>> Narrator: From around the globe,
it's the CUBE,
covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience.
Brought to you by HPE.
>> Hi, welcome to the CUBES coverage
of HPE Discover 2020 of Virtual Experience.
I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased
to welcome from Scality,
one of our long-time CUBE alumni,
we have Paul Speciale,
the Chief Product officer at Scality.
Hey Paul welcome back to the CUBE.
>> Hi, Lisa, it's been a long time and it's just wonderful
to be back, thank you.
>> This is our new virtual CUBE,
that appear where everybody is very socially distant,
but socially connected.
So, since it's been a while since we've had you on,
and your years from Scality,
tell us a little bit about Scality,
and then we'll dive into what you're doing with HPE.
>> Okay, absolutely, let me give you kind of a top-down,
recap of where we're at.
So, interestingly, we're now a 10 year old company,
we actually celebrated our anniversary last year.
We still have our flagship product, the Ring,
which we launched originally in 2010.
That is distributed file and objects for its software.
But about three years ago, we added a second product
called Zenko, which is for multicloud data management.
We do continue to invest in the Ring a lot,
both on the file side and the object side.
Of the current release now is Ring 8.
The target market for this is pretty broad,
but we really focus on financial services institutions.
That's a big base for us,
we have something like half of the world's banks,
about 60% of the world's service providers,
a lot of government institutions,
but what's been faster growing for us now is healthcare.
We have a lot of growth there in medical imaging,
and in phonemics research.
And then I guess the last thing I'll add,
is that partners are just super important to us.
We continue to certify and test with ISV solutions.
I think we have 80 of them, now deployed,
and ready to go but there's a real focus here
now on partners like sera and WekaIO,
and Splunk, Veem, HPE Store One.
So, those partners are critical to our business,
and we just love to partner with them.
>> So you've been partners with HPE for quite a while,
tell me about the evolution of the partnership,
as you've evolved your technology.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
It's interesting 'cause I just noted this,
a couple of weeks ago.
The company is 10 years old,
we've been partners with HPE for over half of that,
so about five and a half years.
The way to think about us, is that we have a worldwide
OEM relationship with HPE for the Apollo 4000 server line.
The official name for our product is
HPE Apollo 4000 systems with Scality Ring scalable storage.
So quite a mouthful, but very descriptive.
And then we work very closely with the HPE storage,
and big data teams.
I'm very tied into the product side talking
to the product managers, but also the marketing side
and very much so on the sales side.
We've had super success with them in Europe,
also here in the US, and there's growing business
that also in APJ in Japan specifically.
>> You mentioned that one of the sectors right now
that's really burgeoning is health care.
And given the fact that we are three months
into a global pandemic,
anything that's interesting that you want to share
in terms of how Scality is helping some of your
healthcare customers rapidly pavid,
in this very unprecedented time?
>> Yeah, I would say that there's a couple of
very notable trends here.
The first one started a few years ago,
we really, honestly didn't focus so much on healthcare,
until about 2017 '18.
But since that time, we now have something like
40 hospital systems globally, using our product,
and notably on HPE servers, and that's to retain,
medical images for long term retention.
These are things like digital diagnostic images,
MRIs, CAT scans, CT scans.
These hospitals are mandated to keep them for long term
right?
Sometimes for five years, 10 years or even patient lifetime.
I would say the newer thing that we're seeing now,
just in the last year or so is genomics research.
There's so much concentration now on pharmaceutical,
and biotechnology around genomics.
That data tends to be very voluminous,
you know, it can go from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes.
And moreover, they need to run simulations on that,
to do fast iteration on different drug research.
We've now been applied to that problem,
and a lot of times we do it with a partner
or something like a (fastier) one file system
and then us as the archive here.
But we're seeing that the popularity of that
just wrote tremendously within hospitals, hospital groups,
and also just dedicated research for biotechnology.
>> You talked about volumes there,
and the volumes are just growing and growing each year
as has retention periods depending on the type of data
the type of imagery, for example,
but from a use case perspective.
>> Yes.
>> What is it that you're helping,
your say healthcare customers achieve?
Is it backup targets?
Is it disaster recovery?
>> Yeah.
>> Is it speed of access all the above?
>> Yeah, so where we focus in healthcare is really
on the unstructured data.
This is all the file content that they deal with.
You know, in a hospital, think about all the different
medical image studies that they have,
things like digital files for CAT scans and MRIs.
These are becoming huge files,
one multi-slice X ray or digital scan, for example,
can be gigabytes in size and per file,
and that's per patient.
And now think about the number of patients,
and the retention of all of that.
It's a perfect use case for what we do,
which is capacity optimized storage for long term retention.
But we can also be used for other things,
for example backups of the electronic patient records.
Those are typically stored in databases,
but they need to be backed up.
What we found is that we're an ideal
long term backup target.
So the way hospitals look at us,
is they can consolidate multiple use cases,
undo our ring system on HPE, they can grow it over time,
they can just keep adding servers.
And typically what they do is they start
with a single use case,
what they think of as a single modality perhaps and imaging.
And then they grow over time to encompass more and more
and eventually think about a comprehensive
image management system within a hospital.
But those are popular today.
Hospitals are also starting to look at other use cases.
Obviously, we mentioned genomics,
but hybrid cloud is coming at them as well.
>> Talk to me about that, as we see growing volumes of data,
different types of modalities,
lots of urgent need to, you said backup data.
So data protection is critical.
But as as healthcare organizations move to multicloud,
how can Scality and HPE help facilitate that migration?
>> Yeah, so what we've noticed is,
you know, there's both a feeling that they're fast
and they're slow to embrace the public clouds.
But one of the things that's obvious
is that from a SaaS perspective Software as a Service,
they've really embraced it.
Most of the big EMR systems,
the electronic medical records are already SaaS base.
So they are there and in fact,
they're probably already multicloud.
But on the data management side, that's where we focus.
And we hear a lot of use cases,
that would involve taking older data from on-prem.
And perhaps archiving it long term
in a HIPAA Compliant cloud in the U.S. for example,
for long term retention.
But there are other things for example,
they may want to push some data that they've generated
on-prem to a public cloud, like Amazon or Azure
and do some kind of computing against it,
perhaps an analytic service, some kind of image recognition,
or you know, image pattern detection.
The third one that we see now in hybrid cloud,
is their interest in having second copies of the data,
just so that they can continue operations, right?
I think we all know that hospitals
have an absolute uptime need.
They need to be running 24 by seven,
one of the things that's starting to happen is,
rather than a second physical data center,
they establish a second site in a public cloud.
And then they stage their applications.
And we can help with HPE move the data from on-prem,
to the public cloud to have this sort of
cloud disaster recovery solution.
>> So Paul dear, interesting topic.
Do you see there that in healthcare in particular,
that hospitals and healthcare organizations
are getting less concerned,
about cloud from a security perspective?
And more open to it, as an enabler of scale?
>> I think what they've seen is that the cloud vendors
have really matured in terms of providing
all of the hardening that you want in terms of data privacy,
and data security, you know 10 years ago,
if you looked at the cloud,
you would've been extremely nervous
about putting your data up there.
But now, all of the right principles are there
in terms of multi-tenancy, secure authentication
based on very, you know, strong keys,
encryption of the data.
One of the first healthcare customers we worked with
was completely ready to do this,
but then of course, they said,
the images that we store in the cloud must be encrypted.
So we were able to work in collaboration with them,
to develop encryption, and actually use their own
key management service for encrypting those images,
so that our system or the HP servers
don't store the keys for encryption.
So I would say yes, it's a combination of
the clouds becoming super mature.
Some of them are now certified
and compliant for this use case.
And the customers are just sort of,
they passed the first step of trying it.
And they're really to sort of go into these use cases
a little bit more broadly.
>> And so with that maturity of the technologies
and the more of the willingness on the part of the customer
to try it, tell me how do HPE and Scality,
go to market together.
>> Yeah, so what we do is we've really focused
on specific market verticals, healthcare being one of them,
but there are other financial services,
is where we've had other success with them.
The way we do it, is that we first start by building
very specific swim lanes in HPE parlance,
that helps aim the sales force on where we can provide
a great solution, not only with Ring,
but perhaps with complimentary software,
like I mentioned, HPE store once for data protection backup.
They have other partner solutions
that we just love to work with vendors like WekaIo,
has a wonderful fast file system,
that is now useful in biotech.
And they use a system like the Ring
for storing the data from their file system
and the snapshots in that.
But the way it's been organized is really by vertical,
and to go and have specialized kind of teams
that understand how to sell that message.
We jointly sell with them,
so their teams and our teams go to calls together,
today it's obviously been very virtual.
But we've usually collaborated very extensively,
in the field, working kind of air cover
at the marketing level and now one of
the newer things with obviously, the new way of working
is lots of virtual events.
We're not only doing a Discover Virtual Experience,
but we started doing more and more webinars,
especially with HPA and these other joint partners.
>> I'm curious in this new virtual era,
where everything like you said,
this is how we're communicating now,
and thankfully, we have the technology.
A couple of questions on that related to
sales and engagement.
One, what are some of the things that the sales teams
maybe the joint sales teams are hearing now from customers
that might be changing requirements
given the COVID situation?
First question.
>> Yeah, I think, well one of the things we've certainly seen
is that almost nothing has slowed down in these industries.
I mean, we're focused on industries
that seem to kind of think long term, right?
I, obviously health care,
they're dealing with the current crisis as much as they can.
But what we've seen is that they're still planning, right?
So they, they want to build their IT infrastructure.
They're certainly thinking about
how to leverage hybrid cloud.
I think that's become very clear that they see that,
as not only a way to offer new services in the future,
but also to save money today,
they're very interested in that right?
How can they save on capital expenses
and human talent as an example?
I think those have been the themes for us.
You know, we do have some exposure to industries,
that might have a little bit more of
sensitivity to the current climate.
Things like travel related services,
but honestly, it's been minor.
And what we're finding is that even those companies
are still investing in this kind of technology.
Really to think about the two to three
and your horizon and beyond.
>> Have you done any any messaging or positioning changes,
I know you also have product marketing
or (property) marketing that relate to customers,
you know, everybody prepares for
different types of disruption or natural disasters.
So now we have this invisible disrupter,
any change in your messaging or positioning
either at Scality or with the partnership with HPE,
that will help customers understand
if they're not in this journey yet, why they need to be?
>> So, yeah we have looked at how we message the technology
and the solution, especially in the light of the pandemic.
You know, we've stayed true to kind of
a top level hybrid cloud data management message.
But underneath the covers, what do customers care about?
They care about a solution that you provide,
but they also care about what they pay for it,
let's be honest.
One of the things we've done very historically,
is to have a very simplified pricing model.
It's based on usable protective capacity.
So the users say, "I have, a petabyte of data."
That's the license fee.
It's not based on how much disk they have,
or how many copies they want to create,
or how many sites they want to spread it across.
So, one of the things we want to do is
make that a little bit more clear.
So that's come out a bit more,
in our messaging in recent months.
The second is that what we feel is,
that customers really want to know us as a company.
They want to feel assured that we're here,
that we'll support them in all cases,
and that we're available at all times.
And what that's translated into
is a more of a customer community focus.
We are very much caring about you know, our customers,
we see them invest in our systems today,
but they also continue to expand.
So we're doing things like new community portals
where they can engage us in discourse.
They can ask questions live, we're online,
we have a lot of tech tips and knowledge available for them.
So I would say that those are the two changes
that we've put in our messaging,
both on pricing and on a community involved.
>> And where community involvement is concerned,
it's even more critical now because we can't get together,
face to face and have conversations
or meetings or conferences.
As Chief Product officer,
I imagine that was a lot of what you were doing before.
Tell me what it is, from your perspective,
to engage with the community, but to engage with sales
and your partners during this TBD time frame
of we don't know when we're going to get back together.
What do you find works really well
for continuing that engagement?
>> Yeah, I think the key word for me
is just been transparency.
You know, customers have always wanted to know
really what's what's going on behind the scenes.
How does the tech work, right?
What's the architecture?
And I think now what we're seeing is there sort of a ramp up
on that, for example, what's very important for community
is for people to know what's coming, right?
They want to know the roadmaps.
They want to be alerted to new things
that are not only the next quarter,
but in the next year, right?
So I think that's our focus here is to make this community
a place where people can learn absolutely everything,
so that they can plan not only for the next year,
but like we said, they're thinking three years and beyond.
So we're going to do our best to be totally transparent
and be as trusted as we can possibly be.
>> Transparent and trusted.
Paul, those are two great words to end on.
We thank you so much for joining us
on the CUBE sharing what's new at Scality,
and with the HPE partnership.
>> It's been a pleasure, Lisa, thank you for your time.
>> Likewise, for my guest Paul Speciale, I'm Lisa Martin.
You are watching the CUBE's coverage
of HPE Discover 2020 Virtual Experience.
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