 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re-invent 2019, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to AWS re-invent 2019. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host, Justin Warren. We're going to talk about data protection, really important topic, particularly in the cloud. Chad Kenney is here, he's the Vice President and Chief Technologist at Clumeo, hot new startup. And to my left is Charlie Gatro, who's the Senior Director of Cloud Services at Ally. Gents, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. You're welcome. So let's start, Charlie, with you. Tell us about Ally a little bit. Sure, we're a 10-year-old financial services company, digital-only bank, multi-cloud at this point. Certainly, you know, talking to Chad about data protection quite a bit these days. I think it's a very important topic. It's actually overlooked quite a bit in the marketplace for us. Yes, so Chad, I mean, exciting days for you guys. Early startup days, you just get a couple of rounds, one sizable financing round. So that's, you got now some dry powder to really go after this opportunity. I first heard of Clumeo, I met a guy on a plane. He had a Clumeo shirt on, and he was a customer. I was like, hey, Clumeo, I haven't just basically heard and so he was very excited, had him into our studio. So we want to learn more about that. But so let's start with backup in the cloud. And share with our audience kind of what you guys are all about, there's a ton of companies out there doing data protection. Why Clumeo? What Clumeo is, is it's a enterprise backup as a service solution, highly secure, built natively in the public cloud on cloud native resources. And we really felt that backup was just this complex solution of a lot of hardware, a lot of different resources and time spent. And it was really low hanging fruit to move to the cloud in a full SaaS based solution. There's been so much SaaS-ification going on in the enterprise as a whole, that this has seemed like a perfect spot for people to be able to take advantage of the cloud and longer term actually get value from the data sets that they're actually backing up in one common platform. It's kind of surprising, isn't it, that it's taken so long. It started with CRM, I guess, then of course email went into SaaS and you had service management, which is kind of a big heavy lift. Data warehouses now in the cloud, so it seems like a logical move to put SaaS in the cloud, but I wonder if you could share with us what you guys are doing in cloud generally. Are you guys all cloud, a cloud native company? You know, I would say we're about two years on the journey at this point. You know, we started out very much on the I ads side of the house, like a lot of folks. More recently though, over the last few years, we're slowly shifting more towards cloud native services for most of our applications that we're releasing. Certainly a large part of that for us is data management in general. Where do we put the data? How do we store it, classify it, cover it, those sorts of things. And certainly our application portfolio is shifting quite a bit from your traditional software packages in the data center to more cloud native services, either we build or that we buy as a SaaS product. So certainly, you know, the SaaS feature, if you will, of Clubeo is very, very interesting to us in that model, in that delivery model. It's interesting, Charlie, how you described it is not, you didn't describe it as backup, you talked about data management, you talked about, you know, how do you categorize it? And so you think, people are thinking about data protection in a different way. It sort of transcends backup these days. Maybe you could elaborate. Yeah, I definitely think it's broader than backup. We don't actually use that term too much, even in my space. You know, to us, it's all about availability, recoverability and durability, right? And all three of those things, along with how you overall manage your data, I think we saw someone else, that's even today on that, or a big piece of the story for us. So it's not only about backup, certainly that's one component. So one theme we've had from the show so far, certainly a lot today has been around transformation. So backup is a pretty traditional kind of idea. It's been around for a very long time. People have had a go at transforming this a couple of times. So maybe Chad, you can give us a bit of a flavor of what is it that Columbia is doing differently that is transformational here? Or is it transformational, or are you just basically doing the same stuff but with some cloud rubbed on it? Yeah, I think, you know, if you look at the past, a lot of the solutions were iterative approaches. It made it simpler to deploy, maybe add some new features to it, but it wasn't fully transformative to actually move it to the public cloud. And what we've done here is, we've fundamentally built an application 100% on cloud native resources, which are highly scalable. And it's not your just make it easier to consume or you pay for the cloud services and then there's a new consumption model by capacity. This is fundamentally an entirely authentic SaaS solution built in the public cloud. And the value that you get with it is the data structures that traditionally were built for backup never really were suited to do a lot of other things on top of it. Our vision is that data backup provides the ability to consolidate data into one common platform, but there are a lot of data services you can provide on top of it. I always jokingly say like the backup guy actually had all of the data in one spot and the trends that happened within that data, but the platform never gave him the ability to be able to leverage and get value from the data set itself. And the cloud gives us that. If you were to build a product today, you would build it 100% on the public cloud but the agility, the competitive advantage you get, it's very tough for people though to switch from the model of the old into the model of the new. And so we have the advantage of building from the cloud up and taking advantage of all of the amazing innovations. Look at what's out here. The amount of innovation here is amazing. Just walking around seeing all of it. It's really because people can get in quickly, innovate fast and bring value to customers. Well, it's interesting in what you're saying about transformation because you think about the sort of post mainframe era. By that, I mean, the era in which mainframe wasn't the be all end all. It was, you know, you had an application, you'd stick it on a, you know, whatever Unix box or whatever it is and you'd figure out how to back it up. Okay, and then virtualization came along and that forced everybody to rethink how they were doing data protection. And then cloud comes along and it's really an opportunity to transform. And I guess what I mean is you've had a lot of entrance into the space with a lot of money, but they're sort of entering in a hybrid sort of model. The cloud is fundamentally different than what it was before. So even a VM is like, well, it's basically still a server. So we're still kind of anchored to this older way of doing things. But the cloud... You just have less physical resources and so you had to think that a little bit, but you guys are coming at it completely differently. Saying, okay, we're going to put the control in the cloud. No appliance, control plane, data plane, right, everything. Right? It's an entirely new world. If you look at where data resides today, it's private cloud, public cloud, SaaS based solutions. Pretty much everyone's got the private cloud backup thing down to a science. It's all of the other things that are actually pretty challenging to deal with. And that's where we're innovating in. We believe that the world is shifting heavily towards SaaS. We've already seen that in the market growth numbers. Many people are getting a competitive advantage of refactoring towards cloud. And so we want to help them protect their data assets along that journey. And it's exciting because a lot of the innovation is being done there. And we're not trying to innovate into the last 20 years worth of stuff that everybody else has kind of built around. So Charlie, you mentioned you're about two years in your transformation journey. So walk us through, how does something like Clumio in this different way of thinking about data protection and data management, how does that join in to the way you think about that transformation journey? Yeah, sure. Taking just a little bit of a sidestep on that for a moment, I think one of the key components and key tenants to any of our transformation has been making sure that we do it in a way that doesn't disrupt the business, right? And all of the new innovations we're seeing in the cloud space are very transformative but they're also disruptive in how applications are deployed and built. And we're looking at it from a, if we're going to deploy to AWS for example, I don't want my backup to be in the same place that I'm running my application, right? Necessarily. I want another provider or another solution to actually own that air gap for me. And especially as we look at multi-cloud, maybe it's Amazon, maybe it's something else, we don't want to be locked in to one provider in that sense. So from a transformation perspective, for us, it's all about that availability from my perspective. You do mention multi-cloud there which is a bit of a verbose and word, it's a choice. Not in the cube. Not in the cube. So talk to us about that a little bit. How do you, where do you see the benefits of multi-clouds? When you say multi-cloud, what is it that you mean by that? How do you think about multi-cloud? Yeah, sure. From my perspective, multi-cloud is a couple components. One, you mentioned SaaS and other options that we have data out there and maybe our CRM solutions, right? Multi-cloud from a, I'm either hosting data or executing the data in some application fashion. To me is exactly what I was really talking about. So whether it's Office 365, whether it's some type of CRM, Azure, Amazon, Google, anything else is what I was referring to. I think that it's certainly, we're in an era where single provider is not really an option for the long run, right? So in thinking about, you mentioned air gap, right? So the ransomware is obviously a hot topic. Do you think about that differently with a cloud data management, data protection solution than you would with sort of a conventional approach or how do you think about that? Yeah, I do. It's kind of interesting, you know, we were having a conversation earlier about this. Companies used to have my data in my server farm. I back it up and I replicate it to another site. It's a huge air gap, right? And then all of a sudden we put data in the cloud and we kind of forgot about that. At least is what I see. And so I think we have to kind of reintroduce that mindset again. I don't see a way that, you know, forward without that type of mindset, really. So you mentioned the SaaS model was attractive to you. What about, is there anything unique about pricing that you guys can share with us? Whether it's the overall cost or the way in which pricing is done in the cloud, is how important is that to you as a customer? Certainly very important, you know, I think prior to any of the SaaS solutions or pay-as-you-go, it was large upfront costs, right? You usually even had to pay beyond that because you needed the growth room, right? So for two or three years, your actually costs were higher than they needed to be. So from my perspective on the pricing model for Clumbio or solutions even like that, you know, we want to make sure that we pay as we go. And really, yeah. Yeah, some interesting stuff that we've been seeing at least in the public cloud side of the house is, you know, retention periods are defined by the budget somebody has to store snapshots. The business requirements in the private cloud is based upon the business requirements. And the challenge with that is, is that you have this inflated cost at long-term durations. And we give some predictability to that. So there's a big value there. But the big one that we talked about a lot earlier is having data reside right next to your backup or even having to manage all of that across many different accounts. The whole concept of having an air gap solution enables you to not only have disaster recovery capabilities into any of your AWS accounts, but also be able to actually protect against malware or data loss from bad actors or whatever else. And there's huge value to that for consumers to have it out of their environment. And then the last part is, if you look at what happens in the enterprise, you have single file restores that occur constantly, not full volume level restores, which snapshots give you the ability to do. And so Clumio's been able to index the data at a file level, have a Google search-like functionality, be able to restore to any of the accounts. So that full functionality that enterprises demand is really what we're trying to deliver in the public cloud as part of this offering. And obviously, you're in the marketplace today, or are you working on getting that question? We're not, we're working on it. We'll be a private listing. Okay, great. So, okay, so how does that work? So if I want to engage, I'm an AWS customer and I want to try out Clumio, how do I do that? So engaging with our sales team, so reach out to contacting us and we're happy to come out and show you a demo. The great part about SAS is you can get up and running literally within 15 minutes. It's almost kind of comical. And we deploy a cloud connector in your environment, inventory the data, you decide what you want to back up. One of the cool parts too, is as you have more and more data sources across SAS, private cloud and public cloud, you can apply the same policies across all of them. So the power of that's really huge to be able to define kind of consistent business practices across all of your data set. We're excited to talk to customers about it. And presumably you can make it granular, I can for one workload, I can have a different RPO, RTO, then other workload. You can define by a whole bunch of different types. So in the cloud, everyone uses tags. So everything's really defined by tags on the policy. Even where it's more defined by cluster or maybe foldering or those types. So we support all of them. So you can create different policies by different ways that the customers constructed their environment. Okay, last thoughts on things you've seen at re-invent this year that are exciting you? Yeah, so many announcements, right? I think just the pure velocity of innovation is exciting. And it's hard to kind of put it into one thing. We were talking about this earlier, what's the big announcement? It's not one, there's 50. So it's pretty exciting. There's a big theme of transformation, but Chad will leave it with you. You're the new kid on the block. Exciting times for you guys. We're excited to be here. This show is like electric. The scale of it's almost intimidating, just even walking around. But we've been roving around the booths just to see the amazing innovation. I think one of the coolest things is just people are able to develop quickly and bring value to customers. And we're excited to continue to do that. The new round of funding will get us to really be able to expedite a lot of the data sources that we've wanted to continue the platform on. And we're excited to be here next year even bigger with more and more stories to tell. All right, well, Charlie, congratulations on the innovation that you're in. And Chad, we're looking for good things from you guys. Very exciting times. Thank you so much. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. What if this short break, Dave Vellante for Justin Warren. You're watching theCUBE from Reinvent 2019 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.