>> Live from Orlando, Florida,
it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite.
Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage
of Microsoft Ignite.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight,
along with my co-host Stu Miniman.
We're joined by Sameer Nori,
he is the director of product marketing at Cohesity.
Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Sameer.
>> Thanks Rebecca, and thanks Stu, and thanks
for having me on theCUBE.
I'm exciting to be here.
>> So you are a tech veteran
you've been in this industry for a long time,
you've worked at a lot of kinds of companies,
what drew you to Cohesity?
>> That's a great question, so when I was at MAPR,
and as you are familiar, MAPR sits at the intersection
of big data and storage,
and what I saw very interesting and fascinating
about Cohesity was a similar hypothesis
in terms of, having built its own file system
but then really applying it to a different realm
of the market, in terms of secondary data and applications
starting with backup as the foundation.
And as you are aware, analytics is a part of our road map
and a solution that we enabled.
But you know, some starter things there,
but that's kind of actually what really drove me
and the opportunity to really try
and be part of another hybrid company
and apply my experience from prior industries
into different segments.
>> So you lead outbound marketing
for Cohesity's Cloud Solutions,
tell our viewers a little about what you do,
and what your day is like?
>> Sure, so my day oscillates and changes between developing
value prop and messaging for our solutions,
working with customers to understand
their pain points and challenges,
being able to translate that into tangible benefits
for customers to parley off of,
and then really enabling and working
with our sales teams closely to help them,
arm them with the necessary things they need
to go succeed in the market.
>> Sameer you've got an interesting space,
questions I think we all get in the industry is,
things are changing a lot,
what do I do with my applications?
If you look at the enterprise,
most enterprises have hundreds,
if not thousands of applications,
and it's not a trivial thing to say,
oh well, yeah we'll just put everything in the cloud,
that'll be real easy, right?
You've got SaaS, Microsoft opened the door
of the flood gates really pushing everybody
to Office 365 to SaaS-ify a lot of what you are doing.
Public cloud is a big growth and then private cloud
really modernizing the environment,
what are you seeing and hearing from customers
as to how they deal with the portfolio of their applications
mobility of what they're doing?
Where does Cohesity play and advise
and help with those solutions?
>> Sure, that's a great question too.
So I think really what we see from customers
is a combination of a couple of things.
As you said, they've got thousands
or probably hundreds of applications,
they are not going to take a big chunk of those
and just move them to the cloud as is, right?
You got to select the right workloads and the right data
and do the assessment and the viability fit,
in terms of what makes sense.
I think where our sweet spot really is
is kind of back to what I said earlier.
Really sort of using back up as the foundation
for what customers can do
and our core hypothesis has always been
that backup should not be just an insurance policy.
You can do a whole lot more with it.
So what we see customers doing is
taking their backups on premises,
which are often times just idle with alternative solutions,
reusing them in the cloud for test dev purposes,
where it makes sense.
So the easy way to convert formats,
so if you are in VMDK format to the VHD format in Azure.
Spin it up, run your test of processes.
At the end when you're done,
you can move those things back on premises
and really use it in that context.
So for us really I think it's a combination of
assessing the right use case
and the right application of the workload.
And then making that, helping customers
with understanding that and making that shift in that case.
>> So talk a little bit about the biggest customer
pain points and how you develop the right solution for them
in this customized and tailored way.
>> Sure, so I think for us, from our perspective,
what we are seeing with challenges,
customers their back up data is sitting idle.
It's shocking actually sometimes to hear that,
if we're talking to IT and storage teams,
and the application test and development teams
with their peers, they often have to wait weeks,
or sometimes even months,
to get a copy of data that they need.
I think in today's world that shouldn't be the case, right?
Our value prop really there is to help eliminate
those expensive copies of data that are getting made.
And because our platform is so purpose built
and agile with the effect of reusing
that backup data for test dev,
that's actually where we really see
the sweet spot coming together.
Customers have even asked us, for example in our UI,
can you actually provision test dev data
and make it more self-service in nature right
from that view point.
I think that is something we are looking into.
Into what makes sense there from a capability.
But that's kind of really actually where we see
the challenge and how we are enabling customers
into solving that.
>> Yeah Sameer, I want to go back to something you said
at the beginning about the premise of,
I've got all my applications,
and I'm going to have intelligence,
usually called machine learning and the like.
How are these going to come together?
We hear Microsoft really talking about that's the future.
Satya Nadella is well-known, you know AI, AI, AI,
is one of the main things that he talks about.
How is that similar with the Cohesity division?
>> Yeah, so I think when we think about the application world
and how we are taking advantage of things,
like AI and machine learning.
Our recently announced capability and product are on Helios,
which is from our perspective the global management piece
to manage all your secondary apps.
We've injected machine learning and AI capabilities there
to help customers with smart assistant type of mode
and capability to help them predict their,
how much, when they need more capacity.
Smart alerts to tell them what's happening in their system.
And that's kind of both on premises and in the cloud.
For us really, I think where we see specifically AI
and machine learning coming together.
I think as customers are injecting those
in the applications they are using.
I think definitely the data side of it
and how that effects the underlying data landscape
will make a difference,
in terms of how we accommodate that.
But I think from a core ML and AI perspective,
Helios is our focal point in terms of
what we are doing to bring those capabilities to bear.
>> So what has the customer response been to them?
It sounds very cool.
Are customers using it?
Are they finding that it is being very,
that it is helping them a lot, in terms of,
as you said, notifying if they need more capacity.
>> Yeah, so I think it's early days for us
when it comes to Helios, right?
It's a pretty new product,
but we're working with customers actively,
especially our existing base,
to get them really on board with a product
and really the service.
Be able to collect and assimilate all of their data,
and help them with the usage of it.
I think the more data we collect,
as you know with machine learning and AI,
the more data you collect the richer sample set you have.
You can do a whole lot more with it.
I think when it comes to the application side of it,
the discussion we had earlier
on application mobility and making that.
I think the University of Pennsylvania
is an interesting example of a customer we have
where they have about forty different
websites internally and externally.
They had a planned power, building shutdown for like a day.
They had a problem where they couldn't get
to recreate those sites easily
from their prior infrastructure.
So our CloudSpin capability,
which is what really helps customers take their
on premises VMs and reuse them in the cloud,
really came to their rescue
with helping them very easily
make these websites quickly operational.
For them it's been a few simple clicks,
and then when they are done with that,
when the disaster, in this case,
a planned disaster was done,
they both go back to their operational on premises.
So that's I think a great example of our capabilities
coming to light, and really shining
in the app mobility arena.
But also actually spill over in a sort of disaster recovery.
>> Sameer, I'm curious.
One of the other things in the application space
is a lot of the new appplications,
call them cloud native apps if you will,
what are you hearing from customers,
and does Cohesity, is there something different
about new type of architectures
and how that ties into Cohesity's solutions?
>> Yeah, absolutely so I think what we are seeing
from customers is when it comes to everything
that's our applications born in the cloud.
Often times I think what we see as backup
is kind of actually a rear guard,
it's not even thought of in the context of cloud native.
I think we see that being a challenge
because customers, I think what they've with backup
in the cloud today,
they've got either a combination of manual scripts,
they've got some, you know, processes they're running there.
There is a lack of automation.
So we have actually integrated with
the snapshot API of Azure, for instance, and Azure disks.
We bring through a combination of what we do
on the platform side and that integration we're actually
able to bring enterprise class backup capabilities
to that cloud native app.
The backup they can experience there.
So that's kind of I think where we are looking actually
to do more, in terms of that.
I think we are starting to see more demand,
in terms of more cloud native backup
as it relates to applications
that are more born in the cloud.
I think with us the beauty is it's a single platform
that's going to work on premises and in the cloud.
And not have a separate solution that's quote unquote,
just for the cloud versus one that's for on premises.
>> One of the biggest challenges that so many companies have
regardless of their industry is getting employees
to adopt new technologies.
I'm wondering how closely you work with your customers
to make sure that there is a wide spread adoption
and a real embrace of the Cohesity solutions.
>> Sure, I think to me what's fascinating
is a big value prop and message for our customers
with us is the simplicity.
That ranges all the way from the way they can
do their upgrades with us.
The way actually our interface presents itself.
So in most cases, actually I think what
we've heard from customers is
with little to minimal training they're able
to actually get up and going with Cohesity.
That actually speaks volumes, to the fact,
in terms of how the product and the UI
and everything else was designed.
We definitely have a support and services team that is,
as we are starting to grow more enterprise
and work with larger customers,
it's starting to have those programs in place
to enable customers to get up to speed quickly.
But actually, in often times, more often than not,
it's more the case of, I could just set it up
get it up and going and I'm off to the races.
>> Sameer, it's our first time here at Microsoft Ignite,
over 30,000 people are here, 5,000 organizations,
what takeaways do you have for people
that haven't been able to attend this show?
What have you seen so far?
>> Sure, no, I think what I've seen is that
from our viewpoint, we've seen lot of customers.
We've had some great sessions with customers.
We've got a couple more coming up.
I think the hybrid cloud message
is definitely mainstream, right?
I think for customers who are not taking
advantage of the services that
A, Microsoft has to offer,
and then B, others ISVs like us plug into
that ecosystem very closely.
I think customers definitely should be embracing
that in full steam and moving forward
with their hybrid cloud initiatives.
>> Great, well Sameer, thank you so much
for coming on theCUBE, it was great having you.
>> Thanks, Rebecca.
Thanks, Stu, I appreciate it.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman
We will have more from Microsoft Ignite
in just a little bit.
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