 Live, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 19, brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. We're here at the Moscone Center. This is day one of our three day coverage of Google Next 2019. The second year theCUBE has done Google Next, Google's big cloud show. Thomas Curry and up on stage today, the newly minted head of Google Cloud. I'm Dave Vellante, and this is my co-host, Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here with Sai Mukundin, who is the director of product management at Cohesity. Sai, great to see you again. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Stu. Nice to be here. So it was a good show. It's hopping, you know, clouds where all the action is, but let's talk a little bit about Cohesity. You guys are on fire, growing like crazy. What's the quick update on Cohesity? Cool. Yeah, Cohesity, as you might have heard last year, we had a big funding round. We were, you know, we had investment from SoftBank. And as a result of that, we just launched Cohesity Japan. So that's how we're going to market in Japan, so that's expanding our international presence, particularly in Asia. And then here, you know, North America, there's been a growing number of customer acquisition. And I would say more importantly, repeat customers as well. You know, you really realize that with enterprises, it's the repeat customers that help you drive more adoption, the customer case studies, and that again gets new customers, right? So that's what we're seeing at Cohesity. So there's some big mega trends that are tailwinds and opportunities for Cohesity and other players in the space. Cloud obviously is one of those big ones that's changed the way in which we develop applications, changed the developer world, but also there's a desire to get more out of backup. So I want to talk about, you know, some of those trends. What is driving your business? What do you guys see as the big trends? What's the premise? Yeah, so the premise is data protection is no longer the insurance policy, so to speak, that customers were thinking about. They're really thinking about what else can I do beyond just data protection, right? So that's where the power of the Cohesity platform comes in in terms of once the data is there or on platform, the ability to do other things, the ability to leverage it for test dev, for disaster recovery, for analytics. So recently, you know, some time back, we actually launched our app store, both powered by applications that, you know, that were built by Cohesity and then also in partnership with Splunk and a couple of other vendors, where these apps are now running on the data set that has landed on Cohesity. So customers are now truly realizing the vision that we had promised to them in terms of being able to do more with the data. So, speed of cloud, you guys got hard news. So take us through that. Yeah, so today's an exciting day. We actually released our first SaaS offering. It's the Cohesity Cloud Backup Service for Google Cloud Platform. So think of it as truly backup as a service. Broadly speaking, three things, right? So it provides that enterprise-grade data protection that customers are looking for in GCP. So you heard in the main stage today about Google wanting to partner with other vendors. And this is one such partnership where we provide backup and recovery for applications running on GCP. So that's the first one, enterprise-grade. The second aspect of the solution is the fact that it is truly scalable in nature, but at the same time, provides that granular recovery capabilities when the customer needs that data back, right? And the last one is really the ease of use and management. Because when you're doing things in the cloud, customers are used to the ease of use in terms of consuming the service, right? So here, it's integrated with Google, both in the marketplace, as well as in terms of the billing that they get. So everything is all integrated with GCP. All right, so Si, we've talked to you at all the hybrid and multi-cloud shows, the big virtualization show, all three of the big cloud shows. What differentiates the SaaS offering from what Cohesity's been offering in the past? Yeah, I think so. Up until now, it's been two major things that we have delivered for customers. One is the hybrid scenarios that you guys have alluded to as well. And then born in the cloud, cloud native, where customers still sort of like do it yourself, deploy the platform from us and then perform all the day to day infrastructure management and keep planning around it. This one truly is a differentiator or a game changer in the sense that it's truly backup as a service. So no longer does a customer need to worry about the infrastructure management aspect of things. They just go into the marketplace as easy as a few clicks, deploy the solution, and then they're up and running in terms of being able to backup and recover. So it's really the SaaS model, the fact that we are embracing SaaS and our customers are heading in that direction is what truly differentiates this particular offering. Great, so Si, why Google? Let's start there as to what you're hearing from customers feedback. How come this is the first SaaS offering you're launching? Yeah, I think two things, right? One is there are enterprises, we are hearing more and more enterprises adopting Google Cloud as well. So this was obviously driven by some customers, some early customers asking for such a solution. So that always helps make a business case, right? And then the second one is, you heard in the keynote this morning about Google being truly open, wanting to work more with partners, and this is the result of one such strategic partnership. So Google sort of collaborating with Cohesity and working together to get a solution to end customers. So... Do you see them as more partner friendly? Can you discern a difference between Google and other partners or, you know, I'm looking for, okay, I heard it on stage. I mean, they're doing some, you know, actions speak louder than words, but as a partner, do you discern that? I think it resonates well with me for just based on, you know, our experience with the whole launch and everything. I'll give you a couple of instances, right? And this relates to the fact that, you know, Google's acknowledging that they are also learning, along with, you know, customers, especially the enterprise customers. So we have a number of enterprise customers and knowledge of how to work with them. And to be honest, you know, some of the things on their marketplace and other things required a close collaboration between us. Not everything was there out of the box. And Google was a very willing partner to listen to us and collaborate with us and make things happen. And the second aspect of it, you know, really comes down to also the go-to-market benefits that we are beginning to see as part of that partnership. Because it's one thing to build a solution, but then taking it to their end customers and our mutual customers, is also a big aspect of the partnership. Okay, I got to ask you, Sai. So I hear a lot. I don't have to back up my data, it's in the cloud. Explain to our audience the difference between sort of that statement and what, you know, backup, recovery, data protection, modern data protection is all about. Why can't I just back it up in the cloud and let Google take care of it? Yeah, I think not just Google, but with all the clouds, what they provide is availability, right? And the fact that data stays in, you know, multiple regions, but it's essentially the same data set that's replicated across different zones or regions as they call it. But at the end of the day, you know, customers want to be able to go back to a certain point in time because there are, you know, several reasons for it. One is human errors, you know, that's probably the number one cause of why, you know, they need data protection. But besides that, there's a reason to do test dev on a certain version of the data. There's a reason to anonymize the data. So a lot of reasons to just, you know, go for a data protection solution beyond what the cloud vendors offer themselves in terms of availability. One of the things we hear is in a hybrid and multi-cloud world, I've got my data in a lot of places. So if I can have something that is agnostic to all those locations, that's what companies like Cohesity have done. How does this new SaaS offering fit into all of those other environments? If I'm already a Cohesity customer, is it going to be a similar look and feel? Am I going to understand that? You know, what's the same, what's different? Yeah, so we have Helios, which is our SaaS management portal. So that's what customers use today for all their both on-premise as well as cloud deployments. And the way it works is it provides you that truly, I know single pane of glass is sort of a very abuse word, but it truly provides a single view into all your environments, you know, across various different deployments of Cohesity, whether it's at the edge, at the data center, or in the cloud. And so in the service, we leverage the same Helios management portal, but in a much more simplified format, because you're taking some of the administrative aspects away from the customers and having to just provide them just the service functionality of just backup and recovery. What is the pricing model for the cloud backup service? Is it capacity-based, usage-based? Monthly, how's it work? Yeah, so it's truly a consumption-based model, like everything else that we are aware of in the cloud. So the way it's priced is it's based on the consumption, the consumption on the service, the Cohesity service. And here's where we provide that benefit back to the end customer in terms of the great deduplication and the storage efficiency benefits that we offer provide a lot lower capacity that actually lands on the service, as opposed to what may be running in your primary environment. So we provide that benefit back to the customer in terms of charging them on a usage-based or a consumption-based model in this case based on the capacity that's landed on the service. And so it's, again, like I said earlier, it's integrated with the Google billing. So when a customer looks at their monthly Google infrastructure costs, it also includes an additional line item for the Cohesity service. So the customer at the end of the day just has to deal with their GCP. So it's a true cloud pricing model? Absolutely. Which I say that because much, if not most of the SaaS products that you purchase are not what I would consider a true cloud model. You know, you have to make an annual commitment or a multi-year commitment. And that's the vast majority of the SaaS as the infrastructure guys, they think, got it right still. You can scale only one way up, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. All right, Sai, I'll give you closing thoughts on Google Next, your announcement, the future for Cohesity. Yeah, one thing that excited me from the keynote this morning was Anthos. I mean, they talked about how that can be a single control plane, not just for GCP, but potentially across other clouds as well and even on-prem. And that's where I think there's more synergy, there's more partnership because we excel in the data center, we excel in the cloud. And so I am looking forward to this partnership with Google to extend cloud backup service beyond what we have released today. Stu, what did you call it? V-motion for the cloud, that's a powerful concept. And we know what V-motion did for virtualization. And so we'll see what Anthos could do for cloud and cloud management. Sai, thanks very much for coming back in the queue. Thanks for hosting us, guys. Really a pleasure to be here. Good to see you again. Bye-bye. All right, keep it right there, everybody. You're watching theCUBE live from Google Next 2018. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. John Furrier is also here. We'll be right back after this short break from Moscone.