>> 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 here in Orlando.
I'm your host Rebecca Knight
along with my cohost Stu Miniman.
We are joined by Sai Mukundan.
He is the Director of Product Management,
Cloud Solutions at Cohesity.
Thanks so much for coming on the show.
>> Thanks, Rebecca, thanks.
So nice to have you guys here at the Cohesity booth.
>> And thank you for hosting us, I should say, yes.
>> Absolutely, it's been wonderful.
>> So we already had you colleague Lynn Lucas
on this morning, she was terrific.
And she gave us a high level vision of the news.
Why don't you break it down for us.
Explain to our viewers exactly what Cohesity
was announcing here at Ignite.
>> Sure.
So, broadly speaking, we announced
three things this morning.
The first one, we've seen a lot of customers,
Optic Office 365, in fact,
that's one of the first or initial use cases
of how they adopt Microsoft's solutions
more off as a service.
So the ability to now backup and recover
old 365 has come up quite a bit
in our customer conversations.
So we announced a solution that will be available
shortly, so customers can leverage
the same Cohesity platform that we had up until now
to also backup and recover old 365.
So that was number one.
Number two was around Azure Databox.
So, this is a relatively new offering from Azure.
It was up until now, it was in preview,
and now it's going GA.
So the fact that we can now integrate with Azure Databox
as a means for customers to move data from on-premise
to Azure, a great initial seeding for long term retention.
And the fact that we integrate seamlessly with that,
that was the second piece of the news.
And then the third one is really
around a hybrid Cloud message in the margin.
Really, hybrid, I know--
Stu, you like to refer to it more as
it's an operational model.
It's not about what the Cloud is
but it's more of an operation model.
And in that model, customers are always looking
to leverage it for disaster recovery purposes.
And their ability to fade over to Azure
and then bring it back on-premise, fade back,
that capability is the third underpinning
of the announcement this morning.
>> And Sai, one of the challenges that we have is,
if we look at Cloud and say it's an operating model.
Well, the challenge we have is
it really is a multi-cloud world.
If you look especially here in the Microsoft ecosystem,
absolutely, start with Office 365.
Microsoft pushed a lot of customers to the SAS model.
I have my data center, I'm probably modernizing things
there, and then I have the public cloud.
Well, when I look at my data, I want to be able
to manage and interact and leverage my data
no matter where it lives.
So, that's where--
I said Microsoft lives in all those places,
and it sounds like your integrations are going to help
customers span and get their arms around their data
and leverage their data no matter where it lives.
>> Yeah, I particularly like the use of the word span,
because as you may know, we call our underlying
distributor file system the spanifest.
(laughing) Right?
So the idea is that it spans on-premise Cloud,
and your point, multi-cloud as well.
So the ability to use the same platform,
and that's really what drives customers today.
When you look at what are the three aspects
of our solution that they like,
I would say one is the scale ability.
The fact that they can start small and then scale
as their environment grows, that's important.
The second is around, everything plays around automation,
API driven, API first architecture, right.
And the fact that we are policy based, API driven
really really resonates with them.
And the third one is the simplicity and ease of management.
I mean, you can build all these solutions,
but at the end of the day, it has to be simple
for customers to consume.
And that's something that really resonates
with prospects, partners, and customers we talk to.
>> Sai, wondering on the Azure Databox,
if you could help unpack that a little.
We have some Microsoft guests on,
Jeffery Snover walked us through.
There's a couple of different versions of them.
Some are for data movement, some of them there will be
really kind of edge, compute, and AI capabilities there.
Which ones do Cohesity use, what do you see
is the use cases that you'll be playing in?
>> Sure, so before I go into the solution and the use case.
I think one of the key aspects of why that announcement
is important for us, is it also shows the kind of engagement
and close technology partnership that we have established
with Microsoft, Azure, right.
The fact that we are one of their launch partners,
both during the preview and now in the GA timeframe.
It's important for both customers and partners,
because that gives them a good, sort of, understanding
that we are there in establishing thought leadership.
We are there in working closely with Microsoft in this case,
along with other technology partners out there.
Just coming back to the solution itself,
there are a couple of flavors of Databox.
So the one that we have done
extensive integration with is Databox.
There's another version offered,
which is called the Databox Edge,
which also has Compute in it.
But the idea here, the use case is really around
when customers are looking at Cohesity, there is backup
and recovery that they can do from on-premise.
But Azure and Azure Blob Storage in particular
becomes a seamless extension for long term retention.
Now, there are a few customers, and I can relate
to several who asked, "Hey, I have a large enough
"data set that needs to be seeded initially."
And obviously the network becomes a bottle neck
in that case.
So with Databox, the ability to now transfer the data
into your on-prem, like you get the Databox
shipped to your on-premise, get it loaded, true Cohesity.
Seamlessly get it hydrated in our Azure account,
and from that point on we only send the changes
or the incremental data.
So that is really appealing to both customers,
as well as partners who are really engaged
in these migration projects in some cases.
>> I'm really interesting what you're talking about
with the thought leadership and your approach
to partnerships, because Microsoft selecting Cohesity
as a partner, it's a real stamp of approval for Cohesity,
a real validation that this company's for real.
How do you then think about who you will partner with?
Particularly if the company is, say, only five years old
or pretty new to the space or maybe not as well known.
>> I think one of the things that Mohit Aron,
and he's a pioneer in the spirit systems
and is the founder of Cohesity.
One of the things that he established,
right from the get go is the ability
for the product to scale, scale on-premise,
but also that the Cloud has to be very seamless.
It's a natural extension of what the architecture
is intended to do or achieve.
And so that kind of made it easier for us on the product team
to figure out who is it that we need to partner with.
Azure is obviously a leader in that space,
particularly over the last few years.
I want to go back to something that was mentioned
in the keynote yesterday.
It's not a know it all, but it's a learn it all, right.
The learning that we have had as we have grown Cohesity
and the product has grown and as we acquired customers
and talked to prospects is they want to work
with the likes of Microsoft Azure,
leverage the infrastructure that they have to offer.
So we started there.
We said if customers are asking for it, we do it
and we learn along with them on why
and what the use cases are.
And it started with, going back to my earlier comment,
long term retention.
And now, as an extension to that, with the hybrid cloud
where not only storage, but leveraging disks,
leveraging Azure Compute, that's now become an extension
of what we started off with.
And so we have Azure DataPlatform Cloud Edition,
which is Cohesity running on Azure.
So I would say how we made the decision in this case,
A. the product and the foundation really set that for us,
but B., more importantly, the customers really asking
for it and asking for that integration
made it easier for us to determine that,
hey we absolutely need to partner with the cloud renders.
>> Sai, I'd like to build off of that,
the customers and what they're asking for.
This is a very large ecosystem here.
To be honest, we know that Azure, Microsoft is a big player
in Cloud, when I look at this show, Azure's a piece
of the overall discussion.
So, I was a little surprised.
Not that we're hearing more about Azure here, but,
it's because if you look at just order magnitude,
how many customers Microsoft has on Windows and Office,
obviously that's going to dwarf customer adopts in general.
Where are your customers when the talk
about Cloud adoption, your customers?
Do you find them more in a Windows customers
in their own data center versus Azure?
What are your customers doing and adoption
of Cohesity Cloud products in general?
>> So if you look at the typical on ramp of customers,
more often than not, at least I would say
over the last couple of years, our customers
have typically started with the on-premise.
Because their immediate pain point was the platform
can do a lot of things.
Customers are always looking to also solve
that immediate pain point while looking into the future.
So the immediate pain point was really around
how do I make my backup and data protection systems,
first of all, simple, efficient, and less fragmentation.
And while I'm doing that, how can I then
potentially invest in the platform
that is capable of doing more.
And that's something that Cohesity offered
in the on-premise world.
And as a natural extension to that, as both
from the bottoms up, as storage admins and backup admins
started looking at leveraging Cloud or Azure in particular
for as an extension of their storage infrastructure,
as well as from the top down.
You know, more of like the business decision makers
and the CIOs driving that mandate of,
hey, I want you to think about Cloud first
and have that mindset.
I think it really appealed to them.
Because now they could start leveraging Azure Blob,
again, back to that long term retention,
legal hold, compliance standpoint.
And then building off of that,
building off of that to do test dev.
We have a great feature, it's called Cloud Spend.
The ability to take some of the on-premise infrastructure.
And your earlier questions too, we have seen customers
both VMware, Windows Hyper-v environments.
Believe it or not, some customers
still have physical systems.
And the fact that Cohesity can take care of all that
in the on-prem world, while seamlessly helping them
adopt Cloud is really the kind of customers
that we have seen in this journey that we have taken
along with our customers and partners.
>> Well this is theCUBE's first time at Ignite.
I know you're relatively new to Ignite.
>> I'm even surprised about that.
I would think you guys would have made
a number of appearances, but I'm glad it's the first time
and it's at the Cohesity booth, so wonderful.
>> We're so excited, but what are some of the things
you're going to take back with you from this conference?
>> I think for me, this conference, as has any other
such conference in particular, it's really the excitement.
You go back and you reflect on the last three, four days
you spend here, and it's about all the great conversations
that we have had with customers, prospects, and partners.
Secondly, we heard a session earlier this morning,
a Cohesity session, we had Brown University join us.
And then there's going to be another one tomorrow.
We're going to have UPenn and HKS.
We are working on your alma mater Cornell, by the way, Stu.
So we'll get them soon. >> Excellent, excellent.
Go Big Red.
>> So the fact that we have all these sessions
and some really great attendance.
And attendance from folks who are yet
to embrace the Cohesity solutions.
So it's great for us to get our message out.
>> Getting the word out.
>> Get our word out there.
And I would say the last thing for us
is also showcasing to Microsoft here in particular,
the fact that we have this big presence here
and the excitement it's having is a great message
to the Microsoft executives and the leadership team
that we work with as well to show more love,
we already have enough that we get attention from them.
But this is more of a validation for them to say
there's more that we should be doing
and could be doing with Cohesity.
So I think those are probably the three things
I'll walk away with and build on
what we learned from Ignite here.
>> Excellent, well thank you so much, Sai,
for coming on the show.
It was great having you here.
>> Thanks, likewise.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman,
we will have more at theCUBE's live coverage
of Microsoft's Ignite in just a little bit.
(techno music)