterprises don't want, hey, move your bits from this stack to this stack, and we'll give you all these cool use cases. They'll say, listen, I already have a bunch of stacks. Show me here. Same thing with an IBM. They have a portfolio. We're doing it across their portfolio. And that's what also, it clicks with them like saying, that's how I want it. That's software defined. That's across different hard work. That's how we want to do it. That's a control layer, not a data layer. So, and that's what we play. All right, Ed, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to see you as always. Good luck with CataLogic and all these platforms that you're knocking down. Appreciate it. Thank you, appreciate it. Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE. We're live from IBM Edge 2015. Right back.