@PunchingClouds talks leaving VMware for Cohesity - CTO Advisor 046

Machine-generated from the episode audio and not hand-corrected, so names and technical terms may be imperfect. The audio is authoritative.

All right, you're looking listening to the episode of CTO advisor episode 4x You know what? It's right in the when you've downloaded the podcast, you'll see it. I think it's 47 48 What's more important? I get Rolison Rivera who works in the office of the way. Hold on. I just got a tweet Rolison you move you move you're the same type of deal CTO something but According to this tweet you're now the CTO the field CTO and Cohesity Yes, sir.

Wait, hold on. Hold on I'm gonna give you plenty of time to talk but let me let me sit here a second and digest that I mean You've heard of you know, when someone says oh man, you're you're captain You know, you like if you're like captain EMC or your captain VMware you're literally captain VCN When it comes to VCN and the branding around VCN I don't think of many people who think of like an evangelist for VCN and don't think of you know There's there's Duncan and then there's you and then that's pretty much it You know I did the whole spiel at VMworld about Rolison and getting excited about VCN and SAP running on VCN people Love it You got it.

You got to break it down to me, man What made you leave VMware after 10 years high profile position? You're on you're at you don't you're on the big stage at at conferences I go to these VMware local events like the headliner on round VCN is you What what made you leave a starlet like? VMware for a startup in Cohesity. Oh Keith a lot of really good stuff man, and obviously first of all, you know, it's it's a really really tough decision Because my heart basically belongs to that company and the people that are there, you know specifically My boss Chris saws and my team, you know We had a relationship that and we still do that it goes beyond just work, right so a lot of stuff that's been cultivated there but you know, it's one of those things where it was it was very challenging very tough, but I saw an opportunity in in evolution from a technology perspective and being able to address a Very troubled space in the storage in the storage industry That Cohesity is is immediately adding some pretty significant value to and as a result of that You know, I started working with them and collaborating with them as you know That's as you said, you know, I deal with my visa and stuff And I have to say that I sat down with Mohit our CTO.

I'm sorry our CEO Patrick Rogers, you know Gaitan and some of the folks and some other engineers In their office as I was getting briefed on some of the things that the platform that they can do and achieve and I said appears to VMware and our ecosystem and particularly with vSAN and then within the first 10 minutes once the light bulb You know was on I was blown away. I mean I I saw more than whatever typical Technologies in our roles and effort in a particular space would do which is just okay.

The technology is there we see there's a lot of good great technology a lot of you know, intellectual IP things that are great, but the opportunity to really attack and really disrupt a Space in the storage industry in the market that it's been pretty much dominated by you know Legacy architectures and legacy pinpoints solutions and products. I saw that, you know, and I I Can honestly tell you that I haven't been that excited about a technology about an opportunity the possibility in Seeing what could potentially be achieved here in a very long time With all the things that go on at VMware I mean we have a VMware they have a lot of a lot of technology specifically in the storage and availability business unit Which is you know, it's just continuous growth and in terms of innovation but you know, I talked to those folks I talked to Mohit and And I fell in love with it, I'm not even gonna lie to you I fell in love with it and I saw an opportunity where If it was in a right position in the right Place I could I could see me helping and contributing to drive Change and disruption in another space in the industry that is in much need for it and because of that I took a really really really deep look into what I've done and what I've achieved the people that I love for so many years at VMware the company and everything else and and took a very very very hard decision and to You know, let me kind of let me to kind of take a chance here and go at this because I think there's a really solid Opportunity for me to try to help our customers And everyone in the industry kind of look at what can now be achieved With this sort of type of product and solutions that Cohesity is developing and already has The data management space is where everything is going to really kind of matter to the most part So it's a lot of you know, a lot of a lot of those things What's what made me sort of make the decision of the job?

So let's let's talk market forces a little bit here. Mm-hmm. So vSAN and solutions like it Just what is the EMC version of scale IO scale IO? Yeah these solutions are Disrupting traditional storage the traditional storage market earlier on an earlier podcast, you know, man You went back and forth on the latest version of vSAN and was that enterprise grade and ready to for my mission critical? applications so I'm trying to kind of right-size the Opportunity that you're presenting to me when it comes to Cohesity vSAN in itself and products like it already Should disrupt them VMware if you've been in VMworld the past two years you can obviously see The focus is no longer on VMware vSphere.

Yeah, it's great still rock-solid state-of-the-art The the the gold standard for For hypervisors, but the growth isn't there. The growth is NSX vSAN and the V realized management suite So you're already in a role that's disrupting the the industry What was it that you saw in those ten minutes that said, you know what? vSAN is Incredible from what I'm doing and personally contributing to the industry But this this is interesting in what ways what what what what in that ten minutes? From both a market.

Let's talk about that first. What's the what's the problem? Cohesity is solving Well, the one thing that I saw as as you know, the the team was initially advocating this to me was the Fragmented architectures and designs that are exist today when it comes to the topic of data management You see that Cohesity along with some of the other solutions that are out there Tend to cater to what is Very well understood and miscared for and what I like to call a dirty word backup You don't really pay much attention to the whole Backup and what goes on with the data and all this kind of things that are much needed in what happens in business today In today's world.

We do a lot more with data when it's resident when a store when it's somewhere Then we almost potentially do or just as much as we do with the later that the data that it's live that we consume on a day-to-day basis because we're now looking into you make use of the data that stored over time to to to to identify trends in different ways to Improvise or introduce value to a business But then when you look back at that, it's like, you know I'll be sudden would be visa is built and designed to to scale and in the proof of that In terms of what it can contain and hold for data is what's happening with VMware and the AWS partnership Visa is a converged hyper converged platform in the largest public cloud in the world today Which means that now there's going to be an immense amount of data that's going to be consumed stored managed by the system Which cannot always be sustained as a you know as a form of a primary storage solution.

So we have to find ways that it's going to Utilize this data protect it in a way but also not just protect it do the things that are necessary for my data management perspective That doesn't exist You know, I was able to immediately Immediately in that room that day see what we do with vSAN what Cohesity is trying to achieve in what they have and where they're going and Immediately immediately. I was excited. I was like, whoa Here's a situation where I Can now be part of something and back then I wasn't really thinking about that right back then I was just thinking about this is so great This is gonna work great for vSAN the value and the principles of hyper convergence Are now being ported over to a secondary storage platform that's going to you know Converge these sort of workflows these capabilities and all of these hardware requirements which are inefficient and when you think about it Everything that we've done with vSAN from VMware from a value perspective for a primary storage purpose It's not being delivered on a secondary platform.

So the same ramp up in the same Opportunity the same level of disruption with a different focus is happening with Cohesity and I saw that In the fact that I was part of the first level of disruption with vSAN being able to now tie it into the secondary storage level I I was very quick to see the potential of those two things together the value that could be translated into that and I to be honest, I did not intend or had any sort of Initial intentions to sort of you know, come because I was very excited to work with them They're excited to know and learn more about the technology what it could do for our customers because I lived that for many years And a lot of our customers when I was a you know, an enterprise architect in VMware is a professional services organization You know, we went and we dealt with their primary storage designs and requirements and you know The secondary stuff the back of the protection the data management pieces They were very convoluted very very intense from a process perspective and all those pains are there But now I saw the ability to fix it and that's what got me immediately thinking Wow and when the opportunity came It I just couldn't ignore it with all my loyalty You know my heart and soul that I had it Vested at me and why should this was something that I I thought I would be doing a good service to our Industry or good service to our customers and even VMware itself by by being able to sort of now protect and deliver better Data management solutions that we potentially had within ourselves And also to do that with you with the same sort of message that we have with visa So let me frame the data management problem as I understand it or at least my challenge Well, there's vcn Nutanix The list goes or even cloud the list goes on and on s3.

I Have a ton of data. I have more data data is cheap to store. It's Users are going out and getting data in and pulling data into my enterprise Faster than I can put a wrapper around it and manage it one of my challenges Not even one of my challenges one of my end-user challenges They came to me and said, you know what? I have a hundred and fifty terabytes of storage out in AWS and I don't know how to back it up.

I just you know, it's there it's great But I don't know how to back it up. I don't know what I'm going to use when I'm going to use it I need it all. I don't know how I'm gonna back it up I don't know how I'm gonna make it available to applications and in this Distributed areas of my user set whether it's analytics and data scientists in Chicago or Data scientists on the other side of the world that data needs to be available I need to classify this data and make it available at different tiers of speed Obviously that's performance and resiliency Those are the practical problems Is cohesity tackling those problems for me Absolutely And I can give you some really good examples on how that's being done But what they have today and this is an evolving, you know, we have an evolving platform now So it's specifically to the pain points that you're referring to so there's a couple of things That are happening without even having to get into the technology specifics here.

Let's look at the actual problems in the Y so when you talk about Having this data and backing it up and availability in this one really big Sort of I don't want to say misconception. Obviously again, I'm somewhat new in this and I don't want to see to the space But in the role that I'm playing and I can tell you that for a very long time. I see that Folks customers people tend to consider Backup as your solution for data protection or data management And that's just one aspect of the data management's domain so when you talk about I need to back it up so obviously you want to have that as a as it from a Purpose of if something goes wrong or whatever happens I need to have a way of recovering that data so that I can make it accessible and you know Businesses can go out of services a lot with can go out of business period by not having their data accessible whenever which is you Know which is why we have to serve insurance policies on these things But another thing you mentioned here is how do I make that accessible?

How do I make use of it? You know, do I have something that allows me to present this information to the different purposes that you're asking for? And in we do that those things and these sort of technologies and features and products exist within within the industry But there again, there are different products different capabilities, which are not entirely well integrated They require different skills as different management cycles different investments Which then requires potential tooling? the other aspect of that is Can I use this data for analytics?

Can I use? Can I use it to retrieve information that will be substantial to my business in any way shape or form? Sure there is we typically tend to move Chunks really large chunks of data put it into some sort of a Hadoop environment and extract what we need And then move it back into whatever we do which are functions that have to be Particularly executed take time takes effort money risks and many things in place So when you look at what Cohesity does number one The one thing that I See and as I started working with Cohesity in my early stages when I kind of got introduced to this Is that everybody knows Cohesity as one of the things that it does and it actually does it very well, which is backup But backup is just one of those capabilities.

So the data platform It as part of the data platform. There are these other data management services and capabilities that are there that can be leveraged once you have The data in place based on what you're trying to do. So number one if you want to present the data to the different Consumers individual scientists or whatnot Cohesity provides the interfaces that could be actually used to present that information That data directly outside whether it be through an NFS share through an SMB share or S3 That's one aspect there when it comes to the analytics piece of it Now that you have data that's ingested onto this particular platform It's not just letting it sit there and not make use of it You now have the ability to use another one of the capabilities of the Cohesity platform to allow you to perform Analytics that are you know map reduce functions and things on that data that you already have which gives you the value that you expect from your for the different use cases of the The information you're trying to retrieve out of that data, but not only that You also have now the ability of potentially adhere to different compliance Factors whether it might be PCI compliance HIPAA compliance, which all have to do with data retention Information in particular files and things that are part of a chunk of data that you might be storing.

So all of these Capabilities are built into this Platform that is designed to do more than just backup and even though today It's the one thing that obviously everyone tends to look at and lead with is Backup and sometimes they look for a backup solution But the things that you have outlined here the the pain points that exist whether it may be in a public cloud or a private Cloud, you know for us, you know in the CEO of Cohesity Mohit We're aligned to get so tied into this because when it comes to the notion of the public car public out Very quickly that's going to disappear You know, obviously we've seen what VMware can achieve and do now in terms of cross cloud migration capabilities course cloud consumption We tend to believe the same right and being able to already have Resources in all of the different and major clouds whether it's Azure Amazon Google And be able to satisfy the requirements here so that you can do more than just Backup more than just archive we can you know through a systematic process Based on the age of the data the contention policies place data where it needs to be whether it may be on your on-prem off-prem Cloud depending on where that's going to go Today that could be achievable.

This platform delivers that even though, you know, some of the things that I found is that number one They think of easy to just back up and it's not a backup product it works great as a backup solution, but it also works great as a backup target so that if you have a An investment in a in a backup solution that you're comfortable with that you already made a recent investment on You don't have to use Cohesity for that, but you can use the Cohesity hyperconverged Appliances to to store that data and as a benefit of that because it's already stored You can now start taking advantage of all the other data services that are there There's a lot of things that are delivered through this platform But which we don't have to you don't have to consume but in the data management domain Either you go outside and back go back to that fragmented world But when you but when you have it in place the things that you just mentioned that you're looking for How do we how can we serve that space much more efficiently better and more cost-effective?

This has those components, right? It's not just about you don't have to use all of them But from a platform perspective we have to be ready for whatever you need so that the investment is that's done And when we're looking at correcting a problem, it's not Pinpoint it's more than just one item, but it builds on top of that particular Use case or capability that you might be using for that platform, which I'm very positive And I'm very sort of assured when it comes to Addressing the data management domain.

This is the absolute best thing there is right now and and it's only the beginning so Rolison I'm personally really excited to continue to watch what you're doing at Cohesity You're bringing to Cohesity, I think You know, we talked about it a little bit before we started recording When someone of your pedigree your resume the stuff that you've done in the industry from both the creative and the technology side Brings your talents to a startup like Cohesity guys like me. We stand up we turn around and we pay attention I'm excited personally that Someone like you is excited for Frankly for a whole market segment that I've not just Cohesity just personally I've dismissed this whole market segment and there's something like okay, those guys are you know, whatever they're interesting or whatever They're backup but you're telling and bringing a different story to this and I'm excited to watch and listen and and and I'm anxious to see the excitement that you bring to this entire Market segment and how you're going to drive and help solve those problems that my personal business experiences with that said New spots what's changed?

Are you still punching clouds? You know, where can people find you? Same thing. I'm still punching clouds The same guy that was you know, just until recently at VMware We can talk the same we can talk technology can talk to him or we can talk You know where things are going with Cohesity, you know, I you know, I I just started at Cohesity as you know the global field CTO In a role that I will be, you know I'm part of the leadership team and we'll be working with you know With every aspect within the company driving whether it's a technology the use case is syncing up with our product teams My big thing is, you know, don't do anything if you're not personally sort of attached with you I mean the one thing about me that you probably know is You can see that if I believe in something or not because the way I talk about it the way I Presented you'll be able to immediately to tell whether I'm I'm being truthful or not And I mean I this is I I'm looking forward to hitting the sort of conference and a circuit In 2017 because there's so much to talk about there's so much to share.

There's so much to do And I just see many many different Opportunities that are goal. They're actually to be honest beyond The technology itself is to how we take this technology and put it together To deliver this value actually show it. I'm one who likes to show the value Whenever it could be seen because conceptually we can talk about many things but I am extremely excited to sort of hit the road and start sharing with customers to see beyond the Traditional what I would like to almost say the misconception of data management In the space where it's not just backup backup.

It's just one of the functions at least for us Right where some of the other solutions may not be there yet But you'll see a lot of evolution come along But you'll see how we will be driving that from our case and trying to really disrupt the market But anything you want to talk about, you know, I'm still the same guy. You'll find me the same place same location just with a different sort of Responsibility but we can still talk the same VMware same policy same visa and same virtual volumes anything VMware ecosystem Converge hyper converge or not.

Yeah, same guy technologies first to the community and our customers and our relationships always You know be second to none. So same guy always. All right, Ralston with that. I really appreciate your time Again, you can find me on twitter at CTO advisor the web the CTO advisor comm You know what share the podcast with your friends like us in iTunes rate us It does help with discoverability with that said I think this is going to be the last podcast of the year Maybe maybe not you guys if I don't talk to you before the end of the year Happy New Year.

Merry Christmas for those for you that celebrate the day. Thanks