>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office
in Boston massachusetts, it's theCUBE.
(techno music)
Now, here's your host Stu Miniman.
>> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here
in our Boston area studio.
One of the biggest topics we've been digging into
as we head through 2020,
has really been multi-cloud and as the customers
as they're really going through their own transformations
understanding what they're doing in their data center
to modernize what's happening
between all of the public clouds they use,
and all the services that fit amongst them.
Happy to bring back one of our CUBE alumni
to dig into a specific topic.
Simon Taylor, who's the CEO of HYCU.
Of course data protection, a big piece.
A big buzz in the industry for a number of years,
in one of those areas, in multi-cloud,
that's definitely of big importance.
Simon, great to see you, thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thank you so much for having me back on,
it's exciting to be here.
>> All right, so, Simon, first, give us the update.
>> Sure. >> It's 2020.
We've seen you at many of the conferences we go to.
You're based in Boston, so not to far
for you to come out to our Boston area studio here.
You know a 40 minute drive without traffic so,
>> Not bad at all. >> give us the latest on HYCU.
>> Certainly well and Stu, thanks again for having me
into your studio, it's gorgeous, everything looks great.
It's a lot easier than traveling over to Europe to see you.
So this is very very convenient actually.
But since we last spoke, which I think
was about six months ago now,
HYCU has been growing fast and furiously,
you know we started out
with the world's first purpose built backup
and recovery product for Nutanix Of course,
we added VMware we added Google Cloud,
we wrapped all the data together
into multi-cloud data protection as a service,
and we called that HYCU Protege.
Well I am so thrilled to announce
that in just the three months since we've launched Protege,
we have seen hundreds of customers flocking to it.
And what we're finding is that customers are calling us
and they're saying things like, "let me get this straight,
"I'm already backing up my data on-prem with you,
"I can now migrate to the cloud,
"bring it back again for disaster recovery as a service,
"and it's all part of HYCU?"
and we say yes, you know,
and they say, "and this is all offered as a service?"
Yes, "and it's natively integrated
"into all the platforms that I'm using?"
Yes.
And I think so customers today,
are more and more in need of the kind of expertise
that HYCUs providing because they're looking
now much more strategically than ever before,
at what workloads to leave on-prem
and which workloads to migrate to the cloud,
and they want to make sure that,
that entire data pathway is protected from beginning to end.
>> Yeah, it's really interesting stuff, I think back to early
in my career that you know that data protection layer
was like, "well, this is what I'm running
"and don't change it."
Think about like when you've rolled out like virtual tape
as a technology it was, you know,
"I don't want to have to change my backup
"because that is just something that runs
"and I don't do it."
For last five years or so it feels like customers.
There's so much change in their environment
that they are looking for things that are more flexible,
you talked about some of the flexible adoption models
for payment and the like that they're looking for.
So, you know, what do you think customers
are just more embracing of that change,
is it just that changes their daily business
and therefore data protection needs to come along with that.
Well it's funny you asked because just a few years ago
I was on theCUBE with you and you said to me,
"you guys have a perpetual license model,
"what are you doing about that?" and I said, "don't worry,
it is shifting to as a service it's going subscription,"
which was super important for the market is,
I've had conversations with folks
who are selling cooking gear
and they're trying to sell that as a service,
I saw yesterday, somebody, I think Panera Bread,
is offering a coffee as a service.
You know, I think what we've started to realize
is that the convenience of the as a service model,
the flexibility, which I would argue
was probably driven by cloud technology
and cloud technology adoption, is something the market
has truly embraced and I think anybody who's not moved
in that direction at this point
is probably very much being left behind.
>> Okay, another technology that often goes hand in hand
in discussion with data protection is security.
Of course ransomware is a hot topic conversation
the last few years, how does that fit
into your conversations with customers,
what are you saying?
>> That's a great question.
So you know one of our advisory board members,
his name is Kevin Powers,
and he runs the Boston College cyber security program.
I had the privilege and the honor
of attending the FBI Boston College cyber program recently
at a large scale event at Boston College,
and FBI Director Ray was actually on hand
to talk about this problem, and it was incredible
you know he said, "cyber crime as a service
"is becoming a major issue,"
you're talking about the commoditization
of hard to build malware, that's now just skyrocketing
off the charts, the amount of cyber exploitation
that's going on across the world.
This is creating massive massive issues for the FBI
because they've got so many thousands of cases,
they've got to deal with.
And while they're doing a fantastic job.
We believe prevention is certainly the key.
So one of the things that has been really really wonderful
as a CEO to watch has been the way
that some of our customers have actually been able
to crack the code in terms of not having
to give in to these bad actors.
We've had actual customers
who have had ransomware attacks
had millions of dollars in data,
literally stolen from them, and they've been told,
"you've got to deposit,
"$5 million on this Bitcoin account by midnight,
"or we're deleting the data."
Right?
Because HYCU is Linux based
because HYCU is not Windows Server based
because HYCU is natively integrated
into all the platforms that we support.
We were able to help those customers
get their data back without paying a penny.
So I think that that's one of those moments
where you really sort of say to yourself,
"God I'm glad I'm in this business here,"
we've built a product that doesn't just do what we say
it's going to do, it does a heck of a lot more.
And I think it's it's absolutely a massive problem
and data protection is really a key part of the answer,
>> You know it's great to hear their success stories there,
you know I think back to earlier days where it'd be like
well you know what if I set up for disasters
and data protection and things like that,
well maybe I haven't thought about it
or maybe I kind of implemented it
but I've never really tested it,
but there's more and more reasons
why I might actually need to leverage
these technologies that I've deployed,
and it's nice to know that they're there.
You know it's not just an insurance thing
that I've never used. >> Oh absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
>> All right.
So I started off our discussion time
in talking about multi-cloud
So you talked about earlier we first first met
it was at the Nutanix shows
in their environments, and some of that you've gone along
with Nutanix as they've gone through hybrid and multi-cloud
what they call enterprise Cloud Messaging.
>> Sure.
>> And play with those environments so bring us up to speed.
What have your big customers doing with cloud
where does HYCU fit in
and what are the updates on your product.
>> Yeah, sure.
And I'll start off by saying that at this point
about a third of all AHV customers
are using a HYCU for backup AND recovery.
>> And just for our audience that doesn't know,
AHV of course is Nutanix's >> Yes.
>> Acropolis Hypervisor >> Absolutely.
>> That comes baked into their solution
as an alternative to people like VMware.
>> Perfectly said as always sir,
yes very much, and you know we've been thrilled
as the rise of AHV and Nutanix
has sort of taken the market by storm.
And when we started out,
you know we use to came on the show with zero customers
and a new product and said,
"we believe in AHV and we think it's going to be great
"and we're going to back it up."
And that's really paid off in spades for us,
which was wonderful, but we also recognize
that customers needed that VMware backups.
We built a VADP integration
and then we started going after the public cloud.
So we started with Google Cloud,
and we said we're going to build
the world's first purpose built backup and recovery
as a service for GCP.
We launched that last year
and it was tremendous you know
some of the world's largest companies and organizations
and governments are actually now running HYCU
specifically for Google Cloud.
So we've been thrilled about that.
I think the management team at GCP has done a terrific job
of making sure that Google can be really competitive
in the cloud wars, and we're thrilled to support them.
>> Yeah, and I'm glad you've got some customer stories
on Google because you know the industry watchers out there
it's like, "well you know Google they're number three,"
and you know we know that Google
has some really strong data products
Where they're very well known
but I'm curious when you're talking to your customers.
Is there anything that's kind of commonalities
to why customers are using Google
and you know what feedback you're hearing
from your customers out there.
>> Sure I mean I'll start off by saying this,
we've polled our customers
and we've now got over 1,300 customers in 56 countries.
So we polled all of them and we just said,
"how many data silos do you have,
"how many platforms, how many clouds?"
The average was five.
Right, so the first thing to say is
that I think almost all of these large enterprise customers
in public sector and private sector
are really using all of them,
the extent to which they may be using
AWS versus Azure versus GCP,
versus Nutanix versus VMware on-prem.
we can argue and debate
but I think all customers at this point of any size
and scale are trying them all out.
I think what Google's done really well
is they've started to build a really strong partner program.
I think where they were a little bit sort of late
to the party in terms of AWS and Azure
being there sort of first.
But I think what Thomas Kurian did when he came in
is he sort of tripled down on sort of building out
that ecosystem and saying, "what's really important
"to make cloud customers comfortable
"that their data is going to be as safe on Google Cloud,
"as it was on-prem," and I'm thrilled
that they've elected to make data protection
sort of one of the key pillars of that strategy,
not just because we're a data protection company,
but because I do think that that was one of the encumbrances
in terms of that evolution to cloud.
>> Yeah, absolutely, seen a huge growth
in the ecosystem around Google.
The other big cloud provider
that has a very strong partner ecosystem is the one
when I went to the show last year, their CEO Satya Nadella
talked about trust, so of course talking about Microsoft
and Azure, very large ecosystem there,
trying to emphasize, maybe against others
and by the way you saw this as much of a shot against Google
>> Sure.
>> you know, how do I trust Google with my data
and information from the consumer side
as AWS is I might be concerned
that they might be competing against them.
So, how about the Microsoft relationship?
>> It's a great question.
So again, so when we started on-prem,
with our initial purpose built backup recovery products.
We added Google Cloud.
You know I'm now thrilled to announce
that we're also going to be launching
Azure backup and recovery.
It's also native, it is purpose built
into the Azure Marketplace.
All the things you've come to expect from HYCU backup.
The simplicity, the fact that it's SLO based.
The fact that you can actually go in
and decide how many times a day
you want a different recovery point et cetera.
All of those levels of configuration
are now baked in to HYCUs own purpose built
backup and recovery as a service for Azure.
But I think the important thing to remember
about this wonderful wonderful new addition
to our portfolio.
Is that, it is a critical component of HYCU Protege.
So getting back to your question
from before about multi-cloud data protection
and what we're seeing,
we call this the year of migration,
because for all of these cloud platforms,
what are they really trying to do
they need to move massive amounts of data in a safe
and resilient manner, to the cloud.
So remember after we built out
these purpose built backup recovery services,
Azure is now one of those.
We then pulled all that data together
under a single pane of glass we called it HYCU Protege.
We then said to customers, we're going to enable you
to automatically migrate with the touch of a button
an entire workload to the cloud,
and then bring it back again for disaster recovery,
and we will protect the data on-prem
in the cloud and back again.
>> Yeah, it's interesting 'cause when we kind of look at
what's happening in the marketplace,
for many years it was a discussion of
what's moving from the data center to the public cloud,
some things are moving back
from the environment edge, of course,
pulls things even further.
Often it's, I say it's not even migration anymore
it's just mobility, because we are going to be moving things
and spinning things up and building things
in many more places, and it's going to change.
As we started out that conversation,
there's so much change going on
that so you're giving customers some optionality there,
so that this isn't just a one way,
you know, let's stick it on a truck put it on this thing
and get it to that environment
but I need to be able to enable some of that optionality
and know what I'm doing today but also knowing
that you know six months a year from now,
we know things are going to be different
>> Yes, yes! >> And in each of these
some of those environments. >> Absolutely.
We call it the three Ds data assurance, data mobility,
and disaster recovery.
So I think the ability to not only protect your data,
whether it's on-prem as it journeys to the cloud
or whether it's in the cloud,
the ability to actually assist the customer
in the migration.
And what I hear time and time again is,
"oh but Azure has a tool,"
or "Google has a tool for migration."
Of course they have tools for migration,
but I think the challenge for customers is,
how do I affect that data resiliency,
how do I ensure that I can move the data
as a complete workload.
Moving an entire SAP HANA instance,
for example, to the cloud.
And it protected the entire time as it journeys up there,
and then bring it back for the disaster recovery
without professional services.
Because again, you know HYCU it's about simplicity,
we want to make sure that these customers
can get the same level of readiness,
the same ease of deployment that they get
from their cloud vendor,
when they're thinking about the data protection
and the migration.
>> All right, I want to click down one layer
>> Please. >> in here.
We're talking about multi-cloud,
you talk about simplicity.
>> Sure.
>> Well, Kubernetes might not be the simplest thing out there
but it absolutely is a fundamental piece
of the infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment
so you know your partners, Google with GKE,
Azure with AKS and
>> And Carbon. >> Carbon with a K from Nutanix
everyone now, I say it's not about distributions
it's really every platform that you're going to use
is going to have Kubernetes built into it
so what does that mean from a data protection standpoint?
Do you just plug into all of these environments
you've tested it got customers using it?
>> It's a great question it comes up,
as you can imagine, all the time.
I think it's something that is becoming more and more
ready for prime time.
A lot of the major vendors are moving to it,
making heavy investments in Kubernetes,
we ourselves have over 100 customers
that are actively using Kubernetes in one form or another
and backing the data up using HYCU
so there's no question in my mind
that HYCU is Kubernetes ready.
I think what's really exciting for us
is some of the native integrations we're working on
with Google and with Nutanix
so whether it's Carbon whether it's GKE, we want to make sure
that when we work with these platforms that we mimic,
how the platform is supporting Kubernetes,
so that our customers can get the same experience from HYCU
that they're getting from the platform provider itself.
>> All right, Simon want to give you the final word.
Bring us inside your customers
what they're doing with multi-cloud
and where HYCU fits there, here in 2020.
Sure, we talked about prime time.
Cloud for many years has been something
that I think large enterprises have talked a big game about,
but have been really dipping their toe in the water with.
What we've seen the last two years,
is a massive massive at scale migration
to the largest three public clouds,
whether that's GCP, whether that's Azure or the other one.
(laughing)
We're thrilled to support GCP and Azure
because GCP and Azure, we believe do provide
the most value to our customers.
But I think the name of the game here
is not just supporting a customer in the cloud,
it's understanding that every customer today is to
is on a journey, whether they're on-prem,
whether their journeying to cloud or they're in cloud
those three Ds, data assurance,
which is our backup, data mobility,
which is the automated migration,
or disaster recovery readiness.
That's the name of the game
and that's how HYCU wants to help.
>> All right, Simon Taylor.
Always a pleasure to catch up with you
thank you so much for the HYCU updates,
>> Stu thanks so much for having us on.
>> All right, be sure to check out www.thecube.net
for all of our inventory of the shows
that we've been at the videos we've done,
you can even search on keywords in companies,
I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.
(Techno Music)