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Tech, a main contributor in today's selloff, down over 4% thus far. For a deeper dive into the sector, we want to welcome in Sanjay Poonen, the CEO and president of Cohesity, an AI-powered data security and management company backed by NVIDIA. Sanjay, it is good to see you. I I I actually want to start kind of more broadly, Sanjay. Because just so viewers understand, you may be at Cohesity now, but you've had a long, impressive career, you know, SAP, VMware. Um, curious to get your takes, Sanjay. We've gone through earnings season now. We've wrapped it up. As you look across the software landscape and you saw those reports, Sanjay, um you saw the results, what did you make of the software market right now? Broad strokes, um, generally speaking, Sanjay. How healthy, how strong does it look to you?

Well, uh, thank you, Josh, for having me on your show. I think that in general, we are in an inevitable move towards digital transformation. The wave of cloud, multi cloud is there to stay, pioneered by Amazon, but Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and there will be private cloud and sovereign clouds. But the top two priorities I see certain enterprise software um is security and AI, cybersecurity and AI. And I think when you look when I reflect on the, um, earnings of this past, you know, kind of couple of weeks, uh, in video, reasonably good. The security companies, even CrowdStrike, everyone expected the worst from, actually did okay. Uh, so I'm very bullish, and I look at every CIO report, the most prominent recently from Morgan Stanley, these two priorities, cybersecurity and AI are at the forefront, not just of CIOs, but CEOs and board rooms, things like ransomware and resilience. You know, you think of fallout from the Microsoft, CrowdStrike is teaching us a lot about resilience. But AI, people are looking for some practical ways in which they can implement that to improve their productivity. And it's happening everywhere. I was recently going to a Burger King and the entire process of how you order is driven by generative AI. So, these are forces that are here to stay over a multi, multi-year timeframe.

Given that you mentioned CrowdStrike, Sanjay, um, you know, given that outage historic, truly unprecedented, really, what are some of the lessons learned there in your opinion?

Um, I've talked about this widely in a number of different forums, and I think resilience is the keyword. Um, this was an a non-malicious attack. I mean, it was not really, I mean, there was an incident that happened because of quality issues in the CrowdStrike agent, and Microsoft, together with CrowdStrike, I think both need to collectively do more to ensure this doesn't happen. But what if it was a malicious attack? So, the bad guys are watching. Look at the way in which just a bug was able to create that much havoc. Uh, and for the next time it happens, it would be malicious. We as an industry have to ensure we can recover from these types of incidents in a matter of hours. It shouldn't take us days. And I think that has to be key in the way in which we think about, if you look at a lot of the way software updates get done on laptops and endpoints, a lot of it was manual. Um, there is a way of doing lights out management that can be a lot more automated. When it's virtualized server endpoints, they're much easier to do, and that's something we have great experience from my years of VMware doing. But I think the combination of Microsoft and everybody that plays at the kernel level, uh, companies like CrowdStrike and Sentinel One and Microsoft's own Defender tools play at that kernel level. You're going to play at that kernel level, you have to have a very high standard of quality. But then, for all of us in the cybersecurity industry, we have to be focused on and in our case at Cohesity it's on the data recovery. One of the things we pride ourselves in is the fastest recovery on our platform. We find found a lot of our customers now asking us about how quickly can you recover in cyber recovery? And we're actively helping many of our customers with that.

Final question, Sanjay. I have to ask for you and your team at Cohesity, any any is there a chance of a public offering for you all, and if so, is there a timeline?

Yeah, we announced a couple of weeks ago that we finished our fiscal year $549 million in revenue, growing 26%, and had just closed out of free cash flow positive of you our quarter, and that's the fastest growth of our pure companies in fiscal 24. As you know, we've publicly announced this Veritas transaction in February. The intent is to close that transaction and then integrate this. The next step after that is a public offering. But to us an IPO is always a, you know, an important milestone. It's not the destination of the journey. We do believe this company has at our size and certainly with Veritas will be the biggest in our space, about 2 billion in size. We'll have the scale to do this in a very good way for investors by creating a profitable growth company. One of the lessons we're all learning, if you're going to go public, is you want to create profitable growth.

Sanjay, great to have you. I only wish we had more time. Hope to have you back soon.

Thank you very much, Josh.