 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. Michael Gray is here, he's the Chief Technology Officer of Boston-Based Thrive. Michael, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Glad to be here. So tell us about Thrive, what are you guys all about? You know, Thrive started almost 20 years ago as a traditional managed service provider, but really in the past four to five years, transformed into a next generation managed service provider. Primarily now we're focusing on cybersecurity, cloud hosting, and public cloud hosting as well as disaster recovery. So take into that, next generation, people use that term, but what does it mean? Well, the needs of our customers really changed over time. Before you could maybe simply roll out some antivirus and do some desktop management, some server management, but with the way some of the innovation has exploded in the cloud and the way application development has changed all of our businesses, we've noticed that our customers have all kinds of new needs. That includes a much higher focus on cybersecurity. These things can't be an afterthought. The other thing was with all the data that we see coming from our customers, they need a much higher level of performance than they ever did before from their local hosting or in the cloud. So when Amazon web services came out in the 2006 timeframe, everybody said, oh, MSPs like Thrive, they're in big trouble. The exact opposite has happened, it's gonna boom for your business to tail in. Why is that, number one, and number two, how do you compete with the big cloud providers? You know, somebody like Amazon or even Azure, those services are not easy to roll out. You still need someone to understand what the business needs are and then translate those into technology solutions. For us, when someone starts asking, how do I transform my business, whether it be in the public cloud or the private cloud, that's a tremendous opportunity to bring our knowledge and all of our engineering support to those customers to help them transform. So I mean, I liken it to, you know, I could hire a plumber, I could hire an electrician, I could hire a carpenter, but I don't want to be the general contractor. I'm happy to pay an expert at that who's got contacts, deep expertise and push the responsibility on them. Is that a fair analogy? Yeah, I do think it is fair. You know, obviously it's a much more technical environment than something like that. So it's much more complicated. Yeah, of course, of course. But, you know, the other thing is when we start to understand some of these business problems and pull the pieces apart, we have a tremendous amount of expertise and experience where we can help those customers understand how to solve those business problems, how to implement the technology and then how to be successful in whatever way they're trying to transform their business. So you sort of touched on some of the trends in your business. Talk more about your customers. My understanding is it's mostly small and mid-sized customers, is that correct? You know, there's far more mid-market than there ever were before. I think people in the mid-market are realizing that they do need to take some of these services outside their walls. I notice a lot of mid-market customers that are focusing on their core business. If you're a manufacturing company, a biotech financial services company, you can realize very quickly that you're not in the cloud hosting business. And no matter how many people they hire grow your staff, it can be very difficult to actually be successful in these technologies. Despite all the different pieces that Amazon or Azure offers in the public cloud, you still have to figure out how these systems work and how they apply to your business. Well, two, the mid-sized companies and especially small companies, they obviously don't have the resources that a large company has. So you bring a lot of that infrastructure expertise along. Yeah, and I think part of it is, we have such a big exposure to a very large customer base. So a problem that a customer may see that they think is maybe perhaps special to them, we've solved that problem maybe hundreds of times. And we can give them a lot of insight into how other companies of similar verticals have solved those problems. So you start out as sort of a local MSP and then have expanded over time? Yeah, that's correct. So we've expanded pretty rapidly over the past three to four years. Now we have five offices primarily in the East Coast and really started to help the mid-market who's now started to understand that they need to, frankly, outsource some of these solutions or get in business with a partner like us who can help them take those outside their walls and provide them a much higher level of service. Often at the end of the day, the investment's much lower for the customer. So paint a picture of your infrastructure. What does it look like and get into that? So we have eight data centers. I have three primary data centers in New England, the New Jersey, New York area, and then in the South. All those data centers actually have infinite at storage which is something that I'm a huge fan of. And one of the things that I like to offer in all of our data centers is I don't necessarily, it doesn't matter to me geographically where the customer would like their workloads. That's one of the things that the public cloud offers. You can move resources around geographically depending maybe where your headquarters is or some of your branch offices. We provide the same solutions at often a much higher performance level and we've extracted all the complications of where to put these. So if a customer is in San Francisco and they'd like to DR to New England, not an issue, but all of a sudden if they change their headquarters or maybe they do an acquisition and they need to change that footprint, I can change that on the fly for them. So I've walked through many data centers of MSPs over the years and 10 years ago, you had one of everything. Even recently, I saw a compact server near the end. So I would imagine you had similar challenges. You mentioned Infinidat, trying to essentially run your entire storage infrastructure on Infinidat. So we've acquired several other MSPs over the past several years. We had a lot of disparate storage platforms. A lot of investments made, some of them hung on to maybe for too long. Some of them were purchased for a specific business reason that might not be there anymore. At this point, we've standardized on Infinidat. It's enabled our business to do a lot of new and innovative services. So high-performance storage replications, similar to what you'd see in the public cloud. But also we can support very complicated, very data-hungry workloads. So you're essentially replacing older storage systems with Infinidat. Maybe you can describe the before and after and kind of what the business impact is. You know, frankly, with acquiring a lot of MSPs, you name a storage platform, we had it at some point. Through this standardization, the beauty of it is a consolidation. So I can leverage the folks that manage our Infinidat across the country. So my TCO on something like this is really kind of amazing. I can leverage a lot of experience with the Infinidat when I go in and need to do a data center consolidation. I have some things that are known. There's a lot of unknowns and acquisitions. And all the due diligence in the world, there's still gonna be things that maybe not every detail has been figured out. But when I roll out an Infinidat, I know I've solved one very foundational problem right out of the gate. So, and I wanna come back and double click on the TCO, but before I do, when I talk to people like you, and I'm not a CTO, but a lot of times I infer that people are comparing the latest and greatest, in this case, Infinidat, with what they had that's five, six, seven years old. Of course the TCOs are better, more is longer. So I'm gonna push you a little bit. I presume you looked at Infinidat and other storage suppliers. And I'm interested in what you found in those comparisons. Is it just great TCO relative to what you had that was five years old, or is it relative to the other state? Yeah, yeah. So when it comes right down to it, I've seen every marketing pitch for a storage platform you can possibly imagine. I've seen every bullet list of features. I've seen every, we have proprietary technology that does X and Y. You know, eventually when you put it on the floor, it's not everything that it was in the sales process. Maybe there's something that was uncovered on a licensing side. Maybe the performance wasn't quite what someone said it would be. The thing about Infinidat is they've delivered on everything they've said in the sales process, and you don't find that very often. The other thing I really need to mention too is that even post-sale, the discussion about the technology continues. It's always a discussion about how the technology is built and how it enables you. It's not, we have a new feature coming on the roadmap that is gonna solve X and Y problem. They've worked out the very foundational problems. You know, the other thing I do wanna mention about Infinidat is being such a strong engineering company, I know that as an engineer I can rely on them to make good engineering decisions. So I wanna ask you about performance because when I first saw Infinidat, you know, we were on the flash bandwagon and we were early on that and these guys came in and said actually we can beat flash performance using our architecture and software and so forth. We were like really? So I'll ask you, have you found that from a performance standpoint? So I have, and you know, I run into a lot of situations where there's technology leaders that are maybe buying into a specific brand name. If we put X technology in, I know for a fact that it's gonna beat the performance of an Infinidat. My approach with that is I've seen all the platforms and I agree, there's a lot of great products out there, high performance. Sit down and take a look at the way the technology has been built and have an open mind and you'll most likely be convinced that that technology is the right answer. A lot of times I like to sit back and say, look, I'm not gonna push any vendor, any software partner, any manufacturer on you. Take a step back and have an open mind of the technology. It'll make a big difference when you actually listen to it. Well, I'm sure you've heard the sales figures. Oh, you're using those slow spinning disks. Mike, spinning disks are mechanical. Yeah. Explain about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But your experience has been, and we've had Brian Carmadeon. Yeah, yeah. And some others, certainly we have Moshe come in here. Yeah. Explain that. And so, but I always like to talk to the customer and get the affirmation. Yeah, yeah. Well, again, to me, the conversation with Infinited is always about engineering. You know, it's not a great deal of marketing. First, of course, everybody does marketing. That happens on a regular, you have to do that to run a business. But if you wanna talk purely about how things have been designed, that conversation often eclipses a lot of other marketing from other storage vendors. So, talk about how you spend your time. Yeah. Are you architecting infrastructure, roadmaps, and so forth? So you're more sort of, I gotta get this stuff up and running today. Describe that. Yeah, you know, we've set a path to build a very high performance nationwide cloud. We are going up against the public cloud. By the way, I'm a public cloud partner, right? I do both. We do hybrid hosting. Well, I wanna give the customer the best of both worlds, which may be a cliche, but we really are aiming to get there. That's one of my primary tasks is establishing a technology vision. You know, I can describe to a customer where our cloud is going, and I can stand behind that. With the public cloud, we do have to lose a little bit of reading the tea leaves. So I help people with trying to understand what maybe the public cloud vision might be, but also how I fit together with that public cloud, with private cloud hosting. And the other thing, primary goal of mine is bringing in some of these different functions of IT. So for instance, high performance cloud, private cloud, plus cybersecurity. I can bring those two together for you in a cohesive solution. That's what I spend a lot of my time doing. So as you look out, you know, put on your binoculars, maybe even your telescope, big trend, and one of the big trends is hyper-converged in bringing in storage, compute and networking altogether. Yep, yep. If I'm inferring correctly, you're going for more of a best-of-breed approach. Yep, yep. And you guys have the engineering expertise perhaps to do that. Can you talk about the philosophy there? Sure, sure. Well, one of the things that I like to do is just abstract some of these confusing and complicated conversations from our customers. You know, if we're going to talk about SD-WAN and make sure I have SD-WAN in my data center, I can tell the customer, I can give you that functionality and you don't have to worry about how these different pieces go together. I'm happy to be transparent. You know, there's a lot of things in the public cloud that simply information you can't get. I'm actually willing to share how those solutions that I built go together because I want people to see that transparent, I want them to trust us. So, you know, when we go and start putting these together, these are things where when the customer does have a question they want to drill in, because they have concerns, I can eliminate those very quickly. You talked about private cloud earlier. Yeah. I want to come back to that. So, we always say on theCUBE, bring the cloud experience to your data, wherever it lives. It's all about that operating model. It's not about physically where it is. But so as you see tool chains like Kubernetes and all the cloud native stuff come in, you want to have that cloud experience. You want to have it yourselves and obviously pass that on to your customers. How do you look at that? What role does storage infrastructure play in that? To me, and this is something that's primary to Thrive's focus is application enablement. We're an application enablement company. So if your application is best run in Azure, then we want to put it there. A lot of times we'll find that just due to business problems or legacy technologies, we have to build private clouds or even for security reasons. We want to build private cloud or purely just because we're running into a lot of public cloud refugees. You know, they didn't realize a lot of the maybe incidental fees along the way actually climbed up to be a fairly big budget number. So, you know, we want to really look at people's applications and enable them to be highly high performance, but also highly secure. I want to come back to the TCO. I said it was good to do that. So when you do the total cost of ownership analysis, what you find is it really boils down to the labor piece of it. And so I'm curious as to when you brought in Infinidat, what the business impact was, you know, economically, there's other sort of non-TCO factors that I want to explore. So was it the labor cost that got reduced? Did you redeploy those resources? Was it actually hardware? First and foremost, and you know, this is going back many years, but and I think I would say this is true for any data center cloud provider. The minute the phone rings and someone says my storage is slow, we're losing money. Okay, because we've had to pick up the phone and someone needs to address that. We have eliminated all storage performance help desk issues. It's now one thing I don't need to think about anymore. We have, we know that we can rely on our performance and we know we don't need to worry about that on a day-to-day basis. And that is not in question. Now the other thing is really as we started to expand our Infinidat footprint geographically, we suddenly started to realize not only do we have this great foundation built, but we can leverage an investment we made to do things that we couldn't do before. Maybe we could do them, but they required another piece of technology. Maybe we could do them or they required some more licensing, something like that. But really when we started this standardization, we did it for operational efficiency reasons and then suddenly realized that we had other opportunities here and I have to hand it to Infinidat. They're actually the ones that helped us craft this story. Not only is this just a solid foundation, but it's something you can build on top of. So you talked about the performance. I wanna ask you. Yeah. I've had certainly Brian, Carmody, Craig Hibbert and I have sat down and Craig actually made this statement. You know, the only bottleneck really is when the system gets filled. Yeah. You describe in the architecture, has that been your experience that it's sort of reduced or eliminated traditional storage bottlenecks? Oh, absolutely. And you know, I mentioned before that this is, storage performance has now become an afterthought to me. You know, in a little bit, the way we look at our storage platform is from a performance standpoint, not a capacity standpoint, we can throw whatever we want at the Infinidat and sort of the running joke internally is it will just smile and say, is that all you got? You mean like mixed workloads or you don't have to sort of tune each array for a particular workload? Yeah, yeah. And you know, I can imagine as someone that might be listening to what I'm saying, oh, hey, come on, you know, they can't really be that good. And I'm telling you from seeing it day to day, again, you can just throw the workloads at it and it will do what it says it does. You don't see that every day. Now, as far as capacity goes, you know, there's this capacity on demand model which, you know, we're a huge fan of. They also have some other models, the Flex model, which is very useful for budgeting purposes. What I will tell you is you have to sacrifice at least one floor tile for an Affinidad. It's very off-putting at first on day one. And I remember my reaction, but again, as I was saying earlier, when you start peeling back the pieces of the technology and why these things are and the different flexibility on the financial side, you realize this actually isn't a downside, it's an upside. So the asset leverage of that floor tile is well worth the return. Exactly. They also make a big deal about a petabyte scale. Is that important to you? What kind of scale are we talking about in terms of if you can share? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we obviously have multiple petabytes of storage for Thrive, for our customers. Again, you know, when someone has a large dataset, if we were to say we cannot handle that, we're gonna be out of business pretty quickly. This is one of the things, the infinite flexibility of the public cloud. Again, if you consider the public cloud, both our competition and our partner, you know, we need to be able to offer that same kind of electricity and that same kind of endless capacity. And at this point, although I don't have completely endless capacity, I have a tremendous amount of options. I have workloads I can move different places. And again, a lot of times now, it's more about performance than it is capacity. I gotta give you something. Okay. It's gonna give you something that you want, the infinite that should be doing to make your life better. Yeah, I mean, I gotta tell you, it solves so many problems. That is actually hard to come up with. And again, I'm smiling here because I've been down this road with those storage providers. I've been let down by other storage providers. I guess to some degree, maybe I'm waiting for them to let me down, but I don't think they're going to. And that's a really interesting part. I think that, you know, the Nutris Cloud, which is something that's been added over time, you know, a public cloud interaction is something that is desperately needed in the storage space. So I'm interested to see how that product grows if I'm gonna give you something, you know, but again, these are enablement platforms. These aren't, you know, we need to do a feature comparison between a cloud and a public cloud and a private cloud. Last question. Some of the cool stuff you're working on, is the CTO always like to ask CTOs that question? Yeah. What's floating about these? You know, one of the really interesting things to me is that we're finally getting there with anomaly detection. Not only, you know, just pure, we found one event that went out somewhere that doesn't make sense, we're profiling user behavior now. AI and machine learning has been one of the big items that, you know, we've been promised for years, but a lot of times it was just a tagline. I think a lot of things that are happening in the public cloud computing space around profiling users and being able to reduce the amount of noise in the security space, I think we're finally here. And I think, you know, in the next 12 to 18 months, AI isn't gonna become a cool feature set, it's gonna become a standard of a lot of security products. So applying machine intelligence to a lot of the data that you have, a lot of metadata, that's infrastructure metadata. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, even if you take, for instance, you know, I'll pull it back to our storage conversation earlier. If there's a storage activity, some storage activity that's outside the norm, that actually could be a security incident itself. So, you know, pulling in data feeds is something that we've conquered. It's what are you gonna do with it now? And we needed some humans to be able to pull that off before. I think AI and machine learning is finally at the point where it's not out of reach for your average customer. It doesn't take someone with a data analytics degree or something like that. We can now buy these kind of products off the shelf and leverage them for a lot of value. Well, Michael, you've been a great guest. Thanks so much. You're welcome back anytime. All right. Happy to be here. Progress, all right. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. We'll see you next time. Thank you.