 Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier here at Scheidemulam, Senior Vice President Product and Strategy at Rubrik here in theCUBE. Thanks for coming in today, great to see you. Pleasure, John. Pleasure to see you. So big news, you joined Rubrik, Senior Vice President. Last time we spoke to you in theCUBE, you were at Splunk and then you did a stint at MuleSoft, a very famous public company, sold to Salesforce for massive amounts of money. Now you're here at Rubrik. Thanks for coming on. What's the story yet? What happened? Well, you know, Bipol, our founder and I, met a few years ago, we were introduced. I guess it was about two and a half years ago. I was running Product Manager and Product Marketing at Splunk at the time. And he just impressed me with his vision of what he was trying to do with Rubrik. The company was significantly smaller than it is today. And talked about his vision to really disrupt this $30 billion market and do it in a way that was very cloud-based, revolutionary, allow companies to extract much bigger value out of the secondary storage arena. And I thought, wow, sounds exciting. But at the time I was just about to take a bigger role at Splunk, my timing was off. And so it didn't work out, but we kept in touch and we touched base again early this year. And I was just so impressed by what he had accomplished with Rubrik in less than four years from zero to 300 million run rate. The executives that he assembled around the company, the progress that the business had made, the customers, the expansion into the cloud arena, the innovation, it was just one of those opportunities you can't walk away from. And so I jumped on it. It's a classic Silicon Valley enterprise story. If you look at the funny, he's been on theCUBE so the folks watching, check out the CUBE video on YouTube or thecube.net, Bitpulse CEO, founder of Rubrik, great interview. But it's interesting. I mean, there's a lot of money thrown at Rubrik. They're growing like crazy. It's the classic rocket fuel going after the story. But there's a unique product angle here that I think is interesting and you're in charge of products and technology for the company. But you've also had a journey in the enterprise. You've Splunk was a very successful company. MuleSoft, very successful SaaS company. Sold to Salesforce, huge tower in San Francisco. There's a new kind of generation shift happening with cloud computing that's forcing enterprises to change their infrastructure. And this is beyond just backup and other things. This is a generation, once in a generation shift in B2B. How's it changed things? And you've seen a lot of the enterprise action over the past decade or so and more. But right now it's more than ever. What's the big shift? Obviously cloud forces a lot of change. What's the impact of the customer? You know, I think there are two phases to that. I mean, there's one that we are serving a market, this backup recovery market, represents a massive area of investment for companies. I've seen stats that suggest that there's six X's as much spend on storage infrastructure for the secondary arena than there is for production grade systems. And so, but yet this market just hasn't seen innovation since data domain and- So tons of money but nothing happening. Nothing happening. So we came in initially with a whole new, very customer centric approach that delivered all of the complexity that this market had seen before, shrink wrapped into a modern era software platform running on commodity hardware. Our customers can be up and running less than an hour. They can archive and leverage the cloud. And so it's driving both TCO benefits, agility of the business and allowing them access to move workloads to the cloud, manage the cloud in ways that they'd never seen before. And so I think certainly that has been one big part of the success of rubric, but I think more broadly on the cloud, we're seeing many companies are really in a hybrid mode. They are moving from on-prem. They're leveraging MSPs. They're starting to build certain businesses in the cloud and the ability to manage all of that centrally in a way that is governed properly and allows them to extract real value from it is something that's really resonating for our customers. What was the reason why you joined rubric? I mean, everyone has a reason. I see you met people who gets keeping in touch. Was it the team? Was it the technology? What was the one thing that you were attracted to that put you over the top? One thing, I've got so many. That's the most important thing. Yeah, I think I'm going to force you with three answers on that one. You know, I fell in love with- I'll still ask you to rank them by one, two, three. I'll end with the last one on the product. I fell in love with Bitbol. Quite honestly, I mean, remarkable guy, incredibly humble, such tenacity, such a focus on customers. The team that he's assembled to me was just so paramount. I wanted to be part of this organization. And honestly, I'm humbled to be sitting around the table with folks like Murray Demo, who's our CFO, and Mark Smith, our head of sales, from Arista, and Kara Wilson, our CMO. And we just keep bringing these incredible individuals to the company to lead the org. I'm truly humbled to be sitting around the table with them. So that excitement, by the way, goes all the way down. The folks that have been hired into the organization are quite remarkable. But the thing that really, from a product perspective, that really is exciting to me is that not only are we disrupting this $40 billion market in a way that's really connecting for our customers, we're doing it in a way that is thinking ahead. We're not treating this backup arena as some blob that's going to sit on tape somewhere. We're building it as part of an integrated management platform that then allows our customers to extract higher value services and insight from that in a way that they've never seen before. So Radar is a, we've had some incredible innovation over the last four months that have been with the company with the release of Rubrik Alta 4.2, a new product Radar for ransomware protection. We've talked about our AWS competency and advancements there. But Radar is an example of a service that we are building on top of this data management platform that delivers higher value for our customers. And I am so excited about the exponential growth and value that we're going to deliver to our customers as we continue to deliver more of these services. You get the technology, it's a great team. You go to market, it's going to be interesting. You get this cloud, you got marketplaces, you got consumption by the users, the customers, if you will, on your end, is changing as the SaaS is being a big part of it. How has the product road map shifted from classic old school product management to now because it has to be a service. This service is out there, still low commodity hardware. Software is driving the value. That's where the hardware gets sold. That's what the cloud gets sold on. It used to be the other way around. Your hardware drove what you can do with software. That's been flipped. Yes. How are you guys working that in the equation? Software first, cloud first? I mean, how do you explain it to customers? Well, we were always a software company and we built Rubrik as a very modern era, expandable platform that runs on commodity hardware and can archive and move workloads to the cloud at its core. I mean, our founders came from companies like Google and Facebook and had really come from this world. And so our customers were able to get that value quickly and I think that was a big part of what attracted them to Rubrik. But if you really fast forward into the future, our vision is to have a ubiquitous, centralized data management platform from which our customers can govern, manage and establish rules that govern all of their applications that they protect across cloud boundaries, across private clouds, traditional infrastructure, cloud workloads, and we really think that's connecting for our customers. Talk about the product roadmap. Obviously you're in charge of product and strategy. Obviously you have a great market entry. The success has been documented. You guys have been one of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley. It has a couple of years. I've seen the success. You always have a big party at VMworld. It's your big show there looking forward. It's going to happen again this year. I heard there's a big performer there coming last year. It was great to have to see the warriors there. But product is interesting because if you're a startup, you want to have a beachhead, secure a core positioning, and then look at kind of holistically what the customers might want. Can you share some insight into what that product roadmap is and how are you guys fortifying your core and what are you adding onto the roadmap? Yeah. You know, the first thing that we did when we came out was to provide the capability to protect your data, make it really easy to use, archive to the cloud, and we focused on VMware and hypervisors. And it was very well received. And over the years, we've expanded to support other areas, other data, other applications. And so our strategy certainly is going to continue to do that with the vision of protecting all of our customers' applications and data, regardless of where they reside, whether they are traditional infrastructure applications running on prem, in private clouds, or new modern architectures that are running in the cloud, the ability to manage all of that, it's certainly going to continue to be one of the directions of the roadmap strategy. The other is, as I mentioned, we're not really looking at these protected images as black boxes or tape images. We're going to enable our customers to extract value out of them in a way that they haven't seen before by introspecting this data and revealing insights from it. Ransomware are- So what's the current situation so why can't they get that today? Well, I think typically these images are stored in a proprietary blob format and you can't really see much in there. You can't unlock it at all. You can't unlock it and you don't really know much about what's even in the black box. And so we were, from the beginning, we started capturing metadata that allows customers to classify this data and get insight into, well, what applications are actually running in this particular snapshot. And so we continue to extract that level of value that is really connecting for our customers and allowing them to resurrect, move workloads, introspect for compliance reasons or otherwise in ways that I think are just really important. That's great. Things like GDPR, for instance, alone is a great use case. Absolutely. All right, so what's the big picture if you had to go talk to your friends and say, hey, I joined Rubrik and they say, hey, I've never heard of Rubrik. What do they do? You don't say backup, you say data company. How do you describe the company? I talk about a company that's providing data management for non-production systems and allowing customers to extract value in ways that they haven't seen before. And I think candidly, John, when I have been very fortunate to work for some great companies, I have never seen an opportunity as exciting and as big as what Rubrik represents. It's just so important to our customers. Everybody has to protect their apps and we're able to do it in a way that's going to allow them to extract so much more value. And when was your official start date? You started what, a couple months ago? April 1st. April 1st, like four months, roughly, yeah. Exactly. And your impression as you walk in, what's the DNA, what's the vibe of the company? Have you described the DNA of the company? You know, I'm really thrilled. I am really thrilled to be part of this organization. There's a deep sense of culture. One of the things that attracted me early on was there was an article written about BIPL, talking about radical transparency, open boardroom meetings. I'd never seen that before. And you know what it's about? It's about employing empowerment. He is so committed to that, to making sure that we are able to set everybody up to deliver their best in the organization. And I think it's spot on. It's why we're innovating so quickly. It's why we're attracting such top talent at all levels of the organization. And it's why I'm so confident about the future of this company. That's great. You know, one of the things too, that I want to get your thoughts on, because you're seeing cloud disrupt a lot of things and it's certainly a great opportunity for you guys. And you know, we're seeing it out there when we talk to end user enterprises is that the common answer is we know cloud's there, we got to go there. But the one thing that's interesting is they all say cloud, no matter what we do, when we talk about cloud for them, it makes them change their infrastructure. Yes. And what they do in the cloud. So it's a rethinking of things. So that's one. So that's opening up new markets. So the question for you have is, as you guys look at new markets, things like public sector, for instance, we're seeing a real story today. It's looking at an angle that Oracle's challenging Amazon for the Department of Defense deal. So public sector and global public sector, not just in the United States, is a very interesting market. How do you guys do and say that market? I know you're strong in the enterprise, but what's the public sector angle? You guys competing there, you winning, what's the story? We are. And I would say there are multiple motions, in addition to the public sector example, we're seeing a lot of global 2000 organizations moving to manage service providers. And so that's an example of a private cloud model that really works for a lot of folks and federal organizations as well, really looking to have a tenant, well-secured service model for their various agencies. And that is very aligned with what we're doing. In fact, in our Alt of 4.2 release, we talked about Envoy that really advances how service providers can and manage service providers, even within organizations, can actually enable more self-service and capability in that regard. We see these varying segments. Can you see public sector as an opportunity for you guys? No doubt. In fact, if you look at the rubric customer base today, it really spans the gamut of markets across the board, including public sector and state and local agencies as well. Well, we know you got a great relationship with Amazon Web Services, AWS, your competency partner of them, which is the highest award or level you can get. What is your relationship with the other clouds, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and others? How do you guys relate to those other clouds? We, our customers run on all platforms and we, Rubric does have a relationship with Microsoft certainly. In fact, we have a co-sell agreement with them. We support Azure at a relatively deep level, same thing with Google Cloud. We enable our customers to... You're agnostic on cloud basically. We are agnostic and the point is that I think every one of these cloud platforms has their own unique angle and value and we want to enable our customers to really leverage the platform of their choice. So a lot of young people are looking at career choices and some of the jobs that are out there that haven't been invented yet, as school starts to figure out quickly starting to see computer science, women in tech is booming, you're seeing a lot of different new kinds of jobs around data science for instance. What do you advise young people who are either in high school or college who are thinking about careers, you don't have the classic, I'm going to be a software engineer, you can be software developer, software artist, there's different jobs in management, marketing, all kinds of different scopes. What's the current track that you would recommend people to explore if they were interested in getting in tech? You know, I think there's, it's remarkable to me to see how the internship programs have evolved and how active there are. I was initially recruited into Oracle directly out of college and it's a very regimented process of recruiting from college. Well now you've got these internships and I tell you some of the interns that have worked with companies that I've been a part of have just impressed the hell out of me. So that's just a great way to get in to see what it's about and to have an opportunity to add value and every single time one of those interns does something remarkable and it happens all the time there is an offer on the table for them to come back to. So I think that's a very good way with many of these organizations to get in. I mean it's so interesting. I mean we do a lot of interviews and there's no classic cookie cutter job anymore. I think you're starting to see interdisciplinary opportunities that are coming up. Some computer science, a little bit of sociology or business mixed. It's very interesting. Almost an alchemy of different projects out there that people can get involved in. Absolutely. Open source certainly is a big one. And it's fun because when we get new college grads we just give them an opportunity to do a lot of different things and rotations and that helps them also sort of get a sense of where their passion lies and what they want to do and it's exactly the right thing to demand as you're coming into the workforce. It's interesting. At Google Cloud I was talking with some folks over there and the women in tech conversation and opportunity recognition and the level up. There's so many new opportunities that anyone of any gender or race can come in and quickly level up. Yes. I mean because it's so new that technology with cloud is kind of interesting. Yes. I mean I think it all comes down to your personal ability and commitment and work ethic and drive and there's no end in sight to what's possible. Shai, well thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you and congratulations on your new role. Thank you, John. At Rupert, great company right down the street here in Palo Alto. Rupert, new Senior Vice President, product and strategy here inside theCUBE. For CUBE Conversation, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto in our studios. Thanks for watching.