 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, this is theCUBE live at VMworld 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, one of my co-hosts, Justin Warren, Dave Vellante, John Furrier, John Walls, John Troyer, like a certain founding founder, Alexander Hamilton, theCUBE is going non-stop coverage for the three days. Happy to welcome back to our program two of our CUBE alumnus, Lynn Lucas, who is the chief marketing officer of Cohesity, and she has brought along John White, who is the chief innovation officer at Expedient. Thank you both for joining us. Happy to be here, happy 10 year anniversary to theCUBE. Well thank you so much, and so many people we've known over the years. Actually the first time I met John White was I believe in this hall. At VMworld, talking about what's going on. So I always love talking to the service providers because it's been going through just a massive transformation all along. And yeah, John, you've got a different title since the last time I interviewed you. You've been involved in the strategy. You and I have gone to cloud shows together and some of the other things there. So bring us up to speed as to Expedient here at the show and what brings you here with Cohesity. Yeah, so thanks Stu, you're right. I think it was probably five or six years ago maybe. I asked you, I said, hey, what do you know about the service provider community? Because I wanted to kind of educate you because it was something that's been fairly new. And Expedient's been in that industry for a long time. We were mainly an infrastructure as a service provider, managed service providers surrounding on all that IT, stuff that people need. And this VMworld is a huge one for us. Last year we launched Enterprise Cloud, which is a product based upon VMworld's full software defined stack. And that was something we wanted to go to market with to give an alternative people when you say, hey, I need to go to the cloud. And you realize that, okay, I really can't just take my apps and lift and shift and go there. There's another place for you that's a little more familiar. And as we see, I mean, 20,000 people know VMworld obviously that are here. So that's usually what's usually happening in the enterprise. We're talking with those folks. And so when we launched that platform, we thought about everything differently. We were running virtualization since 0607 and we wanted to change everything. Backup platforms as well as needing things like scale out NAS were a necessity at that point. So this VMworld are coming out because we had released that last year and now we have a lot of good customers to talk about on that platform 12 months later. Yeah, well, Lynn, first of all, congratulations. I know John sits on customer councils for some of these events. I've dug into a bunch of the networking pieces with him and actually we spent a bunch of years, we went to a bunch of shows together and he was looking at some of the various vendors and a bunch of the new startups and Cohesity is the one that really stepped up, provided the solution that he was looking for. So it's been interesting to hear service fighters, you weren't usually the first ones that companies are talking to, but bring us the Cohesity story there. Yeah, and so we're super pleased and honored to have Expedient working with Cohesity and John has been instrumental in really providing a lot of direction to us on what his needs are and how to make the product even better for him and the service provider community. It's a huge part of our go-to-market strategy. We believe that with the massive growth in the interest in hybrid and just as John was saying, there's so many customers that really aren't equipped to deal with how do I move to a hybrid cloud strategy, whether that be for compliance reasons, whether that be geographical reasons, I'm sure you've seen them all. And so this is something where we feel really thrilled to have VMware's cloud partner of the year. Right, working with us and to help serve customers with the Expedient Enterprise Cloud Platform. Yeah, congratulations on that to the team. And it's right, when we first met five years ago, public cloud for VMware and for most of the service providers, it was the enemy. It's like, oh my gosh, there. You went to Amazon re-invent and created a little bit of partnership. So give us the update on hybrid, what that means and how solutions like Cohesity help you provide services to your customers. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that. I mean, you would ask me, what are you doing here? What are you doing here? Because it was going out, doing this research, seeing where the market was on containers, on adoption of cloud practices. So we wanted to make sure that we were very open with all the different solutions that are out there. And that's been our strategy from the start. So building Enterprise Cloud was one thing we need to do to come to market with a platform like everybody else, but multi-cloud is really where we've focused. And it's funny, I mean, when I first started coming to VMworld, it was very product-centric. You know, you had this product, you can do X with it and here's the return that you would get at it. And when you're coming to VMworld now, it's more about platforms. And that's really what I found most interesting with Cohesity when I first met Mohit probably two and a half, three years ago, was that he was focusing on the platform of data management. And that's really what the problem was. It wasn't NAS specifically, it wasn't data protection specifically. It was what all can you do with that data management? And we're spending a ton of time with Cohesity and we were building multi-tenancy with them to then be able to support that. And that's what we're delivering on now. So it's the scale-out NAS, it's data protection and then we're taking those services and then putting them in AWS and Azure or wherever it might be, because it doesn't matter to us, because long-term we want to care about the, you know, long-term IT care and feeding and focus on that as our value prop instead of just actually which silo it lives in. Yeah, and right from the very beginning, I remember speaking to Cohesity very, very early on when it had just sort of come out of stealth. And it was baked into the product, the idea of data management. That it was going to be much more than just data protection. So what are you seeing now that we'd have a lot of years of product development has clearly gone into it since we first looked at it then. But what are you seeing customers using the platform for here in 2019? Well, we started a little bit more unique than most other customers, I think. We talked about this, you know, throughout Cohesity and we actually started on a scale-out NAS platform. So we have one of our clients, homes.com, who they're with us this week because they have a really interesting, you know, need for this type of enterprise cloud. They're with us and they're talking about all the different benefits they received out of it. And they started actually on the file side of things. So homes.com, real estate, online real estate to think, you know, about how many images and how many files you have out there. We have 2.6 billion images right now running on the Cohesity platform. So that was 2.6 billion and a 30% annual growth rate. Yeah, so the numbers are crazy. You can't put those on any other traditional NAS that's out there. So we use Cohesity first to get started there and then the backups really were the icing on the cake. So last October we built, we started building out the NAS platform to handle those images and if you actually go to homes.com right now it's being served fully out of enterprise cloud from a container and virtual machine layer and then on the back end from Cohesity and then we're using that to protect it as well. And I think that, if I add on to that is really a testament to the foundation that Moet built which is a true distributed file system Google like in that sense. And I think correct me if I'm wrong John but you then also saw wow that benefit of a platform approach and not another silo for the backup and having Cohesity help solve the challenges for both files as well as data protection and then maybe one day in the future looking at some of the things that we're doing now that we're doing more security and running apps and things like that on the platform as that may be an extension for you. Yeah that's definitely a big focus or effort. The global deduplication that you get with Cohesity when you add all those files in all the different customers we have all the different virtual machines the ratios we're hitting are just insane. And it's something we decided as a service provider that we said okay this technology we actually want to give that benefit back to the customer. And so when somebody buys data storage from us on the data protection they buy what they're actually consuming on the disk. So you could have 100 terabytes in all of your VMs if you only need one terabyte that's all you're buying from us. And that's a lot of the power of that platform that we get with Cohesity. So John want to help you to help us understand the nuance of something the word platform. Yeah it has a little bit of nuance into a little bit of loaded thing. VMWare is a platform Cohesity is a platform you use both of them. So just help us understand how Cohesity and VMWare and all those things that they go together they're not you know competing against each other in as your architecture or are they? They're not competing there are two layers in my opinion where you have your primary storage really living in VMWare and secondary storage is everything else on Cohesity. What the nice thing is they did a lot of cool things to kind of marry the two together. One of the tools that we're using inside of Cohesity is called Instant On or Instant Restore a virtual machine. So we can actually spin up a virtual machine almost instantaneously. It lives on the Cohesity platform. Once it's rehydrated it then does a storage vMotion automatically into the VMWare environment. So we're able to do migration or if we had you know if we have a bad ransomware attack and we need to restore 100 VMs within you know a few minutes we can instantly bring those back up in the Cohesity platform and then move them to a production virtual environment once it's done. And that's something that we weren't able to do with our existing vendor and that was something we needed to actually go and focus on because being in the healthcare space being in the compliance space that's a big problem for us. Yeah I would just add I think that VMWare is clearly one of our most important partners. The very first area that Moet developed was data protection for VMWare. I would say well north of 70, 75% of our customers are protecting their VMWare environments. We have a very large customer that's protecting over 18,000 VMs on Cohesity so with the certifications that we have with VCD and with the integrations as you mentioned with VRealize et cetera it's really a partnership and we think we're adding a lot of value to the customers that are building on VMWare. Yeah it's very complimentary for sure. Yeah it's been interesting to see how customers choosing to go with a platform like Expedient because as you mentioned earlier it's stewed like five years ago, cloud was the enemy and but we were being told that on a public cloud it's going to take everything and it's just going to own all of the environment whereas now in 2019 we found that the story is actually much more complicated than that. Some of us probably believe that at the time I'd put my hand up as one of those that customers actually need data to live in multiple places. It's not a story of or it's a story of and so you do need to be able to have something which can work well with others and the same way we've got Cohesity and VMWare as well they're not really competing with each other they work better together and particularly as customers scale we find like any kind of enterprise customer is heterogeneous so you have to have solutions that give them options and that work together well with you have to play nicely with others. I think that's exactly right and part of what we've done is build a software defined solution and to also give John Expedient flexibility how do you want to deploy for your customers this solution? Is it in the hyperscaler? Is it Colo somewhere? Is it your own cloud? And so that's part of the advantage I think all in one solution that then you can give your customers some flexibility as well as to how they want to consume the service as well. Absolutely I mean the flexibility and you mentioned software only or you know software defined that was something that was big for us when we were looking at partnerships we have a standardized hardware build that we want to use and that was all built on Dell and it was something that we were able to work with Cohesity to get that standardized so we can continue to roll out the SKUs that we were most comfortable with and they could just have the software layer on top. Yeah so you've managed to do this successfully it's all going really well, what's next? Well we have, so we ordered in October of last year right now we have six petabytes online and rolling so that's great, that's good to see that's going to continue to grow at a pretty rapid rate. Data is something that obviously we all know is never going to shrink and we're going to continue to grow that with new customer acquisitions and that type of thing. Where we want to continue to go with this product specifically is on the data management side the things that they're doing in Helios to start to get understanding and awareness and value out of that data that's sitting there is really, really important and exciting for us in the future. We deal with tonic compliance, PCI DSS, HIPAA and we want to make sure that the data that we're storing inside of there will be compliant by those so being able to write an application to see if the credit card numbers in a file or in a database by using the Cohesity platform that will provide us value. Same thing goes with a lot of the ransomware protection they're doing so if you see a file that gets encrypted then I know okay I have a problem I better go look at that and it'll give me a time stamp to actually go and restore from instead of actually trying to pick around and hopefully I find it when it before it was encrypted so we're really excited about those opportunities in the future and seeing what data management can just bring to it. Well, Lynn always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thank you so much for joining us again and John my friend this is your sixth time on the program. We're actually going to have a celebration in New England in a little over a week to unveil for a sixth there. So Pittsburgh and New England coming together. So for Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. We love talking about sports here and yeah the Cube we have the Niners and the Patriots for the team there but as always thank you for watching the Cube.