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>> Hello, everyone, welcome to a special CUBE Conversation,
we're here in our Palo Alto studios.
I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE,
and we're here with Bipul Sinha,
who's the co-founder and CEO of Rubrik,
one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley.
Great to have you here in theCUBE.
>> Thank you so much for this opportunity.
>> So thanks for coming in.
You guys have $292 million in funding,
led the Series A with Lightspeed, Series B with Greylock,
Series C with Khosla, Series D with IBP.
You've got celebrities like Kevin Durant, Frank Slootman,
rockstar investors, great momentum,
John Thompson just joined your board recently,
he's on the board of Microsoft as well,
all since 2014, like, a short time. Congratulations.
>> Thank you so much.
We have been very fortunate to have
the market traction and demand
for Rubrik's original cloud data management product.
When we started the company, we saw a market need
around simplification, cloud-enablement,
and really automating, orchestrating,
backup recovery, archive and DR
across on-premises and cloud and we built that product.
>> You guys had a pretty good run here,
you got a new CFO, talk about that news.
I want to get that out there.
What's the new CFO, who do you have?
>> Our new CFO is Murray Demo, we hired him out of Atlassian,
where he joined the company and took the company public,
and then, helped the company the next two years,
become a very fast-growing, very successful public company.
Our goal is to build Rubrik into
the next 30, 40 year iconic company.`
We are building a management team that will have
the firepower and the talent
to take this company to really
become the standard for data management.
>> Yeah, I want to get into that, that's, I think,
the big story for you guys, is that,
you've, not come out of nowhere,
but, it's, you know, the classic startup story,
great investors, but you know, we go to all the events,
we see you guys out there,
just all of a sudden, just a massive run.
So you've put the foundation together.
You've publicly said you're on $300 million run rate,
great numbers, so great growth.
Take us inside Rubrik, I mean, how is this all working?
I mean, you guys got good funding,
you got a great management team,
I mean, what's the core strategy.
Why is it working for you guys?
>> The core of Rubrik is our culture.
Because technology evolves, product evolves,
what is invariant is Rubrik's culture.
Our culture of transparency, the culture of velocity,
the culture of relentlessness,
is what actually drives Rubrik.
When we bring a new employee into Rubrik,
We tell them that it's not about what makes your boss happy,
or what makes the CEO of this company happy.
What moves the agenda of this company?
Always think about,
"How do we make, or give Rubrik,
"the best opportunity the company can get?"
And we drive on that basis.
So there is no ego, there is no superiority.
That "sales is better than marketing," or,
"engineering is anoint all and god."
It's all about, "how do we collectively build
"the foundation of a long-lasting large public company?"
And that's what we're focused on.
>> Talk about that DNA, where does that come from?
Does it come from the product side, engineering side?
Where does that core DNA, that teamwork come from?
>> The core DNA of the team
is Google, Facebook, Oracle, of software.
Folks who build the large scale distributed system.
Very strong industrialist trend.
Enterprise product that powers
most of the large enterprises in the world.
So we took these two parts, of,
Oracle-like industrial product,
and Google, Facebook, Amazon-like
scale distributed infrastructure
and brought together in a single product.
>> You know, it's interesting,
Light Speed does a lot of interesting deals
that were once poo-pooed by many in the industry.
Neutonics was one, and you mentioned Facebook, Google,
these are, I won't say cloud-native,
they basically built the cloud,
they had to build their own hyperscaling,
they had to build their own infrastructure,
all on open source.
So you have that generational DNA
from the tech standpoint and the market standpoint.
And Neutonics is a great example 'cause, you know,
they brought all of this together.
This is a new kind of view.
This is a modern perspective that you guys are taking.
I want to ask you, as you look at the cloud,
and a lot of people were poo-pooing Amazon, early days,
and look at them now, they've run the table,
they're number one by miles in public cloud,
no one's even close, in my opinion.
You know, this is a whole new scene change.
So you've got Facebook, you've got the Googles,
you've got the Neutonicses of the world,
who are doing things different, now are the standard.
What are you guys doing that someone might say,
"I don't really get that yet,"
or might be poo-pooing,
that you think is a modern approach that's different?
>> See the issue really is that,
how do enterprises take advantage
of public cloud simplicity, agility, scale,
without being bothered by it.
Because the cloud is a programmatic paradigm.
Enterprise, traditionally has been a declarative paradigm.
How do you bring these two worlds together
and really create a seamless platform
where enterprises can automate, orchestrate,
and secure their data?
And that has been the vision of Rubrik.
The vision of Rubrik is simplicity at a scale,
with cloud-enabled, single software fabric,
across on-premises and public clouds.
That has been the vision of the company,
and we have been delivering our product
from the very beginning on this vision.
We are just adding one blade,
after the next blade, after the next blade,
to really go be a single software platform
across multiple clouds and data centers.
>> That's great, again, it sounds like data's at the center
of the value proposition from your discussion,
Clearly, Facebook's data is at the center
of their value proposition.
Although, under a lot of criticism today.
Google is a data company.
As companies realize that data
is critical for their business,
how do they transform it from what it used to be?
Because the old way was, you know,
fenced-off data warehouse,
or some sort of batch siloed software stack
And now, with all kinds of new things like
GDPR, for instance, and that's coming around the corner,
All these headaches are emerging, like,
"wow, this is really painful."
But they want to get to a seamless way.
So, what's going on there, can you explain, in a simple way,
that transition, from the old data modeling,
where you had siloed stacks,
or old, fenced-out data warehouses
to something that's really agile,
something where data's part of the intellectual property,
and part of the software fabric.
>> This is a really insightful question,
because we have a dichotomy here.
The dichotomy is, on one side,
data is the biggest strength
and biggest asset for all enterprises.
On the other side, there is a risk
of bad uses of that data and a company's private
or people's private information getting out.
So how do enterprises or businesses create
a platform where they can secure their data
and they can provide access to the data
to the relevant people or applications
in a very controlled and secure way,
and, at the same time, protect the strategic asset
from theft, from ransomware,
from just proliferating or losing?
So the traditional industry focused on
really building storage platforms for it.
But our view is that the storage platform
is just the keeper of the data,
but the real issue is how do you automate, orchestrate
and secure access to the data?
Because, the keeper of the data can be on-premises,
the keeper of the data can be public clouds,
But really this data control plane
that actually manages, and secures, and provides access
to this data, is the critical piece,
and that's the Rubrik's focus.
>> All right, let's get into it.
I want to get into the new product announcement,
but before we get there,
I want to get your thoughts on architecture,
because, a lot of people have been enamored,
and have been using, successfully, Amazon Web Services,
and some are saying that,
"oh, Amazon is the roach motel,"
"once you check in, you can't check out,"
with respect to your data.
Some are saying data portability is coming around the corner
but to move data around the cloud is not that easy.
So, customers are building on Amazon,
but they also might have Azure.
So multi-cloud is out there,
And Google's got some great stuff going on with TensorFlow
and a variety of other things that they've got going.
There's not a one-cloud-fits-all for all workloads,
certainly in the enterprise,
and then you've got the on-premise dynamic.
How do you view that?
Because, now, that's an opportunity for you guys,
but also a challenge for the customers,
where, they start using the public cloud
for business benefits, and then realize,
"well, we got a lot of data in there."
And then it becomes a data opportunity and problem.
What's your view of that landscape?
>> So, the way we see the whole data management,
it is, Rubrik is creating a whole new paradigm and platform,
because architecturally, we thought about this
as something where, you combine
the data and metadata together
so that your data becomes self-describing,
and this is a very architectural thing that Rubrik did.
Because when data understands where it came from
and who he or she is,
then you can take this data from one premises to the cloud
and power it on.
Or go from cloud to cloud and power it on some other place.
So this core, fundamental vision,
an architecture of data plus deep metadata
connected together and mobile, is what really powers Rubrik.
And that is the fundamental platform,
and fundamental architecture of Rubrik,
and that is our view of the future,
is saying that, once you create the self-describing data,
and dissociate the data from the underlying infrastructure,
then you give the real, true power of the data
back to the customer.
The data knows where it came from,
which application it is associated with,
who has access to it, and who can use it.
And that's where you see the real power
of multi-cloud, multi-data center, independence
of data and application from the infrastructure.
>> So you believe data should be frictionless
with respect to where it should go at any given time.
>> Absolutely. I mean, that's where the power
that enterprises and businesses can realize
from their data, because they can actually collaborate,
they can give more access to their data
to their own users, without worrying about
the wrong data falling into the wrong hands.
Can they actually transcreate transport of the data
Can they not, stuck in one infrastructure versus
take the data wherever they find data
to be most applicable, easiest to use and most secure.
>> That's great. So I want to jump into the new announcement,
but before we get there
I want you to just take a minute to explain
Rubrik's target customer that you guys are serving today
you got 900 employees,
you've got over $300 million run rate in business.
Who's buying the product? How is it positioned?
Who's the buyer?
What's the value proposition of the offering?
>> So we sell into enterprises, so we are not an SMB product.
We sell into the enterprise.
Our buyers are cloud architects.
Our buyers are infrastructure architects.
Our buyers are virtualizing architects.
Folks who are thinking about automation, orchestration,
security of the data, recoverability of the data,
protection from ransomware, things like that.
And that's our core technical and economic buyers,
and the core businesses are people
who have employees more than four or five thousand.
>> So cloud transformation is classic projects,
you guys are involved in.
>> Absolutely. That's the big driver for Rubrik.
Rubrik's growth is indexed on the cloud.
>> Yeah, and everyone has that on their agenda.
All right, so let's get into the hard news.
You guys are launching Rubrik's Polaris,
the industry's first SaaS platform
for data management applications.
I'm smiling because whenever I see "first"
I want to know what that means.
I've seen data application platforms out there.
I've seen SaaS. So SaaS is not new.
What makes you guys first?
So talk about this dynamic, about Polaris.
What is it? Why is it first?
>> So the way we see our customers use
multiple clouds and multiple data centers,
is they have some applications running on-premises,
some applications are running in the cloud,
they're building a lot of new applications in the cloud.
So, essentially, cloud is fragmenting
their data and applications.
And we have Rubrik's core product,
our cloud data management product,
wherever they run their applications.
So Rubrik's product runs on-premises,
Rubrik's product runs in the cloud
to protect their application.
>> And so is that the first dynamic,
it's on-prem, it's in cloud?
>> Yeah, that's our first product,
and then, what we learned working with our customers
was that, once we have this setup,
how do you bring all of your applications
and all of your data under a single system of record?
And that is the Rubrik Polaris platform.
Which is complementary to our first hybrid cloud product,
where through the single system of record,
which is a global catalog of
all the applications and data content,
as well as work flows, as well as security,
as well as orchestration, and we expose this
through open APIs for Rubrik
as well as other third-party vendors,
to really build applications
no matter where application runs.
So these applications, the data management applications,
that people, or Rubrik, will build on top of Polaris,
is for compliance, for governance, for auditing, for surge,
across all infrastructure.
>> So you guys are offering, also,
an ecosystem play with Polaris.
You're enabling others to build on top of it.
>> Absolutely. This is kind of like full StartCom platform
for all your data management.
>> So we saw Salesforce and MuleSoft had an announcement
and that got a lot of traction.
What does that mean to you guys?
Salesforce has been very a successful Saas platform,
as well as MuleSoft.
What does that acquisition mean to the marketplace,
and how do you guys fit into that dynamic,
vis a vis that trend.
>> Salesforce did a great strategic acquisition of Mulesoft,
because they realized that if they combine applications
on premises as well as in the cloud,
then they create a single platform
for all the structured data applications.
But our view is that this is just half of the problem.
Other half of the problem is unstructured data,
across many applications and all the metadata.
Rubrik Polaris is our SaaS platform,
across on-premises and cloud,
a single system of record,
with APIs where Rubrik will deliver
data management applications for control,
for governance, for compliance, for security,
across all applications that enterprises are managing
whether these applications are on-premises or in the cloud.
>> And that unstructured data, too,
is that metadata you were talking about,
that's critical data.
>> It's metadata, it's application data,
it's all your unstructured data.
>> So, bottom line, this announcement
how would you put this in a single sound bite for customers?
What does it mean for me, if I'm a customer for you guys?
What's the value proposition of this new product?
>> If you want to manage your business,
with compliance, with governance, with security and access,
Rubrik delivers a single platform
for all your data management needs.
>> Platform, Polaris, from Rubrik, enabling an ecosystem,
first time bringing all that data together
from the data center.
Bupil, thanks for coming on theCUBE,
great to see you, congratulations on all your success.
>> Thank you so much for the opportunity
>> Thanks for stopping by.
I'm John Furrier here for CUBE Conversation,
exclusive news here with Rubrik and theCube in Palo Alto,
thanks for watching.
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